Madeleine, torn between wanting to be loyal and stand beside Pookie in the visiting room and wanting to be with her father, nevertheless opted to sit in her father’s lap and they would share whatever snacks Maddie had brought. Samuel had begun to smoke, and when Madeleine left him, she and her clothes smelled powerfully of smoke. “You smell like Daddy,” Pookie would say to her during the ride back home. “Get away from me.”
Maddie would sit throughout the visit across the table from Samuel and Madeleine, talking to whatever man had brought them to Lorton. And if the man stayed in his car, she would sit reading a magazine. The only word she ever spoke to her brother during the visit was good-bye, never hello and never anything in between. “I wouldn’t have taken you if it was up to me,” Maddie would one day tell her niece. “But you and him was tied to each other by blood and there was nothin I could do about that.”
At thriteen, Pookie said he would not ever go back to Lorton. “Daddy won’t like that,” Madeleine said, waving her finger in her brother’s face. “I don’t care what Daddy don’t like,” he said. And to Maddie, Pookie said that if Jesus could throw the men out the temple at twelve, he could go down to Lorton or not go down to Lorton. “Pookie actin up,” Madeleine told her father during the next visit. “What did he say to that?” Madeleine asked her aunt years later as she held her sleeping son on her lap. “I don’t remember,” Maddie said.
The children in the realm made up these words and they would chant, particularly when Pookie was around:
Yo daddy killed yo mama
And soon he’ll get yo sista
Then you’ll be next, brotha, brotha.
After weeks of the chanting, he went after the biggest of the boys who teased him and worked his way down to the smallest, to the ones his own size. Even if it took weeks of picking a fight with one of them, he would persist until he had finally whipped the kid decisively, whether with just his fists, or the help of a brick, dirt in the face, the limb of a tree. And when he was all done, when it seemed that all the boys in Washington, D.C., knew not to mess with Pookie Williams, he would, from time to time, go after someone he had already whipped. “Sing that song,” he would say before the first punch. “Sing that song you useta sing.”
When Pookie was fifteen, he stayed all night at a friend’s house on Ridge Street. It was the first time he had stayed away all night without Maddie knowing where he was. In the morning, he dressed while all in the house were still asleep and went to the kitchen. He had not eaten since lunch the day before and hunger gnawed at his insides. But he found nothing to eat. On the table, he saw a pocketbook with twenty-eight dollars and he pocketed twenty-one. Then, before leaving, he poured salt in the palm of his hand and licked his hand clean and convinced himself that that was enough to fortify him for the time being.
He sat on the corner at New York and New Jersey avenues and waited for the rest of the world to wake up, for Madeleine as she made her way to Walker-Jones.
“Aunt Maddie called the police and had everybody lookin for you,” Madeleine said when she saw him.
“It’s all right. I done talked to her,” he lied. “It’s gonna be all right.” He gave her twenty dollars. What had worried him most about the hunger he felt before the salt was that his sister would somehow suffer the same, and he could not abide that. “I’m gonna be goin, so you do everything Aunt Maddie tell you.”
“Where you goin, Pookie?”
“To the navy.”
“What navy?”
“The navy navy.”
“Where you get this money?”
“I took it,” he said.
“Aunt Maddie won’t let me have no stolen money.”
“Hide it away,” he said. “You can do that. And don’t spend it on somethin stupid. Use it for a mergency.”
For a moment, he touched her cheek with the back of his hand, then she watched him walk away, and watching him, she was reminded of a short poem a teacher had made them memorize about a hungry man who went down to the river one day to fish for his supper. “Bye, Pookie,” she said, but if he heard, he did not acknowledge. “Bye, Pookie,” she said again. She noticed that already he was getting too big for the pants Maddie had purchased only the month before. In her child’s mind, he was doing no more than playing hooky for the day and she thought they would see him that evening, but in fact he was gone fifteen years and eight months.
Madeleine never gave Maddie a moment’s trouble, her aunt was proud of telling her customers at Cleopatra’s Hair Emporium, a small beauty shop of five chairs at 9th and P streets Northwest. At the shop, at the bottom of the mirror at her station, Maddie taped her two favorite photographs, one of herself and the children taken at Sparrow’s Beach one day not long after they came to live with her. The man she was seeing at the time had captured the three with their backs to the ocean. She treasured the picture because her nephew and niece were smiling. Above that picture, she had taped a photograph of her and Agnes in their late teens. They were sitting with crossed ankles on the hood of an automobile with an ornament of some being preparing to take flight. There was, on both their faces, a look of boredom, and there was, as well, a hint of don’t-fuck-with-me.
Madeleine took copies of these photographs when she went off to Columbia University, which, she had decided, was far enough away to feel she was setting off on her own and still close enough to get back to Maddie in less than a day.
From Columbia, she wrote to Maddie and Sam, wherever he happened to be, at least three times a week. Aside from a postcard now and again, she stopped writing to Samuel after she was fifteen, for no other reason than that she simply had little to say to him. Way before this, she had stopped going to Lorton to see him, but it was for the reason young people usually stop doing things — there were a thousand other things to do in an ever-expanding world. Her father became little more than a man in prison who, she remembered, smelled of cigarette smoke and who would beg for some sugar when she visited him. But when depression hobbled her and gave her new eyes with which to see the world, she began to imagine that she had seen what her father had done, to imagine that she, standing in the doorway, had been a witness, powerless, but somehow nevertheless culpable. “I told him to just stop writin you when you left for New York,” Maddie told her after Madeleine returned for good to Washington. “I told him, ‘New York City’s bad anough as it is.’”
In her sophomore year, she began to do volunteer work at a preschool for Harlem children. All of the children at the center took to her and she to them, but she was particularly fond of a precocious three-year-old girl, Clarine, who, having learned where Madeleine was from, insisted on calling her Miss Washton. Somewhere in her life, the child had been told that she was adorable, and she enjoyed standing before Madeleine and the other adults and slowly turning around so that they could get a good look at her in her dress. “See, see, see,” she would say as she turned, the hem of the dress in both her outstretched hands.