My father, brother, and I were different from this. I went through my days connected to them, but inside myself, holding my brother, laughing with my father, always deeply aware of their presence. But it was a presence in shadow, a presence etched in DNA. When I watched my brother and father bending toward each other to speak, I’d see their fluid connection, a something I was on the outside of. Maybe this was how my mother and I bent into each other. When she returned, we’d bend this way again. In the meantime, I pressed my face against the hot glass, palms flat against the window, wanting to be on the inside of Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi’s continuum.
In late July, my father took a knife to the top window frame, wedging it along the lines of thick green paint until the frame gave in and the sound of the city finally wafted up toward us.
A tinny radio from somewhere on the block seemed to play “Rock the Boat” all day long, and sometimes my brother sang the lyrics around his thumb. So I’d like to know where, you got the notion. Said I’d like to know where. .
From that window, from July until end of summer, we saw Brooklyn turn a heartrending pink at the beginning of each day and sink into a stunning gray-blue at dusk. In the late morning, we saw the moving vans pull up. White people we didn’t know filled the trucks with their belongings, and in the evenings, we watched them take long looks at the buildings they were leaving, then climb into station wagons and drive away. A pale woman with dark hair covered her face with her hands as she climbed into the passenger side, her shoulders trembling.
My brother and I were often alone. My father’s job in the Men’s Section at Abraham & Straus Department Store was downtown, and he left just after sunrise to take the B52 bus. We had never been on that bus or any city bus. Buses were as foreign to us as the black and brown boys on the street below, shooting bottle caps across chalk-drawn numbers, their hands and knees a dusty white at the end of the day. Sometimes the boys looked up at our window. More than once, a beautiful one winked at me. For many years, I didn’t know his name.
Early one morning, as my brother and I took our place by the window, cereal bowls in our laps, a young boy pulled a wrench from his pocket, used it to remove the cap from the fire hydrant below us, then turned the top of the hydrant until white water pounded into the street. We watched the water for hours. Children we didn’t know but suddenly hated with a jealousy thick enough to taste ran through it, their undershirts and cutoffs sticking to their brown bodies. I saw Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi again that day, pulling each other into the water, their voices floating up to our window.
Is she laughing at us? my brother asked. That red-haired girl. She just looked up at our window and laughed.
Shush, I said. She isn’t even anybody.
I was beginning to hate them. I was beginning to love them.
Sometimes, Angela stood apart from the others, biting fiercely at her nails, her short Afro dripping. The high yellow of her skin was as familiar as Tennessee to me. At the small church our mother took us to sometimes, four sisters who looked like Angela sat up front, their hair straightened, braided, and white-ribboned, their backs straight. As their father preached, I watched them, wondering what it was like to walk the edge of holy. For God so loved the world, their father would say, he gave his only begotten son. But what about his daughters, I wondered. What did God do with his daughters?
My father had grown up in Brooklyn but joined the military at eighteen and was stationed at a base near Clarksville, Tennessee. Then Vietnam. Then my mother and SweetGrove. He was missing a finger on each hand, the pinky on his left, and on his right hand, the thumb. When we asked him how it happened, he wouldn’t answer, so my brother and I spent hours imagining ways to lose two fingers in a war — knives, bombs, tigers, sugar-diabetes, the list went on and on. His parents had grown old and died only a block from where we now lived. That summer, when we begged him to let us go outside during the day, he shook his head. The world’s not as safe as you all like to believe it is, he said. Look at Biafra, he said. Look at Vietnam.
I thought of Gigi, Sylvia, and Angela walking arm in arm through the streets below our window. How safe and strong they looked. How impenetrable.
One Sunday morning, on the way to the small church my father had found for us, a man wearing a black suit stopped him. I’ve been sent by the prophet Elijah, in the name of Allah, he said, with a message for you, my beautiful black brother.
The man looked at me, his eyes moving slowly over my bare legs. You’re a black queen, he said. Your body is a temple. It should be covered. I held tighter to my father’s hand. In the short summer dress, my legs seemed too long and too bare. An unlocked temple. A temple exposed.
The man handed my father a newspaper and said, As-Salaam Alaikum. Then he was gone.
In church behind the preacher, there was a picture of our Lord Jesus Christ, white and holy, his robe pulled open to show his exposed and bleeding heart.
The Psalm tells us, the preacher said, I call on the Lord in my distress and he answers me.
Gold light poured in through a small stained glass window. My father lifted his gaze, saw what I saw — the way the light danced across the folding chairs, the rows of laps, the buckling hardwood floor. Then the sun shifted, melting the light back into shadow. What was the message for you, my beautiful black brother, in all that church light? What was it for any of us?
Behind me, an old woman moaned an Amen.
The streetlights had come on and from our place at the window, my brother and I could see children running back and forth along the sidewalk. We heard them laughing and shouting Not it! Not it! Not it! We could hear the Mister Softee ice cream truck song weaving through it all. My brother begged again and again for the world beyond our window. He wanted to see farther, past the small, newly planted tree, past the fire hydrant, past the reflection of our own selves in the darkening pane.
If anyone had looked up just that minute before, they would have seen the two of us there, as always, watching the world from behind glass. I was ten and my brother was six. Our mother was still in SweetGrove. Our words had become a song we seemed to sing over and over again. When I grow up. When we go home. When we go outside. When we. When we. When we. Then my brother’s palms were against the window, pushing it out instead of up, shattering it, a deep white gash suddenly pulsing to bright red along his forearm.
How did my father suddenly appear, a thick towel in his hands? Had he been just a room away? Downstairs? Beside us? This is memory. My father’s mouth moving but no sound, just my brother’s blood pooling on the sill, dripping down onto the jagged glass glinting at our feet. The red lights of an ambulance but no sound. My father lifting my paling brother into his arms but no sound. The trail of silent blood. The silent siren. The silent crowd gathering to watch the three of us climbing into the van.
In the bright white of the hospital room, sound returned, bringing with it taste and smell and touch. The room was too cold. We had not yet eaten dinner. Where was my little brother? A nurse handed me a paper cup of red juice and a Styrofoam plate filled with Nilla wafers. I wanted water. Milk. Meat. There was blood dried to a burnt brown on my T-shirt. Blood on my cutoff shorts. Blood on my light blue Keds. I pressed the cookies together in pairs, chewed slowly.