The art is a gift, a bridge he walks across into an imperfect manner of loving his son. The pictures make him almost forget, make it possible for him to sometimes pretend that what he is sure of can be changed. At twelve, Juwan is quiet, a nearly pensive boy given to solitary pursuits—stamp collecting, drawing, writing poetry—endeavors that he pursues for long hours behind his bedroom door. Activities that offer Carson no way, he feels, to enter into and shape his son’s world. Juwan’s friends are other precocious, nerdy boys in the sixth-grade Gifted and Talented program. And he is beautiful. There is no other word to describe him—the slender elegance of his frame, already as tall as Carson, the symmetry of his face, and his startling gray eyes that stun and mesmerize.
He is an affectionate boy, spontaneously reaching for Carson’s hand to hold when he takes the children to the movies or when they all go out to dinner. It is not the clammy clutching of his daughters’ hands, tense with the need for reassurance, that he feels when Juwan entwines his fingers through his, but rather an affirmative joining of his son’s tenderness with his callused flesh.
Sitting outside the house, parked and waiting for Juwan, Carson sees the boy walk down the sloping driveway. Like the obsessive thoughts about the shooting, his anguish about his son rises, unbidden, automatic, impossible to control, and, he knows in his heart even as it grips him, irrational and unfair.
Why does he always have to be so damned neat? Carson wonders, assessing the tight, tapered jeans and the spotlessly white T-shirt Juwan wears. He sits thinking this even as he recalls with disdain the baggy, crotch-riding beltless jeans he’s seen on boys in the neighborhood. When Juwan slides into the car beside him, Carson hisses through clenched teeth, “When are you gonna stop walking like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like a girl.”
“I don’t walk like a girl. I walk like me.”
“I’ve told you over and over to stop carrying yourself that way.”
“That’s the way I walk, Dad,” Juwan insists, his voice a tinny screech. “I can’t help it.”
“That walk’s gonna get you in trouble if it hasn’t already.”
“How come you criticize everything I do?”
“For your own good.”
“That’s not how it feels.” Juwan reaches for the car door, angry, his eyes damp, his sniffles filling the car like muffled explosions.
Before he can open the door, Carson abruptly pulls off.
“Cut the crying game and take your hand off the door.”
They drive the two miles to the Beltway in silence, Juwan huddling protectively against the car door, sulking and morose.
“I know I’m hard on you. But that’s the way dads are. Mine was a bulldog. But he cared.”
“But I’m not walking the way I do on purpose, Dad. I can’t help it. It’s me. A couple of boys at school call me gay, but what do they mean? I’m not gay. I’m me. The kids call anybody who’s not like them gay.”
“Juwan, I don’t want you to be hurt.”
“But you hurt me, Dad. You do. Lots of times.”
“I want what’s best,” Carson mumbles, stunned by the accusation.
“You want me to be different than I am. Is that what’s best, Dad?”
Carson yearned for a son, to give himself a second chance to be a boy, a loved boy, and to be the father he never had. And he is not just a father. Juwan is not just a son. He is a Black father. Juwan is a Black boy. So there is more to this than love, more than legacies and hope for the future and carrying on his name. There is teaching his son to walk tall through the quagmires he will see and those that are camouflaged, all set, all waiting for him because he is Black.
His son will be profiled, suspected, guilty until proven innocent. How to prepare his son for this world? A world that expects so little of a Black man and lies in wait for him to prove that the skepticism is justified. The girls are like Bunny, able when necessary to slap some sense into the world. He’s seen both girls, even Roseanne, put their small hands on their narrow hips and face down other girls and boys on the playground, has seen them bristle with a sense of impatience at classmates who unlike them don’t make all A’s. He does not worry about his girls. It is the boy, his son, for whom he fears.
When Juwan was born it was days before Carson felt confident enough to hold him, terrified that resting the small body against his chest would reveal not all his strength but the fault line that is his trembling longitude and latitude. He was a quiet baby, his face a mirror of Carson’s. Carson’s mother, Alma, said, “No court of law could ever say this baby doesn’t belong to you.” Bunny breast-fed Juwan and before Carson left to hit the streets, he’d sit and watch her, her breasts swollen with milk, the veins flat and wide, translucent beneath her skin, shuddering as Juwan suckled. Those breasts tumbled from her nursing bra in a rush as she prepared to nurse, and Carson watched his wife and son, all three of them silently enchanted, bound by a spell.
In bed with Bunny, Carson held those breasts, kissed them, and suckled them too, the thin sticky fluid binding him to his wife, the mother of his child. Carson wanted to master everything, and he’d feed and bathe and change diapers, washing the pale brown rear end and the nub between Juwan’s fat thighs as he wriggled, his lips stretched into a smile, his eyes brimming with amazement at the sight of Carson, his father.
“If we do nothing else together, we have done an amazing thing,” Bunny whispered one afternoon as they sat together in the nursery. Juwan was asleep, his fists balled, his breathing a thin, whispering song. Carson had painted the room powder blue. Clouds were pasted to the ceiling and the wall trimmed with teddy bears, lollipops, and ducks. The shades were drawn against the mid-April sun. On that day, as on others since Juwan’s birth, Carson dreaded the impending departure for his shift, rent by a new fear that the streets might swallow him up, take him away from his son.
“I want to do this right, Bunny.”
“You will. We will.”
“I want to give him the childhood I never had.”
“Carson, he deserves a childhood of his own, one that belongs to him.”
“I know, but I can’t help it.”
“Don’t keep fighting with Jimmy Blake. You’ve already done that. Don’t do it in the name of our child.”
Juwan’s baptism brought Bunny’s dad, Eddie Palmer, and his wife, Madeline, down from New York. Carson was no churchgoer. Bunny attended a Baptist church in District Heights once or twice a month. Bunny used to tease Carson about hell and damnation and he’d remind her that he had already been there.
Carson hadn’t been in a church in so long that the day of Juwan’s baptism was like entering an alternate dimension of time and space. But he was back. Back in the sanctuary Alma made Carson and his brother, Richard, attend with her every Sunday until he turned sixteen, old enough in her eyes to make his own choice. Back in the hold of stained-glass windows that never felt like they offered shelter or mercy. The mottled windows of every church Carson ever attended struck him as a kind of spiritual graffiti. The service that day, long, fervent, passionate, rekindled in him memories of his past church-attending days. Days when he prayed for his stepfather, Jimmy Blake, to accept him. For Jimmy Blake to love him. Not to care that Jimmy Blake didn’t love him. Not to care that he didn’t accept him. To know who his father really was. Our Father, who art…
When Carson and the family were finally called forth, however, to face the congregation, to name his son Juwan Aaron Blake, he stepped forward eagerly. Even when he was sprinkled with water, Juwan hardly batted an eye. Now, he thought that day, looking at the boy, I have even more to live for. Even more to lose. But by the time Juwan turned five, Carson knew the boy was different. And his difference struck Carson as a purposeful act of betrayal. Juwan was not only hopelessly awkward and clumsy at sports but brutally uninterested in the ball games he tried to teach him in the backyard. Carson’s anger at the boy’s indifference thrived in the muddy swamp of his own inabilit
y to forget that for him there was no father tossing him a softball on a spring day, or gripping his hands in his as they both held the bat and he taught Carson to swing. Jimmy Blake never did those things with him.
When Juwan was younger and Bunny baked Christmas cookies with the children, Juwan excelled, his face gleeful and satisfied, obsessed as he squeezed icing from the tube to decorate gingerbread men, giving them eyes (with lashes) and lips and creamy frosting smiles. He gazed in studied, grown-up assessment of his creation. Roslyn and Roseanne, dough and icing smudged, made of the effort a game that ended with them mashing cookie dough in their ears and hair. Bunny ordered the girls out of the kitchen and tied an apron around Juwan and cleaned up the kitchen with his help. Where is the grit, the toughness he assumes a son of his should have? When Juwan was younger he preferred Roslyn and Roseanne’s dolls and play stoves to the trucks and toy soldiers Carson bought him. When Carson tried to talk to Bunny about his concerns, he got nowhere.
“He’s sensitive, that’s all. He’s bright and excels in school. Any other father would be proud of him,” Bunny said with a shrug one evening two years ago, when Juwan was ten.
“I am proud, but he needs more than sensitivity to make it in this world.”
“You want to kill his beauty. Juwan has a special nature. So he’s not macho—that’s not the only way to be male. Do you want him posturing and acting out like a little thug? Like that nonsense you see in the videos? Thank goodness Juwan so far is a Black boy in his own way.”
“You make me sound like a caveman.”
“Well, Carson, that’s how you sound. He’s a sweet kid. And you bully him.”
“I don’t want my son to be a sissy.”
“Sissy? Carson, nobody uses that word anymore.”
“Well, I’m using it. And you know what I mean. Anybody who hears it knows what it means.”
His son is soft, and in the world as Carson knows it, being soft gets you ignored, stepped on, or killed. The children of cops have so much to prove, to rebel against. Has he been a father or has he been a warden? If he doesn’t prepare him for the world, if he doesn’t prepare him for the worst things that can happen, then who will? A mother’s love isn’t enough. There’s got to be a father’s expectations, always a little out of reach, so that the boy has something to strive for.
The waiting for the grand jury decision has made him a father again. He’s almost used to it, for the waiting suspends him in a zone between the night of the shooting and whatever is to come. Whatever. A few years back, the word was favored teenage slang. Whatever. A defiant shrug. An indifferent pout in the face of destiny. Carson feels like that some days, but he can’t too eagerly embrace Whatever as a belief. He’s worked too hard. Come too far. Whatever doesn’t give him a fighting chance to seal his own fate. He no longer calls Matthew Frey every couple of days, asking if the grand jury has been convened. He can wait. He has to. The children are now on summer vacation, and he thinks of other things. When he can. Because he’s at home during the day, he and Bunny decided to allow the twins to forgo summer day camp. They ride their bikes around the neighborhood and spend afternoons in the oak tree–shaded wading pool of the family who lives behind them. Evenings, they continue a marathon game of Monopoly that’s been going on for two weeks, neither girl agreeing to call an end to it.
Carson works in the basement in the mornings, and has gotten interest from a specialty furniture shop in Annapolis about carrying some of his smaller pieces, this after he decided he could begin parting with some of the tables and chests he’d made, which have begun to inhabit the basement like lost strangers waiting to find their way home. He’s taking Juwan with him this day to discuss a commission for an armoire that one of Bunny’s coworkers wants him to make.
Bunny has been promoted to creative director of design at Image, Inc., where she still designs but is charged mostly with overseeing design projects. And the small firm was written up in Business Week for landing the contract for the redesign of a major cell phone company’s products and promotion. She is absorbed in her work, and content. They don’t talk anymore about the shooting or the night in the garage. That’s how they survive. That’s how they get along.
They are on 495, cars speeding past, the quiet between father and son feeling ancient and so like a strange healing. Carson aches for closeness with the boy, for the sound of his voice, and tells him, “I’m seeing someone about what happened, the shooting.”
“A psychiatrist?” The bluntness of the question surprises him, but Juwan instinctively rejects euphemisms or anything he suspects is a lie.
“She’s not a psychiatrist. She’s a therapist.”
“How often do you see her?”
“Once a week.”
“Oh.” Juwan looks out the window at the four-lane highway, the interstate, the cars whizzing past. Although Carson is driving the speed limit, the implications of what he has told his son propel him faster, he feels, than the speed of sound.
“I hear you sometimes at night when you dream.”
His son, his boy, has heard him sobbing, the guttural, brutal sound of him retching over the stool in the bathroom. Which dreams has he heard? Carson wonders, staring straight ahead, not daring to look at Juwan. Straight ahead at the highway, just like his son.
In the dream there is only Paul Houston’s face, frozen, framed forever in the moment when he knows the bullet whirling toward him will call his body home. When he knows he cannot outrun the bullet or stop it. A face gone gray and ghostly, filled with the essence of its own demise, a still-life, dire mask.
“That’s why I’m seeing her. Because of the dreams. Because of everything I feel about shooting that man.”
“How long will you have to see her?”
“I don’t know.”
Carson hopes nothing in his voice hints at how he resents the sessions, how they gnaw at his image of the man, the father, the husband, the police officer he worked so hard to create—in control, master of his own private universe. That hallucination shot to hell in ten seconds. But he continues to see Carrie Petersen, to find the respite he fears will ultimately elude him, and he sees her to save his marriage and family. Every session begins with the recollection of what has brought him there. He killed an innocent man, and he thought of killing himself. He measures progress by how easily he can, on any given day, banish thoughts of self-destruction. But why go on? Is life worth living, even with Bunny, if the price of the ticket is the dreams?
Carson allowed himself to see in his son’s silence a reprieve from judgment. How would he feel, Carson wonders now, if he knew his father had killed a man? The knowledge would surely alter everything between them. He’d know what his father was ultimately capable of. He’d know more than any son should know about his father or ever have to forgive.
“Do you have to take any drugs?” Juwan asks, shifting in his seat to look at Carson.
“Drugs?”
“You know, like they advertise on TV for when you’re depressed.”
“Sometimes. To help me sleep. To calm my nerves.”
“You won’t get addicted, will you?”
It’s a risk, no doubt about it, he thinks, and then tells Juwan, “I wouldn’t let that happen.”
“Do you miss going to work?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Some of the kids at school teased me when it first happened, said you were a killer. I didn’t know what to say back to them.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It would worry you and I didn’t want to make things worse. Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“If you can’t sleep at night, you could ask me and I’d sit with you and we could watch TV.”
“I couldn’t wake you up for that, Juwan.”
“When you have bad dreams I can’t sleep. I have bad dreams of my own.”
“About what?”
Juwan looks out the window, his face impassive, mute.
“Juwan, tell me—you don’
t have to protect me. I’m supposed to protect you.”
“Dreams about you going to jail for what you did.”
The admission occupies the car, heavy and stifling.
“Juwan, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I only know I love you and your mother and your sisters. That’s not everything, but it’s a lot. Try to make it enough to let go of your bad dreams.”
“Okay. Dad?”
“What?”
“Maybe you could use it to let go of yours too.”
“I’ll try, Juwan. I promise, I’ll try.”
7
Jimmy Blake, the man he thought for most of his childhood was his father, was a swaggering, blustering force who inhabited the house he grew up in like a shadowy, dark, rumbling threat of disaster. A meat cutter for Safeway, he spent his days in the cold room, lifting heavy sides of beef and pork and turning the fleshy tonnage into chops and sirloins and roasts. The job had given him arthritis in his hands, and the top of his right index finger was cut off one day while he was slicing a side of beef on a heavy-bladed machine. The deformed nub fascinated Carson, and what enthralled him even more was Jimmy Blake’s indifference to that finger, how he used it to deftly pluck a card from the deck during games of tonk, or pointed it at him, hollering, “You better watch it, boy,” the finger thrust like a malevolent, curse-filled wand.
Carson knew something was wrong from the way he looked. How different he was from his brother, Richard, who was a full shade darker than him. Carson was a “dirty yellow,” with a raw, reddish cast beneath his skin, like the remnants of a hidden, unhealed wound. Richard was the same color as Jimmy Blake, the color they call “pretty brown,” the tone of expensive furniture and elegant picture frames. His mother, Alma, was almost as light as Carson, but his color marked him, set him apart. He knew it was his color that Jimmy Blake hated. Because it was not like his. Why else would his eyes always skim the surface of Carson’s face, looking at him furtively, as though to look at the boy closely risked turning Jimmy into stone? Jimmy looked at Carson as though when doing so there was nothing to see, as though his glance had passed over a vacant space. When Carson looked at himself in the mirror, which he did throughout his childhood, obsessively, holed up in the bathroom for hours, earning Richard’s wrath, he wished for a cream that could make him darker. A cream would be so much faster and more permanent than the sun.
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