Hold Love Strong

by Matthew Aaron Goodman

  “Abraham!” my grandma shouted. “Abraham, what you think you’re special? Get over here!”

  With a smile sweeter than anything a horn made of sugarcane could play, and with eyes shining her own inebriation, and although I couldn’t quite believe I saw it there, some level of infatuation too, Kaya said: “Go. Your family needs you.”

  I hesitated. Kaya took the beer I was nursing then gave my shoulder a gentle push.

  “Go on,” she smiled. “You can come back.”

  I crossed the room and joined my family. Stevie Wonder singing “Ribbon in the Sky” filled the apartment, everything and everyone in Ever. Then Mr. Goines tried to join us. He let his camera rest on his chest and approached. But my grandma held her hand up and stopped him.

  “No,” she said. “Take a picture. What else you got that camera for? We taking it back to the beginning, back to how it should have always been.”

  Mr. Goines’s shining eyes went dull and wide, spread like ink seeping into a tissue. She’d hurt him, knocked the wind from his chest. His knees buckled. He rocked back on his heels. Desperately, he grabbed his camera with both hands and lifted it in front of his face, his hands fists around the camera’s sides.

  As if her body were suddenly made of rubber bands, my grandma stretched herself as far as she could and lashed her arms over our shoulders. She reined us in and she held us strong, and we breathed on, in, and with one another, and on my forehead and cheeks, and on the front and sides of my neck, the silent harmony of our breathing fell, following the rhythm my grandma made, the slow swaying of us left and right like she was a gentle ocean and we were the small boat it coaxed homeward.

  “It’s good,” she said. “Lord, ain’t it so good.”

  VI

  His name was Abdul Jalaal Najeeb, “the servant of the glory of the faith of noble descent.” He didn’t want to be called Nice or Roosevelt any longer. Every morning he woke before dawn, unfurled himself from the couch, causing the groan and whine of its old springs to echo through our apartment. He folded the bedsheets and the blanket he used in perfect squares, washed his hands, mouth, face, and feet in the sink. Then he dressed in a salwar kameez, slid his feet into slippers, walked out of our apartment, and climbed the misery of the stairwell, the rank ascent of our building, a prayer mat under his arm. On the roof, he faced east and prayed. He touched his ears and knees and prostrated. On Fridays, he attended the mosque for jummah. He talked about one day going to Mecca, making hajj. He spoke about unity, brotherhood. He said he had no interest, no desire to touch a basketball. It was a white man’s game: white lines around the edge of a court; a fence surrounding concrete; a cement yard; a crude contest where one put a ball through a rim. It imprisoned us, glorious brothers and sisters such as we were.

  Wherever he went, to parole, to find work, for long walks around Ever Park and its surroundings, he repeated the passage of the Qur’an he aimed to memorize or rememorize for that day. At night he quizzed himself, writing passages in both Arabic and English, underlining already highlighted passages, and crowding the already crowded edges of the pages with more notations, more considerations, more insights and questions. He didn’t watch television. He didn’t listen to hip hop stations on the radio. He said As-salāmu ‘alaykum, “Peace be upon you,” and reported to parole, gave them urine when they demanded it, and attended the drug and alcohol counseling program and anger management therapy, group, and one-on-one sessions that were the conditions of his release. He did it all with a self-assured humility, as if such subjugation paled in comparison to his manhood. He said freedom was not physical. It was cerebral and spiritual. No matter where his body may have been, no matter what walls or bars or confinements he was forced behind, no matter what sense of self-nothingness he was force-fed and ordered to abide by, he had been free ever since Islam came into his life.

  “Because here,” he told me, touching his temple with a finger. “And here,” he added, touching his chest with the flat of his free hand. “No man can limit the vastness of Allah, peace and blessings be upon Him.”

  And because he believed this with an incomparable degree of faith, he also believed that he had been free since he pronounced the Shahadah, his pledge of faith, two years to the day after being first locked down. And because he believed this, when his parole officer showed up at our apartment, my uncle welcomed him, introducing the stranger to me and Eric and my Aunt Rhonda as if a found member of our extended family had suddenly wandered into our home. Fellow Muslims, men with similar but not so severely humble dispositions who he had befriended in prison, brothers his age who he had educated and older men who had enlightened and counseled him, visited our apartment and sat with him in the kitchen, dissecting ethics, politics, and the particulars of the sermons they heard at the mosque.

  He listened and spoke softly and I couldn’t believe him. He was too holy, too devout, so devoid of emotions and detached that I feared what might happen when something, someone, some fact slipped past his shield, the shroud and armor of his unwavering faith, and struck his foundation, piercing not Nice, but the heart of Roosevelt, that which was too soft and too huge, too much like a swollen red balloon inflated to capacity not to explode. Of course, I knew the truth that would do this. And so I feared the revelation, feared when I saw him talking to brothers and sisters he was close with before he was locked away, and feared when Luscious wanted to hold his hand, kiss him, sit on his lap, love him, envelop him with the affection he had once initiated, reciprocated, and basked in. He held her off, kept her love at a distance; never revealing a sliver of intimacy while they were in public. She would sit on the couch and he’d sit not fully beside her, maintaining a few inches of space between their thighs. She’d reach for his hand and he’d sneak it from her reach, slip it into his pocket or bury it by folding his arms across his chest. She teased him, poked and pushed him the way an awkwardly coy middle school girl might mess with the high school boy she liked. But he didn’t respond, barely smiled. Instead, he laid awkward, uncomfortable, and somewhat disapproving eyes on her. His detachment wore at her patience. He frustrated her. Shortly after his return, they argued like an old tired couple who had grown sick of each other. She shouted, slammed her hand on her hip, and barked at him. He pretended to listen, nodding at inopportune times that proved he had heard nothing, and then he attempted to rationalize his thinking, his behavior with circuitous, unsubstantiated statements about Islam and love and respect. He was not the same young brother who’d left Ever. He had faith, he said, guidance from Allah (peace and blessings be upon Him).

  “Don’t mistake me for just some brother in some ghetto thinking things that amount to all of nothing,” he said.

  “Nigga,” scolded Luscious. “What you think, your shit don’t stink?”

  “No,” he said. “On the contrary. I know my stench.”

  She left him, said it was over, and came back a few days later to try again. Then they fought and she said she couldn’t take him again, that he was impossible, that loving him was killing her.

  Then one day I was playing basketball at the basketball court and Luscious was standing on the sidelines talking to friends. My uncle marched down Columbus Avenue, marched up to her, and glared through her smile and hello.

  “Baby, what?” she said, laughing uncomfortably. “Why you looking at me like that?”

  He had found out whom Luscious had loved and who had loved her, and as if his arm were a sword he swung it through the air, clamped his grip around Luscious’s neck, and thrust her against the chain-link fence, sending a rattle through the rusted metal. He pinned her there. Then, ignoring shouts and pleadings, ignoring everyone regardless of whether or not they called him Roosevelt or Nice or Jalaal or Nigga or Brother or Cousin or Son, or they cursed him like the devil, he raised his fist to batter her. I stood on the basketball court, frozen, suddenly out of breath. I had never once seen my uncle angry, never once seen him raise his voice. And there he was; his fist raised; paused; prepared to sm
ash Luscious. But then, as if my silence were the world’s loudest shout, my uncle glanced over his shoulder, made eye contact with me, and dropped his fist.

  “You’re dead to me,” he said, turning back to Luscious, giving one last squeeze to her throat and pushing her against the fence before letting go, marching away, leaving Luscious to fall into a heap of weeping.

  “Roosevelt!” she shouted through the chain-link fence as he walked away. “Roosevelt, no!”

  She was a shunned pile of shivering and crying, and although he said nothing of it, my uncle was heartbroken. His true foundation was shattered. Luscious, the real hope that had maintained him for seven years, was not fantasy but human, imperfect and impure just like him. He gave up on finding a job. He gave up on going outside. He gave up on Ever and himself, and for weeks, when he was not praying, and until all hours of the night, fueled by the thick black coffee he brewed, he sat in the kitchen, two feet back from the table, his legs crossed, his elbow balanced on the arm of the chair, looking out of the kitchen’s small square window, drifting far off in thought, the Qur’an open on his lap, a pen sitting in the furrow between the left and right page.

  BAR 8

  Birth of a Nation

  I

  What did I know about love, about being in love and loving? What had I seen between a man and woman that was not forced to wrestle with perilous social predicaments? What love had time not devolved into pain and violence? Where was love undeterred, indestructible, and pure? And of such relationships around me, which were not infected by Ever Park, by the sight of failed and devalued brethren and the abject conditions of our public schools and nearest hospitals, the institutions we placed our children and infirm in the care of? Nowhere else in America did love have to navigate so many emotional, intellectual, and spiritual obstacles.

  And yet, although I wasn’t mature enough to understand what declaring love meant; although I didn’t know love could start wars and end wars and keep fruitlessness battling for years; and although I understood love could be abandoned, just as my father had done to my mother and she had done to me, I said it. I looked Kaya dead in the face and told her. I loved her. Then we stood in silence. It was dawn, the beginning of November, there was a chill in the air. We were juniors in high school and we were on the roof of our building. I watched her, studied how she digested my declaration aglow in the nearly nonexistent light that buffed the blackness from an Ever Park night and made it day.

  “So,” she said, holding the word for a moment. “I mean, now what are we supposed to do?”

  She stopped short. I jammed my hands in my pockets and tried to feign as much nonchalance as I could. We had already kissed. We had already held hands. We had already tickled and teased and tested each other. I had already tasted her and she had already tasted me and we had already had sex; that is, we had both thumb wrestled condoms, and I had poked and stabbed and pushed myself through her taut anxiety and into her in the dark of her mother’s bedroom, in the dark of the room I shared with Donnel, Eric, and my uncle when no one was home, and once in the dark of the bathroom in Yusef ’s apartment.

  “Cause you can’t just be saying shit,” she scolded. “Because I ain’t the type of sister to be bullshitting. And besides, you ain’t ever even seen me.”

  “Seen you?” I said.

  “I mean seen me for real. Like I ain’t ever seen you.”

  “I see you right now.”

  “Naked,” she said. “Nude, nigga. That’s what I’m saying. I mean we never even seen each other’s whole bodies in the light before.”

  A swell of emotions grabbed me by the neck. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. Everyone whom I loved was linked with abandonment. So a precipice was my life. That is, it was just one foot in front of the other; Monday to Tuesday; Tuesday to Wednesday. But one step too far to the left or right, one friendship, one heartbreak and I might be dead. Truthfully. As dramatic as it sounds. As twisted and perverse as it seems. It was not just my pride, but my survival skills that were on the line. That is, what Kaya said was a test to see how I handled being vulnerable, something that could affect me for days, weeks, years to come. Naked, I thought. Like a baby?

  But then I looked at Kaya and she smiled a smile so disarming it severed my bonds with toughness and posturing. Such a cleaving caused parts of me not to lose sensation but to gain it. Coming upon me was a swell of contentment, completion. I gave in. And then, just as doctors and scientists can’t explain why one’s chest swells or aches when falling in or cut off from love, I don’t know how or why but I felt stilled, as if I would never be hungry or thirsty or in need again. Without taking my eyes from Kaya, I lifted my left foot and took off my sneaker. She didn’t believe me.

  “Stop playing,” she said.

  I took off my other sneaker. Then I took off my socks.

  “OK,” I said. “Your turn.”

  After a moment of hesitation, Kaya took off her sneakers and socks. I took off my coat. She took off hers. I took off my sweatshirt. She un-fastened her belt, pulled it free, and dropped it on her shoes. I took my T-shirt off, stood shivering. She smiled.

  “It’s cold,” I said.

  “Look at all your little muscles,” she said.

  I was lean and my muscles were well defined. I was becoming a man. Every day a different hair above my upper lip seemed to darken and thicken. Kaya paused to consider which article of clothing to take off next, her shirt or pants. Then she stripped her shirt off over her head. She wore a black bra, and shivering like me, she folded her arms across her breasts.

  “That’s cheating,” I said.

  “Cheating?” she said. “Nigga, stop stalling. Go.”

  I unfastened my pants, let them fall around my feet, and stepped out of them. As was the style of brothers in Ever Park, beneath my jeans I wore both basketball shorts and boxers.

  “Your turn,” I said.

  Holding one arm across her breasts, Kaya unfastened the button and zipper of her pants and pushed them down her legs. Then, a bit awkwardly, hopping slightly on one foot, seemingly about to lose her balance and fall, she took them off. She wore red panties. Still hugging herself, she stood tall. I took off my shorts. Kaya took a deep breath. Then, keeping her eyes affixed to me, she reached her arms behind her back, unclasped her bra, slipped it off, and let her arms fall to her sides. Her breasts sat still, like swollen drops of rusty dew suspended from her clavicles. This was it. I had only one article of clothing left.

  “You scared?” she asked.

  “Of what?” I said.

  “Of letting me see you.”

  Before that dawn, I would have lied. I would have shouted or laughed or smiled smugly and trumpeted no. I would have used her question, manipulated and molded it until it was an accusation I could use to maneuver from the whole disclosure of myself. But I didn’t then.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, you?”

  Kaya considered what I said, dawn parading upon her body, sunlight rising around her, from her, through her thighs, honeying the gentle mounds of her hips and shoulders.

  “We can look up,” she said. “Then go at the same time.”

  “OK,” I said. “On the count of three.”

  We looked up. Above there were three tiers of flight. The first were the birds, fifty to one hundred feet above Ever and Queens, seagulls and pigeons, and small silhouettes that I couldn’t name darted, soared in circles, and fluttered through the near morning. And thousands of feet above the birds there were a few planes in the distance, gliding, lights blinking on their wingtips. And then above the birds and the planes there was the moon, growing fainter by the moment as if it were floating farther and farther away.

  Without taking our eyes from above, we counted to three. Then we took off our remaining article of clothing. She slipped her panties off one leg at a time. I slid my boxers down my legs. A naked young woman stood before me. But I kept my eyes on the sky. I was not afraid to look. I was frozen by the thought of what Kaya might see
.

  “You’re beautiful,” she whispered.

  I didn’t believe her, so I laughed a breath of mistrust. Then, inch by inch, I lowered my eyes from the sky. I expected to find Kaya looking at my body, at my penis, or maybe my outie belly button. But she wasn’t. She stared at my eyes. She absorbed how nakedness dressed me, how fear and discomfort came to my face from deep beneath.

  “What?” she said. “You don’t believe me?”

  My eyes fell from hers, tracing her body until they reached her feet. Then I quickly lifted them and looked at her again.

  “No,” I said. “It’s just—”

  “Just what?” she interrupted.

  “It’s just,” I said. “It’s just that I am not as beautiful as you.”

  She smiled, rolled her eyes. “Nigga,” she said. “Don’t be thinking you’re all slick. You’re Abraham. It took you years just to ask me out.”

  She was right. I wasn’t slick. And it did take me years to ask her out. And I also didn’t believe her that I was beautiful. Thus, what mattered most was not the shape or sight of Kaya’s nudity, nor was it what we did afterward, how we made love with incomparable heat. Nor did it matter most that I was naked or that I had given myself over to fear and thus bared my complete self, not the defense, parceling, or demonstration of it. And what mattered most was not that I needed to see and hear that I was beautiful. No, what mattered most was that I was in love with a young woman whose love for me introduced me to the vastness of the universe, the infinite and the finite, from Timbuktu to me, the young Ever Park brother who played basketball and wrote secret letters, and who sometimes just happened to, you know, stumble in and find Kaya in the library after school.

  II

  Spring, and it was like I was awakened from a deep sleep. Some teachers and students in my classes talked about college. We could take a free SAT test if we wanted. Some were taking it. Too many were not. It was our chance, Kaya said, and she studied at the library for it. And she’d sit there with an old Peterson’s college guide and look up colleges and their students’ average SAT scores. And she would read the description about the campuses, the student to faculty ratios, and how difficult it was to be accepted. She developed an encyclopedic knowledge of colleges and universities. She knew their locations, their mascots, their fight songs.