But, he thought, low-income housing was always angry and thoughtless. The grass around it was rough and brown, the attempts at spaces where folks could meet and talk were hard and broken. The walls showed early signs of tags and graffiti, and though many would blame those who lived there for defacing the property, they never felt the insult of living within cinder-block walls or the flat-out fuck you in the color of green paint in the hallway.
The night before, Cyrus sat Octavian down, poured both of them Scotch in those same Waterford glasses that they’d used when Octavian got into Cooper Union, and began a long story, one that Octavian could tell he’d been planning for quite some time. One that included a woman from social services and his mother wearing an Ethiopian cross and a sundress. All of this to tell Octavian that he was not Francis’s biological father.
He looked at Octavian with wet eyes and said, “Are you angry with me, son?”
“No,” Octavian said. “I’m not angry.”
And he wasn’t. In a way, Octavian was relieved. It took some of the shine off Cyrus’s angel wings, but that allowed Octavian to believe that maybe he could, one day, be a man like his father. One who told lies and also one who told the truth.
“Is there anything else you want to know?” Cyrus asked.
Octavian shook his head. He thought about this version of his mother’s history. The one that included her falling in love with a soldier who became a heroin addict who died in a white lady’s bathtub, a needle stuck in his thigh, but he didn’t need to know more. What Octavian needed was to hold his wounded brother, but he couldn’t. And since he couldn’t, he stood up and went to where he, thankfully, could still hold his trembling father.
Octavian pulled into the parking lot of the Ferguson Community Center and got out of the car. He stood for a moment watching people come and go, carrying in tables, carrying out signs. A group of young girls in sneakers and jeans, hair natural and pulled back, took boxes out of a van. A cluster of young men with serious expressions talked in low voices outside the front door.
Inside was as busy as outside. A group sat at a table making signs and others were counting and organizing water bottles. Beyoncé’s “Flawless” played from someone’s phone attached to a speaker. Across the room, Octavian saw Brendon giving directions to a man setting up camera equipment. His face lit up when he saw Octavian. He walked over and gave him a long hug.
“Man, is it good to see you,” he said.
“You too, B,” Octavian said, looking at his old friend. “You look good. You’re thin.”
“Shit, I ain’t thin, but I sure ain’t what I used to be. Diabetes got me, man.”
“Damn, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“How would you? Your ass ain’t been back in how long?”
Octavian couldn’t remember.
“Yeah, well, the diabetes sucks, but it made me lose some weight. I got kids, man, I can’t die. At least not yet.” Brendon took out his phone and showed Octavian pictures of his children. Pride spread across his face.
“Wow,” Octavian said. “Three boys?”
“Yeah, man. My house is crazy,” he said and laughed.
An older woman with a lanyard around her neck and a shirt that read Hands Up Don’t Shoot came over to ask Brendon something.
When Brendon turned back to Octavian, he said, “Can you sit for a second?”
“If you’ve got time, I know I do,” Octavian said.
Brendon led him into a side room, where the walls were decorated with kids’ drawings of jack-o-lanterns and witches cut out of construction paper.
“This is amazing, man,” Octavian said.
“It’s the revolution,” Brendon said. “The shit is finally here.” He laughed again.
It felt good to be with Brendon. To hear his easy laugh, see his big hands. “And you’re right here in the middle of it,” Octavian said.
“You goddamn right. Looks like we could have about thousand people marching downtown on Saturday.”
“Cyrus told me,” Octavian said. “We’ll be there.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s exactly the same. Older, but the same. Thank God.”
“You coming to Bones’ I’m-closing-the-store-not-closing-the-store party?” Brendon asked.
“I wouldn’t miss it either way.”
“I’m so glad he’s not closing Rahsaan’s,” Brendon said. “His ass woulda driven me crazy. Bones with no store?” Brendon looked at Octavian. “You know he woulda been up in my shit every day talkin’ about, ‘Hey Bren, what you doin today, baby pa? Wanna come smoke some reefer, listen to some blues?’”
Octavian laughed.
“And,” Brendon said, “we lose places like Rahsaan’s, we can’t possibly win the war. You know what I’m saying?”
Octavian nodded. “Who else is coming to this party?” he asked.
“Ivy, of course. You know he works with me now? He’s downtown organizing today, but he’ll be there. And his daughter, remember Sunshine? She just graduated college. She’s helping, too.”
“Evan?”
“Ain’t no one heard from Evan in a minute, but you never know where he’ll turn up. And Mina. She’s coming.” Brendon stopped and raised an eyebrow at Octavian. “Have you talked to her?”
Before Octavian could answer, a young white man with a beard and a bun came to the door.
“Mr. Graves,” he said, “can I bother you for a second?”
“Sure,” Brendon said and got up. “Be right back, Tave.”
Octavian was grateful for a moment to think about how to talk to Brendon about Mina. When Brendon came back, Octavian said, “We’ve been talking, Mina and I, I mean.”
“Good.”
“That’s good?”
“I tell you what, man. I’m not sorry for what I said back then, because I believed it, but I will say that I understand now why you love her the way you do.”
“I don’t know that love, in the present tense, is the right term,” Octavian said.
“Yes, it is. Because I love her. Not the way you do, but you know what I’m saying. What I didn’t understand back then was that we were different. I was different, Mina was different.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tell me something,” Brendon said. “Outside of Rahsaan’s, you ever met anyone else like me? Like Ivy? Like Mina? Like you? Like fucking Bones?”
Octavian thought for a minute and said, “Not really. I never had friends like y’all—black or white. It always seemed like I had to explain one side to the other.”
“Exactly,” Brendon said. “And that’s why Bones can’t close the store. Music is the one thing that can bring people together. It’s what got all of us to know each other like we did.”
Octavian nodded. “That’s true.”
“And it’s what saved us, you know? I still think things started to go really bad for Francis, not when your mother died, but because he stopped being able to listen to music.”
Octavian wished that after more than twenty years, the wounds didn’t still feel so fresh.
“Man, none of us knew how good we had it,” Brendon went on. “I mean the way we hung out and everything. Wasn’t until later, when everyone kinda went their separate ways and I started doing more work in the community, that I realized how rare it was that we knew each other like that. Shit, Ivy spent more nights at my house than his own. And now he talks to my mother more than I do. I can’t tell you how many white folks tell me that I’m the only black person they’ve ever had a conversation with—they don’t even talk to the people who work for them.” Brendon leaned back in his chair. “And that’s a lot of black people who’ve never even heard ‘Hi how are you’ from a white person. You know how far a hill that is to climb when you’re talking about bringing folks together?” He shook his head. “Shit, imagine Ivy never having had a conversation with a black person? Ivy don’t barely know how to talk to white people
. And Bones? And me? I couldn’t come in here and do what I do if I hadn’t come up going over to Evan’s mother’s house for Greek Easter and shit. I tell you, we were given a gift and we—including Mina, and me, and you—we didn’t even know it.”
“I never thought about it that way,” Octavian said. “But you’re right.”
“I’ll tell you what though, Tave,” Brendon said, rubbing the back of his graying head. “Trying to get people to understand each other, to see themselves the way others see them and then actually put that shit to the side so that they can just talk? It’s hard. Like, sometimes it feels impossible. And these are the people that want to talk, are here to talk to each other. Never mind everyone out there—black and white, who could care less about ever talking to the other. And how in the hell am I supposed to do that?”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Octavian said. “But I do know that I’ve had more conversations with white folks about racism since Michael Brown got killed than I’ve had in my lifetime. And I live in Maine.”
“Well, that’s good to hear,” Brendon said.
Octavian could see his friend’s sad eyes through his thick glasses and he felt the weight of the world he’d abandoned for Brendon to carry on his own.
“I’m sorry, B,” Octavian said. “I talked a lot of shit back in the day. I know I haven’t been much help.”
“Please,” Brendon said. “Teaching art to kids? That’s, like, the most revolutionary thing you can do. What sucks is, no matter how much I work, or you work, or Ivy works, no matter how many people take to the streets, won’t none of it bring back Michael Brown. No matter how many hoodies we wear, ain’t none of us actually Trayvon Martin. Those young men are still gone. And there will be more. Before this comes to an end, if it ever comes to an end, there will be so many more. I talked a good game about the revolution, but real talk, this is not easy.”
Outside the door, the group of young girls laughed and drew on poster board with colored markers. Octavian nodded and thought about what Mina used to always say: “Nothing important ever is.”
MINA AND HER DAUGHTERS arrived in St. Louis and went directly to Rahsaan’s, where Bones clutched them to his chest and crooned. Then Mina handed each girl twenty dollars and didn’t say a word when Chloe used hers to buy a Taylor Swift poster.
That evening, standing in front of Cyrus’s apartment building, Mina remembered that there were forty-two steps from the sidewalk to the front door. Octavian once told her that when he was little, he counted them every day when he came home from school.
“I got superstitious when my mom got sick,” he said. “And since she loved Jackie Robinson, and his number was forty-two, I used to count the steps every time I went up or down. Thought something bad would happen if I didn’t. Even though she’s gone, I still do it.”
They had been standing in front of the building and he’d taken her hand. “Count them,” he said.
Now Mina stood at the bottom. Above her, the yellow lamp-light shone down from the second story window. Octavian was in there. Octavian. Octavian and Cyrus. But not Francis. Mina felt the distance she had put between herself and that sorrow for more than twenty years as she put her foot on the first step. She counted: one.
At the front door of the building, she pushed the bell for apartment five. Her same finger, the same bell. How could it feel like it always did when so much had changed?
Octavian came down in bits. She saw his shoes first, then his legs and then he was there, on the other side of the door. Big, wide eyes. Octavian smile. He opened the door and immediately she was gathered in his arms.
She took a breath. “Tave,” she said.
“Hey,” he said and pressed his forehead into hers. “Hey, Mina girl.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
TK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATHEA MORAIS grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. She has a degree in Literature from NYU and worked in music journalism for many years. Her work has appeared in Trace Urban Magazine, The New Engagement, Slush Pile Magazine, Arts & Ideas and Anti-Heroin Chic. She is the Director of the Noepe Center for Literary Arts on Martha’s Vineyard and has taught creative writing to children and young adults for over fifteen years. She lives with her husband, her three daughters and, of course, a beloved dog.
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