A Kind of Freedom

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  “And Tiger told me they plan on building a hospital out here,” he went on.

  “Why? You plan on getting sick? Anyway, your aunt Sybil called,” she said before he could answer.

  T.C. rolled his eyes. His aunt had been his favorite at one time, but she turned her back on him after the conviction.

  “What for, to dog me out about going in in the first place?”

  “She means well, and she’s your aunt,” his mama said, but it came out flat. His mama didn’t like her older sister either.

  “Well, I’m out now,” T.C. said.

  “Just call her back. I won’t have her thinking I didn’t pass the message along.” She paused. “You might as well know your MawMaw is still on dialysis,” she went on.

  T.C. nodded. “I figured.”

  “Doctors said two more years of it, then—” she cut her hand across her neck. “You betta go visit her now while you can.”

  “I was gonna go.”

  She sucked her teeth as if to say, Don’t get smart with me, boy. You ain’t too big for me to backhand slap you. But she didn’t say that, only “You never know. You went to Tiger before you came home, so I had to say.” Then she downed the rest of her beer. “Aunt Ruby buried her third husband while you was locked up,” she went on after she let out a long, burly belch.

  “I know, Mama, you told me.”

  She ignored that part. “Been a mess about it too. I think she loved this one the most. Woulda been nice if you could have been at the funeral. Everybody was there, Mookie, Alonzo, Cynt—”

  She was still naming names as he walked to the back of the house.

  “Sloppy Joes in the fridge,” she shouted, her voice like gravel though she’d never smoked. His stomach heaved.

  “I ate,” he yelled back.

  He had stopped eating her cooking after he came home from college. He still remembered the day. He’d told her the macaroni she made from powdered milk tasted like poor people food, and she slapped his face, then ran from the kitchen crying. After that he mostly ate at his MawMaw’s. His mama still cooked for him, and sometimes he’d indulge her on simple stuff: pancakes and biscuits, or her annual gumbo. It wasn’t that her food wasn’t good, it was that he knew too much about how long her dishes sat in the sink, that she didn’t wash her dish towels, that sometimes she’d leave the bathroom and he’d hear the toilet flush but not the run of faucet water. She wasn’t always like that. She was the one who got him playing ball in the first place. She didn’t know much about it herself, but she enlisted the best coaches; she worked summers delivering pizzas to pay for the most competitive camps; she went to every basketball game dressed to the nines, and every one of his friends wanted to holla. But it was like that high-end version of herself was too lofty to maintain for long. Every few years she’d relapse into what he saw today. Sometimes as a kid, he’d stare at pictures of her in her good days—slender as one of those models in the white magazines, in her beige suits with hair down her back—and wonder what happened. It wasn’t just her looks that had suffered. When she was out of commission, she’d either spend hours going ham on him for made-up slights or look straight past him with a glaze over her face. Times like those, he didn’t think she even saw him really.

  He needed to lie down for a minute and just think. Tiger had been talking about expanding, and T.C. had thought Bon Bon was going to clear his head, but his thoughts seemed more convoluted than ever.

  When he woke up, it was past dark. “Shit,” he called out to no one in particular. He checked his phone: 9:00. His mama would be off at her night job, tending to that old lady with dementia. MawMaw stayed up until midnight, but he didn’t want to bother her so late. He would just have to make it quick though; there was no way he wasn’t going to see her, and his mama knew that too. Wasn’t that what she was so mad about?

  He rummaged around for some resin, hideaway bud beneath the mattress or under his lone shelf of books, but no, his mama must have come in and cleaned the place. It used to be that his MawMaw was the one person he didn’t need to be high around, but he didn’t like to see her the way she was now, crumpled in on herself like a paper napkin getting ready to be discarded, and he could handle it if she was going out today or tomorrow, but his mama was talking about two years.

  He got dressed for the two-mile-long walk.

  Moving to their neighborhood when he was ten had been a miracle. His house hadn’t been much even then, just three bedrooms, 1,200 square feet, but they’d been staying in apartments since he was born, and once when his mama got laid off, they’d spent a month in the Magnolia Projects. It had been a dream to come out east, if only for the peace and quiet. His mama enrolled him at the Catholic school down the block, and he’d walk there and back without worrying about getting jumped. Now since Katrina, nobody stayed out past dark. The storm was more than five years before, but most of the lower Ninth Ward was still uprooted, and the people who had lived there, who had evacuated to places like Houston and Baton Rouge, just stayed. The ones who did come back were poor and newly homeless, and since the East had been on a gradual decline anyway, the city tipped the balance and infused T.C.’s neighborhood with Section 8 housing. It took only a year for T.C.’s neighbors to go from teachers and secretaries to thugs and prostitutes. He had been square before Katrina. Even after he lost his scholarship at LSU, he took classes at Dillard University and bagged groceries at the neighborhood supermarket, but the New Orleans he knew didn’t survive the storm, and in its wake he’d become somebody different too.

  Still, selling weed out of his house didn’t mean he didn’t feel scared anymore. Instead he had more to fear. Everybody he passed knew he grew plants in his mama’s guest room, that he always carried the product on him, the product and his proceeds. He was tapped right now, but they didn’t know that. Also, there was that new element that was creeping in, cars that didn’t belong on this run-off block, like the black Grand Prix he had never seen before, creeping by at five miles per hour then turning back down the street for Hammond. Before he went to jail, there had been a splurge of home invasions and armed robberies, and from what he’d heard, they hadn’t let up. Now he couldn’t help but look over his shoulder and wonder where po-po was. When he was up to no good, they were surrounding him.

  T.C. began to calm down when he got closer to MawMaw’s. The houses on Lake Forest had always been nicer, and after the storm, people didn’t take as long to return them to their original state. MawMaw for instance had never lived in a trailer. She just rented a condo in Baton Rouge until the contractors were finished rebuilding. When she came back, everything was close to normal, and sometimes he wondered if she could convince herself that nothing had ever happened. He walked up her porch steps, sidestepped the lawn chairs and potted plants—one with an open pink flower he could have sworn she had told him was a petunia—and knocked on the door through the barred gate.

  She made him say his name before she opened the door. It had been only four months, but he had braced himself for this, that she would look different than the woman who’d raised him, the woman who manicured her nails every week and treated herself to MAC foundation. She hadn’t had to waste money at a beauty salon, she always bragged, but now she wore a wig that pressed on her scalp like a helmet. Her collarbones peeked out of the neckline of her shirt, and she’d already taken her dentures out for the night. Still, he told himself to notice her face. Wasn’t her skin as smooth and fine as it had been when he’d stare up at her as a boy, as she peeled crawfish over newspapers, sucking the heads out with her pink lips?

  Once she saw it was him, she dropped her cane in a clang and opened her arms.

  “Your mama didn’t tell me you were out. Boy, get over here and give me a kiss.”

  “I’m early, I wanted to surprise you,” he said. He almost repeated the line he’d told Tiger and his mother, that they needed to make room for the real criminals, but he wa
nted to get through this visit without mentioning that place if he could.

  “Now you know you don’t go surprising people with heart conditions,” she said, and her smile lit up her face, the light brown eyes and pale skin. “Well,” she looked him over. “You’re certainly looking good.” She let out a loud laugh, sweet though, so sweet he wasn’t put off by her empty gums.

  They walked to the sofa. The TV was on in the front center of the room, commanding as much attention as another person’s voice. She always kept it on now that PawPaw was dead.

  “Your aunt Ruby just left,” she said. “I’m so glad,” she went on, though T.C. knew that wasn’t true. “I couldn’t handle another minute of her complaining. Another one of her grandkids moved in with her. I said, Ruby, if you didn’t want a big family, you shouldn’t have had seven kids.”

  T.C. chuckled. There was a picture of MawMaw’s brother out on one of the TV trays and he picked it up.

  “Ruby and I were just talking about Brother,” MawMaw said. “It was his birthday today. He would have been eighty.”

  T.C. tried not to look at the photo too long; people always said he resembled his great-uncle; looking at him now, he could see the similarities around the eyes. The man had died at forty-two of a heroin overdose.

  MawMaw snatched the picture from him, slipped it into one of her albums, and filed it away.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Now that you’re out, you better stay out, you hear?” Then she looked away. “You might as well know, your MawMaw isn’t doing too well.”

  He nodded. “You looking good though.”

  “I look like hell, and you know it,” she said, rumpling up her shirt as if it were to blame.

  “But that’s all right. That’s why you have kids. That’s the secret, you know. To everlasting life. Well, first there’s Jesus, but the other part they don’t tell you about is reproduction. I did my part, and through all of you all I intend to live forever.” She beamed saying this, and the light of her smile seemed to strengthen her whole body. Small and weak as she was, she sat straight up in her chair, and it seemed like if she wanted to, she could carry him into the kitchen for his supper. She leaned over and tapped him on the knee.

  “The girlfriend? Your mama tells me she’s pregnant?”

  He nodded, feeling blood heat his face. MawMaw was a high-end Creole woman. It would have been blasphemy for her to get pregnant before she was married. She had taught them the right way, but he had gone ahead and shamed her anyway.

  MawMaw smiled at him though. “That’s your ticket out, you had a little fun, you lived a high life, but now it’s time to settle down, start a family. You love the girl right?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s complicated MawMaw.”

  “Is it? What complicates it? The money?” She stuck her hand down her shirt.

  He raised his hand. “No, MawMaw. I’m straight.”

  “Now don’t be too proud. I know they don’t make it easy for you young men, plopping you in jail by the dozens, and I notice it’s always right around election time. You noticed that? I got up and voted the morning after you went in. I went to church first, prayed the Rosary over your soul, but then I went to vote.”

  “Aww, I wasn’t going to vote in those little elections anyway, MawMaw,” he said, trying to shut down her concern.

  She sat up even higher in her chair. “I’d vote for the school bus driver if they let me.”

  “Well, I do it when it’s important. Like for Obama.” He smiled. “Yeah. I was able to vote for Obama.”

  “That’s it now though, huh?” She didn’t come right out and say what she meant, just kept going. “And now it’s going to be impossible to get a job too. Oprah was just saying something along those lines. How do they expect you to make ends meet? No wonder you don’t want to take on a wife—”

  “It’s not about the money,” he said without thinking.

  “Oh?” She leaned back in her chair.

  He wished he hadn’t said anything.

  “What’s it about then?” she asked, tapping the spot in her bra where her money had been.

  He didn’t answer her. He didn’t know what to say. Why was it so unfathomable that he and Alicia would settle down, buy a house, raise their kid, in a few years add another to the brood? Part of it was that all that shit was expensive, but there was another piece too that he couldn’t quite wrap his fingers around.

  “I wish you would have met your father,” she said with a sigh.

  He waved the comment away. There had been a time when that was all he wanted. He begged anyone who’d seen the bastard cross a street for details about his stride. He went to bed praying that he would reappear, conjured him up in his dreams at night. But all that was over now.

  “I didn’t need him.” He started the speech he gave whenever the man’s name came up.

  MawMaw cut him off. “I know that, I’m the one who told you to say that. And it’s certainly true, but you don’t believe it. That’s the problem. If you had met him, maybe if you had met him as a grown man, you wouldn’t need to take my word for it.”

  She stood up to fix his dinner. He didn’t want to burden her. He knew she had dialysis in the morning, and though she went to sleep late, she retired to bed around ten to watch the evening news. But, as always, she insisted, dished him a plate of hot white beans over rice, and a tomato salad. She’d picked him up from school every day when he was a kid, and he’d be starving, but when she got him, she’d fix him a double-stuffed sandwich, then set about stewing or boiling her own evening meal. When she was done, she’d feed him as many servings as he could stomach, trying to fill a hunger that was never satisfied.

  Tonight, after he filed his plate away in the dishwasher, she walked him to the door and slipped a check into his back pocket. Her wig had tilted and the curls on the edges of her scalp were grey and sparse. In the bathroom he’d seen a pack of those undergarments they advertised on TV. The tender weight of all this tugged at his heart now. He hadn’t had anything to roll up before he left, but he’d need to find something fast. Maybe it was time to reup in general.

  When he got home, the door was open, though he was sure he’d locked it. He rattled the knob to warn whomever he was coming. He stepped in and heard something shuffling inside.

  He turned the hall light on, called out, “Who’s there?”

  He had found his old pocketknife in his closet and he pulled it out now.

  “I said, who’s there, nigga?” he called out again.

  More shuffling. The noise was coming from the living room.

  As he rounded the corner, he heard somebody scream out, “Whoa nigga.” Then laughing. T.C. turned on the living room light.

  Tiger’s ass was bent down belly laughing in his mama’s chair.

  “I got you,” Tiger said through laughs. “You was all like, ‘I said who’s here?’”

  He looked at T.C.’s hand and started laughing even louder. “Boy, what you was gon’ do with that knife? Nothing! You know everybody out here is strapped now, right? With at least one.”

  “How the fuck you get in here?” T.C. shouted.

  “The same way I used to get in to see to yo’ plants, nigga. You don’t remember that summer I spent robbing houses? Too dangerous now though. Everybody got them alarms with the cameras. Anyway, you said we was gon’ meet up tonight.”

  T.C. sat down.

  “Mothafucka, you lookin’ like you seen a ghost. Where you coming from all paranoid?”

  “That place, nigga, jail, that’s where I’m coming from all paranoid.” T.C. was surprised to hear himself shout. He was still worn-out from MawMaw’s, plus this wasn’t funny.

  “Aw, I’m sorry, nigga, calm down. Calm down. You said we was going to meet up, you don’t remember?” Tiger repeated.

  T.C. shook his head.

 
“Anyway lemme holla at you, dawg. They been feedin’ you for free in that place, but I’m hungry, nigga. I told you about Spud, not even moving the gas himself, letting other people do that shit for him so he out of the limelight. That would save you twenty hours a week, at least. You growing a quarter pound a month now; you could quadruple that. Sell the same amount, but the proceeds are all yours, and a little bit would go to me of course,” he chuckled.

  T.C. didn’t even look at him, just down at his own feet, his white socks and Adidas slippers. He had never wanted much. Even when he was young and MawMaw would try to buy him the newest Jordans, the Girbaud jeans, he would take them because it made her happy, but he never really needed all this.

  “Before you say anything,” Tiger went on, “just listen. That’s the problem; earlier today, I could tell you wasn’t listening, and this is complicated shit. It’s not like before. We can’t just sell to yo random-ass friends. You too good at what you do to be depriving the public, nigga; this is a goldmine and we gotta capitalize on it while it’s hot.”

  And then MawMaw going and mentioning his daddy. He hadn’t thought about him in years, not the way he was thinking about him now, with longing, that old hurt he buried rising back.

  “So my cousin is moving out, I’m thinking we take over his old room, switch to hydro, grow twelve plants, turn out four ounces each. So that’s three pounds, and nigga, it’s all ours to keep.”

  Now there was his little boy. He spent his whole childhood fantasizing about how different he was going to be with his own, but he wasn’t sure he was going to swing it. He wasn’t stupid. You reached a certain depth in the drug world, and it was inevitable you’d be caught, but that took years; he was still riding on beginner’s luck, and all he needed was a few more months to spark a turnaround. Something big to help him scale the next bend in his life.

  “And this ain’t the kind of thing you gotta do forever. I’m talking six months at the most, we get a big yield, turn a profit off it, and we set; you want to open a restaurant, do it. You want to open a clothing store, do it. The sky’s the limit, my nigga. But you gotta be ready to turn the whole thing up a notch.” He paused. “My only question is, how much it cost to buy more plants?”