by Mia Mckenzie
“We’re singing the gospel,” the reverend says. “It’s choir practice. My granddaughter is playing piano. You’re both welcome to come inside and listen if you like.”
“Are you aware that this block is residentially zoned?” the meaty cop asks.
“I’ve lived here for forty years.”
“Is that a ‘yes’?”
The music stops. I look toward the basement door and see a few people poking their heads out, trying to see what’s going on.
“Yes,” the reverend says. “I’m aware of the zoning. Churches are exempt from noise ordinances.”
“Official churches,” says Meaty. “Actual churches. Not a bunch of people singing in the basement of your run-down house.”
Reverend Seymour looks down at her hands, clasps them together, unclasps them.
People begin coming up out of the basement, but they hang back, away from the cops. Brother Nguyen comes out of the house and walks down the front steps to stand near the reverend.
“Unless you’ve registered this ‘church’ somewhere?” Skinny is asking.
“It’s just a small gathering of neighbors,” the reverend replies. “There’s never been a reason to—”
“Well, now there’s a reason,” Skinny says.
“Unless you want to get fined. Do you want to get fined? Because we can do that.”
Reverend Seymour stares directly at the cop and says, “How much is the fine?” I can see anger behind her eyes. But also fear.
The cops glance at each other and smirk. “Up to three hundred dollars for an initial violation,” one of them says.
The reverend sighs. “I can’t pay that. I’m on a fixed income.”
“You could take it out of the collection plate.”
“We don’t take an offering,” says the reverend. “One of the reasons people come to worship with us is they don’t have to feel ashamed of what they can’t give when a collection plate comes around.”
The meaty cop snickers. “Why even have church if you’re not going to ask for money? I thought taking people’s hard-earned cash was the whole point of church.”
Both of the cops laugh.
I glance down at Ethan’s house and see him standing at his door, his head poking out, watching what’s going on.
“We’re gonna let you off with a warning this time,” one of the cops says. “Next time, we’ll fine you. Keep the noise down. Got it?”
“Have a blessed day, officers,” Reverend Seymour says.
As the cops head back to their car, the rest of the churchgoers emerge from the basement. They gather around the reverend, talking in hushed voices.
Both cops spot me as they approach their vehicle. One of them glares. I’m not gonna lie: It’s intimidating. I know it’s my legal right to film them; Vicky has reminded me of that a hundred times. BUT DID I MENTION THEY HAVE GUNS AND IMPUNITY? My hand starts shaking a teensy bit. I consider putting my phone away. Like, why am I even here right now? I don’t know Reverend Seymour that well. I like her, sure, but not enough to get my ass beat, or worse, by the cops. We still don’t know what happened to Sandra Bland. Besides, I don’t even live on this block. This is none of my damn business!
I don’t put my phone away, though. I take another deep breath and keep recording. Through the rectangle of my screen, I watch the cops get into their car and drive away.
Brother Nguyen looks over at Ethan’s porch, where Ethan is still peeking out of the front door. “Hey!” he calls, moving toward Ethan’s house. “Excuse me!”
At first, I think Ethan’s going to duck back inside. But he pushes the door open wider, steps out onto the porch, and glares down at Brother Nguyen. “Yeah?”
“Did you call the police on my friend’s church?”
“It’s not a church!” Ethan yells. “I called the police on the noise. Just like I warned her I would if she kept this up.”
“My friend, the reverend,” Brother Nguyen says, pointing at Reverend Seymour, “has been living on this block longer than you’ve been alive.”
“So, what? Does that mean my baby isn’t supposed to sleep?”
“No, it—”
“You have kids?” Ethan asks.
“Yes. Four children.”
“Then you know how hard it is to get a baby back to sleep,” Ethan says. “Or maybe you don’t. I don’t know how involved men were with their kids back in your day, in your culture.”
Brother Nguyen frowns. “Calling the police on Black people can be dangerous for them. Don’t you watch the news?”
Ethan rolls his eyes, like he couldn’t possibly give less of a damn.
“This isn’t how you solve problems with your neighbors,” Brother Nguyen says, “if you want to be part of a community.”
“That’s right!” someone yells.
“Tell him, Asian brother!” yells someone else.
“Gentrification is hard enough on Black people already,” Brother Nguyen says.
Ethan smirks. “Your people don’t have a great reputation when it comes to Black neighborhoods, either, do they?”
Brother Nguyen frowns again. “No. But I always respected my neighbors.”
“Why don’t you just mind your own business, man?”
“It is my business when my friend is put in harm’s way.”
“You better tell that fool!” someone yells.
Ethan laughs. “Who are you supposed to be? Their Asian savior? That’s a new one.”
“Just a good neighbor,” Brother Nguyen says. “Which is what we all should be.”
“Tell that to her!” Ethan says, pointing at the reverend.
“It’s alright, Phil,” Reverend Seymour says. “You tried. That’s all you can do.”
Brother Nguyen shakes his head at Ethan and walks back up onto the reverend’s porch.
I suddenly realize I’m still watching all of this through my phone camera, still recording. I turn the camera off just as Reverend Seymour starts walking toward me.
“Sister Skye!”
“Hello, Reverend.”
“Are you familiar with Romans 8:16?”
“Can’t say I am.”
“ ‘The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,’ ” the reverend says. “The Lord calls upon us to bear witness for one another, in the name of Jesus. Thank you for bearing witness for me today. Amen?”
“Totes.”
She opens her arms for a hug. I let it happen this time.
“Would you like to join us for the rest of choir practice?” she asks. “I bet you have a lovely voice.”
“The rest? You’re not shutting things down after…the cops came?”
“Oh, no. We’ll reduce the volume on the next song. But we’re not going anywhere,” she says loudly over her shoulder.
Ethan frowns and goes back inside, slamming his door shut behind him.
“I’m on my way to Faye’s, to help her with something,” I tell the reverend. But, honestly, even if I wasn’t, I still wouldn’t say yes to joining them. I’m glad to have been a witness, in the name of Jesus and all that fun stuff. It actually feels good to have done it. But not good enough to take my ass to church.
* * *
—
Faye is asleep on the couch when I get there. Angie thanks me and slips out. I have my period and I’m a little crampy, so I take some Advil. Then I get a root beer from the fridge and sit on the floor by the couch, reading the news on my phone, until I hear Faye stirring. She smiles when she sees me. I move to sit beside her on the couch and ask how she’s feeling.
“Groggy. Sore. But otherwise fine. I was dreaming about Wildwood. Did you ever go there when you were a kid?”
“Sure.” Wildwood is a boardwalk, amusement park, and beach in New Jersey.
>
“Good memories?” Faye asks.
“We used to go there on the last day of camp every summer,” I tell her. “A lot of my memories are of running down the boardwalk with Cynthia, eating funnel cake.”
Faye makes a little sound, like she’s ruminating on that. Then she says, “We used to go sometimes with our mother. We screamed our heads off riding the Sea Serpent. That’s what I was dreaming about just now.”
She’s smiling at the memory. I’m not sure post-surgery is the right time to talk about acrimonious kinship, but I can’t help but ask. “What happened between you and Cynthia? Why weren’t you close as adults?”
Faye is quiet for such a long moment that I think maybe she’s not going to answer. But then she starts talking. “When our mother died and we got separated, Cynthia and I had a plan. On my eighteenth birthday, I was going to get on a bus and collect my sister from Newark. I was going to petition to become her legal guardian.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I turned eighteen. And I didn’t do it.”
Of all the stories I could have imagined about what happened between Faye and Cynthia, one in which Faye failed to show up would not have been among them. “Why didn’t you?” I ask her.
“Because those two years in Jenkins had been very bad.”
I remember the drugs and the abortions and it all starts to make sense.
“I ran away from Georgia when I was seventeen and came back to Philly,” Faye says. “I got a job at night, studied for the SAT during the day, and started rhyming in front of people. But I was still doing drugs. I was still making lots of bad decisions. By the time I turned eighteen, I had barely figured out how to take care of myself. I didn’t think I could take care of anyone else. And I didn’t want to try. I was selfish.” There’s anguish on her face and in her voice when she says this.
“You were only eighteen, Faye,” I remind her.
She nods. “But Cynthia was only fifteen. And not as understanding. When I told her I couldn’t do it, she stopped talking to me. Completely. I didn’t hear from her again until twelve years later, when Vicky was born.”
“Why did she reach out to you then?”
“Because I was the only blood family she had left. I think she wanted Vicky to know where she came from.”
I think about Vicky’s she’s not even my real aunt shenanigans and I wish she were here so I could shake my head in disappointment at her.
“But it didn’t mean all was forgiven,” Faye says. “Cynthia still resented me. Her resentment manifested as judgment most of the time. She had lots of opinions about how I lived my life then. And I still felt guilty. Regretful. And probably angry at her for not being able to forgive me. We could never really get past it.”
I think about my own sibling. I’ve resented Slade our entire adult lives. He never left me. I left, the very day I turned eighteen. He stayed. His staying is what I resent.
Faye yawns and rubs her eyes. I can see she’s tired, so I drop acrimonious kinship for now. I fluff her pillows.
“We should go to Wildwood,” she says, settling back against them. “You and me and Vicky. Before you leave for Bali.”
“Okay,” I say. “Yeah. That sounds fun.”
* * *
—
“I hear you’re an activist now,” my mother says.
I’m crouched beside her bed, guiding her left leg into a sheer knee-high stocking. It’s Wednesday evening and I’m helping her get ready for the weekly vespers service at her church.
“Where’d you hear that?” I ask.
“Viva told me.”
I only told Viva about recording the cops as a way to break up some of the tension that had been lingering between us since our argument.
I shrug. “I just took some video of the cops, that’s all.”
“We’ve always had problems with the police in this neighborhood,” my mother says. “Either they were beating somebody up for nothing, or you called them for something and they never came.”
“Well, they come now. As long as the right people call.”
She nods. “I’m proud of you for the work you’re doing for the community.”
“Thanks,” I say, feeling pretty proud of myself, even though I’m not actually doing any work for the community.
“I was never that big into activism,” she says. “I was working since I was fifteen, so I never had time for that plus school. And once I had kids? Forget about it. I was lucky if I had time to take a shower, let alone get myself involved in a demonstration.”
I get up from my crouching position, stretch, hear things pop and crack in my lower back. I go to the closet and push aside clothes, looking for something for my mother to wear.
“I think I did join a protest once, though,” she says, her face scrunched up trying to remember. “What was it for? Oh, I remember! We marched against the boys at my high school.”
“Really? Why?” I ask, trying not to sound as shocked as I am. I can imagine a thousand different reasons to protest high school boys. But I can’t imagine my mother doing it for any of them. She’s more the kind of woman who lets men get away with anything.
“They were dogs,” she says. “They were always grabbing at us and saying crude things when the teachers weren’t around. And sometimes when the teachers were around. Not that the teachers did anything about it. Nobody did anything about it. So, my best friend, Maureen—you remember Maureen?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this was 1971 or 1972 and everybody was rallying around Angela Davis, trying to get her out of jail. A lot of high school students were doing walkouts, even in Philly. So, Maureen got the idea to do a walkout, too. Not for Angela, but for us. To put pressure on the teachers to get those boys in line.”
“Did it work?”
She shakes her head. “Not that first time. Most of the girls who said they’d do it chickened out. It ended up being only me and Maureen and a couple of others. Everybody pretty much ignored us.”
“That’s depressing.”
“Well, we didn’t really know what we were doing,” she says. “As far as organizing. It took us a while to figure out we hadn’t been loud enough. We hadn’t shocked them. So, the next time, we came up with a slogan: ‘Kick ’em where it hurts!’ ”
“You mean…in the dick?”
“That’s right!” she says, slapping her knee and laughing. “We made signs showing girls kicking boys in the privates. And we went all through the halls shouting, ‘Kick ’em where it hurts!’ That got everybody’s attention.”
I imagine my mother at fifteen, shouting down sexual assault and harassment in the halls. I think about Vicky, kneeing Marco in the dick, some fifty years later.
My mother is still laughing. “I need to call Maureen,” she says, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. “It’s been too long since we spoke. I wonder how she’s doing.”
“Maureen died, Mom. Like, ten years ago.”
“Oh, yes,” my mother says quickly, nodding. “That’s right. I do remember that.”
I’m not sure she does, though.
I pull a plain-ish beige dress from the closet. “You want to wear this?”
She eyes it, then shakes her head, no. “I have a pretty green one in there somewhere.”
I hang up the beige dress and look for the green one.
“You coming with me to church this time?” my mother asks.
I give her a look.
“No harm in asking,” she says, shrugging. “I was just remembering you when you were little, in your pink pantyhose with the hearts on them that you loved so much. And your patent-leather shoes. Singing with the other little ones in the choir. You were adorable. People used to say, ‘You got a smart girl there, Amaryllis.’ And I’d say, ‘Who you telling? That’s my baby.’
”
She’s smiling at the memory and it makes me smile, too.
I find the green dress and hold it up. My mother nods approvingly. I lay the dress out on the bed.
“Mom, do you know what egg donation is?”
She nods. “I think so.”
“Okay, well, I did that. I donated eggs to someone. A friend of mine.”
She squints at me. “Who?”
“Cynthia. From camp. You wouldn’t—”
“The one you used to match outfits with?”
I stare at her for a second. Then, I’m like: “How could you possibly remember that?”
She shrugs. “Sometimes I remember the strangest things. My neighbor down the street used to have a cat named Stevie Wonder. I remember that, even though I was only seven at the time. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast most mornings, but I remember that. The cat wasn’t even blind. Isn’t that absurd?”
Frankly, yes.
“Anyway…I donated my eggs to Cynthia and she had a kid.”
My mother sits forward on the edge of the bed and peers at me. “You mean, I have a grandbaby?”
“No. I mean, I guess. Sort of. Not a baby, though. A twelve-year-old.”
“When do I get to meet him?” she asks with an eagerness in her voice that I didn’t expect.
“Her. And…I don’t know. Do you want to meet her?”
She frowns. “What kind of a question is that? Of course I want to meet my own grandchild. That’s why you’re telling me, isn’t it? So I can meet her?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, why else?”
“To see if you care, I guess?”
Her frown intensifies. “Why do you say things like that? Of course I care. And of course I want to meet her.”
“Okay,” I say.
She nods, smiling, looking content.
“You need a slip with this dress,” I tell her.
She points to the underwear drawer of the dresser. I look in there for a slip but don’t find one. She tells me there’s one in the dryer downstairs, so I go and get it. When I get back to her room, I find her crying. She looks me right in the eyes and says, “Why’d this have to happen to me?”