“Violence didn’t give you your brother.”
Ella grits her teeth and remembers it ain’t this church she wants to punish. “But it will get him back.”
When she squeezes her eyes closed, she sees Mama in her last moments, a phantom of her former self. She feels so much of Mama’s entirety: her history, her love, her bitterness. Lounging on cars with friends in a languid Mississippi summer, mopping blood off a hospital room floor, praying with Ella, for Ella, on a sidewalk in South Central. All of it, gone. And all Ella could do was watch. This pastor didn’t save her. Ella didn’t save her. Ella couldn’t.
She tries not to turn the wooden doors into splinters on her way out.
It’s not till she’s outside that she realizes what she was looking for in there. What she’s been looking for all these years. What she realizes now she no longer needs.
Permission.
I am the locusts. Ella sends the thought out like a concussive wave, so that it hits every surveillance orb in the neighborhood, every wired cop, every crabtank in the nearby precinct. I am the locusts and the frogs and the rivers of blood.
I’m here now.
I’m putting on my watch when I see Ella in front of me, smiling. Her locs are completely silver, not an inch of black in them, and they’re floating in the air around her head, almost like a halo.
Before I can tell her not to, Ella makes the room vanish.
Noise. So much noise. Voices shouting at each other, people giving orders, someone crying out in pain.
I’m in a waiting room.
Everybody’s clustered beneath the TVs. I turn to Ella. “Where are we?” But the question’s barely out of my mouth before I see the grainy footage on one of the televisions. An angry crowd surrounds someone. From the aerial footage, all I can see are shoulders and the tops of heads swarming over a spot where someone has, by now, probably stopped moving.
“I smell smoke!” someone screams, running into the waiting room.
I turn back and see, in the chairs, what looks like my sister as a child. She’s squirming in one of the chairs while Mama, belly swollen, rocks back and forth, eyes squeezed shut in pain. A broad-shouldered man in dark slacks and suspenders holds her hand, or, rather, lets her squeeze his.
“Somebody shut that damn TV off!” Mama shouts. To the man, “Brother Harvey, I ain’t lettin’ them cut me open. Not this time. God, I just want this baby to be born.” There’s a nurse in front of her who keeps glancing back at the doors to the hospital operating rooms and who keeps saying, “Any time now” like some kind of mantra. Like she’s forgotten how to say anything else.
“Ella, is that…” I trail off.
She takes a step toward the cluster of people, and I follow her, and suddenly we’re outside where the chaos hits me in hi-def. A gray Cadillac races toward Florence and Normandie, and it’s dusky out, but this place looks familiar. Feels familiar. I’ve been here before. The car skids to a stop. The man behind the wheel flicks the safety off a gun and hops out. A woman jumps out the passenger’s side and runs with him to a row of stores being looted.
Helicopter blades whip overhead. Spotlights sweep the streets and sidewalks.
A rig rolls to a stop at the intersection, country music lolling out of the open windows, heard faintly through the rioting, then a piece of the mob breaks off and tears the truck door open, hauling the driver out. Rocks and chunks of concrete smash the windshield. Someone darts forward and swings down with a hammer, and the truck driver crumples.
Ella’s walk is stately. I can’t stop staring at the beating and the smashing and the hurting. I lose her, then run to where I last saw her. People are passing around a bottle of Olde English 800, rapping N.W.A. lyrics, some of them twisting the words of Negro spirituals to fit the rhythms. There’s no police.
There’s another swarm around a lone car. I get there just as a Korean woman is being dragged out by her hair. The whoop-whoop of police sirens sound as the black-and-white screeches to a stop. Two officers jump out, guns drawn, and there’s a moment of hesitation before rocks and bricks arc in a storm toward them. Then they’re gone.
Someone takes a near-empty bottle of Olde English left on the floor, folds up an issue of Vibe magazine, lights it, and hurls it at a nearby corner store. Kids nearly run me over on stolen bikes. Further down the block, guys with red and blue bandannas tied around their faces take crowbars to a pawnshop and a group of them dash in, then come out half a minute later, draped in jewelry and carrying the guns they got from the back.
A woman struggles past me burdened with toilet paper on her back and bags of kid’s shoes on both arms.
I move to follow her, and I’m back in the hospital room. Mama is screaming something fierce while nurses scramble around her. A doctor breaks her water, but there’s no progress. Then he and a nurse hook her up to a drip for Pitocin. I track the contractions in the changes in her face, and it’s like her features are sinking even deeper into her skin from the pain. I’ve never heard screaming like this.
The doctor looks back and forth between Mama and the screen where I’m supposed to be showing, then shakes his hands and takes what looks like a pair of spoons and reaches into Mama beneath her gown. He fumbles around, then gives up. On the screen, I’m still not moving.
I’ve lost Ella, and when I rush for the hospital room door, I stumble out onto the corner of Martin Luther King and Vermont. Above me, National Guardsmen perch on roofs with their M16s aimed at the crowds, and looters hug the sides of buildings. It’s late afternoon, and this can’t be for real if time is moving this fast and what about Mama where’s Mama?
In deserted parts of the city where the violence has abated, taxicabs pull up and keep the meters running while their riders hop out and come back with VCRs.
Smoke rises in columns over the city. I run farther, past overturned police cars and roadblocks. I have to get back to Mama. Time runs as fast as I do, and when I blink and stop running, Centinela Hospital looms over me. Night has fallen. Over a bullhorn, an official-sounding voice announces a curfew. Sirens wail as ambulance vans make a regular circuit up to and out from the hospital’s main entrance. Those who walked, weak from gunshots or stabbings or dehydration or beatings or weary from having lost everything, stagger toward the doors for treatment.
Far back, I see a car stop. A two-door. And a man in dreadlocks gets out. Dark, angular face. Some of the bones still twisted in the memory of a beating. He looks at the city, looks at me, with horror. And… guilt. That face looks so familiar, then I nearly fall over when I realize who it is, and he’s staring right at me.
“Is this my fault?” Rodney King seems to mouth at the mass streaming into the hospital. He snaps out of his trance, then gets back in his car and drives away.
Mama.
I shove my way past people who don’t notice me into a waiting room filled to bursting. Blood stains the linoleum floor in pools. I crash through another set of doors, calling out “Mama! Mama!” and look into each room for Mama and Ella and me. Nothing here. I find the stairs and run up and it’s on the second floor that I find them and, through the door’s glass, I see Mama in her hospital gown, sweating a waterfall into the hospital’s bedsheets while child-Ella looks curiously at the squirming new baby in Mama’s arms. Mama’s face is loose. Like how it would get when I used to catch her watching me and Ella play in that cramped Harlem apartment. It’s slackened, wrung out. Liberated.
“This is how you were born,” Ella says at my side.
“Why are you showing me this?” Something deep in me has cracked. I feel myslf slipping, then I land with a thud on my bed. Ella stands over me.