We knew the stories. Down on Knickerbocker a girl ran out of her house, her robe on fire. By the time she was safe, she was naked. On Halsey Street, a fireman carried two small children down the fire escape. For a long time, he couldn’t pry their frightened arms from around his neck. I searched for the children’s names in the paper, wondering if they had been Jennie’s children.
At the end of the night, we pressed against our boyfriends, fingers locked together, slow swaying as the DJ announced, We about to shut this party down, y’all. Still, we held on to them, their skinny bodies as uncertain as our own of what we were moving toward. Please, they begged. And for a long time, we whispered back, Not that. Not yet.
Charlsetta had been sent away. She was sixteen, captain of the Thomas Jefferson cheerleaders. She had a straightened ponytail and bangs oiled and spiraling over her forehead. For weeks, we asked her younger brother where she’d gone. The whole block had heard the yelling. We had watched her mother leaving the house for work in the morning, stern-faced and stiff-backed. Charlsetta got her behind beat last night, we said to each other. Her mother tore her up.
And we laughed until the beating became legendary, a warning to all of us that this kind of public humiliation was only one belt-whipping away. There was some Charlsetta buried in each of us.
She got a baby inside her, her brother finally admitted. She got sent back Down South.
We pulled our boyfriends’ fingers from inside of us, pushed them away, buttoned our blouses. We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. The threat of a place we could end back up in to be raised by a crusted-over single auntie or strict grandmother.
Down South was full of teenagers like Charlsetta, their bellies out in front of them, cartwheeling in barren front yards as chickens pecked around them. We shivered thinking of Charlsetta’s belly and imagined her and her boyfriend together while her mother was at work. How many times had they done it? How did it feel? When did she know?
We sat on stoops looking toward Charlsetta’s house. We thought she’d come home with a pink-blanketed baby in her arms. We imagined her taking up her spot again on the squad, her blue and gold pom-poms in the air—Come on team, fight-fight with all your might-might, get on the floor and let’s score some more. Go boy!—her ponytail bouncing, her bangs low over her eyes. When time passed and she didn’t come home, we imagined she’d come home baby-less, the crusty auntie or pinch-faced grandmother raising the child as her own, sending Charlsetta back to her life in Brooklyn.
Autumn came and the DJs stopped setting up their amps and speakers in the park. The streetlights stopped flickering from the ebb and flow of stolen electricity. Our boyfriends begged, and again and again we said, No.
Charlsetta’s brother broke both his arms at Bushwick Park, the cast slings crisscrossing over his chest. Is your sister back yet, we asked him. Always, the answer was no. Damn! we said. She’s been gone forever.
Was my father as absent as I remember? A folding chair in the kitchen and him in it, his head bent toward his hands, fingers moving over the bump where a thumb had once been, his black suit pants sharply creased by a too-hot iron so that there was a shine to parts of the fabric—a near-burntness that would remain, forever. Where had the fingers gone, my brother and I asked each other well into our teens. A dog ate them, we said. His hands got stuck in a hole and he pulled and pulled until. Until.
Winter came, and by late December Brooklyn was ankle deep in ice and snow. Platform shoes dominated New York, so we stumbled through the neighborhood in knee-high platform boots that zipped up the side but were anything but waterproof. I shivered through the winter, unsteady and half-frozen while my father stared down at his hands. He was living inside his faith by then, which left little room for understanding teenage girls. Where my brother and I had once been locked behind a half-open window, we were now more free than either of us could understand. Some evenings coming home I looked up to see my brother at the window, staring over the block, blank-eyed.
A week after Christmas, a woman was found coatless and dead on the roof of the Marcy Houses projects. Women had been found dead before—in hallways, in basements, in the unlit corners of subway platforms. Sometimes, as we walked the streets, we imagined our own selves found somewhere. How long would it take to know? Who would be the first to ask, Have you seen August? Have you seen . . . Angela . . . ?
Angela said, I don’t know where my mother is. Her voice was thick, a tremble to the words. I grabbed her hard, pulled her to me. Angela, I said, she’s fine. She’s fine!
Sylvia and Gigi stood back, away from us so that it felt like the world was spinning around an eye of sorrow only Angela and I were inside of.
It’s not her, Ang. I swear.
But it was her. A Medicaid card and a five-dollar food stamp in her left coat pocket. A photo of Angela, front teeth missing, in her right. Angela “Angel” Thompson, Age 7, carefully written in ballpoint pen. Someone at Kings County probably said Lord, I know that woman’s child.
Before we knew it was her mother, Angela spent three nights at my house, the two of us curled together on the pullout sofa, my father in my bed. Her hair smelled of sweat and Royal Crown hair grease, her breath coming fast, even when she was sound asleep. In the only light coming in from a streetlamp, I stared at her and saw deep beneath the smooth cheeks and broad nose, there she was—there was the woman staggering past us with her thin face, nearly toothless mouth, and Angela’s eyes.
In the near darkness, I saw the roof, Angela’s mother curled fetal against the cold. I saw the water. I saw Angela crumbling to the snow-covered ground. I saw my father kissing my mother good-bye, the satin lining her bed, the Bible against her chest, the thin gold band on her too-still finger. I opened my mouth to speak. Then closed it again. And stayed that way for a long, long time.
On the third morning, my father took the day off from work and took Angela to the police station. This child’s mama, he said, seems to be missing.
We had never met Angela’s mother. But now we knew we had seen her—in the clenching of fists as a pale woman staggered up our block, tried to hang on to a STOP sign and failed—as the dancing stopped and Angela bent toward us, away from her.
We had asked What is it, Angela? We said Tell us. We pressed our ears to her beating heart. . . .
She’s not dead, Angela, I whispered. They have the wrong person.
When she pulled away from us days later, we didn’t know to yank her back. We didn’t say Wait! We said We love you. We said See you tomorrow. We said Always and all ways, Ang. We didn’t say Don’t leave. We didn’t say We’ll come with you—wherever you go.
We were teenagers. What did we know? About anything.
January came, and for days Sylvia disappeared into her Catholic school and pink room, safely tucked between her glaring mother and Merleau-Ponty–spouting father. Gigi stepped deep into the world of theater, rehearsing late into the evening, too tired, she said, to come around for a while.
She’s not dead, Angela, I whispered again and again. Don’t believe them.
But Angela wasn’t me.
That’s where I live, Angela had said one summer, pointing to a beautiful red-brick building some blocks away from us. But we had never been inside. Two weeks after the woman was found, Sylvia and Gigi returned to me, and together we pushed past the broken-lock foyer door and searched the mailboxes for Angela’s last name. We didn’t find it. Does Angela live here? we asked the people who came in and out of the building. Nah, they said. I don’t know no Angela.
When we called her number, a recording informed us that it had been disconnected. Shit, we said. Damn!
It wasn’t her mother, I said to Sylvia and Gigi. They made a mistake. Believe me. I know.
We waited, shivering. Frayed and awkward now, the three of us too often falling silent.
My brother had grown tall and thoughtful. He loved Sister Loretta, followed the teachings of the Nation of Islam, and searched m
y face for anything he could find there.
You okay, August?
Yeah.
You sure.
Yeah.
What are you thinking about?
Nothing.
One evening, long after my father had gone to bed, but only days after Angela’s mother had been found, he shook me awake.
You used to say she was coming back, he whispered. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
I pressed my eyes tighter together, turned toward the wall.
But you were wrong. She won’t be coming back until the resurrection.
In Tennessee, honeysuckle vines bloomed thick and full in our yard every summer. My brother and I ran out in the early hours, barefooted and still in pajamas to suck the sweetness from the bright flowers. It was never enough. That faint hint of honeysuckle on the tongue an almost broken promise of something better hidden somewhere deeper.
You gonna make yourselves sick, our mother called from the screen door. Behind it, aproned and high-heeled, she was perfect, full-lipped and dark-skinned, her hair cut into an Afro. Let that honeysuckle grow like you grow.
The hair a halo. Hallowed be thy name. On Earth as it is in Heaven.
Her brother Clyde wasn’t dead yet. He was sitting at our kitchen table smoking a Pall Mall and telling stories. We knew this only because he always smoked and we could hear our mother, ever so often laughing and saying, Oh, you just telling stories, Clyde! Saying, And then what happened? Saying, I’m making catfish tonight. You staying for dinner?
My brother and I ran through the fields, the high grass scratching our legs and feet, the sun beating down on us. This freedom was all we had ever known. Brooklyn was a place my father had come from. A hole closing up beneath him. We only knew SweetGrove and the words that ended every fairy tale our mother read to us. We lived in our own happily ever after.
But after her brother died, my mother began disappearing. First, there was the empty table at the end of the day, and me returning home from school to find my baby brother in the yard, searching for sugar snaps and berries, no beginnings of meals in the house. My father arriving hours later with bags of groceries—canned soups and pasta, SpaghettiOs and frozen pizzas to be reheated on the top of the wood-burning stove.
SweetGrove becoming memory. My mother becoming dust.
What’s in the urn?
You know what’s in the urn.
Is Mama home yet?
Memory like a bruise. Fading.
She’s coming tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Don’t wade in the water, children.
Your mama’s done troubled the water.
Our land moved in grassy waves toward the water. The land ended at the water. Maybe my mother had forgotten this.
And kept on walking.
13
We were not afraid of the dark places we went to with our boyfriends. Even though years before, a serial killer who called himself the Son of Sam had terrorized New York City, we backed into the darkened corners of the park anyway. Son of Sam killed white women. We were safe inside our brown skin.
But in Times Square that same year, brown girls were dying. Although we were miles away in Brooklyn, their stories felt close enough to touch, and haunted our nights. Those were the ones that were found, bodies rolled into rugs, behind trash bins, or naked and bobbing on the East River, throats slashed in the bathrooms of Forty-Second Street porn theaters. We knew that crossing that bridge meant being on the same side of the river as that place called Times Square, where girls like us got snatched up by pimps, shot up with dope, and spent the rest of their lives walking along Eighth Avenue, ducking their heads into slowing cars. This terrified us even more than losing Angela.
We’ll see her on Monday, we said. But Monday never came. She’ll be back, her teacher at Joe Wilson’s School of Dance said. Something has to come of that kind of talent.
We were so afraid. Angela had been taken to a foster home on Long Island, we heard. Or was it Queens? With an aunt? Or was it a group home? We were fourteen. There was so much we didn’t know.
One night, my father tiptoed in with another woman. I heard the ice clinking into glasses, heard the soft laughter. Rain beat down hard against the windows. The smell of damp surrounded us. I heard the soft plink of ice returning to the bottom of near-empty glasses. Where was Sister Loretta? I pulled my sheet over my head and reached for my brother’s hand.
In the morning, the prayer rugs were still there but rolled up against the wall now. Outside, Brooklyn was bright blue. Cloudless. Already, kids screamed and called for each other on the street. When I tiptoed into the living room, the woman lying on his sofa bed pulled the covers up over herself but not before I saw the size of her breasts, the dark nipples.
You his baby girl? the woman asked.
Sylvia’s father had a plan for her. One morning, Sylvia’s first boyfriend showed up at her door. He was tall and brown-skinned, the captain of the neighborhood high school basketball team. Please wait a moment, her father said. When he came back, he pointed a .22 at her boyfriend’s chest.
I will die in jail for my daughter, he said, his voice higher and softer than Sylvia had ever heard it. So high and soft, she couldn’t scream. Just watched, her hand to her mouth, as her father lifted the gun higher and her boyfriend closed his eyes, begged, Please God Please until her father lowered his gun, said, Go home to the God you believe in and don’t ever come to my door again.
He didn’t know he had already lost Sylvia.
It hurt like hell, she whispered to us. And then it didn’t anymore. It didn’t feel good like it’s supposed to. But it didn’t hurt.
Please, Jerome begged. But I said, No. Everything but that, I said. At night I heard the woman who was not Sister Mama Loretta calling my father’s name. In the morning, she pulled my father’s robe together at her breasts, made instant coffee, and sat at our kitchen table, smoking.
Oh just do it, Sylvia said. He’s too fine to let slip away.
Forget you then, Jerome said finally. Forget you.
Forget me.
I held on to my body and my brother held on to his faith, finally pulling my father back into it. On the weekends, they left the house in the early morning, spent the day at mosque, then returned late in the evenings, somber and soft-spoken, their Qur’ans tucked into the black briefcases they carried.
Other books began to fill our small bookshelf—How to Eat to Live; Message to the Blackman in America; The Fall of America. We sat together at the kitchen table late into the evenings, my father’s and brother’s heads deep inside their Nation of Islam books, me slowly turning the pages of my textbooks. I was suddenly hungry for the world outside of Brooklyn, something more complicated, bigger than this. Some evenings, my father looked over my shoulder, questioned me about geometry, The Crucible, the USSR. I stared at him, letting my shoulders rise and fall listlessly, the words too much trouble. My father patted my cheek, mumbled, I have a woman I want you to meet, and moved back to his Nation. I dipped my head back into my books. Because what else was there? Once, my brother and I had sat at a window, watching the world. Now we were deeply inside that world, working hard to find our way through it. I cooked the foods they would eat, omelets and eggplant, bean pies and roasted vegetables, leafy salads topped with tomatoes and onions, grilled fish, and olive oil. I was nearly as tall as my father and our Saturdays at Coney Island were long behind us. Hot dogs and boiled corn from hawking vendors felt like something out of another place and time.
The woman’s office was small and smelled of musk oil. Beneath her hijab, her face was unlined and calm, so that at certain angles, she looked no older than Jerome.
Brother, she said to my father.
Sister, he replied softly. This is my daughter.
There were degrees on the wall behind her, her name in boldly inked letters.
August, she said, after my father left. I want you to know you can trust me.
August, she said. Tell me about you
r mother.
Orba (feminine), the Latin word for orphaned, parentless, childless, widowed. There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death’s enormity. But it has. Orbus, orba, orbum, orbi, orbae, orborum, orbo, orbis . . .
The shortcut from the subway meant walking through Irving Park, past the boys slamming balls into hoops and the handball players with their single-gloved hands. So many nights, this park transformed itself into a party, silhouettes of bodies moving to the DJ’s music, couples disappearing into the deep pockets of it. But it was early spring and the DJs weren’t jamming in the park yet. I walked through it slowly, my head down, my mind on the AP exam I’d be taking come Monday.
When I looked up, my eyes landed on Sylvia and Jerome, her head on his shoulder, her hands small and warm inside of his. I knew that warmth, that kind of holding.
Sylvia?
August. Hey.
Hey yourself.
When you’re fifteen, pain skips over reason, aims right for marrow. I don’t know how long I stood there staring at them, watching Jerome slip his hand from Sylvia’s, watching Sylvia inch away.
Where’re you heading?
When you’re fifteen, the world collapses in a moment, different from when you’re eight and you learn that your mother walked into water—and kept on walking.
When you’re fifteen, you can’t make promises of a return to the before place. Your aging eyes tell a different, truer story.
Linden, Palmetto, Evergreen, Decatur, Woodbine—this neighborhood began as a forest. And now the streets were named for the trees that once lived here.
Another Brooklyn Page 6