A Moment of Silence: Midnight III

by Sister Souljah

  “Fourteen,” I said. I was seeing myself kick the gun out of his hands, both of us leaping to get it. “Sixteen,” I said. Of course I got to it first. “Eighteen,” I said. I didn’t shoot; I whip him with it, just wanting to give him some natural cosmetics to wear for a couple of weeks. “Twenty,” I said. I was seeing his cocky ass trying to explain why his face was all swolled up to his military friends and superiors. “Twenty-two,” I said. My second wife’s face popped up. “Don’t hurt him,” she asked me. “It’s better if we can all be friends. We are family,” she suggested softly. I slowed down my dribble. My bounce was slow. My eyes were on the hoop. With my right hand, I pushed the ball between my opponent’s legs and palmed it from the other side and layed it up. Scoring, I said, “That’s it.”

  “Damn,” was all the guy said. He shouldn’t said nothing. How could he invite me to a game and get shut out like that?

  “I got winners,” a next cat who rolled up courtside said. I looked at him.

  “Nah,” I replied. “I gotta go to work.” I left the two of them standing there. It was 7:30 a.m. Never understood the dudes that show up to the court without a ball or a friend with a ball.

  I hopped in a taxi back to Queens. I had twenty-five minutes to meet up on time with Chris and Ameer. Today would be our last day on the wall.

  * * *

  A light rain, more like a mist. It’s nighttime. I’m headed to the train.

  At 8:50 p.m., I climbed the last step that led me out of the subway and onto 115th Street in Harlem. I’m walking beneath a downpour. Had my wool hat on beneath my black hoodie. It was too warm out to wear it, but I wore it for war. Hotheaded, light-footed, heavy-hearted, I’m walking west. I don’t have Marcus’s phone number. I refuse to call my second wife to get it. I wouldn’t give her swift mind even one clue. I could walk directly to his house to see if he stayed home due to the rainfall. But why show up there and tip off his moms? She’s more clever than a fox and an owl, a forensic psychiatrist as aggressive as a pit bull or a bloodhound. Nah, I head straight over to the park, keeping my word to Marcus and assuming he would keep his word also and show up for the fight he wanted, undaunted by some heavy raindrops.

  The park lights were off. The streets were wet and dark. The leaves on the trees were spilling ounces of cold water at a time. The park entrance on Riverside was chained shut. I kept walking, headed south ’cause I knew where the hole in the fence was located. On my way I saw cars, taxis, and vans speeding and splashing by, and a few people running into their Riverside Drive apartments, or beneath a canopy, or ducking into a doorway. Behind me I heard someone running, must be fucking up their kicks in the mud and puddles, I thought, but instinctively I turned to check. The knife that was about to stab me in my back stabbed me in my chest instead. I could feel the puncture, upper chest below my left shoulder but above my heart, and the knife was still in me like a stopper in a sink preventing the water from draining out. He leaned back, must have been more comfortable with his plan to backstab me and then breeze by like it wasn’t him. But now we were face-to-face. I knew it was him. I flew my right fist and crashed it into his jaw. He stumbled to his left. Swiftly, I turned my back to him and kicked him down with half a left-footed roundhouse. He leaped right up, looked dizzy but caught his balance, raised his fists and lunged at me. I pulled the knife out of my chest and used it to back him down. He feared his own knife. As he backed up he tripped on a rock and fell backwards. I jammed the knife into the bark of a nearby tree. He was almost back on his feet when I kicked him in his chin forcefully and precisely like an NFL kicker. He was down again and bloody mouthed. I looked at him and said two words: “Stand up.” As soon as he tried, I kicked him forcefully, crushing his kneecap, and broke his leg.

  I pulled his dagger out from the tree bark. My second wife’s image flashed before my eyes. When I had left the house for this fight, she was making a prayer. I wiped the bloody blade clean with the white washcloth in my back pocket, then stuck it down in the dirt next to him. He tried not to look me in the eye. He tried not to cry out in pain. But no matter how manly a man, no matter West Point military training or not, a crushed kneecap causes extreme pain.

  A second thought came to me. I took two steps back where he lay squirming, and pulled his knife from the soil, and closed and pocketed it. As I walked away, I pressed the bloody cloth against my wound beneath my clothes to clog the blood that was leaking down my chest beneath my T-shirt, which was beneath my hoodie.

  I wasn’t worried about him. His younger brother was across the street beneath a canopy, concealing his identity with an umbrella. Good, I thought to myself. He came to watch his big brother defeat the husband of the girl cousin who they were both in love with. Now he gets to try and carry his crippled big brother back home.

  At my house, I headed upstairs to my Umma, the superb seamstress. I needed her to disinfect and stitch my wound. My second wife opened her first-floor bedroom door and saw me. She watched me move up the staircase. She said nothing. She never calls me back or follows me up these stairs that lead to the bedroom of my first wife. She is an expert at making friends, keeping friends, and not arousing jealousies or pissing anyone off. And she knew that once I take the first three steps up alone, towards my first wife, Akemi, I never turn back. Besides, once Umma disinfects and stitches me, Akemi is an expert at wrapping wounds without questioning, and at sensuously and silently soothing me. She’d done it a few times before. Like the difference between fire and water, tonight, I prefer her.

  21. THE SHE-OFFICER

  “Wrists,” she said. I hesitated. All the other COs said, “Hands.” I pushed my hands through the slot on my cell door. She cuffed me before unlocking the door and letting me out.

  “Thank you,” was all I said to her. I’m completing my first month of twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown in the box. This is my one free hour of recreation alone. However, I requested a shower. She was here to escort me.

  After a long pause, she said, “You’re welcome.” I wondered why she wore perfume to work in a jail surrounded by men whose minds and actions go from one extreme to the other. I could smell her perfume and her body lotion and even her hair spray and mouthwash. Of course I could. She is woman, the only woman I’d seen in four weeks. We’re walking.

  “You’re quiet,” she remarked. “You’re the quietest one,” she said with emphasis. “You have good manners. I hope you don’t let this place destroy you.” We continued the rest of our walk in silence. When we reached the shower stall, she watched me walk in. I knew the shower routine down pat. Before she could call it out, I put my cuffed hands through the slot. She uncuffed me.

  “Three minutes,” she said, like she regretted saying it but had to. She knew three minutes was not enough time.

  “Please turn,” I said to her, because she was still looking in.

  “I have a son your age,” she said.

  “Impossible,” I said at the same time that the water blasted on.

  When my time was up, I swiftly toweled dry and dressed, and stood by the slot waiting to be cuffed again so she could open the door and escort me back. Instead of saying “hands” or “wrists,” she put her face up to the slot.

  “Why impossible?” she asked me. But my mind was elsewhere.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “I said I have a son your age. You said ‘impossible.’ Do I really look that young to you?” she asked, fishing for a compliment.

  “No son my age would let his moms work in a place like this. He’d work two or three jobs if he had to, just to keep you out of here. That’s why,” I told her solemnly.

  “Wrists,” she said, and cuffed me. She and I walked back to the cell in silence same as we came, even as other inmates on lockdown shouted “Yo, CO!” or screamed or begged or rhymed, or cursed or cried. Agony hung in the air, agony and strife. The weight of being isolated and alone was crushing each of them one by one. I was not happy, but I was not crushed. For some of these guys, the last person
they would want to be left alone with was themself. They reacted as though they were being tortured, but there was no one in the box with them but themselves.

  My cell door locked behind me. I pushed my hands through the slot. The CO uncuffed me. I could hear her shoes on the floor as she walked away. She normally works nights, I said to myself. I would see eyes peering in or sometimes feel them paused on me when I wasn’t looking. Or sometimes I would just smell her presence, or hear her breathing before I actually saw the pupils of her eyes. That’s her job, I would tell myself. She was counting bodies and checking to see if I had hung myself same as the man three doors down did three days ago. It didn’t matter to me how many times she checked or for how long she watched me standing or sitting still, or working out. Suicide is not my style, my reaction, or my option. I had love waiting for me.

  Even-tempered, that’s how I been, like a Zen warrior. I was doing time. Time wasn’t doing me. I cut each of my days in the box into fractions. Set and kept appointments same as a free man with a demanding, packed, and urgent schedule. Some were constant and at the same time every day, like my prayers, their count, my three-hour workouts, and their meal service. Already in mint condition before I murdered the one that had to be murdered, now I was becoming cut, carved stone and chiseled, a lean and solid force of steel.

  Outside of the physical training, mind travel was my form of entertainment. It is better than an action flick, an awesome adventure movie, a comedy, a romantic film, and even an R-rated skin flick. It is more than and way beyond a great book or any magazine. Completely quiet and still I would leave my body seated on the floor or on the slab that was my bed, while my mind, heart, and soul escaped into one of my millions of memories. My memories are sharp, clear, vivid, and detailed. I could observe and feel more in a memory than I might have ever seen or felt during the moment that actually happened in real life. I could feel my wives breathing in my memories of them. I could hear my Umma’s voice and feel the weight and wisdom and impact of her words. I could even see and feel the warmth in her smile. Through remembering, I sometimes found my shoulders shaking with laughter at something funny that I recalled. And, for the first time ever, I made love and had sex and even fucked through a memory. Sweetly and slowly it unfolded and spread out in my mind’s eye. Wide awake, not dreaming, and fully conscious, I could see and feel my fingers gripping the tight waist of my second wife, my pinky finger grazing the roundness of her behind. I could see my own fingers massaging Akemi’s clitoris, then pinching it slightly enough until her pussy walls quaked.

  I could see nipples rising, feel lips and taste tongues. I loved being caught in the wind of my memories, sometimes inhaling the scent of my women. Akemi wore the scent of Sudan, perfume that Umma conceived, mixed and slow dripped into a beautiful crystal bottle shaped like an Arabic lantern and customized exclusively for her. In that bottle was the aroma that led to the creation of new lives in my first wife’s womb. A concoction so powerful that through it, Umma’s desire was born.

  Chiasa’s perfume was as unusual as herself. It was not perfume imagined, mixed, or personally and purposely gifted by Umma. She preferred pure fruit and vegetable oils with their natural scent. She always smelled like something edible, which instinctively made me lick, taste, and eat her like a delicacy. And she knew it. Doused from her scalp to the soles of her feet with pure oil from the coconut, or the olive, Chiasa was sensual and slippery. She would oil me after herself. Her nude and evocative body glided across a marble floor once, and I was sliding on her and in her, but that is a memory that I am savoring for a time when I might need it most.

  The men in my memory are up close and sharp. My mind sees their fashions and styles of kicks and jeans and shirts and hats and jewels precisely. There is no fogginess and they are clearer to me in memory than they were in real life.

  In my memories, I am able to go in slow motion, to rewind, to fast-forward, and even to use a zoom lens. Beyond my boys’ styles, in my memory their strengths are amplified, and their flaws leap out as well. In my memory, there is no distance between myself and my male acquaintances, friends, or even the enemies I interacted with, as there was in real life. In my memory I study them all real hard. By studying them, I am also studying myself. In my memories of Chris and Ameer, I could still feel the energy of our friendship.

  * * *

  “Don’t you sleep?” I asked the CO whose eyes were watching me when I raised my head from making the Isha night prayer.

  “I’m doing a double-triple,” she said. I didn’t say nothing back. “I’m saving up. My son goes to an expensive private prep school in upstate New York. You probably never heard of it,” she said proudly.

  “You’re probably right. I never did,” I answered.

  “I am right. It’s you who is wrong,” she said strangely. “My son does love me even though I’m a corrections officer who works in a place like Rikers Island.”

  “What’s love?” I asked her nonchalantly.

  She looked at me like it was a trick question. “For men and for women it’s different,” I explained to her. “A woman who loves comforts and serves. A man who loves protects and provides,” I said, moving up closer to the slot. She was thinking about it. I could tell. “You are here unprotected,” I told her and watched the thought move in her eyes. “You said your son is my age. Then he knows where you are, doesn’t provide for you, but waits for you to work a double-triple in a dangerous place surrounded by dangerous men and then hand the money over to him, right or wrong?” She sucked her teeth hard and walked away.

  “Get off his nuts and come get on mine!” an inmate shouted from the next cell over. He was the new body that replaced the dead body they had already removed.

  Many nights came and went. Every night she worked, she came and stood on the other side of my locked cell door, speaking to me as quietly as anyone could speak in a space where you could not whisper and be heard unless your lips were pressed to an ear. So everyone yelled. I mostly listened to her private thoughts and experiences, in a space where there is no privacy. She talked the most, like her soul was vomiting, and I’d tell her the truth as I saw it about serious, everyday general topics and issues that she had spoken about. I never confided anything personal in her, or revealed anything to her about my case, background, or future. I never touched her or even flirted with her; still she came. She had no husband, she had told me casually, like it wasn’t nothing. “Don’t have one, don’t need one,” were her exact words. “Everything my son needs, I get it for him. He doesn’t need his father either, just like I don’t need no husband,” she said passionately.

  “His father is a real motherfucker, and he’s a CO right up here on the Island making good money. But he’s married already—that was the problem,” she confessed.

  On another night she admitted, “Yeah, I spoiled my son because I feel guilty that he was conceived in jail.” Then she said with a slow, fierce force, “But if I don’t do anything else right, I swear, I’ll keep my son out of prison no matter what.” She paused. Inside of her pause was only silence. Then she said without a smile and without any trace of laughter, “Now that’s love!” She was confirming it aloud to herself, while days later, she was still trying to prove their mother-son love to me. I knew, however, that spoiling your son and loving your son are two different things.

  For me as a young man who is a son and a husband, a woman protecting a man who fails to make a serious effort to protect her does not define love. She was protecting her son, financing her son, spoiling and serving her son. She admitted that he doesn’t work and that she doesn’t want him to work. Without him making a strong push, building a business or working a few jobs, whether she tells him to or not to, he is not a man to me, because he is sucking his mother’s blood, absorbing all of her energy, eating up her time on Earth, stressing and strangling her emotions while allowing her to work for him in a place where she is jeopardizing and endangering her health and her self.

  I understand th
at most mothers in the USA have to work, and that most African-American women have no husbands. It does matter, though, where they work and what they do, and whether or not they are safe. She was confusing love with guilt, I thought. She was punishing herself for her choices and deeds, and working herself into danger and death to reverse them. She was choked up by the guilt of having allowed a married co-worker to fuck her in a closet or in an empty cell, or atop or beneath a desk, or in a prison parking lot, on the ground or in a parked vehicle.

  She would never understand that in my culture her son is a grown man. In America he’s known as a “teenager,” a man whose physique is that of a grown-up, who has already experienced puberty and has the ability to shoot and spill his seeds and bring forth life. In America, a teenage man is nothing but a burden, an overgrown child, a dependent, and sometimes even a parasite. This is the opposite of love.

  “Say something,” she asked me forcefully.

  “Is that an order?” I asked her solemnly. She sucked her teeth.

  “What could you possibly know about real love? I saw your paperwork. I saw how you requested no visitations from anyone. What is that about? What? You only love your lawyer? She’s the only one allowed to see you besides the officers and the rest of the inmates?” She walked away cocky, like she had dropped a bomb on me.

  I knew her regular work schedule minus the occasional double or triple shifts she would pull by working or trading off hours with her co-workers. I also knew that she would return to my cell the following night. She’d roll the book cart around and offer me books, encouraging me towards studying for my GED. She would hand me SAT study guides with complicated vocabulary words to learn and mathematics problems to solve. She would bring me gifts I did not ask for like extra towels, washcloths, and new socks or underwear, peanut butter or fruit, or a chicken breast sandwich. More than that she would tell me how things really go down at Rikers, not just in the box, but in the population or protective custody and in the hospital and on the yard. She wanted me to know how to stay alive, and just how nasty the “nastiest niggas” are. She wanted me to not trust anybody . . . except, of course, her. I listened ’cause I got common sense enough to learn and decipher.