Hold Love Strong

by Matthew Aaron Goodman

  IV

  Donnel called.

  “So I got something to tell you,” he said, sounding out of breath. “You there?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “All right,” he said. “So, I’m just gonna come out and say it.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, fitting awkwardly into wonderment, my head spinning with questions. Was he coming home? Did the DA drop the charges? Had there been a settlement?

  “OK,” he said. He breathed. He started. He paused. “So, nigga. So, shit. So, I’m in love.”

  I laughed.

  “Swear to God,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Me.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean how?”

  “You don’t know her.”

  “How do you know who I know?”

  “Cause she ain’t from Ever.”

  “Nigga,” I said. “How can you be in love?”

  “Shit,” he sighed. “You the last nigga who should be asking me that. Don’t you know anything’s possible?”

  “So where did you meet her?” I asked.

  “Waiting for the train. Before the fight. She makes me want to do things.”

  “Do things?”

  “We’re spiritually connected.”

  She was headed to classes at college. She was a student at Columbia, smart as shit, Donnel said, thick as a motherfucker.

  “I mean, just the sound of her voice and I almost dropped to my knees and started praying. We’ve been writing every day since I got locked up. Now, you tell me what that means.”

  “What you say?” I asked.

  “About what?”

  “To get her to talk to you.”

  “Nothing.”

  “You said nothing and she just started talking to you?”

  “No,” Donnel snapped. “I asked her where she was going.”

  “And what she say?”

  “Nigga,” he scolded. “I just told you she was in school. She was going to class. Shit. I’m telling you. I swear to God. This woman is beautiful.”

  Donnel swore he was going to take her somewhere nice, somewhere in Manhattan, some five-star restaurant, then to the hottest club. Then he said, “Fuck that, fuck that. I’m gonna take her to the top of the Empire State Building. Then, I’m gonna take her to hear jazz. Maybe some nigga will be playing the trumpet.”

  “Since when do you like jazz?” I laughed.

  “Nigga,” he said, “I’ve always liked jazz. Shit, I might even love it.”

  Donnel told me what their lives would be like together, how they’d move down south. She could come to Atlanta if she wanted to. He described how she had a birthmark as big as a dime at the outside corner of her left eye and dimples too.

  “And dimples that blink when she smiles,” he said. “Her whole face: shining. You should see the picture she sent me. You can’t even imagine how fine she is.”

  There wasn’t the slightest degree of anger or restraint in Donnel’s voice, not a hint of burning or sadness. He was simply testifying, announcing himself by identifying another’s uniqueness and glory. He talked about getting his GED. So he could go to college like her. So he could help their kids with homework. Never in my life had I heard Donnel go into a tirade over his future. Never in my life had I heard him so convinced and so determined to convince someone of what he said without once raising his voice or threatening them.

  “You want to hear something?” he asked.

  “What?” I said.

  “Hold on,” he said. I heard a rustle of paper. “Never mind.”

  “Never mind what?”

  “This shit I wrote,” he said, then softly added: “This, I don’t know, I guess, poem.”

  “She’s got you writing poetry?” I laughed.

  He laughed. “I told you. I’m done. I’m telling you: I’m gotten.”

  V

  All night, I wrote. I put my headphones on. I listened to Eric’s Discman until the batteries died. I scribbled and jotted and scratched out. I edited and unedited. I tore paper out of my notebook. I chewed the end of the pen. I gnawed. I gasped. I sighed; Fuck. I vacillated between believing I could do it and knowing I couldn’t. I fell asleep with my head on the kitchen table, drool oozing from the corner of my mouth, soaking the corner of the page beneath my cheek. My Aunt Rhonda came home, shook me, slapped my face, and woke me up.

  “What you doing?” she asked.

  Barely awake, my eyes dry and heavy, I handed her the bulletin and application.

  First, she flipped through it quickly. Then she turned the pages slowly, her face expressionless.

  “College,” she said.

  “I got to write a personal statement,” I said.

  She skimmed through the application’s last few pages, put it back on the table, and looked at me, her brown eyes swollen with the depths of too many thoughts, too many wants, too many declarations.

  “Get some sleep,” she said.

  “But I got to write,” I said.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, her voice stern. “You can take care of this tomorrow.”

  I skipped school the next day and my grandma called in sick and so did my Aunt Rhonda. And Eric was there. And my uncle was there until the middle of the morning when he left to go to parole. And when I grew frustrated and said I didn’t think I could do it, my grandma told me I had to, that I had no choice. So I kept writing. I did so because I wasn’t writing just for me. I thought if Donnel knew what I was doing he would kill me if I stopped. So his absence was also pulling the writing from me, compelling me to keep going. So I did. So I wrote.

  The heat in our building was broken again and our apartment baked with a dry, desert heat that caused everything from my nostrils to my teeth to be chalky. The windows of the apartment steamed. I sat at the kitchen table in a white tank top and shorts. My grandma, my Aunt Rhonda, and Eric came in and out of the kitchen. Occasionally they called my name, shouted words of encouragement, argued over previous suggestions and edits they were convinced I had to make. I worked feverishly. Every word was a weight, a concrete block I pushed and pulled and dragged up a hill.

  I wrote a paragraph, read it aloud, and my grandma and my Aunt Rhonda and even Eric offered their opinions.

  “Let them feel you. Write like you mean it! You know what I’m saying?” said my Aunt Rhonda, relying on rhetoric to inspire me. “Stop telling them what you think they want to hear! And get your spelling right. You know how white people is about spelling!”

  “Capitalize the first word of every sentence,” said Eric, preaching one of the few grammar lessons he could recall. “And don’t mix up your b’s and d’s.”

  “Go ahead!” my grandma said. “Go ahead and let those folks know who you is!”

  What did I write? What did I finally compose? What song did I sing? Honestly, I kept it simple. I was not the type to fabricate details or go over the top concerning the facts of my life, my wants, my wishes. I delineated. I explained. I constructed an introduction that was simultaneously a whisper and slap in the face. I said my name is Abraham Singleton. I made my grandma and Aunt Rhonda cry. I stuck strictly to irrefutable evidence. I said my mother had me when she was thirteen, then she became a crackhead and then she was murdered but before even that she was dead to me. I didn’t bother explaining what such a loss meant. I let the fact hang there on the page. I wrote four, five, six, seven; a total of ten pages. I told Brandeis I never knew my father; that my uncle, Nice, was incarcerated for two crimes, armed robbery and loving his family and a woman more than he loved himself, a crime against his own humanity, his essential potential. I explained how he isolated himself, disappeared himself from our lives. He didn’t write letters. He didn’t respond to ours. Put behind bars, he excised himself from the universe but not because he was selfish or deviant or vile, but because he wished for us not to be limited by his confinement. If this was my chance to be heard, to be free, then I was speaking. I wrote about Donnel, how he had bathed me, raised me, shielded me. I
said Psalm Twenty-three, verse four: Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.

  “There you go,” my Aunt Rhonda cheered. “Hit them with the biblical!”

  Then I wrote about how it felt without Donnel. I didn’t go into the details of his activities. Rather, I gave the details of his absence. I described the holes each day bored in my chest. Then I wrote about my grandma. I explained how she named me, built me, and demanded that I dream no matter how many nightmares sank their teeth in my head. I said as much as going to Brandeis was for me, it was for them, my family; Ever; every brother and sister I loved. I stole that line from the United Negro College Fund television commercial and told Brandeis that I was living proof that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. And I’d seen wasted minds. And I didn’t want to waste mine. I refused to.

  VI

  The library was closing in an hour. It was dark outside. The fluorescent lights in the library only had the strength to make the library a grey dusk, so people had to get right up close to the books to read their Dewey Decimals. I sat at one of the rickety cubicles, my back to the door, reviewing my personal statement for the last time before Ms. Hakim would help me type it in school. Kaya sat to my right, pointing out when I misspelled words and suggesting last-minute adjustments. Cherrie stood over my left shoulder. We had already said hello and talked about what I was doing and how my family was.

  “College,” she said. “I always knew you was special.”

  Cherrie was singing in Pastor Ramsey’s choir. Luscious had joined them. Cherrie was at the library to photocopy Song of Songs.

  “Me and Luscious gonna put it to music,” she said, her jowls jiggling with each hard syllable. “We gonna sing it for real. Do you know how good that girl can sing? She just closes her eyes and lets it go.”

  She put both of her hands on her big, round belly.

  “You know from here; down deep. It’s like…like the sound of ain’t afraid of nothing. It’s good, you know. To hear a voice like that. But you know that. You remember how your mother used to sing? Shit, Jelly used to kill it.”

  I stared at Cherrie. I had signed up for the SAT. I would take the examination in two weeks. I had met with my Legal Aid lawyer and he said things were still up in the air, my guess was as good as his. Who knew what the DA and the judge would do with me? I couldn’t remember my mother ever singing louder than a whisper, or a time and place she sang to me. I suppose I was as close to crying as a cloudless sky could be to rain without raining. What do I mean? I was ten thousand feet high, sun shining, with unending visibility, but in my throat, an ocean swelled and heaved.

  “You know I got a tape,” said Cherrie.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “A tape,” she said. “Me and Jelly used to tape each other singing. I know I got at least a couple of them.”

  The library door opened. Then the cold wind outside slammed it closed. In came my uncle, walking like the slamming door wounded him, dragging himself into the library like a sack of broken eggs, wrecked with exhaustion. He was getting off the job he just got swinging a twenty-pound sledgehammer working demolition for minimum wage. Beneath his arm were the books he finished reading. His eyes were down. He stopped and massaged his right knee. He flexed it, bending and straightening his leg. Then he saw me, walked toward Cherrie, Kaya, and me, and stopped when he reached us.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “My personal statement,” I said.

  “It’s finished?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “It’s good,” added Kaya. “Real good.”

  My uncle put his hand out. “Let me see it,” he said.

  I handed it to him. He read, his face six inches from the pages, intense, immersed in every word.

  “Now, Roosevelt,” Cherrie said, fearing my uncle’s critical eye so using his given name to remind him we were in a public place. “He ain’t got to be Shakespeare. Abraham just got to get the message across.”

  I glanced at Kaya. Then I looked back at my uncle. He finished reading. Dust from the drywall he’d leveled all day powdered his brown skin, speckled his eyelashes, eyebrows, and the edges of his ears. His lips were parched. He looked up and studied me. His eyes were the only part of him untouched, unsoiled. He must have read ten thousand books while locked up, maybe a hundred thousand. He closed his eyes and nodded yes slowly. Then he opened his eyes and they were soft, wet.

  “There’s a lot about Donnel,” he said. He handed the papers back to me.

  He looked away and thought for a moment. Then he held his books up. “I was just gonna return these and get the ones they got on hold for me,” he said. “You almost finished?”

  “Almost,” I said.

  He smiled. “I’ll wait for you.” He looked at Kaya. “If it’s all right with you.”

  Cherrie left. At ten minutes before five, I finished, Kaya kissed me good-bye, and I said I would call her later. Not counting the librarians, only my uncle and I remained in the library. He stood at the back, flipping through a book he had taken from the shelf. I put my personal statement in my backpack, stood up, and walked to him.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  He closed the book he was reading and held it up for me to see. “Moby Dick,” he said. “Call me Ishmael. Man versus the sea.”

  He put the book back on the shelf.

  “You should let D see it,” he said. “You should send it to him.”

  BAR 10

  Deliberation

  I

  Everything was waiting. I waited to hear from Brandeis. And we waited to hear from our Legal Aid lawyers, who waited to hear from the DA’s office and the judge. Were we in or out; nay or yea? Would I be accepted to Brandeis? Would our cases go to trial? Would the DA be flexible, the judge lenient? Would they accept a plea? Because I would write one. I would have written ten thousand of them a day, every minute of every hour. Donnel would do anything, he said, any length of probation, any anger management therapy, any counseling, group sessions, or community service to get out of doing time.

  “Nigga,” he said. “I’ll clean every subway station in Queens with a Q-tip if need be.”

  I checked the mailbox for the response from Brandeis every day. Sometimes three or four times, and even on Sunday. I asked people with mailboxes near our mailbox and those whose last names began with an S if they happened to get an envelope addressed to me. Nobody had.

  The waiting was a plague, all encompassing, inundating. Everywhere I looked, I saw waiting. People at the bus stop: waiting. People at the barbershop, the beauty salon, outside on the street, the young men hustling: all waiting. And how about the nine men on the basketball court who were not shooting a foul shot, and the men and women in church thanking Jesus, praying that their children rise with pride, take every opportunity of a society deemed free: were they not waiting too?

  When Donnel and I spoke all we talked about was waiting. But although he never said it, I knew the waiting hurt Donnel more than it pained me. Because waiting was his living. He had no escape from it. He was locked in with it. And everyone with him was waiting. And he couldn’t be kissed or hugged, he couldn’t be consoled or told an answer would come soon in the moments he most needed it. He had spent Thanksgiving waiting. And Christmas waiting. And New Year’s. Then Valentine’s Day passed. On the phone, he asked me what I did for Kaya.

  “I wrote her a poem,” I said.

  “A poem,” he laughed. “You trying to be me?”

  Kaya was accepted to every city college and university she applied to. So she was deliberating, weighing the benefits of leaving Ever versus the costs. She could go to Queens College or Hunter; or she could go to Brooklyn College or City College; or she could go to Wellesley, or Temple in Philadelphia.

  “I like the way that sounds,” she said. “I go to Temple University. Makes it sound holy, doesn’t it? Like I’m studying to be an angel or somethin
g. But what happens if I get homesick? Or what happens if I need something? You know, what if I want you to hold me, not just talk on the phone?”

  March came and we were still waiting. I hadn’t done my laundry in weeks. I hadn’t cut my hair, gotten a shape-up, or tended to the fine hair that made a sparse tangle on my cheeks and chin. And no matter my age, no matter how my hormones raged, no matter how Kaya smelled or what she did or said, I did not think about sex or the shape and feel of her body.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said, pouting when I didn’t respond to her come-on and nuzzling. “You acting like someone died.”

  On March ninth, the judge sentenced me to two years of probation and fifty hours of community service, and Donnel plead guilty. He had to. Between the fight, and how he fought against the police when they arrested him he was facing anywhere between three to ten years depending on which charges stuck and which did not.

  “I can’t just give up that much,” he said. “If I fight it and lose. Shit, they might try and keep me locked up until my hair goes white. There’s things, nigga, things in life, that I want to do, you know?”

  So they gave him three to five with the chance to be paroled anytime after thirty-six months. Every night I lay in bed, wide awake, too exhausted to sleep. I thought about Donnel. I wanted to blow up and extinguish where he was. I wanted to roll over, hit his shoulder, and say, D, you snoring, and hear him, still half asleep, say, Then put a pillow over your head. I couldn’t leave him where he was. I wanted to call Rivers and tell him the whole thing was off, withdraw my application from the pile of applications sitting somewhere on some desk. And sometimes I wanted to pick up the phone and say: Rivers, what’s up? Yea or nay? Be honest. Tell me. I couldn’t take it. Nothing suppressed my hope for Donnel not to be where he was, that we’d wake up from it. Nothing eased my impatience. When was Brandeis’s answer going to come?