The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

by Junauda Petrus

  “Since you like it like that, Imma get that book soon and read. My father has so many books, I sure this in there, somewhere.” She picks up the Whitney vinyl that was leaning on the side of my bed and gives it a look and starts tracing alongside Whitney’s face and lips. Audre’s nails look like the color of lemon pudding.

  “I like your nails,” I say.

  “Thank you, Jazzy do it for me. My toes too. The yellow remind me of a friend I miss,” she says.

  “A friend in Trinidad?” I ask.

  She is quiet and then nods in her secretive way, which I learned means she doesn’t want to talk about something. She stares out my window and then lies back down next to me with Whitney on her chest and looks up at the ceiling. She is filling my bed with the sweetest smell as she lies there. She is wearing skinny jeans, and they make her big thighs look even more powerful and pretty. We lie there quietly, together. After a minute, I try my best to match the pace of her breath for no particular reason.

  “Sahir!!” my mom yells from downstairs, all hood and loud. “Saaaaaahiiiiirrrr!! I ain’t gon’ tell you again! Come clean up all this hot Lego mess that just busted my foot up. I’m ’bout to keep all of these for me and hide ’em, since you ain’t taking care of ’em!” My mama screams this empty threat every other day when she jack her whole foot up on one of his Legos. But she never do since Sahir loves two things the most: André 3000 and Legos.

  “Is it all right with you if I pass through after school and lime with you? I miss you and I can try and bring you stuff that would make you feel better,” Audre says suddenly. I smile at her and her slang from home, but I’m not sure how to answer her. I don’t know if I want her to be seeing me sick.

  “My grandma Queenie has taught me a lot about healing and I can make you some of the tings she show me.” Her eyes hold mine for what seems like a long time.

  “Okay,” I finally say. “That’d be okay. I’m glad you stopped by today, and I’m sorry I been acting weird.” Suddenly I’m fighting my eyelids meeting and yawning. I stayed up late listening to Whitney and reading Afua.

  “I ain’t vex at all. I see you fallin’ asleep. Dream sweet.”

  I can’t help but close my eyes and follow her guidance into the other side of darkness.

  MABEL

  NEXT TIME I’M AWAKE it is in the middle of the night, and I get the urge to write Afua. Maybe he still uses the P.O. Box, but whatever, for some reason I can’t rest until I write him. I pull a notebook out of my backpack that is lying by my bed, it got Whitney on the cover of it, of course—all my notebooks do. On this one, she is a teenager with her hair pulled up high and she’s smiling sweetly into the camera.

  I start writing.

  Dear Mr. Afua,

  Hi. My name is Mabel Green. How are you? I hope well. There was an address in the back of your book. I don’t even think it works no more since you wrote your book way back in the ’90s. I feel strange writing this, but I feel like I need to, because I really feel alone and need to talk to somebody. I don’t even know what I need to say.

  I guess I just needed to say your book changed my life and thank you for writing it. Even though I am young and in a different situation than you were, I felt like you wrote it for me.

  I also need to tell you something else. I’m dying. Of some rare shit. (Is it cool if I cuss?) Anyway, that is the first time I said I’m dying out loud. Even if it is in a letter, I think it counts. I don’t even understand the disease all of the way, but dying is all I can think about. I’m only sixteen, and my life hasn’t been very long or as significant as yours. But my life matters to me, like I’m sure yours matters to you and I don’t wanna die yet. Even though I know this can be a messed-up world, I want to know it more.

  When the doctors first told me and my parents, I felt like I died right there. Dying is the loneliest feeling I didn’t even know could exist. But on top of that, my body hurts so bad all the time too. I used to love eating. Now I always feel like I am going to throw up. I can’t really play ball for real no more or help around the house. Every day is long and every night is longer, but every day my life is getting shorter, which makes me more scared and more sad.

  How do you deal with knowing you’re gonna die? I just had to ask you, since it is so hard for me. What I feel most guilty about is that before this diagnosis, when I was younger, I wondered what people would do if I died. I guess sometimes I felt so sad about my life and no one seemed to get me. I regret all those feelings now. I don’t even know who I am yet in life and soon I won’t be nothing.

  My parents are scared too. They don’t wanna give up hope on their “baby girl.” But I don’t feel like a “baby girl” no more. I feel old and weak and sick all of the time. In a weird way, their hope makes me feel bad, since I feel hopeless.

  One thing that is good about life, even if it is kind of random, is Whitney Houston’s music has been really getting me through. She is my favorite, always has been. Another thing is, I have a friend who understands me. Her name is Audre. She is from Trinidad so she talks real pretty, and she is weird and nerdy like me, but in a different way. She makes me feel like I can just be myself. I still don’t talk to her about being sick, but she don’t make me. She takes care of me and makes sure I try and eat things and I keep my head up.

  This may be a weird letter from a strange teenager, but if you get it, I hope you don’t mind. I don’t even know if you are still alive. I ain’t search you online or nothing, since I didn’t want to find out. As long as I can read your words in your book, you are alive to me. I think if you were dead, I would be broken in a way. Reading everything you wrote, you ain’t deserve to die. It seems that you, like me, had no chance to be anything either. Thank you for your words and helping me feel not so lonely.

  Sincerely,

  Mabel Green

  SCORPIO SEASON

  i desired to see myself in the nocturne of me

  night vision to look into my shadow

  the secrets and shames of my daddy’s DNA

  his tears coming from a wetness deep inside that was all hid

  my mama’s womb is encrusted in rubies

  of calcified blood

  heirlooms of mothers and grandmothers

  whose womb never got to belong to them

  they sit with me so I can see the root of things

  a sacred death is the climax of life and all death is rebirth

  a soul’s portal into parts unknown

  i deep dived to our ancestors’ Atlantis

  they jumped middle passage to immigrate underwater

  and accumulate wisdom from deep-sea sages

  wise in liquid intelligence

  when to flow, float, and sink

  i went underground

  i grew an armor to protect my secrets and inner delicate

  i was magic and ritual and communion

  and goddess and rain

  and orisha and ancestor

  and fire and dirt

  AFUA

  ANCESTOR SONG FOR THE BROKENHEARTED

  As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. My mom, dad, brothers, and I used to go to the top of our apartment building on 143rd Street and look through a big telescope that my dad found at a pawnshop downtown. On a clear night, our family would take this telescope, our dinner, and a boom box up to the roof, and we would take turns looking at the stars and planets and moon while we listened to tapes by Smokey Robinson, Chaka Khan, Earth Wind & Fire, and John Coltrane and others. I used to love it so much, I never wanted to go back inside. I was so obsessed, my mom got me a book all about astronauts and space, planets and stars for my ninth birthday.

  In the book, I was inspired seeing the women and men of NASA in orange jumpsuits hover in tight and orderly space. They would travel in space capsules and shuttles with dials, buttons, and lev
ers that they knew how to use to command the travel of these vessels through the last frontier. They could watch our planet Earth, floating in the distance, suspended in an expanse of quiet blackness. Our planet seemed inherently gentle when viewed from space, a rounded, smooth and simple Eden, innocently hovering in galactic murkiness. Maybe, as a kid, I subconsciously thought distance would make the heart grow fonder of the life I had. The reality of our planet. My hood could get fuzzier and more tender, the more distant I got in my spaceship.

  Home on Earth was Harlem, glory of creative Blackness and revolution that, in the 1970s and 1980s of my childhood, became depressed and embattled, transformed from a tight community of Black folks into a province of suffering under broken dreams and high unemployment. Many of our families were susceptible to the escape, violence, and enterprise of crack cocaine, and my dad devastatingly succumbed to this addiction. My mom, brothers, and I were drained in the mayhem of his jonesing. Stuff we loved, including the telescope, disappeared, and his gentle nature mutated into the anxiety of addiction. I saw my mom try to love and be united with a man who was shackled to his own destruction. My brothers and I all coped in our own way; I mainly escaped to the streets. And to my best friend James’s house.

  But more than one thing can be true. In all of that heavy, I still remember times when my dad would be clean, and home was a place that was filled with the love of our parents, and the cacophony of our joy and laughter. I understood from an early age that people have many sides and aspects to them. And as I have grown older, I have been grateful for astrology in helping me love and see my dad and mom in their complexity and cosmology.

  On death row, in some ways, I feel like I did become the astronaut of my childhood aspirations. I live suspended, distant and hyperaware of all existence. I’m alien, yet affiliated, living like a satellite, away from all that I have ever known.

  I know more about human life now that I have moved my research on planetary existence from the streets of Harlem and Philadelphia to my Spartan spaceship of four cement walls, steel commode, and a cot. The space travelers of my felonious legion are drafted from our streets, vulnerable and afraid, some innocent, some guilty, all trained and broken in this system. We are sensitive scientists of the soul who stumble into a laboratory of the self we can’t figure out how to escape. We spend our days rereading our star maps, trying to understand how we ended up at this unintended destination. The solitude of these walls allows us the time to explore the vastness inside of us in ways that our survival on planet Earth never could.

  I don’t glorify this irony.

  One thing I learned in the book my mom got me is that, by the time you see a star’s light shining bright, it could be dead already. Its brightness is a remnant of ancient creation. The star is the bright pinprick of heaven shining through darkness, an imploding message sent from a burning ancestor. Its illumination offers an arrangement of meaning from the sky. Sometimes, I think that is what astrology is: wisdom from our ancestors, the stars.

  What is it like to be an astronaut of incarceration? It’s stomped wings and a choked heart. The sound of my mom’s screams in that Pennsylvania courtroom made me deaf, like I was actually being pushed beyond and into the stratosphere. She swallowed all of sound into her pain. I saw my dad poured out of himself, shriveled, his breath hijacked, trying to be a pillar to my mom, as he crumpled.

  A couple days after I turned nineteen, I was sentenced to die. That moment was my death in a way, everything else afterward has been a drawn-out formality of the state.

  * * *

  • • •

  When I got to my prison cell, after the impact and awe of the verdict and the trauma of being processed to my death, I couldn’t sleep. I cried like a baby for my mama. I grieved James till my lips were dry and crusted from the salt of tears. I starved myself to bone. I felt so sick and afraid, sweating and shaking like I was dying already. My best friend was dead, and I was in jail because they said I did it, a jury of my peers. Peers who were all white and not from Harlem. That first night was the longest night of my life, and every night after was a century long. When that first darkness descended on our cell block, there was noises coming from every direction, noises of agony and repressed life. And I had no idea how I got there. Why did I let James leave with that cop when I had that feeling? Who killed my friend and that cop and why?

  I would lie in bed, close my eyes, and see the stars. I would imagine James laughing and remember how falsetto and silly his joy was. In my mind’s eye, I would see the castles that I saw in books about Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, and the slave trade. I would think of other worlds. I would think of the stars and what they would say to me now. What wisdom from before life, from before pain and death and existence did these stars have for an innocent kid on death row? I talked to James in my head, because I didn’t know what else to do. I prayed that if I could feel the stars in me and ask them for guidance, I could solve the equation of my pain, my innocence, and my captivity. Then one day the stars spoke back.

  One day I got a package of books in the mail. My mother and Ms. Valerie had sent me mine and James’s books. Ms. Valerie had sent me a letter saying that she believed me and that she knows I would never hurt, let alone kill, her son. She said she knew we were like brothers and that I will always be a son to her and that she knew he would want me to have his books and she will send me more whenever she could afford to. This is the one thing that I think helped me live even this long. I knew I didn’t kill him, but having her believe me made me feel free in a way, even if I was still going to die.

  Among the books sent to me were two astrology books of James’s as well as other spiritual books. He had read and dog-eared all of them. I opened up the astrology book and saw his notes and underlines and started to cry. It was like he was there reading the books with me.

  I read and reread the astrology books. I memorized each sign, its element, and ruling planets. I studied the characteristics of each sign and what each symbolized. I learned how to make charts. One of the books had a chart for all of the movements of these planets and where they would be until the year 2050, which gave me hope that maybe I could be around that long too.

  * * *

  • • •

  I heard that during the Attica riot, the prisoners who were a part of the rebellion slept in the prison yard so they could be under the stars. I totally dig why.

  A man on my cell block started a fire one night. He must have wanted to destroy this place, bring it down to flames; it consumed him too. He could have waited for a final supper and an IV of a supposedly painless demise, but he was an Aries Sun with a Sagittarius Moon, Scorpio rising, so you do the math. In the middle of the night, an alarm goes off and I’m not sure what is happening. Moments later, a guard calls my name, handcuffs me, and pulls me out of my cell and into a hallway that is filled with smoke and commotion. I’m coughing and my eyes are tearing up, smelling burning flesh, mattress, and building. I cover my face so as to not vomit or absorb any more agony from the stench. We are evacuated into the yard, and I go from a suffocating anxiety into a crisp, chill air with an open sky with stars.

  It was the first time I’d seen night in years.

  How do you explain the feeling of seeing the night sky after years and years of artificial light and darkness, a life of walls? It felt like I was arriving to this planet for the first time. The sky looked brand-new. There were so many stars and mists of galaxy above us, I heard gasps from some of the other captive cats, and then silence from the awe of it. We were convicts of earth entering a cosmic cathedral. As an incarcerated man who studies astrology, I felt like I’d arrived in Mecca, awakened into the most beautiful pilgrimage, a night sky on planet Earth. The sight filled my eyes with water and my chest with hope. Hope because I realized I was among this limitlessness the whole time, even if caged within a finite box. I thought of James and how we would chill outside in Harlem and then in Philly, seeing a
sky with a sprinkling of stars, most of the sky darkened by city lights. Now, I was in the middle of nowhere and the stars couldn’t hide. I looked at the drinking gourd, the big bear constellation that was the astrology that helped Black people on the Underground Railroad find freedom in their own unthinkable enslavement. I asked those stars in that moment to sprinkle my heart with any hope they had left.

  MABEL

  I FEEL SOME PARTS OF AFUA’S BOOK RIGHT AWAY. How he loves his family. How much he loved James and how he looked forward to loving him more. But Afua also wrote a whole chapter about doing an astrological reading for a guy with actual swastika tattoos—a real fucking Nazi who killed a couple because the guy was Black and the girl was white. I didn’t know what to do with this when I first read it. I still don’t.

  In some ways, reading Afua feels like being back in Mr. Trinh’s class, struggling with a new poet. Afua even writes some of his own poems:

  Remember that you are from the stars and that you can return to them.

  Remember you are a sacred being of love, no matter the darkness of an earthly life.

  Remember you come from light and return to freedom.

  Remember you are the healing of your ancestors, that you are Chiron the wounded healer.

  You heal through the compassion you give to yourself.

  Remember you are an astronaut of the soul.

  May you find solace in your travel to another star.

  I started using this poem as a prayer for myself at night and any other time I was feeling scared. He had written this poem to recite to the other men who were on death row with him to give them hope and as their astrological final rites as they left the block to be executed.