In the deep heat of summer, we watched as kids circled around the heroin addicts, taking bets on whether or not they’d fall over. Once, a small boy ran down the street, a bent hypodermic needle he’d just found aimed like a gun.
At night, I wrapped my head in fabric torn from an old silk slip of my mother’s not remembering how I’d gotten it only that it smelled of her and hair grease now. As my brother and I lay side by side, we listened to the men coming and going from Jennie’s apartment — the tinny sound of her bell, the brush of her slippers on the stairs, the men laughing as they made their way up behind her, her quiet No touch Jennie before you pay Jennie money.
Money for what? my brother asked into the darkness.
Things. I whispered back. Just things.
The Tennessee land we called SweetGrove sloped down into a forest of pitch pine, hickory, pecan, and sweet birch trees. Beyond the trees there was more land and where it ended, there was water. The land had belonged to my grandfather on my mother’s side. It had come by way of his grandfather. Clay dirt and grass waves rolled for acres away from the house my brother and I had been born in. The house itself existed in a state of disrepair — bowed beams, water-stained ceilings, splintering hardwood floors. An ancient wood-burning stove sat beside a newer electric one that no longer worked, a hot plate on the counter between the two. A turquoise refrigerator leaned back against the mustard-colored brick. Water dripped deep inside an upstairs wall, echoing. Sash chain windows were trapped halfway open in the dusty library. Three books held up the third leg of the couch in the living room. On rainy days, the house smelled of decaying wood and briny water. Still, my brother and I moved through the house we’d always known without seeing the ways in which it was sagging into itself. We ran through it laughing, slamming out of and into it, closing our eyes at night then waking in the bright morning inside the pure joy of Home.
Clyde was twenty-three. He had graduated from Howard University. He was over six feet tall and had our mother’s soft, sweet laugh. In the evenings, long after my brother and I went to bed, our father, mother, and Clyde sat on the sagging front porch and talked about plans for bringing SweetGrove back to what it had once been, before any of them were alive to see it so. But neither Clyde nor my father knew how to work that much land. My father was a city boy, and Clyde had, as a boy, loved books and maps and pretty girls, so he never learned the secrets of tasting dirt and spot-spraying webworms and sawflies. The working of the land fell to my mother, whose lovely hands, at the end of the day, were rough, thickened, and red from long hours in the fields.
The year my brother was born, a fire burned the south fields to ash. The following year, a letter from the government revealed that most of the land was now owned by the state of Tennessee due to ignored tax debt and penalties. The house remained ours.
Then Clyde got drafted and went to Vietnam. On the morning we said good-bye, my mother broke down and cried, her pain so raw I covered my ears and shivered. Six months after that, in the winter of 1971, she received a letter.
“We regret to inform you. .”
This is memory.
Winter and the sound of wind battering the windows. Cold air like a ghost blowing up from the water. My mother slips down heavily onto the floor, brings her knees up to her chin like a little girl, bends her head into them. My father leans against the dead electric stove, palms pressed together in front of his face.
The government owns the pecan trees now. What had once been my family’s has been taken. By the government.
5
We came by way of our mothers’ memories.
When Gigi was six years old, her mother pulled her in front of the mirror. It was cracked already, Gigi said. I guess that should be a sign. Broken-ass mirror and my crazy mama making promises.
Those eyes, her mother said, were your great-grandmother’s eyes. She came to South Carolina by way of a Chinaman daddy and mulatto mama. Gigi stared at her eyes, the slight slant of them, the deep brown. The hair, too, her mother said, holding up Gigi’s braids. Heavy and thick like hers.
The only curse you carry, her mother said, is the dark skin I passed on to you. You gotta find a way past that skin. You gotta find your way to the outside of it. Stay in the shade. Don’t let it go no darker than it already is. Don’t drink no coffee either.
When we had finally become friends, when the four of us trusted each other enough to let the world surrounding us into our words, we whispered secrets, pressed side by side by side or sitting cross-legged in our newly tight circle. We opened our mouths and let the stories that had burned nearly to ash in our bellies finally live outside of us.
It’s dark, Gigi said. But it’s got red and blue and gold in it. I look at my arms sometimes and I’m thinking skinny-ass monster arms. She held her thin arms up into the light, her head lifted, thick braids falling against her back. And sometimes, she said, they look so damn beautiful to me. I don’t even know which thing is the truth.
We circled her, undoing her braids until her hair fell in black coils across her shoulders, then rebraiding and unbraiding them again, telling her how lucky she was to have such thick wavy hair and eyes like a Chinese girl.
When I’m an actress, Gigi said, I’ll be everywhere — TV, movie screen, onstage. Who’s that? Who’s that?
When it wasn’t wavering around doubt, her voice was deep and sure, and we wanted that, too—Who’s that? Who’s that? we echoed, laughing, our hands on her head, in her hair. That’s that big star, Gigi. Chocolate China Doll!
What keeps keeping us here? Gigi asked one day, the rain coming down hard, her shirt torn at the shoulder. We didn’t know that for weeks and weeks, the lock had been broken on her building’s front door. We didn’t know about the soldier who slept behind the darkened basement stairwell, how he had waited for her in shadow. We were twelve.
I can’t tell anybody but you guys, Gigi said. My mom will say it was my fault.
We twisted the long braids up into a crown, used oil and a comb to etch the fine baby hair over her forehead. Dabbed our fingers against our tongues and smoothed out her eyebrows. We wanted to make her broken self know she was still beautiful. It wasn’t you, we said again and again. We can kill him, we said.
We sat on Sylvia’s bed counting out what change we had, ran the blocks to Poncho’s for a small box of Gillette razor blades, then spent the afternoon practicing how Gigi would hold them when she slashed the soldier. We had heard that Pam Grier slipped them into her hair in Coffy and imagined Gigi pulling the blades from her braids just as the soldier stepped out from the darkness.
It’ll always be the four of us, right, y’all? Gigi asked.
Of course, we said. You know that’s right, we said. Sisters, we said. We said, Always.