36
What do you think your superpower would be? Holly asked me as we waited for Kira to pick us up after school. Someone had drawn a hopscotch game just outside the school yard fence and she started jumping up the numbers, then turning and jumping back down them again.
I had just been wondering that myself—wondering who the superhero is with a dad in prison.
I don’t know, I said. What about you?
I’d want super focus. Super be-still-ness. I’d want to sit like a statue for hours and hours and be like a sponge. Everything anyone said to me would get soaked right up, and I’d be the most brilliant person ever.
But you’re so smart already, Holly. Even if you can’t sit still.
But imagine if I could. Then I’d be even smarter! I’d probably be graduating high school at, like, thirteen.
But then you wouldn’t be in school with me, I said.
Oh yeah, that’s right. Then I think I’d want us to have the same superpower.
Maybe I’d want to fly, I said.
Me too, she said. That’s easy. Everybody wants to fly. But what else?
I thought about my dad. There was a room in my brain where I was mad at him. Some days I opened that door and it made me so sad that I just sat for hours staring off at nothing. Those were the days Ms. Laverne and my uncle and even Holly left me alone. Those were the days filled with gray light and cold, damp air. That was the room where I realized I couldn’t forgive him.
I think, I said slowly. I think I’d want to forget.
Holly stopped jumping.
Forget what?
You know—about what happened between my mom and dad. I’d want to just imagine that I always had a dad. That I never had a mom.
But you did have a mom.
I know.
You’d want to forget even the little tiny bit you know about her? Holly frowned, confused.
It’s not that. It’s just I don’t want to be sad and mad when I think about it all. I just want to think about the good stuff.
Then you want forgiveness, not forgetness, Holly said.
Forgiveness, I thought. I want forgiveness. Standing there, I realized I’d first have to forgive my father. Not forget. But forgive.
Holly started hopscotching again just as Kira pulled up in the car.
37
Check this out, Amari said to us on Monday morning. We were in the school yard before class, and the day was surprisingly warm. Amari opened his book and slowly started turning the pages. We all leaned in over the pictures. And there we were! On every single page. Tiago shooting webs from his hands over buildings and vans and cars, Esteban flying over an ocean and, far down below him, the same tiny man over and over again with a T-shirt on that said PAPI. Holly was Catwoman in a fancy building, her sneakers almost bigger than the rest of her, and we all laughed. When Amari turned the page again, there I was—my hair a mass of curly red wires that seemed to be shooting electricity.
That’s tight, Ashton said.
It’s like I’ve always had my superpower with me, I said. I was born with red hair.
Yup. Amari looked up at me and smiled. That’s the cool thing. There’s all kinds of ways to get your superpower. You take somebody like Superman, who was born with his superpower, and somebody like Spider-Man—the way he got his power was kinda tragic, right? But then it became this good thing. That’s what’s up.
* * *
• • •
That night, as I waited for my uncle to come say good night, I thought about Amari’s drawing of me, about the brilliance of my hair, the superpower in it. And I thought about my mother and father. Tragedy is strange. It takes away. And it gives too. I couldn’t ever imagine a life without my uncle, his laughing, his stories, the way he looks at the world. But until I saw Amari’s drawing, I hadn’t really thought about my hair. The power is both my mom and dad running through it, through me. And their moms and dads. And theirs. The a and b of me. The c and d, as Holly said. I smiled. My mother was gone, but she was continuing too. Inside of me. And that was its own superpower.
You ready? my uncle said. He stood in the doorway, holding his guitar. Before my father went to prison, they played music together, my father on the piano, my uncle on the guitar. Lame songs about mountains and clouds and rainbows, my uncle said. But then when my father went away, my uncle started writing his own music, telling stories in his songs. Sometimes he played them for me. I liked falling asleep to the quiet hum of his guitar and his soft voice, the notes trembling.
My uncle had lived through it all, the car accident, my father being taken away, him suddenly being not just my uncle but my mom and dad too. He was my superhero.
Yeah, I said. I wanted to tell him about the day, but instead, I pulled the covers up over me and smiled. My uncle sat in the small chair at the foot of my bed and started strumming his guitar.
38
When we came back to school after Easter break, Esteban was gone.
Where? we asked Ms. Laverne.
Home to the Dominican Republic. The family left on Sunday.
But he didn’t tell us, we said.
He didn’t know, Ms. Laverne said. She said, I’m sorry. She said, Let’s just do what we want today. She said, I know you all will miss him terribly. Amari looked at his drawings. Tiago put his head down on his desk. After a while, I could hear quiet sobbing. Ashton stared out the window. The sun was so bright, the buildings seemed sharp enough to cut someone. Holly got up and walked around the classroom, pulling books off the shelves and then putting them back again. After a few minutes, she went back to her seat, took out her knitting, then put it back. Then took it out again and started knitting, the needles clicking and scraping against each other.
I took out the recorder, turned the volume down low and played the last poem Esteban had read to us, his sweet voice filling the classroom.
And when his missing feels like it’s going to
break him into pieces, tell him it won’t.
Tell him that he is made of the iron
of grandfathers and grandmothers and
their grandfathers and grandmothers, people
who were human and worked hard and had dreams.
Tell him to hold on to his dreams because his abuela
and abuelo still believe in the power of dreams.
Tell him he is their dream.
And he is my dream.
And he is the dream come true
of the ancestors.
We are all the dream come true of the people
who came before us.
And when he asks, tell him I am fine.
Tell him I am free.
Tell him the mountains go on and on
and where they stop, Pico Duarte’s peak points up like lips
telling God a story. Maybe this mountain sings
of promises and families broken. Maybe
it holds inside it a beautifully remembered dream.
Tell him to hold inside himself
all good memories—hugs. Friends. Laughter.
Tomorrow holds no promises but now is not the time
for tears.
39
In June, just before the school year ended, we met in the ARTT room one last time.
Amari said, I’m gonna miss you guys.
Me too, Tiago said.
Me too, Ashton said. You guys are awesome.
There was air in the room where Esteban’s Me too would have been. We had left his desk where it was, left the pillow he sat on in the window, and it felt like a ghost in the room, like he was still with us, telling us about his papi, baseball season, poetry.
Me too, I said, looking at his empty seat. I hoped he was in the Dominican Republic. I hoped that he and his papi were catching baseballs and swimming in the ocean. I hoped that the family was t
ogether and safe and happy.
Holly looked around at us. It’s just the summer, people. We’ll be back together in September. It’s not like it’s for forever.
True, Ashton said. But it won’t be like this. We won’t be with you and Haley. It won’t be the ARTT room.
Yeah, Amari said. But don’t forget our promise. Every day gets us closer to twenty years from now, right?
Yup, Holly said. When we all meet back here, all old and gray and wobbly.
I’m not gonna be old and wobbly, Amari said. Maybe you will be, but not me.
You already are old and wobbly, Holly said.
We laughed—even Amari.
Remember how scared we were the first time Ms. Laverne brought us in here? Holly said.
Yeah, I hated this room, Amari said. It was, like, depressing. That one sad picture hanging on the closet.
We looked at the kid’s picture of the sun. It was as familiar as time now, something we saw but didn’t see. It was beautiful.
And a lot of us didn’t know each other, Tiago said. We all just were like, ‘What’s this thing?’
And it was us, I said. That thing that we were so scared of was just us together.
Yup, Tiago said. He smiled at me, his glasses glinting. Beneath them, I noticed how pretty his eyes were. Isn’t that crazy?
And Esteban, Ashton said softly. Esteban was here. Never gonna forget Esteban.
We all got quiet.
Some part of him is still here, Holly said.
Yeah, Amari said. That’s true.
Yeah, the rest of us said.
We still have his voice and his dad’s poetry, I said. He left that for us. For us to keep forever.
Amari opened his drawing pad and flipped through the pages until he came to a brightly colored picture.
That’s us, he said. And that’s a harbor. He carefully tore the drawing from his book. Then, without saying anything, he walked over to the picture of the sun, pulled one of the thumbtacks from it and hung his picture beside it.
We all stared at it. It was us. And like the picture of the sun, it too was beautiful.
40
The light has shifted now and the Ailanthus tree has turned to a shadow in the dusk. I turn the recorder off and sit on my bed. I can hear the soft swish of the ceiling fan in the hallway. Outside, little kids on the block are playing a game of tag, yelling, Not it! Not it! Then a woman’s voice breaks through, calling someone home to dinner.
I uncurl my legs from beneath me and head for the stairs. But at the top of the stairs I stop and sit, watching my father at the piano as he lifts his fingers from the keys and presses them down again. His fingers are long and white and delicate. I’d never really looked at his hands. But as they move over the piano keys, lifting such sweet music out of them, I want to run down and hug him. I want to tell him about my year in the ARTT room, about everything he missed in the many years he was in prison.
I want to ask him if he had great friends when he was my age. Friends he promised to meet up with again in twenty years.
But I stare at his back as he plays. He is somewhere else. He is with my mother in another dream. A dream of a place before this place. A time before this time. A story before this story.
Soon my uncle will be finished packing and will come down to join him on his guitar. Maybe they’ll ask me to sing and my voice will be high and off-key and they’ll laugh about how the musical gene skipped right over me.
When I was in fifth grade, I didn’t know how fast time could move. How you could wake up one day and so much around you had changed forever. I didn’t know that one day we’d have a teacher who would say, Take your books. You won’t be coming back here today. And that we’d walk out of the lives we’d always known, our faces turned toward her, so many questions and so much fear.
Daddy, I say. My father turns from the piano and looks up at me.
Play ‘Summertime.’
My father looks confused for a minute, and then his face softens into something warm and familiar. Something I knew a lifetime ago when I was a tiny girl getting tossed into the air by him, laughing and screaming, both afraid and thrilled.
When I was in fifth grade, I didn’t know the Unfamiliar would be beautiful and funny and heartbreaking and hard. That it would be Amari calling me Red and the glint coming off of Tiago’s glasses. That it would be Esteban in the window, a silhouette with the sun coming in around him. That it would be poems and pictures and questions. And answers.
I head down the stairs and sit on the bench beside my father. His fingers are long and pale and stretched out across the keys. He smiles, bends and kisses the top of my head, the first notes of “Summertime” rising from the piano.
I dreamed this moment a thousand times, he says.
I didn’t know it would be people you barely knew becoming friends that harbored you. And dreams you didn’t even know you had—coming true. I didn’t know it would be superpowers rising up out of tragedies, and perfect moments in a nearly empty classroom.
Me too, I say. And when I rest my head against his arm, when the music circles around us, when my uncle stops packing and joins in with his guitar and we pick up the song as if we’d always been singing it, what I know for sure now is that this is the end of one of many stories.
And also a beginning.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful to all the people who helped me write during such a crazy time in our country. You all know who you are, so I’m going to skip the names here. What I will say is harbor each other. Even strangers. Every day.
Jacqueline Woodson
PRAISE FOR JACQUELINE WOODSON
“Ms. Woodson writes with a sure understanding of the thoughts of young people, offering a poetic, eloquent narrative that is not simply a story . . . but a mature exploration of grown-up issues and self-discovery.”
—The New York Times Book Review
BROWN GIRL DREAMING
National Book Award winner • NAACP Image Award winner • Coretta Scott King Award winner • Newbery Honor winner • Sibert Honor winner • New York Times bestseller
“This is a book full of poems that cry out to be learned by heart.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Gorgeous.”
—Vanity Fair
“Moving and resonant . . . captivating.”
—Wall Street Journal
“A radiantly warm memoir.”
—Washington Post
“An extraordinary—indeed brilliant—portrait of a writer as a young girl.”
—The Horn Book, starred review
“Vivid.”
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, starred review
“Mesmerizing.”
—School Library Journal, starred review
“A marvel.”
—Booklist, starred review
“Will linger long after the page is turned.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Clear, evocative language. . . . A beautifully crafted work.”
—Library Media Connection, starred review
“Sharp images and poignant observations seen through the eyes of a child.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
FEATHERS
Newbery Honor winner
“With her usual talent for creating characters who confront, reflect, and grow into their own persons . . . the story ends with hope and thoughtfulness while speaking to those adolescents who struggle with race, faith, and prejudice.”
—School Library Journal, starred review
“The heroine is able to see beyond it all—to look forward to a time when the pain subsides and life continues.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
AFTER TUPAC AND D FOSTER
Newbery Honor winner
“A memorable, affecting novel about the sustaining power of love and friendship.”
—Booklist, starred review
“The emotions and high-quality writing make it a book well worth recommending.”
—School Library Journal, starred review
“The subtlety and depth with which the author conveys the girls’ relationships lend this novel exceptional vividness and staying power.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
MIRACLE’S BOYS
Coretta Scott King Award winner • Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner
“Readers will be caught up in this searing and gritty story. . . . Woodson composes a plot without easy answers.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
HUSH
National Book Award finalist
“Complex coming-of-age story. . . . Images and characters who are impossible to forget.”
—School Library Journal
“Readers facing their own identity crises will find familiar conflicts magnified and exponentially compounded here, yet instantly recognizable and optimistically addressed.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Intellectually engaging . . . will give youngsters plenty to think about.”
—Kirkus Reviews
LOCOMOTION
National Book Award finalist • Coretta Scott King Honor winner
“Moving, lyrical, and completely convincing.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A masterful use of voice.”
—School Library Journal, starred review
“Skillfully and artfully composed.”
—The Horn Book, starred review
PEACE, LOCOMOTION
Harbor Me Page 10