by Tayari Jones
“Daddy,” I whispered, “be kinder.” Then I took Dre’s hand, the one not holding the bottle, and we walked toward the front porch, which wrapped around the entire house. Before we made it to the doorway, my father called, “Thank you, Andre, for the libation. We’ll sit down with it after dinner.”
“Yes, sir,” Andre said, pleased.
Uncle Banks was ahead of us on the porch, untangling a clump of lights.
“Hey, Uncle Banks,” I said, hugging his legs on the ladder.
“Hey, baby girl,” said my uncle. “And how are you, my man?” he said to Dre.
Just then Aunt Sylvia popped her head out the front door. My earliest memory of Sylvia was when she and Banks first started dating and they took me to the Omni for ice skating. As a souvenir, she bought me a pale yellow candle, set into a wineglass. My mother confiscated it immediately. “You can’t give a child fire!” But Sylvia pleaded with my mother on my behalf. “Celestial won’t light it, will you?” I shook my head no, and my mother paused. “Trust her,” Sylvia said to Gloria, but her attention was on me. For my wedding, she walked the aisle before me, beaming as matron of honor, although technically she wasn’t a married woman.
“Celestial and Andre! I am so glad you made it. Your mother wouldn’t put the rolls in the oven until you got here.” Angling her face toward Andre, she said, “Give me some sugar, nephew.”
She pulled the door wide and Dre followed her in. I hung behind and stood at the base of the ladder. “Uncle Banks?”
“No,” he said, reading my mind. “I didn’t tell anybody but Sylvia. It’s your call about breaking it to your folks.”
“I want to thank you,” I said. “You didn’t give up.”
“No, I did not. Those peckerwoods didn’t know what hit them.” Wearing his Sunday shoes, Uncle Banks took several careful steps down the ladder and landed on the porch beside me. “Your daddy is my oldest friend. We came to Atlanta in ’58 without a penny between us. I’m more loyal to him than to my own brothers. But I want you to know that I don’t agree with him on everything. As an attorney, I have seen it all, so I have some perspective. Frank, on some topics, he has the same ideas he was born with. But he treasures you, Celestial. You have all these people loving you—your daddy, Andre, Roy. Try to think of it as a high-class problem.”
Dinner was served on the heavy oak table, which was covered with a lace cloth to hide years of everyday use. While everything else in my parents’ meticulously renovated dream home was lovely and polished, this table had a story to tell. It was a wedding gift from my grandmother, one of a few my parents received after their courthouse wedding. “You will pass this on to your children and their children,” she had said. When the movers delivered it to the house, Gloria said, “Be careful. That table is my mother’s blessing.”
Only at holidays did my father reveal his training as a preacher’s son. “O Lord,” he boomed, and we all bowed our heads. I took Daddy’s hand on my left side and Andre’s on my right. “We are gathered here to give thanks for all the blessings you have heaped upon us. We thank you for this food and the table upon which it rests. We thank you for freedom. We pray for those behind bars tonight who cannot enjoy the balm and succor of family.” Then he recited from memory a lengthy scripture.
Before we could all say “Amen,” Andre spoke. “And we thank you for one another.”
My mother raised her bowed head. “Amen to that.”
Immediately, the room came to life with a pleasant racket. My father sliced through the turkey with the electric carving knife, which resembled a chain saw in miniature, as Gloria served iced tea from a gleaming pitcher. Banks and Sylvia sat at their places, as calm as a pretty day, but I was convinced that under the table Banks’s hand rested on Sylvia’s thigh. It was quite a tableau, the room stuffed with flowers as candles burned in the candelabras. I took a lemony sip of iced tea from a heavy glass, which reminded me of Olive. She adored crystal and bought her goblets one at a time. I wondered what happened to all her things after she passed, since she never had a daughter to bless with her approval or glassware. I bowed my head and said a prayer for her. May heaven be filled with elegant objects. Then I whispered to the air, “Please forgive me.”
I shifted my eyes to my mother, hoping that she would grace me with at least a smile. Gloria is outrageously beautiful. I used to warn Roy not to see my mother as a guarantee on my future looks, although I share many of her features. We are both tall, deep brown, large-eyed, and full-lipped. She is Gloria Celeste and I am Celestial Gloriana. When I was a girl, she often kissed my forehead and called me her “love child.”
I heaped my plate, but I was unable to eat. The secrets blocked my throat like a tumor. Anytime I said anything other than Roy will be out before Christmas, and Andre and I are getting married, it was a lie, no matter how true. Across the table, Uncle Banks cut his food but didn’t have much appetite either. I was overcome with tenderness for my sweet uncle. He had done his best, and for all these years, until now, his best hadn’t been enough. He deserved to be able to share the news with his friends. He deserved thanks and honest congratulations.
I felt Gloria studying me. I gazed at her with a question on my lips and she gave me a subtle nod, like she knew what she couldn’t know.
Dessert was blackberry jam cake, a recipe passed to my mother from hers. To have a cake ready to serve on Thanksgiving, you have to bake it on the last day of summer, douse it in rum and seal it away when the fireflies are still thick on the breeze. This dessert figures into my parents’ courtship. Gloria, at the time teaching social studies, offered a crumbling slice to the new chemistry teacher. “I was bewitched!” he claims to this very day.
Gloria placed the cake on the table and the aroma of rum, cloves, and cinnamon rose to meet me. I looked up at her over my shoulder and she said, quietly, “Whatever it is, you know I’ll always be your mother.” I turned my eyes to my plate, to the cake centered on the paper doily and to the tiny spoon balanced on the rim. It reminded me of our rehearsal dinner. Roy asked for my mother’s specialty as his groom’s cake. As everyone else ate duck and drank cava, Gloria pulled me outside the restaurant. Standing in the parking lot, beside a fragrant gardenia bush, she pulled me close. “I’m happy today because you’re happy. Not because you’re getting married. I don’t care about all the top-shelf details. All I care about is you.” And this was my mother’s blessing. I hoped that she would extend it once more.
I turned to Andre, who radiated confident excitement. Then I glanced at Uncle Banks, who was deep into a murmured conversation with Sylvia. Finally I faced my father. For so many years I was Daddy’s girl, his little Ladybug. When I married Roy, I wore ballerina flats, not so I would be shorter than Roy but so I wouldn’t tower over my father. Even though I insisted that the pastor omit the word obey, for Daddy’s sake we kept the line “who gives this woman” so he could say “I do” in his surprisingly deep voice.
At the table, when I lifted my glass, only a splash of tea remained. “I would like to make a toast.” Five glasses rose as if on their own accord. “To Uncle Banks, whose tireless efforts have borne fruit. Roy will be released from prison before Christmas.”
Sylvia let out a sweet cheer and pushed her glass forward through the silent air, hoping that someone would clang theirs against it. Uncle Banks said, “Thank you.” My mother said, “Won’t He do it!” And my father said nothing.
Andre pushed back from the table. Tall and narrow, he stood like a lighthouse. “Everyone, I’ve asked Celestial to marry me.”
Roy and I announced our engagement at this same table, much in the same way, but our news had been greeted with Bordeaux and applause. This time, my father turned to me. “And what,” he asked mildly, “did you say, Ladybug?”
I stood beside Andre. “Daddy, I said yes.” I tried to make my words decisive, but I could hear the question in it, the need.
“We can work this out,” my mother said with her eyes on my father. “We can talk i
t through.”
Andre circled his arm around my shoulder and I felt myself breathing deep, calming breaths even as water burned my eyes. There was comfort in the truth, no matter how difficult.
My father set his dry glass beside his untouched cake. “It’s not right,” he said casually. “Ladybug, I can’t cosign this one. You can’t marry Andre if you already have a husband. I’m willing to take responsibility for my part in this. I indulged you since you were a little girl, so you think every day is supposed to be the weekend. But this is reality. You can’t always get what you want.”
“Daddy,” I said. “You should know more than anybody that love doesn’t always obey the rule book. When you and Mama got married—”
“Celestial.” Gloria wore an expression I couldn’t decipher, a warning in a foreign tongue.
Daddy broke in. “Entirely different scenario. When I met Gloria, there were extenuating circumstances. I was in a marriage that I rushed into too young. Your mother is my soulmate and helpmeet. Water always finds its own level.”
“Mr. Davenport,” said Andre. “Celestial is that for me. She is the one I want forever.”
“Son,” my father said, gripping the dessert spoon like a pitchfork. “I have one thing to say to you, as a black man: Roy is a hostage of the state. He is a victim of America. The least you could do is unhand his wife when he gets back.”
“Mr. Davenport, with all due respect—”
“What’s all this Mr. Davenport this, Mr. Davenport that. This ain’t complicated. You want this man to come home after five years in the state penitentiary for some bullshit he didn’t even do, and you want him to come back and see his wife with your little ring on her finger and you talking about you love her? I’ll tell you what Roy is going to see: he is going to see a wife who wouldn’t keep her legs closed and a so-called friend who doesn’t know what it is to be a man, let alone a black man.”
My mother was on her feet now. “Franklin, apologize.”
Andre said, “Mr. Davenport, do you hear yourself? Hate me all you want. I came here hoping for your blessing, but I don’t need it. But Celestial is your daughter. You can’t say things like that about her.”
“Don’t cuss me, Daddy,” I said. “Please don’t cuss me.”
Uncle Banks didn’t rise, but he projected a calm authority. “You had to see this coming. Franklin, what do you want the girl to do?”
“I want her to be the girl we raised her to be.”
Gloria said, “I raised her to know her own mind.”
My father attached his hands to the sides of his head like he was trying to secure it on his neck. “What is all this stuff about love and her own mind? I don’t mean to be harsh, but this is bigger than any little romance. She had her whole life to lay up with Andre if that’s what she wanted to do. But that juncture has passed. What did Roy do to deserve any of this? He didn’t do anything but be a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is basic.”
There was no easy comeback to this accusation. Andre and I were still standing, stranded in the crowded room. My father dug his spoon into the jam cake, self-satisfied, I could tell, with his performance, enjoying having spoken the last word.
Across the table, Sylvia whispered to Uncle Banks, her earrings tiny mirrors catching the light. Harnessing her nerve, she took an audible breath and spoke in a rush. “Technically, I’m not part of this family, but I’ve been here long enough. Y’all are way out of line. Every single one of you. First off, we need to take at least a minute to give Banks a round of applause. He worked like an animal these last five years. All anybody else did was write checks and pray. Banks was the one who got it done. He’s the one who was fighting city hall.”
We all mumbled embarrassed thanks, which Uncle Banks accepted with a charitable nod. Then he reached for Sylvia’s hand, a signal for her to stand down. But she didn’t.
“Now, Franklin.” She cocked her head toward the head of the table. “You didn’t ask my opinion, but I am giving it anyway. Look, Celestial already has to choose between Andre and Roy. Don’t add your weight to this. Don’t force Gloria to choose between her daughter and her husband, because you can’t win that. Don’t make your daughter feel like she got to lay with who you want her to lay with, like you’re some kind of pimp. That’s street fighting, Franklin, and you know it.”
Roy
In the short/long weeks between when I got news that I was leaving until I actually left, Walter hardly slept at all, talking through the night, 1,001 life lessons for the recently unincarcerated. “Remember,” he said, “your woman has been in the world this whole time.”
“You don’t know her,” I said. “How are you going to tell me what she’s been doing?”
He said, “I can’t tell you what I don’t know—which is what she has been up to. I have no idea, and neither do you. The only thing I know for sure is that everyone else’s life has moved forward, just not yours.”
According to him, the key is to wipe your mind clean. The future is what I should think about. But he never explained how I was supposed to not pine for what I used to have. Walter didn’t understand because there is nothing behind him but missed opportunities and regret. For him, the chance to start anew would be a reprieve, but for me it would be the mother of all setbacks.
Until they slapped a twelve-year sentence on me, I had hit everything I aimed for: a job that more than paid the bills, a four-bedroom house with a big lawn I cut myself on Sundays, and a wife who lifted me up like a prayer. My job was good, but in a couple of years, I would look for a better one. Our place on Lynn Valley Road was a starter house. Next on the agenda was children. It takes being together to another level when you go to bed for a purpose larger than your own feelings. Even after what happened next, I’ll never forget that night and all our sweaty intentions.
“Walter, you tell me to forget what I had and to focus my mind on what I want going forward, but for me, it’s the same thing.”
“Hmm,” he said, buckling his face like he was thinking some deep Ghetto Yoda thoughts. “Well, somebody in your situation needs to look at life like a newborn baby. Pretend like you have never been in the world before and you’re waiting for it to show you what’s what. Keep your head in the right now.”
I surveyed my pitiful surroundings. “You can’t tell me to live in the present when the past was so much better.”
He clucked his tongue. “You know what you have right now? Right now you have to clean that sink.”
Even in prison where everything is upside down, I could see how weird it was—him giving me chores. My Biological threw a small sponge at me and I caught it. “It’s your turn,” I told him, tossing it back.
“Fathers don’t have a turn,” he said, batting it back in my direction.
I rubbed a little bar of soap against the yellow sponge and started wiping down the sink, which wasn’t really that dirty.
“Country Yoda,” I said.
“Watch your mouth.”
What Walter didn’t tell me was that innocent or not, I wouldn’t be allowed to leave through the front door, a modest expectation from a man who should have known better than to expect much. Banks warned me not to look for any kind of formal apology, no envelope outfitted with the state seal. Hell, I didn’t even know the names of the officials I should have demanded this apology from. I wasn’t getting any restitution other than the twenty-three sorry dollars that everybody gets when they walk out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary. But was it unreasonable for me to think that I, as an innocent man, having paid somebody else’s debt to society, would be allowed to exit through the front door? I pictured myself making my way down a big marble stairway with the sun shining on my face, entering a little grassy lawn where my whole family would be waiting for me, even though Olive was two years dead and Celestial was two years gone. Big Roy would be there. This much, I could take to the bank. But for true, only a woman can truly welcome a man back home, wash his feet, and fix his plate.
A dozen of us were released that day. For a young cat, no more than twenty, a family waited with metallic balloons shaped like Christmas ornaments; a little boy wearing a red rubber nose squeezed the bulb on a bicycle horn, somehow causing the nose to glow. Another dude didn’t have anybody. He didn’t look left or right but walked straight to the gray van that would carry him to the bus station, as though pulled by a leash. All the rest were picked up by women: some mamas, others wives or girlfriends. The ladies drove to the gate but made sure to let the man take the wheel as they left. I was the last one out the door on that bright winter day. My shoes felt foreign on my feet—leather wingtips. My dress socks got lost somewhere, so I settled my feet in the shoes raw. The texture of the asphalt was rough beneath the leather soles as I walked to my father. Father, what a clumsy word now, as I approached Big Roy, afraid to want anything at all. Not that I would ask for much. When I was in high school, too old for Roy to punish me for cutting up, the way boys do, he would say, “Listen here, boy, get yourself arrested, don’t call me. I’m not into prodigals. I don’t do welcome-back parties.” But that was when we thought incarceration had something to do with being guilty or at least being stupid.
If anybody deserved a party, it was me, the other son, the one that didn’t get the fatted calf. Or Job. Or Esau or any of the many people in the Bible left hanging. When I went to fill a bucket with ice on that fateful night, every smart decision I’d made suddenly became irrelevant.
Somebody raped that woman—that was clear from her shaky fingers twitching in her lap—but not me. I remember feeling tender toward her when I met her that night at the ice machine. I told her that she reminded me of my mother and she said she always wanted a son. Walking to her room, I spilled my guts, telling her about my stupid fight with Celestial, and she promised to light a candle for me.