His Last Wife

by Grace Octavia

  “The DA? Jamison went to Morehouse with Charles Brown. He won’t even talk to you?” Kerry asked. “That doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’s you. Maybe that’s why he won’t speak to you.”

  “Why? Because I’m white?” Stan asked, sensing some hesitation in Kerry’s voice. “No. That’s not it. Listen to me, Kerry. You and I both know I’m not just the best man for the money for this job. I’m the best man, period. I win my cases. I don’t lose. Val didn’t get my number from some phone book or on Craigslist. I’m the best criminal defense attorney in the state. And I’m telling you I just need a little more time. There’s something going on here and I need to figure it out. Don’t give up on me now. You give up now, and I really don’t know if you’ll ever get out. That’s how serious this is. That’s how many doors are closed. Locked.”

  Kerry felt a bubble of anxiety burst in her throat and travel up to her tear ducts. This was a heavy load. Too much for her to bear and survive it sane. In 1997 she let her best friend talk her into going to Spelman’s Valentine’s Day dance and there she met Jamison. He became her best friend. He was the only one who understood her. Could make sense of her crazy mother and crazy upbringing. Could laugh at it all. Laugh at her. And still love her anyway. After the wedding it did all fall apart. But she knew the role she’d played. Jamison was no angel, but she wasn’t innocent, either. And when it was all said and done, after they packed their bags and walked away from each other, she still loved him. And she knew he loved her. So what was all of this? How did this happen? How did she get here?

  Kerry couldn’t say another word. If she opened her mouth she was afraid something like fire would come from her throat and burn everything in the world.

  “I’ll be there to see you next week,” Stan said, hearing Kerry’s soft sobs. “I think Val is stopping by there this weekend. You hold on tight until then, kid. You hear me?”

  Kerry hung up the phone and dragged her body away on shuffling feet.

  Still crying with memories of her past life creeping in, she went outside, hoping a last bit of sunlight or maybe the Georgia breeze that even the jail walls couldn’t keep away would make her feel like somebody who was alive again. Or maybe the glimpse of the outside world above her head would remind her of some reality she was keeping from herself. She considered that maybe she was wrong and everyone else was right. Had she done it? Had she pushed Jamison from that rooftop? Why would she do it?

  Maybe no part in the story had gone the way she was telling it. Jamison always needed more attention. Needed her to say things a certain way. Believe what he believed. Do what he did. The fragile black-male ego stuff. He hated her family and everything that it stood for. That old Atlanta. That old money. Black folks who acted like white folks and loved those white folks more than their own black folks. The poor black folks. “What does Jack and Jill do for the community? What does a cotillion do to save the lives of poor black children who can’t read or write or think straight because they didn’t have breakfast that morning?” Jamison asked one night when they first started dating and were hugged up in bed in his dorm at Morehouse. Kerry had looked up at the Lil’ Kim poster hanging on the side of his bed and laughed. She was just telling him how much she hated being in Jack and Jill and hated those cotillions. “Why are you laughing?” Jamison asked her and she said, “No reason. I was a kid. I didn’t know anything about that. My mother signed me up and I went. I had to.” Jamison hopped off the bed and looked at Kerry like she was a thief. “You had a choice, Kerry. You always have a choice. Just admit that you liked it. You enjoyed it. Just say it.” Kerry rolled her eyes and pulled Jamison’s cheap, thin sheet up over her bare breasts. “Sometimes I did, I guess. It wasn’t all bad. Sometimes it was fun.” Jamison looked at Kerry with disgust in his eyes. “I hated all those organizations when I was kid. I hated them because I knew they hated me. Wanted me to go away and disappear. Come back a new Negro who knew how to act right. How to act like them. Sit at the big table and eat rare steak and talk about going to Morehouse and pledging the right fraternity and marrying the right woman and moving into the right neighborhood with just enough black people and vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard.” Kerry asked, “What’s wrong with all that? You’re at Morehouse. You pledged.” She paused and added, “You’re dating me.” Jamison cut his stare from Kerry and his shoulders sunk down really low. He stood there and looked at Lil’ Kim on the wall for a little while like he was in a trance. Her legs cocked open. Her crotch scrubbing the ground. Erykah Badu’s new jam “On & On” was playing on his CD player. He suddenly became so aware of the contradiction in the room. He walked out and left the door wide open. Kerry would let herself out hours later.

  That became the thing between them. Always the thing between them. Good girl and bad boy. Rich bitch and born hustler.

  When Jamison started cheating, Kerry knew what kind of woman she had to be. Before she even met Coreen, she knew she was nothing like her. She was feeding that side of Jamison that Kerry could never touch. That he’d never let her see.

  And although she loved him and he loved her, Kerry knew she’d never be enough. She could never be herself and someone else. Love wouldn’t change that. And Jamison would never just accept that. She knew it and he knew it.

  Maybe that was why she threw him off the roof. To quiet that constant quiz of who she was and what she could do to stop it.

  With the Georgia breeze blowing over her skin in the jail yard, Kerry closed her eyes and imagined doing it. Being high up there on the roof over all of Atlanta around her. Her past a maze down below through the streets and highways. She could see I-85. Wasn’t that the way she’d taken to Coreen’s house that night when she was pregnant? When Tyrian was so heavy in her belly she could hardly walk? And she had to get up out of her bed and into her car, swollen ankles and all, to go out into the world to find her damn husband. Get him from another woman’s house, smack in the middle of the ghetto. Make him see her. His wife. His first wife.

  She imagined her hands pressed against Jamison’s chest on that roof. Every question he’d ever asked her about who she was and how she could change, she turned on him. Who the fuck was he? How the fuck could he change? How the fuck could he do this to her? Promise her so much and then take it all away for some other woman? For Coreen? And a stroke of his ego?

  She pushed.

  She pushed.

  She pushed.

  She imagined pushing and pushing and pushing.

  And he fell.

  And he died.

  And here she was, paying for it all.

  Kerry opened her eyes and through tears, she looked out at what all her past had gotten her. Even though she hadn’t really killed her ex-husband, she knew that where she’d found herself had to have been linked to that past. What she was guilty of . . . what she wasn’t guilty of . . . none of it mattered. She only knew that if she wanted to change her future, to get out of that place, she had to change herself now. But how?

  “What you doing out on the yard, sis? You ain’t never out here.”

  Kerry turned and a woman she recognized as the leader of one of the groups sprinkled out on the yard had sat on the bench beside her. The social structure of the women on the jail yard was pretty much a mirror of the social structure they’d created as girls on the schoolyard. There were cool girls and nerdy girls. Good girls and bad girls. And then everything else in between clumped up in little gaggles around the open field. But now that they were women, the group titles had become more complex and even limited. There were the black women and white women. The lesbians and the straights. Rich and poor. Deadly. Marked for death.

  The woman who’d just called Kerry “sis” belonged to what Kerry would describe as the earthy black chicks. The ones who probably wore head wraps up to the ceiling like Erykah Badu outside of jail and had likely gotten locked up for staging some kind of protest about legalizing marijuana or public breastfeeding. They all had dreadlocks and tattoos of ankhs and other symbols Kerry could
n’t recognize on their forearms and at the nape of their necks. They prayed in a group facing the east, like Muslims, in the morning and read poetry in the library at night. That’s where Kerry always saw them. And she’d heard the woman sitting beside her referred to as Auset. Sister Auset Supreme. She had a head of long, thick black hair that was a natural Afro, but from the back it hung below her elbows when she stood and walked across the yard. Her skin was a pale tawny and she had patches of freckles under each eye. She had a slender body that exposed her muscles and hinted at a lifestyle that probably included plant-based eating and lots of yoga. And while she looked not a day over twenty-five, something in her eyes and walk and the way the other “sistren” responded to her made it clear that she was much older—probably in her early forties or so.

  “I come out here sometimes,” Kerry said, answering Auset’s question about why she was sitting on the yard. “Clear my mind. Get some air.” Kerry wiped her tears and tried to look away from Auset like it was even possible or necessary to hide her tears.

  “Clear your mind out here? Seems impossible.” She smiled at Kerry. “I’m Auset.” She nodded deeply, almost bowing.

  “I’m Ker—”

  “I know who you are. We all do.”

  “We?” Kerry repeated.

  “The sistren. We know who you are.” Auset nodded toward her group sitting out in the grass toward the back of the yard. Had it not been for their inmate jail jumpers, they’d look like they were enjoying some late-evening picnic in Malcolm X Park. “I guess everyone here knows who you are, though.”

  Kerry nodded.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m not,” Kerry said bluntly and she felt good for not lying to be pleasant. And for some reason, she felt safe sharing that little vulnerability with the woman sitting beside her.

  “Well, that’s okay, I guess. What you’re going through can’t be easy,” Auset said. “But then I guess it isn’t any more than what Sister Betty Shabazz or Sister Coretta Scott King went through. So, you can do it.”

  Kerry laughed aloud. “Well, I wouldn’t dare put myself on their level. Not at all. Betty? Coretta? Kerry?” Kerry laughed some more. “Imagine that. Why don’t we just throw in Winnie Mandela and Kathleen Cleaver?”

  “Right on.” Auset didn’t laugh with Kerry. She pumped a Black Power fist in the air. “How do you figure you’re not?”

  “Not what?”

  “Like them.”

  “Well, I’m just me. And if you mean Jamison . . . it’s not—he’s not like one of those men. He wasn’t,” Kerry explained.

  “A lot of us thought he was. He did some great things for all of us. You know? The short time he was in office. Most of those fucking politicians—by the time they make it into office riding that black vote—they forget all about their people. He didn’t. We had a lot of expectations for Brother Taylor.”

  Kerry hardly nodded, but she agreed with everything Auset was saying. Jamison had taken his run and win so seriously. When he’d first told Kerry he was thinking of running for mayor and offered to sell her 10 percent of his dividends from Rake it Up so he could have campaign funds, she thought he was just bored with running the company and wanted a quick out. Selling her that 10 percent would put her in control and he’d just be on the sidelines as they restructured and got a new CEO and president. But he stepped all the way back and when he emerged with his actual platform for mayor, she realized he was really going to do it. He wasn’t happy with the sitting mayor’s decision to shut down all of the midnight basketball programs in the city and use the money to build a new wing at the airport. Like most of the moves of the controversial “New Atlanta” mayor, the action felt like another nod toward the gentrification that was pushing all of the color out of the city. Where there was once public housing, there were now high-priced condos. Affordable and once family-friendly shopping centers and entertainment venues were replaced by urban “live, work, play” enclaves that attracted yuppies and buppies and anyone else who could afford a ten-dollar panini and eight-dollar craft beer for lunch. Jamison wanted to challenge this notion that a new Atlanta had to mean a white or rich Atlanta. The city had to be for everyone. All races. All classes. His campaign slogan: “For every resident, a new promise.” He won. And when he got into office, he went straight to work and hustled his way through like the old Jamison Kerry knew and loved . . . before the divorce.

  “A lot of people didn’t like that stuff he was doing,” Auset reminded Kerry. “Not those rich crackers trying to buy out the city. You know at the height of the recession they was setting us all up.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Mean?” Auset looked at Kerry, surprised by her question. “You don’t know? They set it up. What happens when a good man loses his job? He can’t pay his mortgage. He loses his home. Funny how when that happened, people showed up with cash, ready to buy those houses. They auctioned off half of Southwest Atlanta on the courthouse steps. Now they got this Beltline coming through the city. New everything. That ain’t nothing but the big lockout and lockdown. Black people won’t be able to move in this city in ten years without a fucking ankle bracelet on. That’s why they wanted to get rid of Mayor Taylor.” Auset looked into Kerry’s eyes. “He was in the way.”

  “I don’t think it was that deep. Yes, he was bumping heads with some folks, Governor Cade and those guys, but it was just politics as usual,” Kerry said.

  “Politics as usual? Is that what got Ras killed?” Auset asked, bringing up Jamison’s old Morehouse roommate who’d become a community activist and was working with Jamison on some projects to get scholarships for college-bound black males from Atlanta’s poorest neighborhoods. He’d been mysteriously gunned down after Jamison denied an indirect order from the governor to end the program in favor of labor-training initiatives he’d wanted to institute for black males in the city.

  It was a sobering moment for Kerry. She knew Alfred Jenkins from the Atlanta University Center before he was “Ras” Baruti, before he’d grown out his dreadlocks and became a leader of local grassroots organizations. Though she and Jamison had already split when Jamison and Ras started working together, she didn’t believe any of the charges the district attorney came up with to put Ras behind bars before he was killed. They’d painted him as a drug kingpin and an arms dealer.

  For the first time, Kerry picked up that little dot and connected it to the line of dots leading to her current situation.

  “What happened to Ras didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Jamison,” Kerry said, though she was really just thinking aloud.

  “That’s what they want you to believe, sis. But that’s not what the people believe. We—and by ‘we’ this time I mean black people, conscious people, the community—know why they killed Ras. Why they wanted to kill Jamison.”

  Kerry got up from the bench and looked toward the door leading back into the jail. It was almost time for her to be in the kitchen to help start dinner service. But that wasn’t why she’d suddenly felt prickled and wanted to go inside. She’d heard all of this before. When Ras died, there was a whole grassroots movement mobilizing that painted pictures of Ras and Jamison like they were starting some new Black Panther Party. There were even rumors that they’d both joined some militant organization that had camps in Israel, Cuba, even Venezuela. To Kerry, this was just as much of a myth as the idea Auset was sharing about “the man” and that old, haunting “they” who were out there trying to enact genocide on any black person with a brain.

  “Look, I’m happy you believed in Jamison. He really did enjoy being mayor and if he’d stayed in office I know he would’ve done some good, but there is no ‘they’ in his case,” Kerry said in her corporate voice. “I was there when he died. And there wasn’t any ‘they’ up there on the roof. It was his past. That’s what killed Jamison. His past. Saw it with my own eyes.”

  “But what if I told you your eyes haven’t been made to see things the way they re
ally are? That you’re asleep to everything that’s really going on? You’ve been programmed?”

  “Programmed? Right.” Kerry laughed like Auset had said something that was totally ludicrous. She started heading toward the door. “Maybe you and the sistren should stop smuggling weed into the jail. Makes you do and say crazy things, you know?” Kerry smiled at Auset once more and turned her back. “Programmed?” she repeated, still laughing. “Right.”

  After dinner, Garcia-Bell was in Kerry’s cell. They were talking and laughing in what had become a kind of nightly routine since Kerry’s fight with Thompson. Their once-convenient friendship had taken on a new depth and on some nights anyone listening outside the door might think the women were at an adult slumber party. They mostly chatted about their mothers. Their dreams. How their mothers had ruined their dreams. Talking to Garcia-Bell, Kerry remembered how badly she’d wanted to be a doctor. That she’d had her heart set on Cornell Medical School and when she didn’t get in, she was crushed. So much so that she could hardly get out of bed. And though Jamison had gotten into Cornell, he decided to stay in Atlanta to wait for her. Garcia-Bell wanted to own a trucking fleet. Five or six haulers moving whatever from wherever to someplace else. She’d been a certified truck driver for ten years. She had a business plan and all the contacts she needed. But her criminal record made financing her own truck impossible.