Something Like Beautiful

by asha bandele

  “It’s a total lockdown joint,” Rashid writes me, in a letter from his new address. “Everybody here is in the box. That’s how they’re building prisons now,” he writes. “We’re locked in cells that are the same size as single cells everywhere else, but here it’s all double-bunked. Can you imagine being locked up in a room the size of your bathroom, with a stranger? For months? For something you didn’t do?”

  I am at work as I read this. I am trying to live this new life as a mother, as a magazine editor. And I am trying to do it with a measure of competency and cool, but here is my reality. I am sitting in a cubicle waiting for Denzel Washington to call back on a story I am writing, but no matter how hard I am pushing for this new life, looking dignified and hip at the same time sitting in a cubicle, I am snatched back into the old one. And as much as I love Rashid, I don’t want to be. I don’t want to spend my days and nights worried about the world of prisons and guards but I can’t imagine leaving this man alone, this man I made a child with. I want to curl up in a corner, sob, scream. I want to call a friend, tell her what’s happening. But I am at work. I am a mother. I cannot lose it. At work there is professional decorum. At home there is my baby, and my loss of calm destroys hers. Of course out in the street if you lose it and you’re Black, you’re doing time. I tell no one what’s happening, not for some time, not until I trust I can say the words, but devoid of emotion.

  The transformation into that person, the one without feelings, begins on the subway ride home as I finish reading the rest of the letter. On that 3 train speeding toward Brooklyn, it may look like me, but it isn’t me. It is someone else, an impostor, a pod person. She can walk through the world without reaction, and certainly without tears. I let her take in the information, consider it, but not process it. I let her go home, breast-feed my child, go to sleep in my bed. Me, the real asha, has already ferreted out a hiding place and stored myself there, while a Step-ford mother, worker, woman, wife, moves about in my stead. She deals with everything, including the words contained in Rashid’s letter:

  “If you want to come see me, just so you know, visits here are at night from 6 to 9 PM.” After that he adds, “You cannot come see me the first 30 days though. The first 30 days here, all visits are behind the glass. And I’d have to be shackled. Leg irons and cuffs. You and my daughter can’t see me like that. But after 30 days—now only 22!—I can be at a table with you. That’s if you want to come.”

  I knew I would make the trip and Rashid did too. Despite my decision to retreat from half of my life being spent behind prison walls, my need to keep prisons from institutionalizing my child, I could not let Rashid sit in a cell for four months with no outside contact, no outside confirmation that he was still alive and that he mattered and that he would always matter. To me, certainly, but most of all to our daughter.

  Chapter 6

  crash

  We leave the house, Nisa and D and I, like fugitives under the dark weight of night, quietly slipping out of my apartment building sometime before four in the morning. Rashid’s father and best friend had offered to split the nine-hour drive upstate so that Nisa could see her dad. So that he could see her. The night before we were to leave, Rashid’s dad backed out, but D did not, and together we began the nine-hour journey to a place none of us would ever, in a world we made, a world we had control over, choose as a destination. It was March 3, 2001, and the weatherman was predicting a horrible snowstorm that weekend, but I didn’t learn this until after.

  Later, when my parents asked me what happened, how did things go wrong on that trip to see Rashid, I said to them that all I remembered was telling D I was getting tired, that I didn’t think I could stay awake with him any longer. I suggested to him that we pull over; we had already been driving about seven and a half hours and we had plenty of time to rest by the side of the road for a little while and still arrive at our hotel, put our things away, freshen up, eat, and head over to the facility on time. He said, no, no. Just like that. “No, no. I got this. Go to sleep, baby girl.” After that, I said to my mother, all I remember is screaming, begging him to get control of the vehicle; he was not able to do it.

  We hydroplaned, flipped, went over a thirty-foot ravine, cut down four or five trees, and the car broke into three parts before finally stopping. And then suddenly there was a man standing over us, a stranger who had seen the accident. “I don’t think there are any survivors here,” he said. “No,” I mumbled at him, I think, anyway, that the word came out. I struggled to get myself loose, screamed for them to help my baby, who was strapped tight in her car seat in the back.

  The stranger helped me out of the car and I ran, stumbled, ran some more, stumbled some more, over to the other side of the car to get to my baby, to pull her out of the wreckage and then back up the hill where paramedics were already arriving. D followed behind us a few minutes later. I kept thinking that the car was going to blow up just like in the movies. It’s real, you know, the thing that takes over you, the superhuman strength thing, when you think your child’s life is on the line. I’m sure I’ve never moved so fast in my life, certain as I was that there was going to be an explosion.

  When we reach the top of the ravine, the paramedics strap me onto a board and they separate Nisa from me. I don’t know where she is. The paramedic brings her over but I cannot touch her. I am strapped down. There is a fear that something is broken and they want to keep me immobilized. I don’t remember how D was taken out of the car, or how he gets to the hospital, and I don’t remember if Nisa and I ride in the same ambulance. I don’t remember seeing my baby again until we are in the hospital. They bring her to me finally and place her on my chest and it’s only then that her screams stop. We are, all of us, x-rayed and examined and determined to be fine, considering.

  D has a bruised rib cage, I have a concussion, but Nisa is completely without physical injury. It is four-thirty in the afternoon. A police officer is there and I ask him to call the prison, to tell my husband what’s happened. I give him the phone number, Rashid’s information. “Please tell him that we’re fine,” I nearly plead, “but we will not be able to see him.” All I can think of is that I want to be home. I want to be safe, alone and safe with my daughter. When the cop saunters back toward us about fifteen minutes later, I ask if he’s called the facility. “Yup,” he responds. I ask if he said that we were fine despite the accident. Calmly, he looks at me and says, “I just told him that there was an accident and y’all wouldn’t be coming.”

  Of course we have to go now. Now there is no choice, no way we can rest. If Rashid does not see us, if he does not hear anything more—and there will be no way for him to know more before we are back home—he will cave in to worry. Something bad happening to a family member is a major fear for men in prison I have known. Rashid and I will never forget the day a man’s wife, in a freak accident, fell out of a moving van on the highway on the way to see her husband. She did not survive. I could not let Rashid have any of those fears, especially about his baby, a baby under a year old. Where does additional anxiety take a man, I wonder, who is already in hell?

  From the hospital I call a taxi service and a guy who could have been a body double for one of the mountain men from the film Deliverance shows up in a car I thought he would have to turn a crank on to get running. But he seems nice enough and besides, we are desperate. “You know how to get to the prison?” I asked him. “Sure do,” he responds, not cheerfully, but neither does he sound judgmental. He gets us to the facility safe and sound, and exactly on time, just as a van of other wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters are unloading packages and getting themselves signed in and processed through metal detectors.

  I have almost no memory of that place, what it looked like, how we were treated by the guards, if we ate from the vending machine, if Rashid was waiting for us when we walked in, if we had to wait for a long time for him to come to the visiting room. That whole visit, nearly the whole of it, happened someplace outside of me, someplace that doe
s not normally store memory. There are just small snatches of images: Rashid holding me, holding us, Nisa and me. He told me that when the facility informed him of the accident, he thought things had been much worse, that he hadn’t been given much information.

  After I tell him the details of the accident, Rashid shakes his head, holds us tighter, tells me he cannot believe we are there, with him. D is sitting at the table with us. I’m sure they talked. I don’t know what about. And then Rashid says, I suppose for emphasis, “I just can’t believe after everything that’s happened, you’re here. You’re here and you’re looking at me like you used to look at me.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “I mean you’re looking at me like you need me.”

  I don’t respond. Maybe I do need him. Maybe I do not. I have no idea at that moment, nor did I the day before that or the day before that, what I need.

  When the visit comes to an end, Deliverance is waiting, as promised, right outside the prison door. The snow, already swirling above and around us, seems now poised to rage. The airports have been closed, as has the bus station. There is no train service in this part of New York State. Deliverance is our only hope for getting home in the next twenty-four hours. I can’t believe I’m willing to get in a car for hours and hours again, that I’m willing to ride those roads, but I need my home, my own warm place with its multicolored walls, its mud-cloth prints, the pillows and the candles and the peace lily and the ivy; and my home with the all its books, the Dexter Gordon CDs, the yellow-and-purple sheets Nisa and I curl up in, the notebooks I write in. I needed to be near it all. I needed to feel safe, and I could not feel safe in this place, this place of prisons and crashes.

  We negotiate with Deliverance’s taxi company. Nine hundred dollars and the deal is done. We have a ride home, which we are ready for first thing the next morning. Deliverance shows up with a friend, also someone who would qualify for mountain man body-double status. This doesn’t feel like the smartest decision I have ever made, but what choice do we have?

  D and I look at the two young tattooed men, and we all shake hands and get in the car, which, you can’t make this up, they called their company’s luxury vehicle—a gray and rust-stained Caddy, circa 1972. I look at the vehicle. Unlike the other, I don’t think it needs a crank, but I wonder how much gas the boat-sized thing takes. D, Nisa, and I ride in the back. I place Nisa gently in her car seat, which had been one of the few things—besides us—left relatively intact after the crash. Still, I say a prayer, whisper it into Nisa’s ear. The boys turn on the radio. Black Sabbath is playing. I don’t know what I was hoping for—maybe a little Donnie McClurkin? I buckle up. Double-check Nisa’s straps.

  We’re about fifteen minutes into the trip back to New York City when Deliverance’s dispatcher two-way-radios him and says the price of the ride is double and if we can’t pay, no trip. Deliverance, and his friend—who also works for the service—argue vehemently with their boss. “A deal is a deal,” one of them says. Their boss tells them if we don’t pay now—and if they don’t drop that money off at the base before heading south to the city—they would both be fired.

  More words are exchanged, and then suddenly—it was Deliverance who said it, tossing his long, blond hair around defiantly—“Fuck it, man. We’re going to New York.” With that, he turns off the two-way, turns up Black Sabbath, and together the two of them navigate us safely back to our home.

  What those two days will teach me, beyond reminding me not to judge people right off the bat—and that was a big one—what I will carry for the next three years, is some sort of scattered lesson, one with no real beginning, no real end, only a whirling dervish of fear, hazy but repeating, and brutal images of the entire end of the world I know, the streets and the people and parks and waters and the loves and my baby, my baby, snatched up by giant enemy arms, snatched up and thrown, crashed to the ground, and all of them, all of us splitting apart, breaking, broken. No survivors. The lesson that sat in me, in my bones, in my blood, waiting there like a slow-moving poison, was one of danger lurking everywhere, but nowhere more so than with Rashid.

  The lesson I should have taken, but the one that will not occur to me until I sit down to write this story, is that I can make my way home, I have always made my way home, no matter what the challenge, no matter how icy the road. And I can do it not only because I am invested in doing it, invested even when I am not conscious of it, but also because there are others, there are people, human beings, who, despite a million real or meaningless differences that may exist between us, those people, those humans, agree—and sometimes it is for just one brief moment, and sometimes it is as a life’s commitment—that yes, we do, each one of us, deserve the chance to get back home.

  Chapter 7

  not love, actually

  I can still hear my mother’s voice admonishing eight-year-old me to slow down, to pay attention. Me, a girl, forever trying to run a circle around the wind. I rushed through school, I rushed through my schoolwork and childhood and childhood’s friends, and now at thirty-three, I was rushing through the end of a marriage. It made me wonder, though I will never know, was I born early too, did I rush even then, before I knew word or concept? But whether it was a genetic or learned trait, I knew I wanted to move on, to heal the hurt, build a new life for me, for Nisa.

  I’m trying to say I fell in love again, quickly and thoroughly, not long after Rashid and I broke up.

  I close my eyes even now and see him, Amir, his walk that made him seem bigger than he was, his brilliant smile, his even more brilliant mind. The first time we met, he said to me, “Forgive me for staring at you. You’re just so beautiful.” And it wasn’t the words so much as the way he let it go right afterward. He didn’t do what most men I’ve known have done: decide that they like the way you look, that they want a relationship, and that they will pursue it regardless of your feelings. It was different with this man. I felt then, right there in the beginning, respected. Those words, his words, they made me believe that after a childhood in which so many boundaries had been violated, and after time with a man in prison where the boundaries of our life were violated, finally I was safe. I was safe with this man who early on held my face and said nothing bad would happen to me again, that he would see to it, that he would, “bleed for me,” if need be. How could I not want him? And then one day he said to me, “And you know I love Nisa.”

  In the time after the deportation order, Amir and I talked about the future of the world and the future of our world and our hopes mirrored each other’s. “Do you want more children,” he asked me once, and I said yes. And he asked me if I would ever consider being a stay-at-home mom and I said yes. And he asked me if I would ever consider moving away from the city and I said yes. And then he said he still wanted to go slowly—before making the full-on commitment—and that surprised me. But I said yes.

  In those first months following the end of my marriage, I spent weekends with Nisa and Amir walking across the New York autumn. South Street Seaport, Prospect Park, long drives upstate, we would lose ourselves in the colors that it seemed I was experiencing for the first time in years because for the first time in years, I was experiencing them while holding the hand of a man I loved.

  I had never had such a time with Rashid. Never had these simple moments. Not even during my first marriage, really. I’d never had the simple romance of sharing a day, letting the hours fall where they would, answering to no one but ourselves. And when I had nighttime child care, as I did once a week back then, Amir and I did something else that was brand new to me and sexy. We went to lounges, to clubs together, a couple. We danced fast or slow, but we always connected, legs and arms cobbled together on dark floors. We drank great wines and toasted each other and toasted love. We named the son we imagined we would one day have together, the baby brother Nisa would help guide. We kissed in darkened doorways and then later in the back of taxis because waiting until we were home was too long a wait.

  We
made love in public places, in bathrooms in fancy restaurants. We talked every day. We made career decisions together—he was a Wall Streeter. We talked about books I would write, screenplays, how he could help with financing. When career challenges presented, we supported each other. And yes, yes I thought about Rashid and what we’d had and what we’d lost, and there were many times when I felt the strangle of guilt. But greater than that discomfort, greater than the pain of the end of a marriage, was the sense that I needed someone who could understand the contours of my life. Amir seemed like that person, the one who understood the contours of my life. And I was certain I understood the contours of his. We even declared as much, our emotions nearly choking another. We said our minds were twin engines. We discussed creating our own human rights organization. We talked about the world as we wanted to see it. “I’m sick of our people suffering,” he said, frustration in his voice when we talked about the Amadou Diallo case that was being played out in the media at the time. “Just so damn sick of it,” he said, even more emotion brimming, and I knew he was thinking about the boys on the block he came up with, so many of whom were dead, others in prison, others still wandering the neighborhood, shouting to passersby. I think it’s likely true that he’d seen more death and destruction before he was ten than I have even now, as of this day—which is saying something given that not long after Nisa was born, in one year alone, fourteen people I knew, many of whom I loved, died. Only one, my aunt Mary, was elderly. But everyone else hovered at just about fifty, except the man who would have been Nisa’s godfather, Taheem. He didn’t make it to thirty-five.

  I knew death and I knew loss and so I knew when someone had the same weight in their heart that I had in mine. He had it. And I wanted to heal it. I wanted to heal it for him and I wanted to heal it for me. We began sharing the details of our lives. He told me of his missing father, the one he looked so much like. I told him of my missing childhood.