My father had grown up in Brooklyn but joined the military at eighteen and was stationed at a base near Clarksville, Tennessee. Then Vietnam. Then my mother and SweetGrove. He was missing a finger on each hand, the pinky on his left, and on his right hand, the thumb. When we asked him how it happened, he wouldn’t answer, so my brother and I spent hours imagining ways to lose two fingers in a war—knives, bombs, tigers, sugar-diabetes, the list went on and on. His parents had grown old and died only a block from where we now lived. That summer, when we begged him to let us go outside during the day, he shook his head. The world’s not as safe as you all like to believe it is, he said. Look at Biafra, he said. Look at Vietnam.
I thought of Gigi, Sylvia, and Angela walking arm in arm through the streets below our window. How safe and strong they looked. How impenetrable.
One Sunday morning, on the way to the small church my father had found for us, a man wearing a black suit stopped him. I’ve been sent by the prophet Elijah, in the name of Allah, he said, with a message for you, my beautiful black brother.
The man looked at me, his eyes moving slowly over my bare legs. You’re a black queen, he said. Your body is a temple. It should be covered. I held tighter to my father’s hand. In the short summer dress, my legs seemed too long and too bare. An unlocked temple. A temple exposed.
The man handed my father a newspaper and said, As-Salaam Alaikum. Then he was gone.
In church behind the preacher, there was a picture of our Lord Jesus Christ, white and holy, his robe pulled open to show his exposed and bleeding heart.
The Psalm tells us, the preacher said, I call on the Lord in my distress and he answers me.
Gold light poured in through a small stained glass window. My father lifted his gaze, saw what I saw—the way the light danced across the folding chairs, the rows of laps, the buckling hardwood floor. Then the sun shifted, melting the light back into shadow. What was the message for you, my beautiful black brother, in all that church light? What was it for any of us?
Behind me, an old woman moaned an Amen.
The streetlights had come on and from our place at the window, my brother and I could see children running back and forth along the sidewalk. We heard them laughing and shouting Not it! Not it! Not it! We could hear the Mister Softee ice cream truck song weaving through it all. My brother begged again and again for the world beyond our window. He wanted to see farther, past the small, newly planted tree, past the fire hydrant, past the reflection of our own selves in the darkening pane.
If anyone had looked up just that minute before, they would have seen the two of us there, as always, watching the world from behind glass. I was ten and my brother was six. Our mother was still in SweetGrove. Our words had become a song we seemed to sing over and over again. When I grow up. When we go home. When we go outside. When we. When we. When we. Then my brother’s palms were against the window, pushing it out instead of up, shattering it, a deep white gash suddenly pulsing to bright red along his forearm.
How did my father suddenly appear, a thick towel in his hands? Had he been just a room away? Downstairs? Beside us? This is memory. My father’s mouth moving but no sound, just my brother’s blood pooling on the sill, dripping down onto the jagged glass glinting at our feet. The red lights of an ambulance but no sound. My father lifting my paling brother into his arms but no sound. The trail of silent blood. The silent siren. The silent crowd gathering to watch the three of us climbing into the van.
In the bright white of the hospital room, sound returned, bringing with it taste and smell and touch. The room was too cold. We had not yet eaten dinner. Where was my little brother? A nurse handed me a paper cup of red juice and a Styrofoam plate filled with Nilla wafers. I wanted water. Milk. Meat. There was blood dried to a burnt brown on my T-shirt. Blood on my cutoff shorts. Blood on my light blue Keds. I pressed the cookies together in pairs, chewed slowly.
My mother said Clyde hadn’t died in Vietnam. They had the wrong man. So many brown and black men, who could know? my mother said. It could have been anybody. He told me.
Another nurse wanted to know if I was all right.
Your brother will be fine, she said. Everything’s going to be all right, Sweetie.
Clyde is fine, my mother said. He’ll be home soon.
Kings County Hospital. No rooms, just wards. Slide a curtain back and there’s a baby crying. Slide another one and there’s the girl with the crazily hanging arm. Curtains and children. Nurses and noise. Where was my brother?
You enjoying those cookies, Sugar, the nurse asked. You was hungry, wasn’t you?
The Benguet of the Northern Philippines blindfold their dead then sit them on a chair just outside the entrance to their home, their hands and feet bound.
My mother turned the telegram around and around in her hands, smiling. Her eyes on the door.
For a long time after the broken glass, there was no room in my head for the newness of Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi. When they hollered at each other under my window, I didn’t look down. I lay in my bed, my eyes on the ceiling. A medallion circled the bulb. Off-white flowers orbited the light, stem to blossom to stem again. If my mother was coming, she would be coming now, so close to splintering glass, my brother’s slit-open then sewn-up arm.
When my brother called, Those girls are out there again, I didn’t answer, curled my toes inside my socks, and turned my face to the wall. Beneath the bandages, black stitches folded my brother’s skin back onto itself. I wanted my mother.
3
Soon after the window shattered, my father began to let us go. The front gate first—Stay inside it. Keep it closed. Then to the tree in the middle of the block. Then to the STOP sign on the corner. Around the corner to Poncho’s bodega, but only together. Hold your brother’s hand. Then onto the curb, into the street, the handball court, down Knickerbocker, across to the park, the baby swings, the big swings, until my brother and I were finally free.
Some days, I roamed the streets alone, searching for my mother. Would her hair be gray now? Still in an Afro? Would she be skinnier than I remembered her or had the years added a weight to her like the old Italian and Irish women who had moved away, who had once walked our streets slowly, heavy-breasted and waist-less. Did she still call Clyde’s name in the night, curse my father, walk through the land that used to belong to her, walk down to the water and believe it belonged to her still?
Come with me, I said to my brother again and again. Let’s go look for her.
Before Sylvia, Gigi, and Angela were mine, they arrived at our public school each morning, far away from me. They called to each other across the yard. They linked arms and laughed. They curled into each other to whisper when the teacher’s back was turned. Before I knew their names, I knew the tiny bones at the back of their necks, the tender curve of their hairlines. I knew each Peter Pan–collared shirt and turtleneck they owned. I knew Angela’s scowl as she waited in line in the lunchroom. I knew Sylvia’s bronze arm draped around Angela’s waist in the school yard. I knew Gigi’s voice, a waxed-on Spanish or British or German accent as we pledged in the auditorium.
Every teacher who entered the school yard loved them best, the rest of us sinking into invisibility.
Before they were mine, I stared at their necks, watched their perfect hands close around jump ropes and handballs, saw their brightly polished nails. As they grabbed each other’s arms and bounce-walked down the hall, I was sure no ghost mothers existed in their pasts. I truly believed they were standing steadily in the world. I watched them, wanting to have what they had—six feet planted. Right here. Right now.
That year, before we all grew to one height, Sylvia was the tallest. The day we finally became friends, Angela wore a too-small coat, her thin pale arms protruding from the sleeves. My own jacket was also too small, so I met her eyes first, hoping she’d see we came from the same place—a place where we cornrowed our hair and were unprepared for how quickly winter settled over this city.
The sadnes
s and strangeness I felt was deeper than any feeling I’d ever known. I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone? And now the four of us were standing together for the first time. It must have felt like a beginning, an anchoring.
I held my nearly flat book bag with both hands.
Why do you stare at us like that, Sylvia said. What are you looking for?
Years later I’d remember how shaky her voice was, how I wondered if it was the cold or fear that made it quiver. And in it, there was the slight lilt of Martinique, an island as foreign to me as the Bronx.
Sylvia came closer to me. Really, I’m asking what are you seeing? When you look at us? I’m not trying to be mean.
Everything, I said. I see everything.
You’re the one without a mother, aren’t you? Sylvia touched my cheek, her mouth so close I could smell her wild cherry Life Saver.
No. That’s not me.
It was years before the woman with the hijab. Years before the silence and afternoons of watching ivy cascade down from a windowsill, a pen stilled in a thin dark hand.
The sky was overcast. The school bell was ringing. All around us, children were running toward the entrance. Sylvia took my hand. You belong to us now, she said.
And for so many years, it was true.
What did you see in me? I’d ask years later. Who did you see standing there?
You looked lost, Gigi whispered. Lost and beautiful.
And hungry, Angela added. You looked so hungry.
And as we stood half circle in the bright school yard, we saw the lost and beautiful and hungry in each of us. We saw home.
Months later, I would learn that Sylvia had arrived the year before me, with her parents and three older sisters from the small island of Martinique. She had spent the summer walking the few blocks her parents allowed with Angela and Gigi, quickly forgetting the French she had always spoken. Her father, who had her same reddish brown hair, thick coils of it, read Hegel and Marcel, quoting them back to Sylvia in a French patois she swore she no longer understood. When she laughed, her beauty stilled me.
Gigi had also come to Brooklyn the year before me, from South Carolina, because her mother’s dream was to celebrate her twenty-first birthday in New York City. Don’t do the math, Gigi said every time someone asked if her mother was her sister. It just adds up to teen pregnancy. It was late autumn and we were friends by then, Gigi tucking a heavy braid behind an ear, rolling her eyes.
This would never happen to us, we thought. We knew this could never be us.
Some days, Angela’s eyes were narrow and distant. When we asked what was wrong, she said, Nothing! God, why y’all hounding me like I’m a dog! Those days, we left her to the anger, walking quietly beside her, side-eyeing her hands until they uncurled, reached for ours. I’ve always been here, she said when we asked if there had been anywhere for her before Brooklyn. I don’t have any history, she said. Just you guys. Just right here, right now.
4
We left Tennessee in the night, my father gently shaking my brother and me from sleep. For weeks before, my father and mother had argued. My mother swore she’d bring the butcher knife to bed and sleep with it under her pillow. Clyde told me about you being with that woman last night, my mother said. My uncle Clyde had been dead for almost two years by then.
Don’t trust women, my mother said to me. Even the ugly ones will take what you thought was yours.
On Saturdays, my father took us to Coney Island, the three of us riding the double L train to the F train to the last stop. My brother and I watched from the first car window as the Wonder Wheel came into view, then the long-closed Parachute ride, then the Cyclone, and finally, the ocean. We were terrified of the people who hung around the edges of the amusement park—skinny white men covered to their neck in tattoos, stringy-haired women half naked and fighting against heroin-induced nods on the boardwalk, hawkers yanking passersby toward them, promising them thrills, enormous brown women spilling out of tiny bikinis, Puerto Rican children covered in a thick layer of baby oil. We held tight to our father’s hands as we walked, begging for the corn dripping with butter and clouds of cotton candy being sold. But there was usually only enough money for a few rides and maybe a hot dog and soda for lunch.
We didn’t understand the kind of poverty we lived in. Our apartment was small, furnished by our landlord with a yellow Formica table and chair set in the kitchen, small beds for my brother and me in the single bedroom, and a dark green pullout sofa in the living room. Every evening, after my father kissed us good-night, we heard the squeal of springs as he lifted the sofa into a bed for himself, pillow-less and draped with a thin floral bedspread.
We slept in my father’s castaway undershirts in the summer. In the winter, we paired the shirts with dingy long johns, my younger brother’s frayed with the hand-me-down scars of my own hard wearing of them.
But my brother and I were never hungry, our faces never ashy, and we were always dressed adequately for whatever the weather brought us. We had seen the truly poor kids, the hard bones of their knees and ankles, the raggedness of their clothes, their eyes hungrily following the Mister Softee ice cream truck as we stood inside the front gate with our father, licking our cones. We were not them. Most days, we had enough.
At night, my father shushed us as we cried. Again, I promised my brother that our mother was on her way.
Why did we leave? he asked.
Because Mommy was talking to Uncle Clyde, I said. Daddy doesn’t believe in ghosts.
Our mother was sad-eyed and long-limbed like my father, with graceful hands that always seemed to be reaching for something or someone. When Clyde died, those hands slowed, lifted away from her body less often, rarely reached for us.
The first time I watched Angela’s pale fingers curl into a fist, I thought of my mother. Light dappled cars, our shoes, the bright gray sidewalk. Angela had been dancing, her leg lifting into an arabesque, her long fingers extending out in front of her. Then just as quickly, she pulled her arms in, her hands closing, her eyebrows twisting with such ferocity, I took a step away from her. What? I said. What is it? But Angela just shrugged, shoved her hands into her pockets, and shook her head. I wanted to ask, Where did your hands go, Angela? I wanted to tell her that when her fingers were still like that, my mother reappeared.
At that moment, a woman had staggered past us slowly, fighting against a nod, her hand swollen and veinless. We watched her, the four of us saying nothing. Her dark skin looked soft enough to touch, a blue sheen beneath the brown.
Where were my mother’s still fingers now? I had wondered as I watched the woman, her skin so familiar that I was, for a moment, pulled back in time. Where was my mother’s sad-eyed smile? What was the Tennessee air like without me breathing it with her? Lemonade on the porch. The ringing sound of her laughter. The shine and smell of her scalp just after she’d oiled and pressed her hair.
The woman had staggered to the corner, grabbing for the STOP sign and missing it before disappearing around the corner.
How were we to learn our way on this journey without my mother? Even my father on the boardwalk at Coney Island, the music and hawking and rumble of the roller coaster to the right of him, the vast ocean to the left, walked slowly, unsteadily, as though he was as unsure as we were about what step to take next.
One evening, my father came home with a small radio. When he turned it on, soft music filled our living room, and my brother and I danced the way we had danced back in Tennessee, lifting our arms, as though our mother was holding our hands, our eyes closed, our heads dipped down.
If someone had asked, Are you lonely? I would have said, No. I would have pointed to my brother and said, He’s here. I would have lied even as the empty street on rainy afternoons threatened to swallow me whole. If it was the autumn after Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, and I became inseparable, I w
ould have pulled them close, bending deep into the balm of their laughter.
A woman named Jennie moved into the apartment below us. She was dark and reedy and wore a long, black wig that stopped at the middle of her back. When she spoke, her voice lilted up. Most of what she said was in Spanish. My father explained a place called the Dominican Republic to us but when she was silent, she could have been from Tennessee. She reminded my brother of our mother. She was beautiful in the same haunted way. She’s almost back now, my brother said. She’s almost here. But my father told us to stay away from Jennie.
My father had brought the wooden horsehair brush we used in Tennessee, its bristles still smelling of Dixie Peach and Sulfur 8 hair grease. After washing my brother’s hair, I brushed the small kinks out while he bit his lip to keep from crying. These are Mama’s hands, I whispered. Close your eyes and it’ll be true. He closed his eyes, reached up, and grabbed my hand with his own. August, he said. I can feel her bones.
Every two weeks, my father washed my hair then gave me three dollars and sent me wet-headed across the street to Miss Dora’s house. Miss Dora was big enough to fill two folding chairs and always sat outside with a mason jar filled with ice and Coca-Cola at her feet. With a towel wrapped around my shoulders, I sat on the ground, the back of my head resting against her enormous thigh, watching the block and wincing through her oiling and cornrowing of my hair. She hummed softly as she braided, and often, I found myself dozing off to “Amazing Grace” or “In the Upper Room.”
Another Brooklyn Page 2