I’m in solitary.
I try to think about the last parts of the riot, the sound of the ground getting pushed in, breaking against itself, the CO flying through the air, arms swimming, before landing on his back and not getting up. If I can only regulate my breathing, I’ll be all right. I just have to stay calm, but, because that’s not how this is supposed to go, my headache is back.
My nose has been bleeding.
Ella has the rice and beans steaming in two plates, ready for Mama when she comes home from the hospital still in her scrubs. Mama never seems tired coming back from an overnight shift. She has never fallen asleep on the subway, stays alert all through the trek home, always takes the stairs, and keeps her eyes open all through the meal. And Ella wonders once again at her strength. She had tried once to massage calm and peace into her mother’s mind, ease her into sleep, but Mama had shot back with a curt “Don’t do that,” before going to sleep on her own.
Mama takes her seat now in the kitchen and lets out a sigh. “Thank you for cleaning the bathroom.”
Ella smiles. It’s the least she can do, clean the place while Mama’s at work, but Ella knows that Mama says these things because she knows Ella needs sometimes to feel useful. “You workin’ again tonight?”
“Mmhmm,” Mama says around a mouthful of beans.
“Do you wanna do something when you have a night off? See a movie or something?”
Mama looks up, then frowns. Silence stills the air between them. Mama puts down her fork. “What’s in those boxes, Ella?”
Ella looks behind her, feigning surprise, at the shoe-boxes. When she turns back, she can’t look Mama in the face. “I just thought, you know, if you needed the money—”
“Where’d that money come from?”
Ella wants to snap at her, bark that she has a Thing that nobody else has, a gift that she can use and that all her life, she’s been giving and giving and giving and now why not take something somebody’s not gonna miss and it’s not like she took it all from one person or even like she’s robbing anyone they know. Ella wants to spit the words out, that she’s tired of skimming, of snatching food from supermarkets or making toilet paper vanish off bodega shelves. She can destroy an entire building, she can plumb the depths of any person’s mind and find their worries and their wants and she can twist them. She can make things fly. “Why don’t you want it?” It comes out as a hiss.
“I don’t need it.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Ella, I don’t need this.” She’s standing now, palms heavy on the table, arms shivering with the weight.
“Mama,” she growls. And in her mind, scenes replay. The chaos of the trauma ward, blood-slick tile floors that oiled gurney wheels squeak over, commands issued over the body of a man bleeding out from his gunshot wounds, Mama at the trauma surgeon’s side as the team opens up the patient’s abdomen, the gape the size of a basketball, Mama later sopping up the stomach acid leaking from the exposed intestines with gauze, then hooking the man up to a machine that sucks the acid out; Mama opening the door to another patient’s room to see two hulking men in T-shirts and shorts looming over the bed, Mama thinking they’re family. Then the men jumping back and telling her they’re plainclothes cops and this patient’s the suspected shooter. Mama wishing they’d leave the boy alone for just a little bit, not interrogate him and get ready to lock him up while the vertical incision from just below his nipple to his belly button was still fresh, while the kid was still reeling with just having had his kidneys removed and his spleen and part of his stomach, while the kid lies there as raw and open as the wound they can’t yet stitch back together. And how could Mama not want to leave all that behind?
“It’s wrong, Ella. And I don’t need wrong in this house.”
“You could buy a new one.”
Ella stands, snatches her jacket off the back of her chair, and leaves without another word. Outside, she lets visions wash over her. Of Mama attending to a little black boy shot in the arm, Mama assisting the surgeon as the surgeon massages the heart back to life. Then that same little black boy, not even six months older, back with a gunshot wound to his upper arm, his brachial artery almost bleeding out, almost dying again, then the boy before Mama’s eyes for a third time, shot in the head. Dead.
She’s halfway up the block to a nearby park when she stops. She can’t let herself get this angry. Not again. A couple deep breaths later, she heads back and is at the door again, but it opens without her key. Which means Mama never locked it.
“Mama?” Her “I’m sorry” dies on her lips.
Mama lies on the floor, her legs tangled beneath her, her arms splayed out, limp. Urgency radiates from her body. Even before Ella rushes to her side and fumblingly checks to see if she’s breathing and thanks God that she is and calls for an ambulance and helps them get Mama into the back without even bothering to hide the shoe boxes, crumpled and conspicuous, in their kitchen, even before getting to the hospital where she’ll watch over Mama as she recovers from what she’ll tell Ella was “just a fall,” Ella knows that as long as Mama’s alive, she can’t ever let herself get that angry again.
“I’m not leaving,” she says at Mama’s bedside. “Mama, I’m not leaving.”
Eyes closed, Mama squeezes Ella’s hand. Ella knows she should be thankful, but she can’t get herself all the way there, because she knows the only reason Mama’s squeezing her hand is because she knows Ella needs sometimes to feel useful.
“Have you ever been to a rodeo?” Kev asks. There’s quiet eagerness in his voice the next visit, a thin, fast-moving river. “You know. Horses, bulls?”
“No,” Ella manages behind her smirk. It’s good to see Kev animated like this. For a time, after his stint in solitary, he didn’t say much. Some visits, he said nothing, and it was always a tiny miracle that he took her visits to begin with. He could just as easily have refused. Or been denied.
“They had rodeos at the prison where I was held before they transferred me up here.” As he speaks, he does not look at Ella; he seems to look everywhere else, at the COs who walk alone or in pairs throughout the visiting room or along the hallways seen through the smudged glass of the entrance and exit doors or at the dust motes that, to Ella, would occasionally swirl to mimic the features of someone’s face, a loved one’s, an enemy’s, a passing stranger’s. “You know how it is down there. They couldn’t do it to slaves anymore, so they put collars around our necks and did it to us. Field niggas. Just hoein’ away. Pretty much picking cotton.” At her knee. “The sheriffs sit on horses with their shotguns at their shoulder.” At the floor. “The Passage.” Out the window. “And you got a lotta niggas locked up for petty shit. Larceny, that sort of thing. Property crimes.” At her. “They called it Angola. In case you forgot it all comes back to Africa.” Which makes Ella breathe a nervous chuckle.
Underneath the table, Kev shifts one of his pant legs up, touches the skin of his ankle to the skin of Ella’s.
Ella does not have to close her eyes to see what Kev sees; the vision, the memories, the past as he remembers it, all of it bleeds slowly then with increasing volume into Ella’s brain, as though a cord were connecting his mind to hers. It begins with sights: children dressed in Polo shirts and jeans and dresses with golden and brown and black hair, smiling or frowning or laughing with their blue, green, brown, black, morning-colored eyes in the front row of the stadium; the striped prison uniform; the black and white of one prisoner’s shirt as he stoops down, nappy hair shorn close to his skull, and pulls out a handful of identical shirts, stripes spraying in all directions, patterning him and the ground around him; other prisoners, elderly ones aged too quickly by what prison does to a person, their striped shirts tucked into stone-washed blue jeans, which are, in turn, tucked into knee-high leather boots. Then the sounds: the shimmering of a melody from the merry-go-round on the prison grounds, the hum of chatter between the incarcerated selling wares they had crafted in their workshops, magical and shining things, and the free folk who hold up those glimmering belt buckles to the light or who turn over the intricately detailed wood carvings in their fingers or who marvel at the necklace of beads held together by near-invisible thread, the creaking of a metal fence on which leans the chest of an inmate, her arms and tattooed hands dangling over, one of them bandaged and wrapped in gauze up past the wrist. Then the smells: the bull shit in the holding pens, the sweat-stink of prisoners unable to ask the air to press moisture into the skin, God unwilling to answer that prayer, sitting or standing motionless in their cages in the thick wool of their striped gowns and striped shirts; the perfume wafting off the girl whose long blond hair comes down in smooth threads to the small of her back, her face shaded by a large black cowboy hat, a black button-down shirt clinging to a shapely frame, tucked into tight jeans that raise her ass as she walks. Miss Rodeo Louisiana, making the rounds, waving to the families in the stands, waltzing past the cages that hold prisoners rendered hideous by the climate and their captivity.