And when we pressed our heads to each other’s hearts how did we not hear Carmen McRae singing? In Angela’s fisted hands, Billie Holiday staggered past us and we didn’t know her name. Nina Simone told us how beautiful we were and we didn’t hear her voice.
I spent my twenties sleeping with white boys in photo-less rooms filled with jazz. As I pushed their resistant heads down, I thought of Brooklyn, of Jerome and Sylvia and Angela and Gigi. I cried out to the sounds of brown boys cursing and Bowie’s trumpet wailing. When I pulled my lovers into me, my eyes closed tight against the faces I had grown up believing belonged to the devil, I imagined myself home again, my girls around me, the four of us laughing. All of us alive.
In the Philippines, a beautiful brown man pressed his lips to my feet again and again, saying, Always begin here. In Wisconsin, I promised my housemate turned lover that I’d stay with her always. Months later, as the scattered pages of my dissertation lay finished and approved on the floor beneath us, I kissed her slightly parted lips as she slept and left in the night. In Bali, I waited at night for a beautiful black man from Detroit to show up in the dark. Say it, he begged, our bodies moving against each other with such a hunger, we laughed out loud. It’s just three damn words.
I turned thirty in Korea, cried for a week because I thought I was pregnant. Then cried for another when it was certain I was not. In the background, Abbey Lincoln sang “It’s Magic” and I saw again the view of our block from a high-up window, the children playing below my brother and me.
Once in a café in San Francisco the woman I had lived with for eight months asked why did I sleep with fisted hands.
Do I?
Yeah, you do, she said.
Once I came very close to saying For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet. But didn’t.
16
In the autumn of my sixteenth year, my father took us back to SweetGrove. We rode the train to Tennessee then rented a car and drove an hour to where our land had once been. The leaves were beginning to turn, but the air was still thick with heat. We arrived in the early evening. My brother and I slammed out of the car like we were children again, running down the long dirt road that lead to the house. But where our house had once been, there were weeds now, taller than any of us and thick as poles. From where we had stopped, I could smell the briny water. We stood there, silent. In the silence, we could hear the soft lap of the lake. I took my brother’s hand and together, silently, we walked toward it. Orange signs were nailed to the trees around us. NO TRESPASSING. PRIVATE LAND. DO NOT CROSS. But we kept on walking. The water was dark, near black against the brightly colored trees.
When did you realize your mother was actually dead, Sister Sonja would ask again months later.
Never. Every day. Yesterday. Right at this moment.
When my father took us back to the water.
I could hear our father approaching. Even here, so far away from Brooklyn, his soft, slow steps were as familiar as time.
Way out, I could see a person in a canoe, gently paddling along the line of pine trees. At its deepest point, the water dropped down to twenty feet. I’ve only ever put my toes in, my mother would say. I just needed to feel it against my feet, that’s all. And be close by.
At the diner, after my father’s funeral, my brother suddenly asked, Why did you always say that? Why did you always tell me she was coming tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?
For a long time, I said nothing, then finally, Because I believed it was true. That one of these tomorrows, she’d get here.
Someplace off the coast of South Carolina, a tribe of Ibo people brought over by slave catchers tossed themselves into the water. They believed that since the water had brought them here, the water would take them home. They believed going home to the water was far better than living their lives enslaved.
When I see Angela again, I am in my first year at Brown, sitting in my room on a Friday night. A boy I am planning to sleep with has his head on my lap. She appears suddenly on the television screen, darker than I remember her, her hair long and straightened. But her face is the same, angled and beautiful. The movie is about a dancer hungry for the lead role in La Sylphide, as her fiancé runs off and her own real life mirrors the story. Angela is stunning as she dances across the stage, her body thinner than I remember, but muscled and able. When she dances toward the camera, I call out to her.
Angela!
The boy asks if I know her.
She’s hot, he says.
Angela, I whisper. You made it.
Behind my brother and me, my father was saying that it was time to move on now, but none of us moved from where we were standing.
Wind came up, shuddering the leaves. The person in the canoe had stopped paddling and now cast a line into the water. Perch. Trout. Maybe catfish but I’m not sure.
This is memory.
I watched the water slowly lap back and forth against the shore. The sun was beginning to set. I took my brother’s hand and held it. We had no people left in Tennessee. We’d stay the night in a hotel, buy some souvenirs somewhere. In the late afternoon tomorrow, we’d get back into our rented car and begin the long journey home to Brooklyn.
I lifted my head to look up into the changing leaves, thinking how at some point, we were all headed home. At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory.
ON WRITING ANOTHER BROOKLYN
Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don’t always do or say what a writer wishes. I am often asked to explain this and find that I can’t — when I am inside my novel, it makes sense. But once I emerge from the world I’ve created, I find it difficult to go back to the moments before my characters walked through it with me. I guess in many ways, the characters a writer creates have always existed somewhere.
Long before I began to sketch the lives of August, Gigi, Angela, and Sylvia, I was thinking about what it means to grow up girl in this country — remembering and imagining, as the poet Rilke wrote, “the powerful, the uncommon, the awakening of stones.” So while Another Brooklyn is a work of fiction, for the years the story took to feel “done,” I have lived inside the lives of my characters, asking questions of myself about their own survival — who makes it big, who doesn’t, who lives, what will they wear, do, say, how long or short is their hair, how old will they be at the beginning, in the end?
Who will they love? How will they leave us, and what will they leave behind?
And, most of alclass="underline" What is the bigger story?
I do know that as the novel takes shape on the page, it’s hard for characters’ lives not to intersect with the writer’s own life. As we unpack our characters’ stories and actions, it’s hard not to unpack our own history. In Another Brooklyn, I looked back to my teenage years, mining them, rediscovering the deep love I had for my friends, the startling joy and fear of first loves, the will’s intensity to survive, and the slow-motion ferocity of the end of childhood.