I imagined the four of us — brother, father, new woman, me — sucking the last of the pickled meat from the pig’s-foot bone, wrapping cartilage and bone back into the brown paper, washing it down with Dr Pepper.
Pork rinds were packaged and sold for fifteen cents. With hot sauce sprinkled into the plastic bag, you almost had a meal. My brother ate his without the sauce, sometimes adding more salt.
On good days, our father took us around the corner and let us buy ham-and-cheese heroes, the boiled ham cut into thin slices and layered over Italian bread already spread thick with mayo. Some days my brother preferred the square cuts of spiced ham with its tiny speckles of white fat.
That was before.
The woman who came didn’t tiptoe through our room in the night, didn’t ask for just a taste when my father offered his whiskey, didn’t sit with us eating pig’s feet and spiced ham. She came by way of the Nation of Islam, her head wrapped, her dark dress draping down below her ankles. She said, My name is Sister Loretta, her body a temple, covered and far away from my father’s, her thin face free of the swine-filled makeup with which unenlightened women painted their faces. She said I know how amazing and lovely I am. When she looked down at us and smiled, her dark face broke into something open and hungry and beautiful.
She said, Your father is ready to change his life. She said, The food you’re eating is the white devil’s plan to kill our people.
She came into our apartment on a Sunday morning, pulling down dusty pots and pans from the cabinet to wash in warm, soapy water, humming softly as she worked, my father at the table, reading from the Qur’an, a watery Brooklyn sunlight falling over the pages. Her hands were large and moved as though they’d always known our tiny kitchen with its yellowing sink and peeling linoleum counter. I watched them, imagining they were my mother’s hands and that we were again in SweetGrove with our broken stove and dusty bookshelves. I sat in the kitchen doorway, my knees pulled up to my chin, eyes lifted toward her. Her breasts were heavy beneath the dark dress but she wasn’t a heavy woman. Still, her body seemed to hold promises of curves, of the soft and deep spaces I was just beginning to understand. One day I’d have full breasts, hips, and large hands. One day, my body would tell the world stories beneath the fabric of my clothes.
Sister Loretta made us navy beans and eggplant Parmesan. She said no more collard greens or lima beans and my brother and I said I can dig that, because we were learning to speak jive talk. She pulled us to her, looked into our eyes, and said jive talk would keep us uneducated and in the ghetto. We believed her and whispered jive only when she wasn’t near. When she rang our bell, I took the stairs two at a time to be the first one to her. She hugged me quickly then pushed me away, saying there was so much work to do. The bags of raw peanuts my father brought home to boil and salt were erased. Our beloved boiled-and-spiced-ham heroes, our potatoes both sweet and white, all gone. The white devil’s poison, she said. The white devil’s swine. Slave food, she said. And we’re nobody’s slaves anymore. She came by way of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, messenger of Allah. She said Allah was God and when we said God is white ’cause his son is Jesus, she shook her head, looked around at the layer of dust covering everything in our apartment, and shook her head again. She said, I think I can handle this if this is what Allah has planned for me.
She came in the daytime, mop and bucket in hand, and showed me how to pull on yellow rubber gloves. Together we attacked the black dirt collecting between the moldings while I told her stories of SweetGrove, how beautiful my mother looked when she walked through the woods toward the water. I used to walk with her, I said, hearing again the sound of pine needles crunching under our feet.
You would like SweetGrove, I said. So much quieter there.
All is right with Allah, Sister Loretta said. With Allah, joy again is possible.
We kneeled together beside a bucket of Clorox-water, stiff brushes circling the linoleum until a pale green replaced the brown edges of the kitchen floor. In the late afternoon, we spread our prayer rugs and kneeled again toward Mecca.
Just as Sister Loretta promised, Allah healed us. The caterpillar of a keloid moving from the top of my brother’s forearm nearly to his wrist faded to a reddish brown. He was proud of the scar, holding his thin arm up, his hand fisted like Huey Newton’s.
It could have been worse, the Nation of Islam brothers told my father. Allah had prevailed. The shards of glass could have landed on others below. A vein could have been hit. My brother could have lost his arm. My father could have chosen that evening to take a long walk around the neighborhood, maybe stop after work for a drink.
We lived inside our backstories. The memory of a nightmare stitched down my brother’s arm. My mother with a knife beneath her pillow. A white devil we could not see, already inside our bodies, slowly being digested. And finally, Sister Loretta, dressed like a wingless Flying Nun, swooping down to save us.
The children of Biafra faded into news images of children starving in the ghettos of Chicago, Los Angeles, New York. We stared at the TV, watching the news cameras pan over neighborhoods then close in on children who stared back, hungry and questioning. In New York, the cameras found Puerto Rican street gangs laughing and wrestling as a somber man warned us of their danger. At the window, my brother searched the block for cameras.
While my brother and I cleaned the wooden cabinet doors and polished the glass knobs, Sister Loretta made us bean pies and scalloped turnips with cheese sauce, beets with orange glaze, curried rice, broiled steaks, and asparagus. She came in the late afternoon with chicken she had bought from the kosher butcher and told us that only the Jews and the people of Allah knew how to eat to live. We called her Sister Mama Loretta when we forgot our true mother was coming soon, and begged her to remove her hijab so we could see her hair. After searching for signs of my father and finding none, she pulled the black fabric back to show us the short natural living beneath it. She cornrowed my hair then wrapped my head and promised me I would grow up to be as beautiful as Lola Falana if I ate the right food, followed the messenger Elijah Muhammad, gave all praise to Allah, and remained modest. So I pressed my legs tight together, draped baggy shirts over my new breasts, and promised her I’d remain the sacred being Allah had created. But I was lying.
In the early mornings, I kneeled toward Mecca and prayed silently for my mother — that she would return to us in the darkness, kissing us out of sleep. I prayed that my own brain, fuzzy with clouded memory, would settle into a clarity that helped me to understand the feeling I got when I pressed my lips against my new boyfriend, Jerome’s, his shaking hands searching my body. I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame — of everything.
Sister Loretta became my partner in prayer, the two of us together in a room separated from my father and brother. Honorable Elijah was God’s chosen messenger. We were Allah’s chosen people, clean living now, our heads covered during prayer, our bodies free of the foods that were killing us, our hearts and minds moving toward a deeper understanding.