The hair a halo. Hallowed be thy name. On Earth as it is in Heaven.
Her brother Clyde wasn’t dead yet. He was sitting at our kitchen table smoking a Pall Mall and telling stories. We knew this only because he always smoked and we could hear our mother, ever so often laughing and saying, Oh, you just telling stories, Clyde! Saying, And then what happened? Saying, I’m making catfish tonight. You staying for dinner?
My brother and I ran through the fields, the high grass scratching our legs and feet, the sun beating down on us. This freedom was all we had ever known. Brooklyn was a place my father had come from. A hole closing up beneath him. We only knew SweetGrove and the words that ended every fairy tale our mother read to us. We lived in our own happily ever after.
But after her brother died, my mother began disappearing. First, there was the empty table at the end of the day, and me returning home from school to find my baby brother in the yard, searching for sugar snaps and berries, no beginnings of meals in the house. My father arriving hours later with bags of groceries — canned soups and pasta, SpaghettiOs and frozen pizzas to be reheated on the top of the wood-burning stove.
SweetGrove becoming memory. My mother becoming dust.
What’s in the urn?
You know what’s in the urn.
Is Mama home yet?
Memory like a bruise. Fading.
She’s coming tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Don’t wade in the water, children.
Your mama’s done troubled the water.
Our land moved in grassy waves toward the water. The land ended at the water. Maybe my mother had forgotten this.
And kept on walking.
13
We were not afraid of the dark places we went to with our boyfriends. Even though years before, a serial killer who called himself the Son of Sam had terrorized New York City, we backed into the darkened corners of the park anyway. Son of Sam killed white women. We were safe inside our brown skin.
But in Times Square that same year, brown girls were dying. Although we were miles away in Brooklyn, their stories felt close enough to touch, and haunted our nights. Those were the ones that were found, bodies rolled into rugs, behind trash bins, or naked and bobbing on the East River, throats slashed in the bathrooms of Forty-Second Street porn theaters. We knew that crossing that bridge meant being on the same side of the river as that place called Times Square, where girls like us got snatched up by pimps, shot up with dope, and spent the rest of their lives walking along Eighth Avenue, ducking their heads into slowing cars. This terrified us even more than losing Angela.
We’ll see her on Monday, we said. But Monday never came. She’ll be back, her teacher at Joe Wilson’s School of Dance said. Something has to come of that kind of talent.
We were so afraid. Angela had been taken to a foster home on Long Island, we heard. Or was it Queens? With an aunt? Or was it a group home? We were fourteen. There was so much we didn’t know.
One night, my father tiptoed in with another woman. I heard the ice clinking into glasses, heard the soft laughter. Rain beat down hard against the windows. The smell of damp surrounded us. I heard the soft plink of ice returning to the bottom of near-empty glasses. Where was Sister Loretta? I pulled my sheet over my head and reached for my brother’s hand.
In the morning, the prayer rugs were still there but rolled up against the wall now. Outside, Brooklyn was bright blue. Cloudless. Already, kids screamed and called for each other on the street. When I tiptoed into the living room, the woman lying on his sofa bed pulled the covers up over herself but not before I saw the size of her breasts, the dark nipples.
You his baby girl? the woman asked.
Sylvia’s father had a plan for her. One morning, Sylvia’s first boyfriend showed up at her door. He was tall and brown-skinned, the captain of the neighborhood high school basketball team. Please wait a moment, her father said. When he came back, he pointed a.22 at her boyfriend’s chest.
I will die in jail for my daughter, he said, his voice higher and softer than Sylvia had ever heard it. So high and soft, she couldn’t scream. Just watched, her hand to her mouth, as her father lifted the gun higher and her boyfriend closed his eyes, begged, Please God Please until her father lowered his gun, said, Go home to the God you believe in and don’t ever come to my door again.
He didn’t know he had already lost Sylvia.
It hurt like hell, she whispered to us. And then it didn’t anymore. It didn’t feel good like it’s supposed to. But it didn’t hurt.
Please, Jerome begged. But I said, No. Everything but that, I said. At night I heard the woman who was not Sister Mama Loretta calling my father’s name. In the morning, she pulled my father’s robe together at her breasts, made instant coffee, and sat at our kitchen table, smoking.
Oh just do it, Sylvia said. He’s too fine to let slip away.
Forget you then, Jerome said finally. Forget you.
Forget me.
I held on to my body and my brother held on to his faith, finally pulling my father back into it. On the weekends, they left the house in the early morning, spent the day at mosque, then returned late in the evenings, somber and soft-spoken, their Qur’ans tucked into the black briefcases they carried.
Other books began to fill our small bookshelf—How to Eat to Live; Message to the Blackman in America; The Fall of America. We sat together at the kitchen table late into the evenings, my father’s and brother’s heads deep inside their Nation of Islam books, me slowly turning the pages of my textbooks. I was suddenly hungry for the world outside of Brooklyn, something more complicated, bigger than this. Some evenings, my father looked over my shoulder, questioned me about geometry, The Crucible, the USSR. I stared at him, letting my shoulders rise and fall listlessly, the words too much trouble. My father patted my cheek, mumbled, I have a woman I want you to meet, and moved back to his Nation. I dipped my head back into my books. Because what else was there? Once, my brother and I had sat at a window, watching the world. Now we were deeply inside that world, working hard to find our way through it. I cooked the foods they would eat, omelets and eggplant, bean pies and roasted vegetables, leafy salads topped with tomatoes and onions, grilled fish, and olive oil. I was nearly as tall as my father and our Saturdays at Coney Island were long behind us. Hot dogs and boiled corn from hawking vendors felt like something out of another place and time.
The woman’s office was small and smelled of musk oil. Beneath her hijab, her face was unlined and calm, so that at certain angles, she looked no older than Jerome.
Brother, she said to my father.
Sister, he replied softly. This is my daughter.
There were degrees on the wall behind her, her name in boldly inked letters.