by Danzy Senna
Khalil is already down the steps, putting his suitcase into the trunk of the black sedan. He looks handsome, dapper, in his camel-colored trench coat. He slams the trunk closed. Pauses. Watches her where she stands at the top of the steps.
What is it? he says. What’s wrong?
Nothing, it’s just— She touches her lips and shakes her head.
Khalil starts back up the steps toward her. You’re crying, he says. I can cancel the trip if you want. Just say it. Ethan can do the meetings without me.
No, no. Go. I’m fine. I have work to do.
Okay, okay. But don’t spend too much time alone. I mean, call Lisa if you need company.
She scoffs, looks away. I think Lisa’s got other things on her mind.
Khalil wraps his arms around her.
She clings to him. He is a good man. A hard-to-find good man. Elsa is right. He is a keeper.
He tries to pull away but she won’t let go. She can’t let him go. It seems important that she not let him go.
Easy, tiger, he says, breaking out of her grip. I’m going to miss my flight.
He starts down the steps but glances back.
Your curls, he says. They’re growing on me.
They both laugh at the way it sounds. And she thinks, laughing with him, just then, that they might pull it off. There is still time to pull it off, to shift the course of things inside her. She thinks back to the first time they spoke in the Quad that day. Remembers him on his skateboard, the sling on his arm, his Basquiat hair, the casual white boy smile cast into a brown boy’s face. She took one look at him and knew he was the one. He is still that boy who inspired such clarity in her. She saw him and understood he was her fate. He is still the same boy. She is still the same girl. He waves at her, smiling behind the glass of the sedan, then the car pulls away.
Maria does not move to go inside. She thinks about surprises—how you can look at a thing for so long, can think you know it in its entirety, but there are always more surprises. When she began her research about Jonestown she thought she knew the story. She thought the only defectors were the ones who fled to an airstrip with the congressman. But she now knows there were a group of defectors who left in secret on that same morning. Eleven, all of them black, had been plotting their escape for months, whispering to one another that Another America felt more like the America they’d left behind, only worse; they’d noticed since arriving that the black people worked the fields and the top decision-makers were white. They didn’t want to call Jim Jones Father. He was not their father.
On the morning the congressman left for the airstrip, they asked the guards if they could go on a picnic. Though they had no food and the sky was stormy, the guards said okay. They walked to the edge of the compound, then kept walking onward into the jungle.
They carried their babies strapped to their backs; they had drugged them with Flavor Aid mixed with Valium so they would not cry. They walked through the night and into the next morning. They walked for thirty hours straight, taking turns carrying the babies, not sure exactly where they were going or what they’d left behind.
It has begun to rain, softly. Maria has the sense of being watched. Across the street, she glimpses a figure standing in a third-story window, watching her. The figure is small and gray with a pale face and it stands behind a gauzy curtain. At first glance it looks like a child, but no, she thinks it is somebody older, much older. She thinks it is the old Creole woman, the one who dresses all in white. She lifts her hand to wave. But the figure doesn’t move or wave back and Maria understands it is not a person after all.
Inside, she turns on the television. Seinfeld is on. The sound of the actors’ voices reminds her of Khalil. She goes to the bookshelf by the window. There is a framed photograph of her and Khalil on graduation day. They each wear a cap and gown and each also wear a kente cloth sash over their shoulders. They bought the sashes a week before graduation from a kiosk in the campus plaza where a white man had materialized one day, balding and pink, to sell various theme sashes for graduation day. He sold graduation sashes for every identity: Greek sashes, ethnic sashes, gay sashes. The day before graduation he disappeared, like Mr. Monkey McBean with his Star-Off machine.
Most of the black students bought the kente cloth sashes and wore them, save for a few miscellaneous types. The sashes were proof that they were still black even after four years at the Farm. No matter how much money they would make someday, no matter how many white people they would fuck or marry, no matter how light-skinned their children, no matter how many times they listened to Joni Mitchell in the years that would come, the sashes were there to tell them and anyone who was looking their way that they had not lost their negritude out there in the Rodin sculpture garden.
In the photo Maria and Khalil appear so young, like puppy versions of their current selves, the subcutaneous fat still plump beneath their skin. They are laughing, arms around each other, in the Quad, wearing those goddamned corny kente cloth sashes.
Maria can see Lisa standing off to the side, at a distance, in a red dress and low heels. The expression she wears in the photo isn’t really a smile. It is more like a sneer. She looks like any other angry second child, sulking and acne pocked, watching her golden brother have his day of glory.
She’s not as pretty in the picture from the past as she is now. She has never been as pretty as she is now. She just keeps getting better looking. By the time she is dead, Maria thinks, she will be stunning.
Maria puts the photo back on the shelf facing backward, so that she and Khalil and Lisa are staring at the wall.
The Seinfeld theme song is playing—the pluck of guitar strings signifying the end of another episode, or maybe the beginning of the next. George’s face is no longer blue. Yes, now another episode is coming. It’s a Seinfeld marathon. A new Seinfeld is always beginning. She’s seen this one before. It’s the episode where Jerry can’t remember the name of his girlfriend. Khalil likes Seinfeld. So does Ethan. Sometimes he comes over just to sit watching it with Khalil.
Ethan once, about a year ago, described the characters in Seinfeld as New York intellectuals. That’s how he said it.
Maria was in the room with them at the time and she asked Ethan what made the characters intellectual. Was it just the fact that they were white? Because as far as she could see they were anything but intellectual.
After she said it Ethan stared at her with such loathing she was certain he was going to strike her, but again, he didn’t. Khalil made a joke about all of them being children of academics, and, like magic, Ethan became merry and harmless again.
It is dark outside of the window. The clock reads seven. Khalil is already on the plane, barreling west across the sky with Ethan at his side.
She is hungry. Hungrier than she has ever been in her life. She needs to get food. Meat. She must be iron-deficient. She has to have meat.
She will just run out quickly and get some chicken or ribs. She will be back shortly to finish watching the episode. She wants to find out what happens, if Jerry ever figures out his girlfriend’s name. She heads out, leaving the lights and the television on. She will be that quick.
It is no longer raining. The street glimmers beneath the street lamp. The pavement is still wet, the air has that post-rain clarity. She walks to the place where they sell Jamaican jerk chicken and goes inside and stands in line and orders a plate of food. She sits at a small linoleum table and hunches over the plate and eats the chicken with her fingers until it is just a pile of bones on her plate. Sated, she wipes her mouth with her sleeve and takes a gulp from the fruit drink that came free with her meal. It is not the food she usually eats but it is delicious.
Afterward, Maria stands outside the chicken joint for a while, just breathing in the cool night air. She knows she should go home. It is time to go home. She left the television on. She left the apartment waiting for her to return. And yet
, almost like somebody in a trance, when she leaves the restaurant she turns left instead of right. She walks to the train station and swipes her card through the turnstile and heads underground and waits at the platform, watching rats scurry around the tracks. The train isn’t crowded yet. The night is young. She finds a seat between two old people. She thinks how Khalil is high in the sky and she is beneath the earth. She thinks about their registry. Wonders how much of the shit they put on the list they will actually receive. She thinks about Jim Jones. She thinks about how so many of the people who died there were black. How many of them were old. It was like a giant black nursing home. And how much Jim Jones loved black people before he killed them. What a warrior against racism.
He even insisted on calling them white nights, those occasions when he’d call them into the pavilion under duress. He didn’t want to use the word black to signify terror, emergency. Jones felt there was too much negativity already assigned to the idea of blackness.
So those nights of terror he called white nights, when he would rouse the sleeping people under cloak of darkness, summon them over the loudspeakers to the pavilion, crying out, Alert! Alert!
Obedient, the people would rise from their beds in their pajamas and walk through the darkness to the center of the compound where he waited. There, they would stand before him, the white man they called Father, and listen to him rant. Each time he told them the same story: The American government was moving in for an attack. It was imminent. Couldn’t they hear the forces coming?
Indeed, they heard voices, sounds of machetes hacking through the jungle. How could they not believe him? They had each left for a reason. They knew their government was capable of great evil.
Father himself was weeping, half-mad with grief. What to do, where to go? He said it was an emergency. Couldn’t they hear the planes in the distance? They were coming to bomb them, to spray them with poisonous gas. He rattled off their options: They could go to the Soviet Union. They could fight back against their attackers. Or they could choose revolutionary suicide. Father voted for suicide.
Mothers, he said, don’t let them take your babies. They will torture your babies.
To me death is not a fearful thing, he said. It’s the living that is treacherous.
On those white nights, the people drank what he gave them without protest. They squirted the purple liquid down the throats of their babies. Afterward, they stood in the dark, weeping, clutching one another, as they waited for death to take them. But it didn’t. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour later, nothing happened. And with the sunlight rising over Guyana, Jones would tell them it was only a test. The Flavor Aid was just Flavor Aid. He was only testing them. You’re still alive, he’d say. Isn’t that beautiful? It was only a test.
The subway rises out of the station, rumbles across the bridge toward the mass of Manhattan. She thinks about the television set back at the apartment, how the laugh track of Seinfeld is filling the empty room.
Toward the end of her days, when Gloria was in hospice, she seemed to split into three people. The nurses at the hospice called it “sundowning,” something where dying people grow confused at the end of each day, when the light shifts. But really, it seemed like something else to Maria. It seemed she had split into three distinct personalities. Like Sybil, she even spoke with distinct voices and referred to herself by three different names, depending on the evening.
Some nights she was Beth Ann. That was what she called herself. Beth Ann was all gravelly, kindhearted wisdom. She believed in homeopathy and hugs and medicinal mushrooms. The nurses in the hospice liked Beth Ann. She spoke in uplifting, quasi-Buddhist aphorisms. Not all paths are straight and not all meanings are apparent! Enjoy your journey! Everything Beth Ann said had an exclamation point at the end.
Other nights, she became Nigel, a haughty British anthropologist who liked to ramble on about all he’d learned on his extensive world travels. Nigel was an unapologetic lech. He spoke to women—the nurses, female visitors—with his eyes fixed boldly on their breasts.
Nigel once told Maria that women were like fruit: Different races of women, he said, ripen at different ages, and you had to know this before you plucked one. He kept calling Maria “son.” He told Maria that WASP women ripened too early—at puberty—and their beauty faded and withered each year that followed. He said Jewish girls ripened at about thirty, just in time for childbearing, when their hair grew thick and shiny, their zaftig breasts ready to spout milk. He said black women ripened slowly, like wine, and came to fruition in middle age. Son, Nigel said, that’s why a black woman is a good investment; she’s sweetest when she’s fifty.
Other nights, Gloria was just Gloria, but those were the worst of all because she didn’t recognize Maria. She would give Maria the side eye, as if she were a stranger.
When the nurses came to check Gloria’s vitals, she would pull them close and whisper to them, loud enough so that Maria could hear, This strange girl keeps showing up. Can you tell me where she comes from? She’s actually starting to give me the creeps.
The fire station is alive with activity. Maria stands on the sidewalk, watching through the open garage door. The firemen inside must have just returned from putting out a fire. Their faces are streaked with ash. They are changing out of their uniforms. They stand half in and half out of their suits, their bare chests rippling, taut. They look like Chippendales dancers, secretarial porn. Maria feels a predictable tremor of desire at the sight of these half-nude white men, but it is more like a memory of desire than the real thing.
Once upon a time she would have wanted a man like this. A hero out of a history book—someone who would pull her from a burning fire. Khalil showed up instead. It was Khalil who took her hand and led her to safety.
She takes one final glance at the firemen, then heads down the avenue, turns one corner, then another, until she is there, on the poet’s street. She looks up at the windows. There is a light on in one of them. If she blurs her eyes right it looks like a fire burning.
She digs around in her purse. She still has the extra set of keys she stole from Susan’s apartment. They have been lurking in the bottom of this bag for months. She lets herself inside. The stairwell smells of bleach and pizza. She climbs upward, wearily, doggedly, on legs that feel much older than twenty-seven years.
It seems like a lifetime since she began her dissertation. She knew then only the barest of facts about the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project. She now knows so much more.
On the recording Jones made of the day they all died, there seems to be music playing like a dirge under the cheers and screams of the people. For so long Maria was not able to identify the song they were playing. Now she knows there is nothing there. The music on that final audio, the tape the FBI calls Q042, was always just a shadow. The backward lyrics, the slowed-down organ, are echoes from a previous recording. On the day they all died, they was no music playing.
The people still believed, until the weary end, that the man they called Father had their best interest in mind. They were old and they were black. They were young and they were white. They were children and they were parents.
Jim Jones said, Take this poison and drink from this cup. This is the blood of Christ. Drink from it and you will be free.
A woman named Christine Miller—a sixty-year-old black woman, a longtime member of the church—was one in a thousand voices. She was not in a trance. On the death tape, she is the sole voice who steps up to the microphone and pleads with Jim Jones to reconsider. She is the sole voice to disagree with his plan to kill them all. She asks if Russia is still an option. Or Cuba. He tells her it is too late for Russia, and Cuba. But I look at all the babies, Christine Miller says, and I think they deserve to live.
Jones says the babies deserve peace. Without me, he says, life has no meaning. I’m the best friend you’ll ever have. Revolutionary suicide is the only way to go. The decision h
as been made. All hope is lost. Christine Miller’s voice is drowned out by the rage of the collective. In the background are the sounds of screams, children crying, mothers weeping. A rising hysteria. Jones, like a scolding parent, orders them to die with dignity. Are we not black, proud, and socialist?
The last thing that can be heard on the tape is Jones shouting out over the loudspeaker—Mother, mother, mother, mother, mother!—followed by silence.
The hallway floor looks dimmer, narrower than she remembered. The other apartments are silent. She presses her ear to his door. It seems to pulse beneath her skin. She can hear music playing within. The tune is familiar, a song she loved once. Luther Vandross. Long ago, and oh so far away, he sings with silky wonder. She used to listen to Luther in her pantry bedroom, trembling with sadness and longing for some delicate boy she’d never met.
Maria knows that Luther Vandross usually means one thing. The poet is not alone. But she tries to keep hope alive. Maybe he is alone. Maybe he’s in there waiting for Maria to come to him. He’s already dumped Lisa. He dumped her at the UniverSoul circus just this afternoon, surrounded by clowns and jugglers. Maybe Lisa was always just a pawn in his plan to get closer to Maria. Maybe his goal from the start was to marry into the same family as Maria so they could remain linked in an illicit love affair. A desperate, foolish move, yes, but maybe.
Maria tries his door. It’s locked of course. She expected this. She goes next door and tries the key she still has in Susan’s door, and it works. How odd, Maria thinks, as she steps inside, that after everything that happened, it did not occur to Susan to change the lock.
Susan’s apartment smells of the baby. Everyone is sleeping. There are only night sounds—a humming refrigerator, the ticking of a clock. Maria moves softly, stealthily, into the living room. The television is on, but the sound is off. It’s an infomercial for a ThighMaster. It flickers onto the sofa, illuminating a woman who lies prone, fully dressed, asleep in its glare. There is a bag of potato chips and a half-empty bottle of Beaujolais open on the coffee table before her.