And my grandparents threw away their old dishes. They bought two sets. One for them to use. Another for me to use. No hugs. No kisses. No love. They threw me behind a glass wall while I watched my mother wither and die a slow death that I did not understand.
Never wanted to see another dead body after that.
Never wanted anybody else to have to go through what I went through.
It was different then. Not much better now. But harder before it became celebrity driven. The word gets around school, the rumors begin, the ignorance spreads, nobody wants to touch you. Nobody wants to be your friend. You’re ridiculed, left alone for fear that you may breathe on them and sentence them to death. You are left devoid of human contact. Left devoid of love.
Even by your grandparents. Even by the ones you need to love you unconditionally.
I wipe my eyes and look at Genevieve.
Her hair is in ponytails. Her teeth, crooked. The clothes she wears are ill-fitting, old rags. I look down at my hands. They are small. So small. As are my lace-up tennis shoes.
We are children.
I struggle with my words, manage to say, “Two years after we had that car accident…”
I pause. My voice is so young, that of the child I used to be.
I say, “AIDS killed Momma. That’s how she died. She wasn’t on no drugs. She needed some more blood and those people gave her some bad blood. Blood that had that… had that disease in it. They said they didn’t know. And they said if Momma didn’t get that d…” moment passes. Genevieve says, “That’s so sad.” look at Genevieve. At LaKeisha Shauna Smith. She’s thirteen, five years older than I am now. Hair in those ponytails. A brown-eyed girl in hand-me-downs. She says, “Dag. Why that so doggone hard to say? My momma was killed by my daddy and I can say that.”
“I wanna… when I grow up I wanna make sure nobody else get that.”
“Why don’t you tell nobody the truth then?”
“Because people stupid.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Talking about people doing it with monkeys and it being a funny-people disease.”
“They don’t say that no mo‘.”
“I wanna ‘member my momma the way she looked when she was alive.”
Silence.
I shrug and stare at my little hands. “Because if I say that then I ‘member how she looked before she died. I want to ’member her how she looked before… before that… before. I wish we had made it to the museum. I sho‘ wanted to see those buffalo soldiers.”
“Bet that would’ve been a whole lotta fun.”
“But we didn’t make it. Almost made it down there. Almost.”
I close my eyes and open them again.
We are once again adults.
Genevieve says, “I still think you’re brave.”
“No, I’m not. I’m a coward.”
“You’ve always been brave to me.”
I lower my head, wipe my eyes. I fold inside myself. Inside my dubious integrity.
I say, “We never made it to the Buffalo Museum. Never made it.”
She says, “I know.”
I cry. I give up my ghosts and I cry.
Genevieve’s hand touches my shoulders. She hugs me.
I wonder who I would be if it wasn’t for that day in the rain, if my momma had lived, if I had grown up in Pasadena and Houston, if Galveston had remained my playground.
“It’s scary telling someone you care about, someone you love who you really are.” Genevieve says that, her voice so clear. “I almost did in Fresno. Our first night. I sat there watching you sleep, staring out at those railroad tracks, thinking about all of this. I drank and got high to ease my anxiety. You woke up and I backed down. All I could think… keep thinking… thinking that, if you knew, you wouldn’t be any different than the rest of them.”
“I’m your husband.”
“As I am your wife.”
I rock.
She says, “People know your tragedies and they treat you like you’re not human. Like you’re a three-headed goat. A monster from some other planet. They keep reminding you of your pain. You see how they look at me? They’re stuck on that person I used to be. They can’t see that old life as just a moment in time that I’ve moved on from. It was a horrible life.”
“Panic attacks. The way you burn trees. All of that makes sense now.”
She adds, “The way I keep putting off having children.”
“Yes. That too.”
“The reason I didn’t tell you in Fresno, one thought came to mind.”
I look at her and wait.
She says, “If you know about LaKeisha, if you know about all that LaKeisha has left behind, if every time I look at you I see the creation of LaKeisha, then how can I be Genevieve? When you know it all, I don’t know if I can look at you every day and stand to see LaKeisha’s reflection in your eyes. And if we had children, and this is what they know… I do not want to look into my children’s eyes and see a reflection of a life that I loathe.”
She stands and walks away. Heads toward the graveyard.
I follow.
She wipes her eyes. “This would be a good time for you to turn around.”
“Why?”
“It just would.”
I catch up with her. I take her hand. We walk toward the dead end sign then turn right, walk between the trailer homes and head up the hill toward that graveyard.
I say, “I heard Delphinie was always gone. She ran away to Birmingham.”
“Kenya told you.”
“Yes.”
“Delphinie would leave and she’d get homesick or broke, maybe she’d miss us. But she couldn’t stay gone. Don’t know what she was feeling. But she’d come back long enough to get pregnant by Gravedigger. They’d take up like she’d never left. She’d have a baby and leave it with Willie Esther, which was just like me having a baby because it all fell on me.”
“Heard Willie Esther made her take one of you with her whenever she left.”
“One time my mother took me and one of my brothers, J-Bo I think. When we got to the store she told us to hold hands and walk back home. Then she got in the car with some man who was down there waiting for her. J-Bo cried. I didn’t. I watched her leave. I remember thinking, I’m going to do that one day, head down 411, see what’s on the other side of this bubble, and vanish.”
We walk slowly until we get to the fence. We pass by Willie Esther’s trailer and walk on the other side of the fence. Move over burial ground and stop in front of Delphinie’s tombstone.
Genevieve says, “I bought that tombstone. As soon as I got a job and could save some money, I bought that tombstone. Before then, Momma was in an unmarked grave.”
“It’s nice. Real nice.”
We stand in silence.
“She had me when she was fifteen, then married Gravedigger the same year. She had six children by the time she was twenty-six.”
“She only lived to see the age of thirty.”
Genevieve nods. “We’ve both lived longer than our mothers.”
I wipe my eyes, wipe away my own memories, and under the moon’s light, I wait.
“I was her first child,” she finally says. “Maybe I sealed her fate, kept her from her dreams. Always felt like I did. Jimmy Lee was last. He doesn’t remember his mother. Or me.”
“He was young.”
“You’re not listening to what I’m telling you.”
“Okay.”
She falls silent again. Then she looks back toward the library. Toward her memory.
“He was from Africa.” Genevieve says then wipes her eyes with the palms of both of her hands. “The man in the yellow car, the man I saw that day, he was from Africa.”
“The man who gave you your first joint.”
She nods. “Yes.”
“The man you watched drive away.”
“He didn’t drive away.” She sets free a weary chuckle. “Not exactly.”
“What happened?”
/>
“I went with him. He drove away and I chased that car from the railroad tracks to 411. He stopped and took me with him. I was with him for six months. Lived with him. He had an apartment in College Park. Told people I was his cousin, but I don’t think anybody believed it.”
I swallow my discomfort. “Why didn’t they?”
Like Kenya did before, Genevieve makes a motion at her arm, at her complexion.
I nod my understanding.
She says, “He sent me back when I got pregnant. I was thirteen and pregnant by a grown man. Thirteen years old. Having sex before I knew anything about my vagina.”
I echo, “Pregnant.”
“I left Odenville with him, stayed with him, got high with him, got pregnant by him, then he got scared and dumped my young ass back in Odenville. Drove me right back here in the middle of the night, had on the same tattered clothes I left here wearing. Left me crying. Facing that graveyard.”
“He brought you back.”
“Pregnant underage girl staying with a pedophile. Nobody believed I was his cousin. Being young and pregnant, too obvious. One phone call and his life would’ve been over.”
“Why didn’t you call and turn him in?”
“Why didn’t you turn your pedophile in?”
I suck my bottom lip.
She says, “I loved him.”
Silence.
“I was thirteen. Had been trained to cook three meals a day and clean up behind everybody and take care of a house filled with trifling lunatics. Being with him was wrong, I knew that, but that was easy. To me, at that time, compared to Willie Esther, compared to living under the iron hand of Lady Macbeth inside her tin Bastille, it was like heaven. I could check books out of the library and read as much as I wanted, could go outside and walk to the park, could see other black faces, could go places in the evening. Couldn’t do much in the daytime,. but I could read and watch television. Could watch whatever I wanted to watch until he came back home.”
“And when he came back home?”
She sighs. “My pedophile. I hated him in the end. A few days later he came back to check on me, talked to my mother while Willie Esther gave him the evil eye. I have to give him credit for that. He came back to check on me. But still, how I hated him for bringing me back. For dropping me off, for putting me out of his car, for leaving me facing that damn graveyard. Hated him so much.”
Silence.
Again she whispers, “How I hated him.”
Miles away, lightning dances in the sky. Another storm will be here soon. I say, “Genevieve.”
Silence.
“I used to dream about going to Africa, even before I met him. Willie Esther would laugh at me. Momma would laugh at me. That’s how we’ve been conditioned. You tell people you want to go to Africa and they laugh. When I was growing up a black man would rather be called a nigger than an African. If you called a black man a nigger, he’d just call you a nigger back. But if you called somebody an African, watch out. You had to be ready to fight. Amazing how we are taught to be ashamed of who we are. How we shun our truths in hopes of social acceptance.”
“You wanted to go to Africa.”
“Yes. Ask me what part?”
“Where?”
“Kenya.”
I repeat, “Kenya.”
“Kenya. The name I gave my daughter.”
I groan and die a thousand deaths.
I open my mouth, prepare to lay my own burdens down.
I’m falling apart.
My composure crumbles.
The hole that has been unearthed for a new tenant, I want to throw myself inside.
I say, “Genevieve, no Genevieve.”
Genevieve puts her finger to her lips, asking me to hush.
“She calls you her sister.”
“Not her sister. She calls me Sister. Out of spite.”
I crumble.
A light flickers on and off. On and off. The source is Grandpa Fred’s front porch.
The town is resting. But like a Roman god, that stern and legless warrior is up watching his land. If nothing else, the epitome of Neighborhood Watch.
Genevieve says, “He’s waiting.”
“For what?”
“Me. Us.”
“Genevieve, I need to say something.”
She puts her finger to her lips again.
I hush before I start my confession.
She asks me if I remember the day Grandpa Fred called, if I remember when I gave her that news. That she went out and jumped in the pool. It was a few days ago, not that many hours behind us, but she speaks as if it were a lifetime ago.
Like all tragedies in my life, I remember.
“I jumped in the pool. I was going to kill myself.”
“Why would you kill yourself, Genevieve?”
“To make sure Willie Esther was dead.”
Once again I do not understand.
Grandpa Fred coughs. He has come out on his porch, cigarette in hand. He coughs hard and strong. He gags and I see bits and pieces of him floating away like cancerous insects, each fleeing and leaving less and less. And I imagine that skeleton, Death, standing near, that scythe in his left hand, a bony finger teasing the edges of Grandpa Fred’s face.
Again the sky rumbles. Dark clouds move to cover the moonlight.
Genevieve says, “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to the church. I’m going to see Willie Esther.”
“Her body is there?”
“Yes. The storm came and that kept the funeral home from taking her away.”
“You sure?”
“Grandpa Fred told me. Wait over there until I get back.”
I look at him, again scratching the side of his face with his nub.
I say, “I’ll go with you. Make sure you’re okay.”
“I have to go make sure she’s dead.”
I stress, “Willie Esther is dead.”
She firms her voice. “What if she isn’t?”
I don’t argue with her.
She takes a breath. “I want to see her alone. There are things I have to say to her.”
“Some things shouldn’t be said inside a church.”
“I’ll ask for forgiveness before I leave.”
Genevieve heads across the grass, walks by graves. She stops and looks at the open spot, the place where Willie Esther will be put to rest. She spits then moves on.
Light rain starts to fall.
I walk backward, letting the sound of Grandpa Fred’s cough guide me as I watch Genevieve head toward First Baptist. She heads around toward the front and vanishes.
I turn and face him.
He extends his hand. His face-to-face apology.
With my soft hand I shake his rough hand.
He smiles, shows those four long teeth.
Our business is done.
He says, “Rain coming bade”
Then I roll him back inside his home. His windows are closed. The cigarette stench is the strongest I’ve ever experienced. Billows of cancer dance around my head.
A battle is taking place on his big-screen television. Guns and airplanes and bombs.
I look at his old furniture and older decorations on his wall.
He coughs a good cough.
Willie Esther’s obituary rests in his lap.
When Grandpa Fred is done coughing, he takes a pull from his cigarette, stares at the obituary, and shakes his head. He gets emotional. Then he says, “Willie Esther didn’t have nobody for over fifty years and never gave me the time of day. No sir. I wasn’t good enough for her. I didn’t really care about what happened to her down in Lower Alabama, or about who her folks was. No sir. She lived right next door to me for years, never gave me the time of day.”
I look at him, his handlebar moustache gray while his hair is dyed black. His clothes clean, pressed. I see an old man who is trying to look young again, trying to clean himself up for a woman’s appro
val, doing the best he can to look good for her funeral.
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