“Speak, brother,” and “You telling the truth,” and “Power to the people” punctuated his sentences and then his phrases and soon the entire room was participating in the rousing back-and-forth rhythm. For fifteen minutes he went on like that without benefit of script or notes, making his points and then building on them, then bridging effortlessly to shaping his next point, rounding it, making that one whole as well. And then as his talk was winding down, he focused right on Verdi again. “Don’t feed into the way that they’ll look at you that challenges your right to be here, don’t contribute to their accumulation of a standard deviation that justifies the choking of financial aid for those who will follow, avail yourselves of all of the resources that will help you to make it. Remember, unfair though it is, inordinate amount of pressure though it may be, it’s not just you alone occupying a seat in that chem lab, or Psych I course, or Intro to American Lit lecture, it’s your entire race, my brothers and my sisters, it’s that ten-year-old playing half ball up in West Philly where I come from, who’s already figured out the physics of what happens to a ball in flight when it’s cut in half as opposed to how it behaves when it’s whole, he’s in class with you black people, because if you don’t make it, they can justify preventing him from ever having the view of Walnut Street from the inside of one of these buildings overwrought with ivy, and let me tell you as a Philly native, it’s a different view, a pretty damn sweet one too.”
Verdi met his gaze when he looked at her, held on to it, surprised herself at the grip with which she held on to it. Though she hadn’t opened her mouth when his words called for a verbal affirmation, she went with the tempo, felt her arms bead up in chill bumps as the substance of his words went right to her head and her heart, but it was his voice, the feel of it resounding through the room then pushing through her ears that got under her polite cotton shirt, made her breaths come faster the more he talked, until by the time he was finished she had unfolded her legs from their lotus position, had straightened them and crossed them at the thigh so that she could squeeze herself, hold herself in because she felt a dropping inside of herself like she’d never felt before, as if his voice had gone between her legs and done to her what she’d never allowed the boys from home to do with their fingers.
She wondered then if he was the type her cousin Kitt had warned her about when she’d called Kitt panting and wheezing she was so excited as she told her she’d been accepted to the university, and Kitt went stone silent, and then in a voice that almost slurred it was so low and absent anything that resembled happy asked, why you want to live here? It’s okay if you just coming to spend the summer with me, but live, shit, you got the run of the country to choose from for a school, and you coming from Georgia to this city with its sharp-edged corners and cold, no-speaking, eye-rolling women; and jive-talking two-timing men; and racist flat-footed, humped-belly cops; and bigoted low-income whites with their tightly zipped pockets of slums? Here?
Verdi was not deterred though. She’d spent enough alternate summers here to allow her attraction for the place to percolate into a strongly brewed passion so that she was not even the thinnest thread disillusioned when Kitt rushed her with admonitions. The high crime rate around campus, the city slicksters who prey on young girls and boys living away from home for the first time, the tear gas likely to be inhaled during student demonstrations, the no-good men, the filth, please, cousin, go to Spelman, Tuskegee, Fisk, Hampton, please spare yourself the filth of northern, so-called integrated city campus life.
But Verdi came anyhow. Bolstered by her prosperous preacher father who couldn’t see beyond the swell of pride that his daughter had gotten accepted into the Ivy League. It was a way to extend his family’s reach beyond the familiar and entrenched soil of southern black schools. Isn’t this what he’d marched nonviolently for in the last decade, why shouldn’t his daughter sample the intellectually liberal leanings of northern whites. Wasn’t she a National Merit finalist, top tenth of her class, seven hundred on the verbal portion of the SATs. And wasn’t he funding ninety percent of her tuition out of pocket. He’d shut down all protest by his wife Hortense, who’d been frightened by Kitt’s late-night phone calls whispering, “Don’t let her know I’m calling you, but, Auntie, this is a bad town for a young girl living alone, especially one as naive and trusting as Verdi, don’t let her come, Aunt Hortense, please don’t let her come.” Leroy overruled even Kitt who he knew wanted only the best for their girl. Promised Hortense that whether or not Kitt was there, he’d make sure their baby girl was getting along. He was an office holder with the National Baptist Convention and a sought-after preacher and lecturer so his travels took him to Philadelphia often enough anyhow. Between that and the protective reach of the university over its own, and their fervent implorings to the God they both called a personal friend, Verdi would do fine, he’d calmed his wife in the end. Just fine.
She thought then that Kitt’s admonitions had nothing to do with the likes of Johnson when he knocked on her door later that evening, said, “Hello, Verdi from Georgia, my name is Johnson and I just stopped by to say welcome.”
Three
Johnson punched the dashboard in the rented maroon Grand Am trying to get the radio going, to intercept the upholstered quiet inside this car, to blot out the crunch and squeal of chain-reacting brakes on the outside. Heavy traffic today. It was a Friday afternoon in Philadelphia, he reminded himself, Philadelphians drove stupid on Fridays. Even in the 1990s he still knew Philadelphia after all; born here, died here too in a sense. Had had to leave here in a jones-induced flourish more than twenty years ago to shed his skin, to reemerge as he was now, a restored version of his better self. He was back here this time on business. The advance man for a Chicago-based Institute for Human Potential that raised funds for nonprofits. He was the mission maker, a master in fact at recasting, or even formalizing organizational missions that could yield hundreds of thousands of dollars for deserving entities willing to write his employer into the contract as an administrative cost. Here it was a from-the-grounds-up program benefiting boys at risk, like he’d been a boy at risk, even though he’d been finger-pointed as a boy with promise.
He jumped at the chance to come back here, live here for the next two months. At least his heart did: he’d be closer to Verdi’s cousin Kitt, his true and abiding friend; and Kitt’s mother, Posie; and maybe, maybe even Verdi. Foolish to wish for closeness with Verdi he told his heart as he slammed on his brakes and then switched lanes and then cursed because he’d ended up behind a SEPTA bus. Hadn’t she refused to spend some time every other time he’d been back he reminded his heart as he turned the radio up loud to drown out the thought that this time it would be different. How could it be? Wasn’t she still with him, Rowe, her once college professor who’d swooped in like such a fearless knight to save Verdi from herself, and from him. And hadn’t he, Johnson, been responsible for her tasting hell after all.
He sighed and adjusted the volume on the radio and resigned himself to being behind this bus and the fact that he was going to have to bump and grind through this rush-hour traffic all the way back to his City Avenue apartment. A dose of Johnny Hartman blaring through the radio singing “Just the Thought of You” melted down his throat like a cherry-flavored lozenge and took the edge off of his trek through West Philly near where he used to live. He looked beyond the bus to try to picture this corner before this Amoco gas station was here.
When it was a three-story apartment building where his dead brother’s best friend Bug lived. Dealt drugs. OD’d. Saw himself there on Bug’s orange vinyl couch under the Jimi Hendrix poster. Shook the thought. Concentrated instead on the mixer he needed to attend tonight with an association of probation officers. They’d be valuable stake holders, and could attract significant dollars.
Troubled Waters Foundation. That’s the name change that had been swimming around since he’d taken this assignment. Hadn’t voiced it to his bosses yet. But he liked the sound of it, so did the woman he
’d sipped ginger ale with two nights in a row at the hotel lounge across the street, she’d talked about the possibility for metaphor for whoever had to write the ad copy. He’d tried to explain that it wasn’t ad copy, but she was a burned-out copywriter so that’s how she thought, she told him.
He pulled into the underground parking lot and took the long way around to get into his building. Turned the key and pushed the door open on his one-bedroom efficiency that smelled of day-old Chinese takeout. He’d complained twice about the cleaning service, they wouldn’t do a white boy like this, he muttered. He sat on the side of the bed and picked up the phone and hit the numbers to retrieve his messages. Kitt’s voice pushed into his ear.
“Good news bad news, Johnson, baby. Verdi said that she won’t see you. Surprise, surprise. But I still want to invite you over for Sage’s eighth birthday party. Next Saturday, the day before Easter. No she won’t be here. Call me and tell me what you want special for me to cook for you. And Mama said you’ve avoided her each time you’ve been back before and if she doesn’t see you this time somebody’s getting their butt kicked. My words not hers.”
He lay across the bed and drew his hand down his face. Had to just accept that it wasn’t their season. That’s one thing the brutality of his past had taught him. Everything happens right on time no matter how long it takes.
It appeared that everything was happening right on time as Johnson sat at his mother’s oppressively sad kitchen in October of 1971 thinking that he’d always had only two options: college or death. At least that’s how it had been staged out among his three older brothers. The oldest dead in a metaphoric sense, in jail, the result of running a package for a friend; the package was filled with two ounces of uncut heroin and Johnson’s brother refused to name the friend he was running for, where he was running it to. The next oldest brother dead for real, when his helicopter was brought down in the U Minh Forest of the Mekong Delta. The third brother, Thompson, closest to Johnson in age, had navigated the land mines in their West Philly neighborhood and avoided jail, gone to college instead, Cheyney, majored in secondary education and ended up teaching phys ed and coaching the award-winning chess team at Vare Junior High until he fell away and moved to San Diego with his bride and didn’t visit often because he couldn’t breathe in his mother’s sadness.
Johnson followed in that brother’s footsteps easily, even as he made his own tracks to surpass him, to do what he could to patch up the shredded lining in his mother’s heart that showed so in the creases around her mouth when she tried to smile.
He’d always been certain that he would go to college. Before he was picked out by the guidance counselors at West Philly High to be part of a special program that sent him to enrichment classes at the computer lab at the university, before his soaring SAT scores that had recruiters licking stamps to him from Bucknell to Holy Cross, before every other program for the disadvantaged scrambling in 1971 for lucrative federal matching dollars tried to claim him as their poster boy, the success story, the one raised by a poor single mother in the impoverished, intellectually devoid slums of the city who triumphed after all. He knew he’d go to college much before the helpers swarmed.
He’d always excelled in geometry. Gifted when it came to shapes: naming them; measuring them; positioning them; predicting changes in them over time; determining their functions on a graph, in an equation, a schema, a room. “I’m gonna build you your dream house, Mom,” he’d told her after he’d been accepted to the university. “I’m majoring in architecture, and opening my own firm, and then I’m gonna design and build houses for you and all the hardworking beautiful black mothers just like you.”
He’d actually been building her houses of sorts since he could remember. Out of wooden building blocks that he’d sneak home, one or two a week from his kindergarten class; out of Popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue in the third grade; out of pinocle cards, a game that he played like a pro from the time he was twelve; out of cut glass and clay, a solar-powered house that had been his science project and took second place in the all-city competition his junior year in high school. And now out of his textbooks as he sat at his mother’s kitchen table this Friday evening itching to get back to campus, to Verdi’s room, to her cheerful naïveté that so begged for him to teach her things. He piled two books horizontally on top of the spines of two more and asked his mother if she could cut his meat loaf extra thick, and sop it in gravy because there was someone he wanted to share it with.
“Who?” she asked. “Turtle? Rev? Counselor? Moose? Tower? Medic?” She knew them all by their nicknames, these other scholarship students who’d crowd around her table during semester breaks when they couldn’t afford traveling fare home and wolf down her good home cooking as if they didn’t know when their next meals would come.
Sometimes they didn’t, Johnson told her, melting her heart with stories of how this one couldn’t buy a ticket to get back to Oakland over Thanksgiving nor could that one who lived outside of Cleveland, and they were going to have to dine with the skid rowers at a soup kitchen on Ridge Avenue because they were out of money. So Johnson’s mother, who had a throbbing soft spot for young men, having already lost her second son to the war, insisted that they all come to her house, and even overspent so that she could cook twice the volume and send each young man back to the dorm with mountainous go-plates to tide them over until the university started feeding them again. But after she lost her oldest son to prison, and her third to a new wife and geography, she would sift in and out of depressions that had Johnson stroking and kicking to keep from drowning under the weight of the air in her house.
“So which guy is it?” she asked again. Her voice distant and tired as she talked into the pan she’d just pulled from the oven.
“It’s not a guy,” Johnson said to his mother’s back. He unstacked the books he’d been building and laid them out end to end.
“Not a guy? Then must be a girl,” she asked and answered at the same time as she glanced over her shoulder at him and then turned back to spoon continuous clumps of white rice onto a plate.
“Yeah, some girl from Georgia. Verdi’s her name,” he said as he reassembled the books to bring them to a point.
“Verdi. From Georgia, huh? And she’s not cooking for you? You taking food to her?” She laid two thick slabs of meat loaf over the rice and washed the top with brown gravy. “Southern girls learn how to cook early, you know.”
“Come on, Mom, she’s a freshman,” he said as he watched the gravy edge to the crust of the meat loaf and just hang there as if deciding whether or not to fall.
“Well, why haven’t you brought her past?”
“No big deal, Mom, she’s just a friend.” He moved the books around some more as his mother walked the plate to the table and just stood there looking down at him. He didn’t return the look; didn’t want to. He knew that her expression would be a fatigued hurt, as if even her sadness was tired of being sad, the skin under her eyes thick and sacky, her mouth turned in an upside-down U, set, like a plaster-of-paris mold. He couldn’t remember when she’d lost her beauty, her ability to take over a room with her smile. But sometimes lately he’d look at her and her face would be so sallow, so drained of faith and hope and the robustness that used to make her brown face so inviting to gaze upon. Sometimes her despair was so exposed and magnified on her face that even in his manhood it frightened him and he’d want to run and hide himself in the pleats of her skirt the way he did when he was a child. He guessed she’d have that effect on him now so he rested his head on his arm and fiddled with the books.
She set the plate down on the table. Waited for him to look at her as she watched him playing with the books, shuffling them one way then another. Sighed then to the top of his head when he still didn’t look up at her. “She must be a big deal seeing as how you bring all of your other friends past. Especially when they’re hungry.” She yawned as she went back to the stove. “I’ll put the string beans in a separate dish, a good-siz
e dish,” she said, “that way I can load her up on them, nothing beats hunger like some fresh string beans in a cornstarch-thickened base the way I do mine.”
“She’s not exactly what you would call hungry, Mom,” he said, struggling to keep from getting defensive about not bringing Verdi by. It was true, he had ushered all of his friends in and out of his mother’s house since he’d been at the university, her house just a ten-minute bus ride from campus, a half-hour walk if they were quarterless. Even the ones from money he’d not hesitated to show the modest house where he was raised; he reminded himself of that now, bolstering himself so that he wouldn’t have to admit to the unforgivable in his mind, being embarrassed about his mother when it came to Verdi. Now he looked at his mother’s back as she stirred around in the pot of string beans. She had a pink crocheted sweater over her shoulders, the silver beads that held her glasses around her neck peeked unevenly through the top of the sweater’s open-weave stitch. Her black-and-gray hairline was tapered in an oval and a few strands hung longer than the others and poked against the sweater’s yarn. At least her back was easier on his eyes; the pink sweater made her appear soft and young.
“Well, why am I sending her half of my good meat loaf if she’s not hungry?” she asked, reaching for her slotted spoon from the Maxwell House coffee can she used as a utensil holder.
“’Cause I’m always bragging about the culinary skills of my dear, sweet mom.” He tried to make his voice go light to deflect the heaviness sighing in the air. “And she’s always talking about her cousin who lives somewhere in West Philly too, and we just have this silly bet, you know, I told her that my sweet generous mom could probably cook her cousin under the table any day of the week.”
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