She was Sister Mama Loretta when our foreheads burned with fever, when our stomachs curled back over themselves and our heaving heads needed soft hands holding them. When we gathered over Monopoly boards and checker games we found ourselves laughing at her stories and begging her Tell us another one, Sister Mama Loretta. But she was not my mother. We all knew this.
At breakfast, when WWRL played Dorothy Moore singing “Misty Blue,” my father fell silent over his food, his eyes furtive on the window, as though my mother would suddenly show herself, perched like a bird on the sill. Oh, it’s been such a long, long time. Look like I’d get you off of my mind.
But my mother didn’t show herself. I imagined her crazy, wild-haired and wide-eyed now, not the woman we knew before her ghost brother came back, the woman who ironed her blouses and spread her lips across her teeth to apply red lipstick.
At night, I wrapped my head and kneeled alone, the apartment quiet with my brother and father at mosque where they prayed together, separate from the women. I pressed my forehead against the floor, my arms stretched out above me. We would be women, one day, Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, and I. There wouldn’t be the world we were walking through, arm in arm, the ear against thigh on an afternoon of hair combing. There wouldn’t be the cheek placed against beating hearts, the 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 song of a double Dutch game. When we were women, there would be nothing. We couldn’t be friends, my mother had said. We couldn’t trust us. And everywhere I looked, I saw glass shattering into truth.
When I was nine years old, Jerome looked up at my window and winked at me from where he and his friends were playing in the street. I didn’t know how to wink back. I didn’t know how to look down on his dark face and see promise there. The worlds of SweetGrove and Brooklyn hadn’t yet merged into one world. So years later, when he grabbed my hand and said, I know you, I looked up at the teenager standing there and remembered so many things. One day, you and me gonna do that thing, he said. At twelve, I thought sixteen-year-old boys said this to every girl, so I nodded and said, Okay. He leaned down then, and kissed me.
Who could understand how terrifying and perfect it is to be kissed by a teenage boy? Only your girls, I thought.
Only your girls.
Sylvia was the baby of four sisters. Piano lessons. Dance lessons. On Sunday afternoons, when the family returned home from church, a French woman waited for the girls in the living room. You must walk like this, the woman said in French. You must cross your legs like this when you sit. This is the salad fork, the dessert spoon, the glass for Burgundy. Angela, Gigi, and I watched from the doorway, stopped at entry by her mother’s sharp eye. Beyond this point, the woman’s brow said, you don’t belong. Even here is too far. We heard the tone in the French words we did not understand. Crowded in that doorway, we were no longer lost and beautiful but ragged and ugly, made so by a flick of her mother’s eye.
Still, Sylvia begged us to stay, begged her father with a girlish Papá, and then French words like a song falling from her mouth.
Photos of the four girls lined a room reserved just for sitting. There was a pool table in the basement, a refrigerator that dispensed ice. The two oldest sisters had already left for, as Sylvia’s father called it, University. But Sylvia and her third sister each had a room painted the color of their choosing. Sylvia’s room was pink. Her older sister’s room was a pale gray. The older sister retreated to this room when we arrived, mysterious and evil. One Saturday she emerged from her room simply to slap Sylvia for laughing too loudly. Sylvia held her cheek silently. It’s against the rules to laugh like that, she said finally. I’m supposed to know we’re better than that.
But you always laugh that way, we said.
Not always, Sylvia said. Not here.
The parents questioned us. Who were our people? What did they do? How were our grades? What were our ambitions? Did we understand, her father wanted to know, the Negro problem in America? Did we understand it was up to us to rise above? His girls, he believed, would become doctors and lawyers. It’s up to parents, he said, to push, push, push.
Once, as a young child, my mother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. A grown-up, I answered. She and my father laughed and laughed. But listening to Sylvia’s father, I felt myself straightening my back, tilting my chin up. Law, I wanted to say, like you. I want truth, I wanted to say. An absolute truth, or if not truth, reason—a reason for everything. But the hems of my bellbottoms were tattered. My socks in this shoeless house had holes in the heels. In the winter, because of my own absentmindedness, my hands and arms were often ashy. How could I even think of aspiring to anything when this was how I walked through the world? Sylvia’s mother’s flick of an eye said to us again and again, Don’t dream. Dreams are not for people who look like you.
So I wanted to be Sylvia. And because I wanted it so much, I told her about my secret love, how Jerome and I met in my vestibule some evenings, his hands everywhere, his lips on my mouth, neck, breasts. How I had to stand on the upper stair to reach him. How he looked outside for grown-ups before leaving my building.
Sylvia’s world felt delicate and foreign. Mother and father in one city, one home. Each room spare and clean. Beds were always made. Bookshelves dusted. Pots and pans put away into what her mother referred to as the pantry. Unstreaked mirrors hung above dressers. Bathrooms smelled of Pine-Sol.
There was fresh baked bread in a bread box. Peas and rice in Tupperware in the fridge. There were white knee-high socks folded in drawers, pantsuits hanging in closets, platform shoes neatly arranged on shoe racks. There was a painting of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture above the piano, another of Biafran leader Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu between the velvet-curtained windows.
In the world of Sylvia’s house, Angela, Gigi, and I sat with our feet crossed at the ankles, embarrassed suddenly by our bitten-down nails and frizzing hair. In this world, I wished for a head covering, a skirt that draped to the floor. We felt we had snuck into a party we had not been invited to. We feared breaking the china plates lined along the mantelpiece, speaking too loudly, laughing with our mouths open. Each side-eye glance from Sylvia’s mother reminded us of how truly unworthy we were.
We saw the little girl Sylvia became there and tried to become little girls again, too.
Don’t try to act like a dusty, dirty black American, Sylvia’s sister said.
Sylvia’s cheek reddened into her sister’s handprint. It stayed that way for days and days.
Law. No one had this dream for me. No one held out a hand saying, Here, take this. So I told my secrets to Sylvia with the hope that I’d get something in return. I whispered how I fell in love slowly. First with the way Jerome called my name, August, so much breath around the sound that it was hard not to feel the summer light pouring out through his voice.
I was thirteen the first time we went further than the kisses we stole in the dark of my vestibule. Only Sylvia knew. Give this back to me, I wanted to say to her. I want your promised future filling up the empty space ahead of me.
10
But Gigi was the first to fly. A woman in white patent leather go-go boots came and got her from school one day so she could audition for a performing arts school in Manhattan.
Everybody, Gigi said. Meet my mom.
Hey, we said, struck silent by a woman so young and beautiful she could have been on the cover of Ebony or a centerfold in Jet magazine.
Hey yourselves, Gigi’s mother said.
At the audition, Gigi told us she had to say the same lines over and over—Hey Big Daddy, ain’t you heard . . . the boogie-woogie rumble of a Dream Deferred?
Gigi said her lines again and again for us, her voice deeper, strange, our Gigi but different, standing in front of us inside someone else’s skin.
They said I had something. A white lady there said, You could be someone.
Then, suddenly, as though Sylvia’s father looked closely at us and saw every single thing he hated, we were no longer Sylvia’s friends but
ghetto girls. When we arrived late in the afternoon, he stood at the door. No company today, he said to us. Sylvia needs to get ready for her new school.
Go home, he said. Study. Become somebody better than you are.
We could have blamed his stinging words on his stilted English. We could have said Fuck you, man—become who he thought we already were. But we were silent.
None of us asked, what new school. Or why. He was tall and thick, his hatred for us a deep wrinkle between his eyebrows.
We turned away from Sylvia’s door, said good-bye to each other at the corner, each of us sinking into an embarrassed silence, ashamed of our skin, our hair, the way we said our own names. We saw what he saw when we looked at each other. So we looked away and headed home.
In class, Sylvia’s empty seat reminded us of her father, his arms folded across his chest, his glare a reminder of a power that was becoming more and more familiar to us. A power we neither had nor understood.
When we saw Sylvia again a week later, she was wearing a St. Thomas Aquinas uniform, her older sister’s arm tight around her shoulder. She glanced at us, mouthed, Park later. I squeezed Gigi’s hand and nodded.
That evening, Sylvia pulled a joint from her coat pocket, let it slowly disappear into her mouth then pulled it out again, To seal it, she said. None of us asked where she’d gotten the joint or the Winston matchbook. We circled around her and watched her take the smoke deep into her lungs, hold it, then exhale. We followed her lead, the smoke hot and hard against the back of my throat. We had seen teenagers doing this, crowded together tight as fists, their eyes closed against the smoke. We coughed our way through, laughing at our own ignorance until the laughter and the smoke seemed to release everything impossible in the world.
It was winter again and Angela had lost herself in dance, Gigi in lead role after lead role at the performing arts high school she now attended.
I spent my days watching people move, both outside our building and inside, too. Jennie was replaced by Carla, who stayed only a month before the police came and took her away. Carla was replaced by Trinity, a small, girlish man who spoke French to the men who followed behind him up the stairs in the evening.
At mosque the sisters asked, What about their mother? their eyes taking in my father’s thin mustache, his thick close-cut head of hair, his broad shoulders. The manicured nails on his eight remaining fingers promised them damage, imperfection, and, they hoped, need.
Their mother is gone, my father answered.
Their mother’s gone, Sister Loretta echoed.
What’s in the urn, Daddy?
You know what’s in that damn urn, August!
At night, I spoke to my mother, apologized for the lies my father told, promised her there’d come a day when he’d be less afraid. He’d take us back to Tennessee then, back to SweetGrove. I told her to be patient, that with Allah, all things were possible.
11
We turned thirteen and it seemed wherever we were, there were hands and tongues. There were sloe-eyes and licked lips wherever our new breasts and lengthening thighs moved.
Angela and Gigi and I showed up at Sylvia’s house one Saturday morning when the family was gone. Sylvia, able to sneak us inside, stood ironing her Catholic school uniform as we talked. It happened, Angela said. I’m bleeding.
Finally, we said.
We thought you’d never join us on this side, we said.
We were teenagers now, our bodies different but all of us still the same height, all of us still blending into each other.
We found places to be together, sharing a joint on the stairs of the closed library, stepping over prayer rugs to sit on my bed, cutting two pizza slices into four at Royal Pizzeria because if we bought something, we could sit for hours. Park swings, handball courts, the spot of sun on the corner where a windowless factory set dozens of pale, tired women free every day at 5:00 P.M.
Angela said, My mother said don’t tell a soul.
But we didn’t have to open our mouths. Summer came again and men and boys were everywhere, feathery hands on our backsides in crowds, eyes falling too long at our chests, whispers into our ears as we passed strangers. Promises—of things they could do to us, with us, for us.
When Sylvia threatened to run away, her father said we could stay over. He asked to call our parents, make sure they knew where we were. We no longer looked at him—gave him our numbers without lifting our eyes. Angela said, My mother already knows, quickly before anyone could dial a number, speak to someone. It’s fine, Angela said, looking anywhere else.
After speaking to my father, he said, He’s a good man. He has his God. A man needs his God. He eyed Angela, the torn sweater, the hole in the toe of her dingy socks. Angela tucked one foot behind the other, bent into herself. Then, saying nothing, he left.
We stayed up late, watching television sitcoms, eating Popsicles and bags of candy. Sylvia and I wore baby-doll pajamas that felt obscene and made us giddy. We slow-danced with each other. Angela showed us how to French-kiss and we spent hours practicing. We practiced until our bodies felt as though they were exploding.
We whispered, I love you and meant it.
We said, This is scary and laughed.
When Jerome asked where I’d learned what I learned I said, Don’t worry about it because he was eighteen and I was nearly fourteen and nothing mattered but hearing I love you and believing he meant it.
There were days when we sat in front of the television watching Clark Kent fall in love with Lois Lane and understood what it meant to hold secrets close. When Angela cried but wouldn’t tell us why, we promised her our loyalty, reminded her that she was beautiful, said Knock, Knock, Angela. Let us in, let us in. We stroked the sharp knots of her cheekbones, moved our fingers gently over her lips, lifted her shirt, and kissed her breasts. We said, You’re so beautiful. We said, Don’t be afraid. We said, Don’t cry.
When she danced, her dance told stories none of us were old enough to hear, the deep arch of her back, the long neck impossibly turned, the hands begging air into her chest.
What are you saying, we begged. Tell us what it is you need.
But Angela was silent.
On the Fourth of July, my father took all of us to the East River, where thousands of people crowded to watch fireworks explode above the water. Pressed against each other, Angela whispered into my ear, I’m gonna leave this place one day.
I promised her we’d go with her.
But Angela shook her head, her straightened hair hot curled into a mushroom low over her brow and ears. She stared straight ahead at the fireworks.
Nah, she said. Ya’ll won’t.
That night, as New York and the rest of the country celebrated its independence, everywhere we looked, the world was red, white, and blue. We had shared a joint in the smoky bathroom of a crowded McDonald’s and felt wild and giddy and free. On the subway home, someone’s boom box played “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” and we all laughed, singing along.
Hop on the bus, Gus. You don’t need to discuss much.
Angela nodding, saying, You know that’s right!
On a different planet, we could have been Lois Lane or Tarzan’s Jane or Mary Tyler Moore or Marlo Thomas. We could have thrown our hats up, twirled and smiled. We could have made it after all. We watched the shows. We knew the songs. We sang along when Mary was big-eyed and awed by Minneapolis. We dreamed with Marlo of someday hitting the big time. We took off with the Flying Nun.
But we were young. And we were on earth, heading home to Brooklyn.
12
I looked for Jennie’s children in the faces of strangers. The terrified girl with her hand closed tight around pieces of bologna, the boy with his too-small shoes. The night the woman came to take them, they had cried late into the day. My brother and I went down to get them, but the door was locked. Open the door, we said again and again. But even though we could hear them crying, they wouldn’t open it. So we went back upstairs and turned the radio on.
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They were on this side of the Biafran war, filling their mouths with whatever we offered, their stomachs never seeming full. Same dark skin. Same fearful eyes. Where had they been taken to this time?
Open the door, we said. It’s us. We have food upstairs. We can play hide-and-seek. Please open the door, we said. We can take you someplace better.
We were not poor but we lived on the edge of poverty.
Alana moved in across the street. She wore men’s suits and did the hustle with her green-eyed girlfriend inside the front gate, her perfect dome of an Afro bouncing. When she smiled, one side of her mouth went up followed by the other, and the four of us sat on the curb watching her, fascinated.
At night, when the DJs plugged extension cords into the streetlights, the four of us followed the line of brown and white cords to the music in the park. We watched neighborhood boys break-dance on flattened cardboard boxes and we screamed when the DJ threw Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” onto the turntable, and Jerome pulled me away from my girls. In the darkness, with Stevie singing, They can feel it all over . . . I let Jerome kneel down in front of me, pull my shorts to my knees, and put his mouth on me until my body, from neck to knees, exploded. I pressed my back into the cement wall of the handball court, trembling. The DJ had cut a slow song I didn’t know into Sir Duke and I felt tearful suddenly. This was the temple I had promised Sister Loretta I’d protect, and now, cold suddenly, my shorts still down below my knees, I held Jerome’s head a moment, his face soft and wet against my belly, then pushed him down again.
Temperatures broke the hundred-degree mark and we sweated through the days to get to nights in the park. Angela found a boy named John who had delicate fingers and spoke with a lisp. Sylvia’s boyfriend was Jerome’s age, pulling Sylvia away from us into the darkness behind the handball courts. Gigi said she was falling in love with Oswaldo, whose older brother had been killed in a gang fight with the Devil’s Rebel’s the summer before. We were afraid of the gangs and the fires that turned the wood-framed houses in our neighborhood to ash. But we had our guys and we had each other.
Another Brooklyn Page 5