Antebellum

  Marcus Jenkins was a genius. Big Mama told me that her husband left him a saxophone that one of his war buddies brought to him personally after he came home. From that day on, my dad never went anywhere without it. When it got old and rusty, my dad worked a whole year to make enough money to get it refurbished. By the time he graduated from high school, he was making enough money playing music that he started doing it full time.

  “Only two groups of people I really believe is cursed in this world,” Big Mama would always say with sadness pouring from her eyes, “the Kennedys and musicians.”

  Tisha Freeman fell in love with Marcus Jenkins while he was playing “In A Sentimental Mood” with his band in a local club. Her love was thick and sweet, like honey, my dad always used to say. She was smart enough to know what his twitches meant, but too smitten to care. He brought her home one day to meet Big Mama, and when he came back from dropping her off, Big Mama told him to marry her.

  Mama says I kicked her so hard during the wedding that she had to hold on to the pews as she walked down the aisle.

  Seven years after my parents married, my mom decided she couldn’t take care of my dad on her own. He’d been hospitalized more times than she could count, and she was terrified of waking up one morning and finding him dead beside her. Mama and Big Mama had a long talk one afternoon, and the next week mama packed us all up and we moved from our apartment into the family house. The day we moved in, Mama put all of my dad’s stuff into his childhood room and told him they wouldn’t sleep in the same bed again until he was clean.

  In the end, it was Big Mama who made the difference. To this day, she won’t tell us what she told him, but after Mama took the last of my dad’s stuff in the room, Big Mama went in and closed the door behind her. When she came out, my dad swore to us that he wouldn’t leave the house until he got better.

  About three days in, my father called me into his room. In between the shaking and cold sweats, he told me stories about Big Mama cleaning up feces off the bed and floor when my great-grandfather would have accidents. He told me how she would bathe Papa Jenkins and put him in her bed while she stayed up bleaching the floor and mattress, only to have to go bathe herself and head out to the Whitfield house to scrub and wash and scrape and soak all day.

  “Why didn’t y’all just take him to an old people’s home?” I asked.

  “Sh...she...she could’ve,” my father told me. It was the middle of July, and he shivered like he was caught naked in a blizzard. “I...I asked her the same thing...one day, when the...the whole house smelled like a toilet... ’cause Granddaddy had the stomach flu...”

  I went and got a warm cloth to put on his forehead.

  “What did she say?” I asked when I came back.

  “Sh...she slapped me...’cross the face.”

  “Dang.”

  “Then...she looked at me...and said that without him, n...n... none of us would b...b...b...be here. She said he...he gave his s...ss...soul to white folks so he could feed her mother and her, and anything else he had left over he g...gave up for this house....”

  “Wow, Daddy...”

  Marcus Jenkins did all he could to sit up in his bed. Dripping sweat like an icicle when the sun comes out, he looked me in the eye and cupped the back of my neck with his hand.

  “That’s...why I called you in here, Moses. My grand...my granddaddy died before his time...tryin’ to make sure this family had something...and my daddy...di...died in the war doin’ the same...thing. It ain’t a day that g...goes by that I ain’t proud of both of ’em. I’m in bondage right now...but I swear...Moses... soon as I get...get...this monkey off my back...I’ma make you just as proud...just as proud of me.”

  I was only seven years old, and I didn’t understand what was happening to my father. All I knew was that he was sick and confused. I couldn’t do anything about him being sick, but I knew I could cure his confusion.

  “But, Daddy...” I said as I looked back up at him. “I am proud of you.”

  It was the only time I’d ever seen my father cry.

  Two weeks later, when he walked out of his room, it was as if someone had turned on a lightbulb under his skin. That week was the best one of my life. He asked me whether there was something I always wished we could do when he was sick, and after I told him, he found a way to make it happen. I felt like Richie Rich.

  His first gig after sobering up was that Saturday. At 1 a.m. on Sunday morning, Rico, the drummer in my dad’s band, handed him a small case with a needle in it.

  The following Monday night, Rico came to our house and wept on our couch. “I was jealous,” he struggled to speak through his tears. “He looked so young, so healthy, and the rest of us was still junkies...I just wanted to show him the demon was still there... that he wasn’t no better...I swear...I ain’t know he’d do it all...”

  By 2 a.m. Sunday morning, Marcus Jenkins, my father, was dead. Big Mama had Jeremiah 9:4 engraved on his tombstone.

  Beware of your friends; do not trust your brothers...

  My mother loved my dad to the point of insanity. When he died, she tried on two separate occasions to commit suicide. After the second time, Big Mama went out and bought a gun. She filled it with bullets and took it up to Mama’s room. Mama’s wails echoed through the door as Hattie Jenkins rested the gun on my mother’s lap, and told her that if she didn’t love her son enough to stay alive, then go ahead and put herself out of her misery and stop costing the family money by running back and forth to the hospital. But if she decided she did love me enough, then come downstairs tomorrow morning ready to start living again.

  “Black girls born wid pain in they blood...” Big Mama said as she walked out of the door. “They cain’t help it. Each one a’ us get to a point where pain so deep it seem to set our souls afire. And we each gotta choose whether we wanna live o’ die. Time to make yo’ choice, girl.”

  The next morning, Mama got up early and made pancakes for breakfast. Since that day, it had always been Big Mama, Mama, and myself. That’s how it had been from the time I was seven years old to the time I left D.C. as a signed rap artist. And I was sure that back home nothing had changed.

  I had tried five different times to get Big Mama and Mama to move. I knew they would never sell the house, and that was never my intention. I just wanted to give them what they deserved. I had realtors waiting nervously with mortgages for huge mansions in their hands, knowing that depending on a yea or nay from the women in my life, they stood to make enough commission to take the rest of the year off. Mama and Big Mama would come see the properties, marvel at their size, rave about their beauty, and still politely decline. The realtors always left disappointed. Tisha and Hattie Jenkins had their home, and no Jacuzzis or indoor pools or guest houses were going to replace that.

  They wouldn’t even spend the money I sent them. The few times I got to drop into D.C. for a few hours, I would never notice anything different about the way they lived. When I asked where all the money was going, Mama showed me a statement from a money market account with upwards of $5 million in it.

  “We keepin’ it for a rainy day,” Big Mama nonchalantly commented as she stood over the stove. “You cain’t never have too much saved up, you know.”

  Mama and Big Mama were never too happy about my rapping. Mama was just scared that I would end up like my daddy. I tried to tell her that things were different and I would never be addicted to anything except rhymes, but she stayed worried. She, of course, never heard about the narcotics that I’d become so fond of.

  Big Mama’s problem was on another level. When I first started rhyming, and talked about everything going on around me and in the streets, all she would tell me was that she wished I wouldn’t curse so much. When the first single under Cosmos Records was released, and she found out that my stage name was Da Nigga, Hattie waited until I flew back to D.C. to sit me down.

  “Boy, don’t you know you got the blood of slaves in yo’ veins? You gone off and lost yo’ mind, hangi
n’ ’round these folks!”

  We were at the kitchen table, sitting across from one another. My mother sat beside my grandmother, but her thoughts weren’t aligned with my grandmother’s. Mama was just happy to have her son, the big star, home again.

  “Big Mama, listen, it’s just a name, okay? Just a fake name to set me apart from everyone else who’s trying to get rich rapping. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “That’s a load of manure, Moses. Who you got feedin’ you these lies? A man’s name tell the world who he is! It tell ’em who his family is—what kinda stock he come from!”

  “I know, Big Mama, and everyone will know that my real name is Moses Jenkins. Everybody will know the name Mama and Daddy gave me.”

  “Don’ lie to me, boy. I ain’t dumb. People get rich and they pick who they wanna be. You tellin’ people you don’ wanna be Moses no mo’. And you replacing it with the worst name you could think of...”

  “Naw, Big Mama, you don’t understand. That’s not what I’m tellin’ people...”

  She raised her hand just slightly off the table with her palm facing me, and I shut up. I could tell it wasn’t something she wanted to discuss further—she simply needed me to know how she felt about it.

  After a few seconds, she looked back up at me, perplexed.

  “I...I jus’ don’t understand...you really want every white folk you meet the rest a’ your life callin’ you nigger?”

  “No, Big Mama...it’s not nigger, it’s nigga. My name is Da Nigga. You see the difference?”

  “No.”

  I gave some thought to how I should explain to her.

  “You see, ‘nigger’ is a racist term. It’s the name that white people used to call black people during the Civil Rights Movement and slavery and everything. But ‘nigga’ is like calling someone your friend or your homie. It’s like, we took the word, and turned the whole thing around.”

  Big Mama dropped her eyes and pondered what I said. She pressed her lips together like she did when she read the Bible, and I looked at her from my seat and waited for her to get my point.

  Finally, she raised her eyes to me again. Her face was resolute.

  “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life, baby.”

  It was my turn to be perplexed. She turned and looked at my mother, who was just as shocked as I was to hear her mother-in-law speak so bluntly.

  “It is, Tisha. It’s jus’ dumb...but the youngins, they believe it...they really do...”

  She turned back to me with sympathy in her face.

  “Nigger is nigger, no matter how you say it, baby. You can roll it ’round in yo’ mouth and gargle it like Listerine, but when you spit it out, it still gonna be nigger. You youngins might not understand that now, but you will. In the meantime, far be it for me to tell you something you believe ain’t right. Jus’ promise me, when you learn the truth, you’ll come on back here and tell me.”

  Her words were a code that I wasn’t able to crack. I nodded my head, not knowing what else to do. She gave a weak smile in return, and retired up to her room.

  I suspected that Big Mama’s disapproval of my name was one of the reasons they never really spent the money I sent them, but I’d never asked.

  We sat at the front of the plane, listening to Henry sing nursery rhymes and waiting for the attendants to shut the door. SaTia’s phone rang just as she was about to turn it off. I already knew who it was, but looked over at SaTia to confirm my suspicion.

  “It’s Rose,” she said, and looked from her phone to me, and back to her phone.

  “Tell him the same thing you told him last time.”

  This was the sixth time Rose had called since learning of our spontaneous plans. The first three calls were full of threats of contract cancellations and breach lawsuits. The only good thing that had come from the last twenty-four hours was the fact that I was now dinner table discussion for any family with a television. Rose knew how much money he stood to gain from my misfortunes, but he also knew how much he stood to lose if I bailed from the company. He tried to act as if he didn’t, but after the third call, which contained threats to make sure I was penniless and blacklisted, SaTia quickly reminded him of what he already knew, and then hung up on him.

  The fourth call was an apology for the first three, and the last two calls consisted of him pleading with me to stay on the schedule.

  “My client has already made up his mind on this issue, Mr. Rose. When we arrive in Washington and he has a chance to clear his head, we will be in touch to figure out how best to proceed from there. In the meantime, I don’t have to remind you that your competitors would love an opportunity to steal Mr. Jenkins, especially given the current situation. We plan on giving them that opportunity if Cosmos Records retaliates in any way, shape, or form against the act of self-preservation that Mr. Jenkins is currently undertaking.”

  I imagined SaTia dressed in a business suit with her incisors sunk into Rose’s carotid artery.

  Nervousness seems to make time speed by and slow down simultaneously. Our plane ride seemed as if it took both eight hours and eight minutes. I found myself staring out of window into nothingness, and without knowing, I drifted into a fitful sleep.

  Had I been awake, I would’ve seen Henry, his medicine having worn off, walking lightly up to SaTia. He tried his best to keep the left side of his body still, but with the plane swaying back and forth, his muffled cries of pain became rhythmical. SaTia heard him as he approached, and turned to face him as he slowly knelt down beside her.

  “Hey, Henry. How are you feeling?”

  “I’ll be a lot better once I pop another pill.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  Henry hesitated a moment.

  “I wanted to talk to you about something while I was still clearheaded.”

  SaTia turned her body more in Henry’s direction to show that he had her full attention.

  “What’s up?”

  Henry looked over at me to make sure I was still asleep, and then back to SaTia.

  “’Lando called me yesterday.”

  SaTia’s body tensed up, but she kept her face calm.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He said he heard I was out the coma, and he wanted to check for himself.”

  “Okay...well, that’s not a big deal.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinkin’ ’til I saw this...”

  Henry reached SaTia his smartphone. There was a news report from BET News that had been paused on the screen. SaTia took the phone, glanced at Henry, and then hit play on his touchscreen.

  “As you know, we have been following the attempted murder of Moses “Da Nigga” Jenkins, and its aftermath, since it occurred two nights ago. The developments in this story seem to get more and more bizarre. Earlier this morning, we reported that Orlando “O-Dogg” Brown, a known member of Da Nigga’s entourage, had been ousted from the group...”

  “How did they...?”

  Henry shrugged his shoulders, winced in pain, and motioned for SaTia to look back at the screen.

  “Speculations have been flying about the reason for this break, and Brown’s possible involvement with P. Silenzas, who many think organized the murder attempt. These speculations hit a fever pitch tonight, however, when just a few hours ago, Brown was seen leaving his hotel and getting into an SUV driven by Simon “Ounces” Taylor, a former bodyguard and known associate of the rival rap group...”

  SaTia dropped Henry’s phone. It hit the ground with a deep thud as she put her hand over her mouth.

  “Oh my God.”

  Henry looked back up at SaTia.

  “See...see, that’s what I was thinkin’, right? But then I stopped. I mean, we talkin’ ’bout ’Lando here. We been boys since high school. Ain’t no way he teamed up with no Silenzas. There must have been some kinda mistake.”

  SaTia hadn’t heard anything Henry said. She sat in shock, trying to pull her thoughts together as I snoozed beside her.

  Fin
ally, she whipped her head over to Henry.

  “Did you tell him we were coming to D.C?”

  “What?”

  “Did you tell him we were coming to D.C?”

  Henry stumbled over his words, and then dropped his head.

  “I didn’t know, SaTia. I didn’t know. All I said was that we were comin’ home to clear our heads for a while.”

  SaTia threw her arms up, pressed her palms against her forehead, and tried not to panic.

  “Why? Why would you do that, Henry?”

  “I thought maybe him and Moe could work stuff out. It ain’t feel the same without ’im, you know?”

  SaTia resisted the urge to grab Henry by the neck as she forced her brain to think clearly. When she spoke out loud again, it was to herself.

  “Okay...I’ve already got a uniformed cop at the house at all times. There’s another hour and a half left in the flight—use the Skyphone and call back and see if I can get two uniforms and a plain clothes. Also, contact Danny, get him to contract four personal bodyguards as soon as possible, and don’t let Moe leave the house without them...”

  “SaTia? SaTia?”

  Henry was disturbing her concentration. She couldn’t hide her annoyance.

  “What???”

  “Do you think we should tell ’im?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Moe. You think we should tell Moe?”

  The agitation fell off of SaTia’s face as she looked over at me.

  “No...for God’s sake, no! We don’t know anything for sure, and he’s got enough on him already. And don’t tell the guys either! Just let me handle it, okay? Pretend like we never had this conversation.”