“And I do not always tell the truth?”
Befuddled, he stiffened with surprise at the disembodied voice. Where had it come from? He knew who it was pretending to be, but who had really spoken it? And why? And if it was actually her, how? He was just about to turn around—the voice must have come from behind him—and confront the mystery when the punch, as forceful as the one he’d thrown to fell the madman, struck him in the back of the head. Aunt Zahirah yelped and made a languid attempt to catch him, but the momentum of his collapse was more than she could handle. He braced himself for the landing, and as his face smacked the floor, he saw the toe of her black slipper edge out below the hem of her voluminous blue dress. She kneeled beside him and shook his shoulders, trying to revive him, though he was still conscious. Then she tried to roll him over, but he declined, exaggerating his weight, wanting gravity to have its way with him, treat him as if he were dead. Rana, it was now clear, was not. He could hear her raging from above.
“Are you crazy? Do you want to die?” She saw in him the same thing he had seen in the man threatening Adad at the store: lunacy, danger.
“I will tell you this truth. Yes, you are crazy! Yes, you want to die! The family of this American girl. Do you know these people? No! Adad says there are killers in that house! Do you want to end up like your father? I never told you why he was killed in that bar. He wasn’t killed by just any man. He was killed by someone’s husband. There, that is your truth. Is that what you want? To be like your father? To be like Muhammad Totah? I see now you are just like him. Wanting a woman you should not have. But this woman—whoever she is—I tell you right now, you will not have!”
Mustafa, sucker-punched but not necessarily down for the count, wanted to get up and go another round. When his mother had attacked him, he wasn’t even ready. (In retrospect, in fairness—he realized it now, lying here, so unjustly defeated—maybe he should have called out to the madman before striking. Maybe he could have talked him down. There were, he admitted, reasons for rules of engagement.) Round One with his mother had been a bust. He wanted to pick himself up—but the embarrassment of it all was too much to bear. (The feet of a security guard were scurrying their way.) He sighed and let his head sink into Zahirah’s thigh. “Bae-bae,” she kept saying. Her fingers, moving through his hair, strummed his body into a state of peace. “Bae-bae . . .” His mother was still screaming, pointlessly. She’d already won; she was just piling on. No, he didn’t want to be Muhammad Totah. He wished he had the strength to tell her, if only to silence her. There are other Muhammads, Mama—millions of them. All over the world. I’ll imagine myself one of them. I already have! As surely as he was rejecting the idea of his father, he was also resigning himself to the improbability of ever again having Alicia. It was much more likely—his mother’s rantings proposed no more pleasant an alternative—that he would remain in exile forever, never to return to Skinny Israel. Of course, he could try not to give up. If he could withstand the pressure of holding out in fruitless desperation, he could live his life as one long cliffhanger. A comic book character who keeps unsuspecting readers like Malik turning pages in vain. Then, at the end, the hero—Mustafa the Dreamer, Mustafa the Fool—never sees her again. Never holds her again. Never regains the superpower of which she is the only source. Yes, he could fake his way through years of convincing himself hopelessness was hope. But Aunt Zahirah, still rubbing his head, had stroked him down to a more conclusive truth: he wouldn’t get to be the Muhammad Ali of Love after all. He would have to be the Muhammad Ali of something else.
4
Behold—Ramadan Ramsey!
Mama Joon had been thinking the child should be named Pamela if she was a girl or Tristram if he was boy. Clarissa’s name had come from the same section of books in Judge Dumas’s home office, where they had so often met behind locked doors while his wife was out shopping on a Saturday or visiting her mother after church on a Sunday. (His collection of Elizabethan plays was in a case to the right of his volumes of eighteenth-century English literature, and that was where she had decided, while dusting one afternoon, that Romeo and Juliet would be original names for twins. When Clarissa had given birth to two boys instead of a boy and a girl as expected, she had insisted on bestowing upon them a masculinized version of her idea—and Romeo and Julius were born.) Her baby-naming mojo hadn’t met with many beneficial results. Those she had attempted to endow with a literary flourish had mostly proved mockeries of their antecedents.
So she wasn’t the least bit upset when Alicia handed her the new baby boy on the afternoon of Friday, August 4, 2000, and, ignoring her mother’s suggestion, said, “His name is Ramadan. Ramadan Ramsey.”
Yes, of course, it was. Just like his father’s name was Abdullah or whoever that boy she had been running around with was. She couldn’t remember his name, though she thought she would recognize it if she ever heard it again. She had been in the Quicky Mart one time when another worker had called out to him—the same good-looking, narrow-tailed young man she had once seen hurriedly kissing Alicia goodbye on the front porch before dashing away when she had opened the door, not to run him off, but just to say, “Hello. How are you? Would you like to come in?” That was the only time she had seen them together. Kashif—no, that wasn’t it—had stopped coming around not too long after that, so Mama Joon had thought the baby’s father could also have been one of Alicia’s other secret lovers, a throwback maybe. But now she knew better. Alicia was making a statement when she said, “His name is Ramadan. Ramadan Ramsey.” No mistake about it—this was Mos Def’s child.
“Hello, Ramadan!” Mama Joon beamed down at the boy. Beaming was her thing. When she was eight years old she had begun occasionally spelling “June” as “Joon” because she had felt, deeply, that she was closer to the moon than to any month, even the month of her own birth, which connoted warmth, another of the essential qualities she felt emanating from herself. But it was the light of the moon, which had warmth in it, too, that she sensed was more indicative of her whole spirit. And the visual rhyme of “Joon,” while technically superficial, had the advantage of those double o’s, whose shapes mimicked that of the changeable and mysterious celestial body she was claiming as her muse. Those vowels ogled duplicitously like eyes, the body parts most capable of emitting your beam, assuming you had one.
Ramadan’s own eyes were closed now, but it was Mama Joon, looking down at the radiant boy, who was momentarily blinded. His brightness matched and perhaps surpassed the light of love she felt swelling in her. She blinked a few times and tried to bring him into focus. A fuzziness remained, but she could see him plainly now, and gradually she smiled her way back to 20/20. There had not been anything mystical about the boy’s luminescence at all, just a Black grandmother—a dark brown one anyway—going sightless with surprise at the pallor of her minutes-old grandbaby. Under the harsh incandescence of the Charity Hospital delivery room, he had left her squinting in search of his negritude. It was there, she finally noted with relief, at the tips of his ears, in the curvy line of his lower lip, which was reminiscent of Alicia’s and her own, and even—well, maybe—in the curly, if wispy, nap of his black hair. Her sense of unquestionable ownership returned. That moment of doubt, followed by the sudden affirmation that he was theirs, hers, made Mama Joon draw Ramadan even closer to her. It was as if, during the first thirty seconds of their meeting, she had had him, then lost him, then found him again. The lilt of that contracted mini-drama of suspense—reminiscent of the elusive, rhythmic phenomenon dubbed “swing”—sealed their bond. (Yes, she could feel it—“Ah!” she said—here it was, the music she was after!) The had him, lost him, found him ordained them not just grandmother and grandson, but also inseparable companions, soul mates—irrevocably conjoining not just their spirits but their destinies.
5
Ramadan’s First Adventure
Perhaps only one such affinity can exist at any juncture, for Alicia found it impossible to forge a bond with Ramadan rivaling his
and Mama Joon’s. Instead of nursing him, she busied herself attending to the thing she had birthed along with him, as if a twin, a demanding little bundle of gloom. It had begun its incubation right around the time of Mustafa’s departure, though its origins must have lain deep inside her all along, some dark ovum of delirium waiting to be seeded not by a spasm of love but of loss, waiting to be inseminated by pain. While Mama Joon rocked Ramadan in her arms, Alicia lay in bed mothering her melancholy as if it were an alternate, more intimate newborn. One who wanted and needed her in a way Ramadan did not. Whenever Ramadan was hungry or irritable, Mama Joon was there to comfort him with a bottle and a lullaby. But this other one wanted to be pampered by only Alicia. Only she could meet his demands to be held so tightly he could feel her heartbeat (as if his own had not fully developed, if it ever would), subsisting as well on her thoughts, even as he murmured things back to her with a strange precocity. His neediness registered as abject loyalty, a loyalty that, unlike Ramadan’s, was exclusive and unconditional, placing his “brother” in an unflattering light.
Nevertheless, Ramadan was eight months old the day Alicia—aching to connect with him, all that was left of Mustafa—strapped him into his stroller for a trip to the river. Unlike on some days, this April morning her depression did not render her immobile or housebound. With an effort that presented itself as grace, on good days like today, she could change Ramadan’s diapers, give him a bottle, burp him, rock him to sleep. Her movements were noticeably slower, but if you didn’t know her before she’d given birth, you would have thought she was just more naturally deliberate than most. Even those who did know her chalked up the difference to the arduousness of childbirth and a rough transition to motherhood, which was, after all, quite a job.
Clarissa came out onto the porch and saw Alicia on the sidewalk grappling with Ramadan and the stroller. “Strap him in good. Boys always wanna get away.”
She wasn’t just remembering the experience of placing one of her own boys into a stroller. She was thinking more about the relative ease with which she had performed this same act with Alicia, a sibling so much younger that she was more like a daughter. Looking at her baby sister tussling with her own infant aged Clarissa and made her nostalgic for an innocence that had long since perished. She had been eighteen and still a virgin the first time she had held Alicia in her arms. Mama Joon had guessed it and pronounced her “a late bloomer.” Something in the way Clarissa literally refused to let her hair down back then, insisting upon wearing a schoolmarmish bun until a few months after Alicia was born. Late bloomer—the phrase had hurt her at first, harmonizing with the other deficiencies Mama Joon, under the guise of motivating her, had charged her with possessing: tardiness, laziness, stubbornness, slowness to laughter, all of which were true. But when she had finally bloomed, it had been with an azalean flourish. Less than three months after Alicia’s arrival, the bun came down. That was when she had let Leo Walls take her to a motel room on Airline Highway, where he had abruptly stopped kissing her neck, spun her around, and pulled out the three bobby pins that had so long triangulated the bun into place. Then he had raked his fingers through her hair, tousling it free. In that moment, she wasn’t sure if she was in for sex or a shampoo—which, in retrospect, she would not have minded one bit, water whooshing from a faucet, setting her whole head a-tingle, cooling the entire orb of her scalp, the anticipation of a bubbly rub, a sensuousness that left you, in the end, clean and fully intact, the one who beneath it all you always were, only better. But then Leo’s hands had moved so fast from her head to her breasts that Clarissa’s whole body was drenched in wetness anyway, awash with his warmth and surprising humidity. His touches, manly and manic, lathered her up. And she wasn’t her ordinary self anymore but some long-haired alternative-universe Clarissa—something at once beautiful and strange, perfect and horrifying—a Rapunzel in waiting, the Cousin Itt of herself, who had always, without ever knowing it, been in need of this: a good conditioning. Later, while Leo enjoyed the nap he’d earned, she had gotten out of bed and looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, hair all over her head, not hanging from a window or from head to toe as on a freak, but sticking up and out, as wild as a bush. That’s when she had again heard Mama Joon’s “late bloomer” jab and seen herself anew in the dim motel room, head adorned with tufts and curls that looked like blossoms, some new living, breathing variety of rhododendron. In sex she had found a way to counter all the shortcomings “late bloomer” re-indicted her with, the laziness and stubbornness, the lack of a comic sensibility. She had found a way to avoid being marked tardy or absent ever again—as Mama Joon would have it. A way to be diligent; to be not obstinate, but fully compliant; to respond, quickly and properly—with gusto and good humor—to something vitally amusing in life. She had watched her shoulders hunch themselves in the mirror, and smiled inwardly at the smile that was reflecting back at her, and then she hugged herself, the one who she was literally, at that moment, holding in higher esteem.
Thereafter, every act of sensuality would be for her an act of self-improvement, an aspiration to a better self, to the spring of herself. Her boys were blooms, too—arriving in quick succession, faster than perennials—as duplicitous as roses, beautiful but thorny as all get-out; bruised, prom-night corsages from season after season of self-actualization.
But still, when it came to mothering, Crip wasn’t her first; Alicia was. Alicia had been the baby whose smile gaped with the vulnerability of a buttercup, inspiring Clarissa’s own flowering. Even now, her femininity on parade down there on the sidewalk, Alicia effortlessly contradicted Clarissa’s conceit about her boys. They weren’t blooms at all—maybe some roadside wild things, technically weeds, which occasionally pressed forth some pale triplet of leaves that might, to an inexpert horticulturalist or a desperate bee, pass for petals.
When had their bond been broken, hers and Alicia’s? It must have been not long after Clarissa had had Clarence, her real first. Hers. Oh, but no—she knew when. Exactly when. Yes, it had been one day when she was taking care of them both. (Seeing Alicia down there fumbling with Ramadan was bringing it all back—a memory she’d willed into meaninglessness. But here it was, as alive and fidgety as Ramadan, as undeniable as Mama Joon’s affection for him.) Alicia had been a year and a half old, crying in her crib, while Clarence, only a few months old, was sleeping soundly on Mama Joon’s bed. Hearing her sister in diaper distress, Clarissa went down the hall to the bedroom, where Alicia, ready to be rescued, stopped crying and struck the “pick me up” pose of damp-bottomed toddlers and landlocked angels. But two steps into the room, Clarissa stopped. Alicia hummed a few puffs of anxiety at the delay of her deliverance, and then she followed her sister’s gaze to where Clarence lay, resting peacefully and dry, or if not, oblivious to his wetness, so not in conscious need. Still, Clarissa had moved to her right, away from Alicia, toward the bed, toward Clarence, hers.
Alicia had cried out, not a cry, but the word she knew best. “No!”
Clarissa had heard her, but she could not stop herself. Call it hormones, love, or the inclination to do wrong when no one is watching—but she did it. She rushed past her crying baby sister, whose “no” warbled into a wail. In her hurry to get to Clarence and leave the room, the scene of her crime (a stroke of incivility that even to its perpetrator felt felonious), Clarissa had swooped her baby up with such force she woke him. Startled into unwanted consciousness, he also began to cry.
“There, there,” Clarissa had whispered to him, pressing him to her breast, soothing him, trying to soothe herself. “Did she wake you up with all her damn crying?” As she was carrying him out of the room, she paused, looked down at Alicia and said, “See what you did.”
In the hallway, she had heard Alicia’s shrieks growing louder and louder, even though Clarissa was moving farther away, defying the laws of physics. How was that possible? It was a riddle for a genius, something a latter-day Einstein might puzzle over for decades before finally solving, positing some
perfect relationship between decibels and deception. Guilt had gripped Clarissa. A fear of being found out seized her as well (if science could sort out sound, couldn’t it sort out sin!), and she had called back over her shoulder, “I’m coming back. I promise. I’m coming back.” She had meant it, too. Sitting in Mama Joon’s chair in the living room, she had rocked Clarence to sleep as fast as she could and laid him on the sofa. Then she had run back to the bedroom. Alicia, distrust in her eyes, was there waiting with her arms up, like one of those statuary angels, stuck in stone.
Now, years later, the vestiges of her sister’s betrayal fueling the rejection of her advice about strapping Ramadan in tight, Alicia called up to Clarissa, “I got him.”
“Booker jumped out on me one time before he was one. That was how I knew he could walk. No, run. Ran clean across the street before I could catch him. People looking at me like I’m crazy. Letting a baby run across Rampart Street.”
“I said I got him, Clara.”
“Where y’all going?”
“Just for a walk.”
Ramadan, sensing an adventure, smiled up at his mother and began pumping his arms up and down. The moving would happen soon. When Mama Joon put him in like this and the blue was up there and everything flipped upside down, the moving was about to happen, the awayness, the gone. But there was nothing like the moving. Not until you got to the gone. Getting to the gone was—
Alicia’s silver crucifix, dangling from the chain around her neck, caught Ramadan’s eye, and he reached up and gripped it for a couple of cheery fist pumps before releasing it into a gentle pendulous swing.
“Just like your daddy.” Alicia leaned down farther, smiling back at him, remembering how Mustafa, in the afterglow, liked to play with her crucifix, rubbing it so much she sometimes thought he was less interested in her body than her soul.
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