Given this spiral, it’s a relief when Gigi’s eyes, cloudy with cataracts, slowly flicker open and focus on me, her cracked lips breaking into a smile. “My baby girl’s here.”
“I’m here, Gigi. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to come more often this week; it’s been hectic.”
“You here now, that’s what matters.”
Gigi gets irritated when anyone fusses over her, so I ditch the washcloth and move to sit in the chair beside the bed.
“How you doing, Leroya?”
My grandmother’s never going to call me Riley. For a full month after I changed it, I refused to answer whenever she used my given name, a bratty act of defiance, a protest as shameful as it was futile.
“Your parents gave you the name Leroya—after my darn fine husband, I might add—and so that’s what I’m gonna call you. Period,” Gigi said. And that was the end of it.
“Forget about me, how are you?”
“Oh, you know, these old bones have seen better days. But I’ve seen worse too.” She looks up, over my shoulder, at the TV. “That march is today, ain’t it, for that boy? And your interview?”
She doesn’t miss a beat.
“Yeah, it’s this afternoon. And then I’m supposed to sit down with Tamara, his mom, right after.” I hope. I glance at the clock on the wall to see how much time before my meeting with Wes.
“How’s the boy doing? It’s Jesse, right? How is he? He ain’t in this hospital. He over at CHOP. I asked if he was here. I woulda liked to see him, woulda liked to hold his hand.”
The thought of my grandmother being wheeled down the hallway to hold the hand of a boy she never knew when she can’t even get out of bed for a bath touches something deep inside me.
“His name is Justin and…”
“What, girl, what happened?”
“He died. Yesterday.”
Gigi lets her lids fall closed, lies still for a long moment. Then a tear leaks out of her eye and falls onto the pillow. That single tear is quickly followed by others, chasing to catch up.
I scoot myself closer to her frail body, rattled by her emotion. “I know, Gram. It’s so sad. He passed away in his sleep.” I try to reassure her. “He didn’t feel any pain.”
I have no idea if this is true, but I say it anyway. For Gigi’s sake and also my own. It’s what I want to believe, though who knows how he felt in the moment. Or when he was lying on the cold concrete, bleeding. Did he know he was going to die? Did he cry out for his mother? That’s what I keep imagining: Justin wanting his mother so badly, begging for her.
Gigi reaches out a hand dotted with moles, swipes at the tears that spill over. “They just keep killing us, don’t they?”
What is there to say to that? I’m at a loss. Maybe what we need is some light. I stand and go to open the curtains; a golden glow peeks around the fabric. She stops me.
“No, leave it closed. Leave it be.”
I turn back, sit on the edge of the bed. “It’s awful. I know. It’s just awful.” God, can I manage anything more than these empty platitudes?
“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe Kevin killed that boy.”
“I know, Gigi. I can’t believe it either.”
“He killed that baby.” Gigi’s facing the same struggle, saying it out loud, processing it, trying to figure out how to feel and what it means.
“Just like Jimmy,” she adds softly.
Does she think Justin’s name is Jimmy now?
“Who’s Jimmy, Gram?”
“They left him hanging from a tree, full of holes.”
I still don’t understand, but the imagery instantly conjures a cold dread.
She pulls her hand from under the sheet to grab ahold of mine, like she’s steadying herself.
“Jimmy was my aunt Mabel’s eldest boy. You remember Aunt Mabel, my mom’s older sister.”
I do, vaguely. I remember her as an impossibly ancient woman I met a few times as a child. She always had a butterscotch candy in her mouth and would point to her prune-like cheek and say to me, “Come give me some sugar,” which I resisted until Momma ushered me forward with a jab in the back that said, “Or else.”
“Jimmy was my cousin. Mabel’s oldest. Eleven years older than me. Lord, did I worship him. He loved his woodworking, and sometimes he let me help him in his little shop. In the afternoons we’d go fishin’. Out there by the stream for hours even though we never caught nothin’. I’d just be so happy he let me hang around.” Her lips curl into a gentle smile at the memory.
“Jimmy was only ’bout seventeen or eighteen, still a young fool who didn’t know better. Well, he did know better but was too much a fool to stop himself—he took up with a white girl in town, daughter of Roger Wilcox. I caught them kissing once, in his woodshed. He bribed me with a peppermint to keep my mouth shut, and I did, never told a soul. But then Roger caught them one afternoon, and they said he raped that girl and took Jimmy to jail.”
I know exactly how this story ends. Now it’s me squeezing Gigi’s frail fingers inside my own. I ease off before I hurt her.
“They tried to go visit him that night—my parents and Aunt Mabel and Uncle Donny—but they couldn’t. The sheriff wouldn’t let ’em. Our parents went about gathering money for a lawyer, a good colored lawyer someone knew up in Montgomery, but…”
A bout of dry coughs leaves her struggling to catch her breath. I pick up a glass of water, maneuver a long straw to her lips. Gigi takes another full minute to recover, or maybe it’s to gather her strength before telling me the rest.
“That night, they got him. Just took him.” She’s crying in earnest now.
“It’s okay, Grandma.”
“It’s not okay, it’s not.” Her words drip with anger. I know it isn’t directed at me but at everything else. At all the ways it has not been okay. “They dragged him through the town. Roger and his friends. They did terrible things to him. Terrible.” I don’t need the horrific details; she can spare us both. I can already picture them. I have a vivid memory from my own childhood of coming across a copy of the 1955 issue of Jet magazine with Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse right there on the cover. I found it in Daddy’s desk drawer, tucked away like a keepsake. There was Till’s face, bloated beyond recognition, flesh mottled with deep purple bruises, swollen slits where his eyes should be. You couldn’t even tell he was a young boy, only a few years older than I was at the time; the savage beating and drowning had left him horribly disfigured. I couldn’t tear myself away from the picture, or the article. I read it over and over, like it could offer an answer to the question that most vexed my young mind: Why do they hate us so much?
When I learned a few years later, in my sixth-grade history class, during our requisite one-week unit on the civil rights movement—in February, of course—that the white men who’d lynched Emmett Till were acquitted, I’d slumped in my seat in disbelief. I couldn’t believe how naive I’d been, how shocked I was to learn this, like I had somehow missed some essential truth, like I should have known better.
The week before, when we’d covered slavery, our teacher had avoided looking at me the entire time—at all the Black kids—speaking about its horrors in this singsongy voice she never used otherwise. Mrs. Trager came from New York, a master’s program at Barnard. She was completing a one-year teaching fellowship in the Philly public school district, and even though she tried too hard, I liked her.
As she spoke, I busied myself writing in my notebook (“Dred Scott,” “Underground Railroad,” “Middle Passage”), hoping to avoid the uncomfortable glances of my white classmates, even Jenny. I knew she wouldn’t get it either. Why did I feel so ashamed and self-conscious when I hadn’t done anything wrong? A sickening realization had dawned on me: my good grades didn’t matter, or the extra credit, the proper English, how faithful I was, how kind. None of it could ever erase the fact that people were going to hate me. My head felt heavy. I let it drop to my desk, hiding from the burden of it all. In that moment, tuck
ed into the dark haven of the crease of my elbow, more than anything in the world, I wanted to be cute and white and blond and have the whole world find me precious. I wanted to be Jenny.
By the time Gigi starts talking again, my jaw has worked itself into a tight knot. “My daddy went to go about cutting Jimmy’s corpse down from the tree, but everyone said it was too dangerous. It was too dangerous for us to stay. I remember the adults sitting around the table. No one knew what to do. Everyone was so scared… and when you’re a kid and adults are scared, well, that’s the worst feeling. No one cared if we went to bed, so we stayed up all night. We packed what we could, left the next morning in two caravans. Early as it is right now, we set out, my father and uncle driving two cars, with all of us cousins and everything we owned that could fit in the back. We drove all the way to Philly without stopping. Aunt Mabel wailed the whole time. That’s what I remember most. And no one could make her stop. No one even tried. Aunt Mabel was never the same. You don’t recover from that. Losing a child. Especially like that. Hand me a tissue, will you?”
I jump to grab her a pack of Kleenex, happy to have something to do. I wish I didn’t know this story. It’s like I’m in sixth grade again. I want to hide my face in my arms on my desk.
“I don’t get it; why didn’t you ever tell us, Gigi?”
“What’s the point? My momma told me we should try to forget about it. The hurt was too much. It was easier to never speak his name again, Jimmy’s name, to block out the pain. Better to seal it off, like a room you stop goin’ into. And the shame. We all felt so much shame. Ain’t that something? We felt bad even though they’s the ones that strung him up and left him to die. And he didn’t rape that girl.”
Gigi dabs at her eyes some more.
“God help him, he loved that girl.”
Y’all need to stay away from those white girls, ya hear? All those times Gigi had said this to Shaun. To her it had been a matter of life and death—someone she loved had died because he loved a white woman. That kind of fear follows you for your entire life. I think of Shaun and Staci, and all the Stacis who came before. Every fiber in my body feels flush with adrenaline, a response to a threat I can’t quite pinpoint, thinking about all the ways my brother and dad are unsafe in this world. But deeper than that, bone-deep, there’s a dark hum, pain like a shadow, the ancestral trauma that lives in me. Meanwhile, Roger Wilcox probably has grandkids of his own walking around somewhere right now. I wonder if they know what their grandfather did, or if they’re oblivious to the fact that the sweet old man they remember for giving them crisp $2 bills for Christmas or for flirting with the nursing-home staff was a ruthless murderer.
“Do you know what happened to them? To Roger Wilcox? To the girl?” They’re probably long dead, and I wonder something else too: How the hell did they live with themselves?
Gigi only shakes her head slowly, full of weariness.
“We don’t know what happened to Jimmy either. I mean, where they put him. When we left, Mabel said she would never set foot in that state again until she died. She wanted to be buried near her son, even if she didn’t know exactly where that was. Uncle Donny too. He died before your time. I’m thinking that’s where I wanna be too.”
“Grandma, it’s not time—”
She cuts me off with a look. A Don’t even try it, so I don’t bother. I can give her that.
“I want to be buried in the family plot too—with them. Y’all make that happen, ya hear? And you bring Grandpa Leroy’s ashes and scatter some around me so he there too. God knows why that man wanted to be cremated. I want to be in the ground, dust to dust, like Jesus. Right where I was born. Sometimes you gotta go home. You promise you’ll take me there.”
“We will. I promise.” My heart is screaming.
“And when you talk to that boy’s momma today, you tell her I’ll take care of him. I’ll see him soon. I’ll take care of her baby. Me and Jimmy. We got him.”
Gigi lies back in bed as if she’s resolved something vital. Or maybe the weight of the story has taken something essential from her, as it did me. I never knew my cousin Jimmy, never even knew of him until five minutes ago, and yet Gigi has been carrying this grief all these years. And Aunt Mabel—to lose a child in that way. How many Mabels have there been? How many Tamaras?
It kills me how some people want so badly to believe racism is buried beneath layers and layers of history, “ancient history,” they say. But it’s not. It’s like an umpire brushing the thinnest layer of dirt off home plate: it’s right there. Only too often the trauma, the toll of it, remains unknown generation after generation. Like how Gigi kept her own awful secret, presumably to protect us from the ugly truth, and I’ve kept my own secrets, haunted by a similar shame.
I assume she’s nodded off, but then Gigi opens her eyes and looks up at the ceiling. “I want the world to be better, baby girl. We gotta do better.”
The washcloth is ice-cold now. I pick it up anyway, wipe the wet streaks from my own cheeks. Gigi’s nodded off again. I lean over and kiss her forehead, cool as silk. I need to leave—I only have about twenty minutes to get to my meeting with Wes—but I stay rooted anyway, listening to Gigi’s steady breathing. When I finally tear myself away and get to the door, I hear my grandmother’s voice behind me. “Tell my Jenny to come see me. Never mind all the troubles. I wanna see my firecracker.”
When I turn around, Gigi is fast asleep. But I heard it. I know I did.
Jimmy’s story clings to me like a scent as I race across town to meet Wes. It’s shaken something loose in me, my emotions stirred up like flakes in a snow globe. I need to settle down, focus on what I have to say to Wes. I haven’t told Scotty the interview is in jeopardy. Hopefully I won’t have to.
I pull into the small parking lot of Morgan & Sons Funeral Home, and there’s Wes sitting on the steps in front of the place, under a dark green awning. It’s easy to recognize him from his pictures, an older, brawnier version of Justin—light skin, a smattering of freckles across his nose, gap teeth, and his eyes, a striking hazel that lean brown or green depending on the angle. He’s wearing a giant pair of Beats headphones and nodding his head.
When he looks up, he slips them off and calls out my name like we’re long-lost cousins and not strangers. “Riley Wilson!”
I sit down on the stairs next to him; the concrete is as frigid as a block of ice.
“You ever see Hamilton?” he asks.
“No, I wish. I wanted to take my grandmother to see it when it came to Philly last Christmas, but we couldn’t get tickets.”
“Same. I stood in line at six a.m., but ticket brokers scooped ’em all up and then they were out of my price range. That’s what I was just listening to, the soundtrack.” He looks at his headphones like he wants to pick them back up and tune out the world again. I don’t blame him.
“I can’t stop listening. Justin and I knew all the words to all the songs. We would do a full-out performance to ‘The Room Where It Happens.’ I mean, we got down!” He stops to sit with the memory. “Justin put it on TikTok or Chatsnap or one of them. He showed it to me, but I’ll never be able to find it—but then, I probably couldn’t even watch it anyway. It would hurt too much. Him singing, laughing. That boy loved to perform—he was always spitting rhymes, writing poems….”
Wes looks down as if shocked by the coffee cup next to him, when really the shock must be where he’s sitting and why. “Listen to me going on, before I even offered you some coffee.” He thrusts a steaming paper cup at me. “I stopped at the new place over on the corner. Six dollars for a coffee should come with a nip too, but this is just straight caffeine. Could use it though. Haven’t been sleeping much. I didn’t know how you like it, so here….”
He pulls a handful of individual packets of creamer, sugar, and sweetener out of his pocket. I can’t believe he even thought of getting me coffee, much less all the fixins. But I’m grateful to have the warm cup in my hands, and the hit of caffeine. I pour the creamer and
sugar in my coffee.
“That’s how I like it too,” he says. “Light and sweet. Opposite of how I like my women, by the way.”
We Are Not Like Them Page 11