By the time he was ten feet away from Mama Joon, he could have stopped running altogether and just stood still in the hallway and said, “No!” Because everything had changed. But, obeying the commands of inertia and affection, he kept running.
And this time, as he leaped into Mama Joon’s arms, he was only pretending he was the boy who was pretending to be a bull. It would be his last such performance. Because flying through the air as himself was a whole lot more fun. It was he who had taken flight. Why be a bull when you can be a boy who can fly! Always trying to bring him down for some reason, Clarissa had set him soaring.
By the time the Ebony had tapped the ceiling fan chain in the living room and sent it swinging, and hit the mirror before ricocheting onto the ottoman; by the time the weather lady was pointing at yet another satellite image and saying, “Look at the strength of this one!”; by the time he landed in Mama Joon’s midsection and the two of them started laughing—Ramadan was Ramadan.
* * *
ANY QUESTIONS?
Mama Joon heard her bitchy retort to Clarissa come whizzing back like a boomerang of retribution. The next night, with the hurricane churning into town, as she sat straight up in her uncomfortable seat in the Superdome, arms around a sleeping Ramadan, she had many questions. All for herself, and all of which amounted to one: What the hell was I thinking?
Why had she let nostalgia, her memories of surviving Hurricane Betsy, endanger her and Ramadan? How could she be the head of a family so dysfunctional that she couldn’t trust them to transport her to someplace better than this dubious “shelter of last resort”? Why hadn’t she checked at the Ritz-Carlton, where she’d worked for the past couple of years, to see if they had any vacancies? Maybe not—but she hadn’t even made the call! What would it have cost to charter a private jet? What good was hoarding money if you didn’t use it to take care of yourself, to keep you and yours safe?
She and Ramadan were perched in the Plaza, the first section up from the artificial grassy expanse of the football field, and she was staring out at the 40-yard line. Great seats, if they were here to watch a Saints game. Next to them, a large woman named Cassandra with a leopard-print scarf loosely tied around her head had taken over most of the seats in the row with her three youngsters and their belongings. Friendly but noisy, she kept dialing numbers on her cell phone, but it wasn’t working. At least she had a cell phone. Question: Why don’t I have a cell phone?
And why didn’t she own a car? Why didn’t she know how to drive? She and Ramadan had walked to the Dome. It wasn’t that far from the house, but still—what the hell was she thinking? After the mayor issued that mandatory evacuation, she knew they had to make a move. It was too late to catch a ride out of town, so she had settled for the Superdome. She had been inside the venue only a few times, for a football game, a concert, the circus. It had always struck her as welcoming, the most natural place in the city for thousands of people to gather for a special event. The powers that be must have felt the same way. A big-ass storm is coming. Yes, of course, let’s go to the Dome. Didn’t they know that the productions that thrived in this place took months, if not years, of planning? She didn’t know anything about anything, but even she knew that. What kind of Mickey Rooney–Mickey Mouse governance was this mess? This was a municipal emergency, not a time to just put on a show!
She huffed, more at herself than at politicians and bureaucrats. If you wanted to be forgiving and not count the decades of warnings, then technically they had had only a few days to figure out what to do about people who didn’t have anyplace else to go. But she’d had her whole life to devise a better plan for herself. She was damn near sixty years old and, quiet as it was kept, a woman of means, but still here she sat in the middle of this storm, in this colossal arena, helplessly sheltering in a structure designed for entertainment. She felt as if she’d been situated upon this massive stage, having stupidly accepted a role for which she was ill-prepared, unrehearsed. Or part of a ragtag pickup squad of thousands, none of whom knew any plays, and someone was about to yell, “Hut!” The sheer scale of the building suddenly struck her as indicative of its awesome vulnerability. Before finally drifting off to sleep, like most of the others nearby, her last thoughts were, “Titanic sank . . . Goliath fell.”
* * *
“OH, BUT JUST wait—I’ma beat his lil ass!”
Mama Joon had lost count of how many times Cassandra, during the last week, had threatened that assault (or a more gruesome one) upon her son Ricky, who, on the night of the storm’s arrival, had gone missing in the Superdome—along with Ramadan.
At the moment, the two women were sitting side-by-side on cots in a makeshift evacuation center inside the Astrodome in Houston.
Then Cassandra got up and said, “I’ll be right back, Miss June. I need to go see if they charged my phone yet.” She pointed to her two children asleep on another cot and said, “Would you watch them for me, please?”
“Oh, sure, honey.”
Cassandra’s cell phone hadn’t worked since the night the hurricane hit. At first her cell service wasn’t connecting. Then she had kept trying to use it so much she had drained the battery dry. Her dialing had been as insistent as it was futile—family, friends, 911, New Orleans Police Department Central Lockup (a number she had committed to memory), Charity Hospital. With every number she punched on the handset, she seemed to be taking a poke at a different part of Ricky’s body. Back in the Superdome, when they had both awakened to the sounds of the storm passing and realized the boys were gone, Cassandra had vowed to Mama Joon (and to all within earshot) that she was going to “wear that lil muthafucka out.” Outside the Dome waiting for the buses that would take them away from the heat, funk, and stench of catastrophe emanating from the oceanic remains of New Orleans, she had said, “I’ma tear that lil fool a new asshole.” And along I-10, as their bus had cruised through Beaumont: “Baby, his lil ass is mine!” Just before admitting the truth—she wasn’t hot with anger, but ablaze with anxiety. “Got my nerves on fire!”
A less vocal, emotional inferno herself, Mama Joon would have separated from Cassandra and suffered alone in silence but she felt bound to this stranger by mutual loss and by the same hope of being made whole again. It was too much of a coincidence for her son and Ramadan to have gone missing at the same time, from the same place, and not have been somewhere together—wherever they were. If and when they turned up, maybe they would still be together—and safe. Besides, this woman with the authoritative touch of an Antebellum overseer had an incongruously delicate confectioner’s flair. Mama Joon had reluctantly accepted the praline Cassandra had offered her shortly after the two of them had introduced themselves and first begun to fret about the whereabouts of Ricky and Ramadan. She rarely ate anything other than her own food, and she didn’t have much of a sweet tooth. But it was only neighborly to accept Cassandra’s “made ’em myself” offering. (“Everybody say mines is the best. Thinking ’bout startin’ a bizniss.”) As the sweet, buttery, impossibly moist candy had dissolved in her mouth, almost granule by granule, it liquefied into a deliciousness that soothed her worries with the potency of an antidepressant. Cassandra had been muttering something under her breath about Ricky having raided her stash of treats, and said, “I’ma choke his lil ass”—then, without pause, jovially soliciting Mama Joon’s review of her candy—“not bad, huh?”
In spite of Cassandra’s causticness about Ricky, and because of the coupling of all that professed viciousness with the humility, the innocence, of her question about her, really, for all intents and purposes, perfect confection, Mama Joon had no choice but to betray her own pacifistic nature. She had smiled and mmm-ed her hearty approval. Yes, beat his ass! she might have been saying. This woman was the Betty Crocker of brutality. The mix of culinary acumen whipped together with torturous intent was an oil-and-water concoction to Mama Joon. Cooking, for her, had always been linked to compassion and care. She made her best meals when she was in a good mood and thinking ab
out serving what she was making to her family. Yes, even to her disappointing brood. Wasn’t there always the chance, she had wondered, adding a bay leaf to a pot of beans or sprinkling slivers of an extra clove of garlic and more basil into a tomato sauce, that the perfect balance of spices, hitting a devilish tongue, might set even the most no-count Negro straight? And she had never cooked more lovingly and successfully than since her darling, her last grandbaby, the one who should be here with her now, had started eating table food. The delight on Ramadan’s face after tasting his first spoonful of her gumbo is what inspired her to conjure it again and again. And it was that same vision she would take to the grave, as it was the thing, more than breathing itself, that made her feel alive. When she had swallowed the last of the praline, she had almost shed a tear, for the sublime delicacy, for her complicity in Cassandra’s abusiveness, for the return of despair, which surged through her heart at the precise rate with which the sweetness in her mouth dissipated.
Mama Joon had never hit Ramadan and never would. But since Monday—when she had discovered she had lost him—she had bludgeoned herself with blame. On some level, she had always known she would lose him. That moment at the hospital the day he was born. At first, he was all hers. But then as she glanced down, for a second he looked like one of those maternity-ward mix-ups. For one frightful instant, the baby boy she thought was hers, wasn’t. Her own face had felt as tight and pale—and foreign—as his had looked. In that flash of doubt, she wasn’t even hers. But then something shifted, and there it was. The resemblance. Just enough of an ourness to bring him back to her—and to bring her back to herself.
That was the first time she had lost Ramadan. Quick—and it was over. This time, though, days in duration, the loss had taken its toll. She was a mess. Her gums were sore from grinding her teeth to withstand the self-inflicted pain. Her neck ached, she was having back spasms, and she had noticed a strange bruise the shape and color of a medium-sized eggplant on her right thigh. The muscle and joint issues could have been the result of tossing and turning on this Red Cross cot, but what was that weird mark on her leg? Was she whacking it with her fist as she slept? Submitting subconsciously, unconsciously, to a corporal punishment consistent with the mental abuse she was inflicting upon herself? Most disturbing, the last time she had gone to the bathroom, she had seen evidence of her psychic torment achieving a more intimate physiological expression. After wiping herself, she had gulped when she looked down and saw red stains on the tissue. No, she wasn’t the least bit afraid anything was seriously wrong. She knew it was all because she had lost Ramadan—a personal crisis as dire as the municipal one. The city wasn’t prepared for its struggle and neither was she. (The images on the television monitors in this shelter kept showing the flooded streets of New Orleans on every channel, although when she had seen her neighborhood the other night on CNN, she had quietly rejoiced at the sight of her relatively dry block.) Yes, the splotches on the toilet tissue had shocked her, though not because she was looking at her own blood. She just didn’t know the body could do that. And, no, she didn’t need a doctor to diagnose the problem: her heart was leaking! First the levees, she had thought before flushing—now this.
She could have sat in silence in the Astrodome pining for Ramadan in the abstract until she died for committing the sin of having lost him. The notion of death—oh, God, Alicia! She was experiencing the loss of a child all over again, in a different way. All she could do was pray; she hadn’t prayed yet. And she didn’t need just any prayer. Not an Our Father. Not the Apostle’s Creed. Paternalism and a masculine sensibility would not soothe her broken heart. Like leaving the levees to the Army Corps of Engineers—she’d seen only men on the news. They were dropping sandbags from helicopters to plug some breaches, she had overheard a man say, shaking his head in disbelief. No. Stemming the tide of all that would gush out of her if Ramadan was gone was not to be attended to by men, heavenly or otherwise. This was woman’s work. Nesting. Bleeding, bleeding, bleeding, until you achieved an incubation. Midwifery and wailing. This was about having nurtured a male child only to have him get away from you—as somehow you always knew he would—and the world having its way with him. Your divine boy! Only a woman could come to her aid now. Only a woman who had suffered such a loss. She needed one prayer, one prayer only. No, she thought, as she looked around at the hundreds surrounding her, slouching on their cots in various poses of discontent—she needed two.
She dug around in her purse until she found the old rosary buried deep at the bottom of an inner pocket where it had settled during its many months of disuse. As she lifted the black-and-gold strand, it flickered to life in the Astrodome light. Then she bunched it into the fist of her free hand. Without bothering to find the single bead representing the prayer of her choice, she closed her eyes and said:
Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.
Then, without stopping:
Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve: to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious Advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary!
She sat on her cot saying the Hail Mary and Hail Holy Queen over and over again. The magnanimousness of the prayers—the “us” and “our”—brought the other evacuees into focus, and she was grateful to be pulled out of her singular sadness.
“. . . and after this our exile,” she was praying again, when—
“Miss June! Miss June!”
She heard the world calling her out of the spiritual realm with a rough approximation of who it thought she was, pulling her back into its grand tedium. She opened her eyes and saw, across the field of cots of humanity that lined the Astrodome floor, Cassandra yelling and waving her cell phone in her right hand.
“They found them! They found them!”
Mama Joon didn’t know who the “they” were, but she knew the “them.” Cassandra kissed her phone, making three loud smacking noises. “MMMwah! MMMwah! MMMwah!”
In response, Mama Joon pumped her hands in the air and rejoiced at a distance with the woman whose pronouncements of violence toward her missing son had blossomed into this silly bit of public foreplay with a telecommunications device, and not a particularly fancy one at that. Mama Joon gripped her rosary, and just as reflexively, overwhelmed that Ramadan was coming back to her, that her pleas had been heard, she lifted the fistful of cheap religious jewelry and smashed it into her lips. A couple of the plastic beads scratched her front teeth, and she winced at the way grace, believe it or not, could grate. The sentimentalist in her gave way to the pragmatist. Mary might have been a conduit to God, but Cassandra’s cell phone had messaged the answer to her prayers. Whatever miracles the world had left in it—and she wasn’t cynical enough to think only a few remained—would owe both to God and to that little instrument upon which Cassandra was lavishing an embarrassing display of affection.
In the way that trauma can sometimes leave one vulnerable to the oddest of devotions, Mama Joon found herself transformed from an occasional Catholic and a haphazard Luddite into a woman of prayer and an early adopter.
* * *
“I WANT MY daddy! I want my daddy!”
A week later, Mama Joon was awakening—yet again—to the voice-over of Ramadan’s nightmare. She moaned as she propped herself up on the edge of her twin bed in their little motel room in Southwest Houston. Then she crept over to Ramadan and rubbed his back until he recessed into silence—“I want . . . I want . . . I . . . I . . .”—back into some semblance of soundness.
But she was so flustered by his cries tonight that she couldn’t go back to sleep. Ramadan’s uncensored desire echoed throughout the small c
ave of a room. She decided to take a shower, if only to blot out the boy’s shouts, which she couldn’t help feel were a commentary on some deficiency of her own. Stepping into the splattering wetness, she thought about how she had raised two daughters, not particularly well—she’d be the first to admit it. Still, she had known how to do that. But here was Ramadan calling out to the world, or at least to her, that he wanted more than her. Her grandson was out there squirming in a strange bed, crying out for someone, a stranger, to give him something she apparently could not. What was that? Protection? A different kind of love? Harder hugs than she could muster? A manly projection of his little boy self? Someone hairier, more muscular, taller—someone quite literally to look up to! Yes, yes, yes to all of that, no doubt. Oh, God—the limitations of matriarchy!
She couldn’t even remember the Arab-sounding name of the young man she’d seen with Alicia. Even if she could, there was no telling what might have happened to him in the storm, assuming he was even still in New Orleans. Then, as the water splashed her face, hiding her tears—saying another Hail Mary, now and at the hour of our death . . . our—she heard a sound, repeated, that seemed to toll with meaning. A word. Our. Maybe it was nothing—but it felt like something. Maybe—it was something.
When she and Ramadan had been packing to evacuate to the Superdome, she realized she needed a loaf of bread. Having slaved over that roast, there was no way she was going to leave it or throw it out. And, of course, she couldn’t bring it with them whole, so she was determined to make sandwiches. Instead of going all the way to Matassa’s, she and Ramadan had made the short walk to the Quicky Mart, which she rarely went to, thinking it less a grocery store than a filling station. She knew Alicia used to shop there, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Buying food where people pumped gas was an unpalatable proposition. The smell of petroleum nauseated her. In fact, the idea of gas gave her gas. But that day, with the city a-twitter and in full evacuation mode, she had held her breath and tromped into the place that, in that moment at least, was the very essence of itself—a convenience store. As she was checking out and paying the man behind the counter, Ramadan had heard someone blowing a trumpet and run outside toward Rampart Street. “A parade!” he had yelled.
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