Miss Dora’s son had died in Vietnam. Small American flags adorned her gate and stairs and were hung with a brown extension cord across the bright red aluminum siding that covered the front of her building. A tiny gold flag was pinned above her heart. As the damage of the war staggered, strung-out and bleary-eyed along our block, Miss Dora greeted every ex-soldier who passed. Glad y’all made it home, she said. We’ll see my boy in the by and by.
In the deep heat of summer, we watched as kids circled around the heroin addicts, taking bets on whether or not they’d fall over. Once, a small boy ran down the street, a bent hypodermic needle he’d just found aimed like a gun.
At night, I wrapped my head in fabric torn from an old silk slip of my mother’s not remembering how I’d gotten it only that it smelled of her and hair grease now. As my brother and I lay side by side, we listened to the men coming and going from Jennie’s apartment—the tinny sound of her bell, the brush of her slippers on the stairs, the men laughing as they made their way up behind her, her quiet No touch Jennie before you pay Jennie money.
Money for what? my brother asked into the darkness.
Things. I whispered back. Just things.
The Tennessee land we called SweetGrove sloped down into a forest of pitch pine, hickory, pecan, and sweet birch trees. Beyond the trees there was more land and where it ended, there was water. The land had belonged to my grandfather on my mother’s side. It had come by way of his grandfather. Clay dirt and grass waves rolled for acres away from the house my brother and I had been born in. The house itself existed in a state of disrepair—bowed beams, water-stained ceilings, splintering hardwood floors. An ancient wood-burning stove sat beside a newer electric one that no longer worked, a hot plate on the counter between the two. A turquoise refrigerator leaned back against the mustard-colored brick. Water dripped deep inside an upstairs wall, echoing. Sash chain windows were trapped halfway open in the dusty library. Three books held up the third leg of the couch in the living room. On rainy days, the house smelled of decaying wood and briny water. Still, my brother and I moved through the house we’d always known without seeing the ways in which it was sagging into itself. We ran through it laughing, slamming out of and into it, closing our eyes at night then waking in the bright morning inside the pure joy of Home.
Clyde was twenty-three. He had graduated from Howard University. He was over six feet tall and had our mother’s soft, sweet laugh. In the evenings, long after my brother and I went to bed, our father, mother, and Clyde sat on the sagging front porch and talked about plans for bringing SweetGrove back to what it had once been, before any of them were alive to see it so. But neither Clyde nor my father knew how to work that much land. My father was a city boy, and Clyde had, as a boy, loved books and maps and pretty girls, so he never learned the secrets of tasting dirt and spot-spraying webworms and sawflies. The working of the land fell to my mother, whose lovely hands, at the end of the day, were rough, thickened, and red from long hours in the fields.
The year my brother was born, a fire burned the south fields to ash. The following year, a letter from the government revealed that most of the land was now owned by the state of Tennessee due to ignored tax debt and penalties. The house remained ours.
Then Clyde got drafted and went to Vietnam. On the morning we said good-bye, my mother broke down and cried, her pain so raw I covered my ears and shivered. Six months after that, in the winter of 1971, she received a letter.
“We regret to inform you . . .”
This is memory.
Winter and the sound of wind battering the windows. Cold air like a ghost blowing up from the water. My mother slips down heavily onto the floor, brings her knees up to her chin like a little girl, bends her head into them. My father leans against the dead electric stove, palms pressed together in front of his face.
The government owns the pecan trees now. What had once been my family’s has been taken. By the government.
5
We came by way of our mothers’ memories.
When Gigi was six years old, her mother pulled her in front of the mirror. It was cracked already, Gigi said. I guess that should be a sign. Broken-ass mirror and my crazy mama making promises.
Those eyes, her mother said, were your great-grandmother’s eyes. She came to South Carolina by way of a Chinaman daddy and mulatto mama. Gigi stared at her eyes, the slight slant of them, the deep brown. The hair, too, her mother said, holding up Gigi’s braids. Heavy and thick like hers.
The only curse you carry, her mother said, is the dark skin I passed on to you. You gotta find a way past that skin. You gotta find your way to the outside of it. Stay in the shade. Don’t let it go no darker than it already is. Don’t drink no coffee either.
When we had finally become friends, when the four of us trusted each other enough to let the world surrounding us into our words, we whispered secrets, pressed side by side by side or sitting cross-legged in our newly tight circle. We opened our mouths and let the stories that had burned nearly to ash in our bellies finally live outside of us.
It’s dark, Gigi said. But it’s got red and blue and gold in it. I look at my arms sometimes and I’m thinking skinny-ass monster arms. She held her thin arms up into the light, her head lifted, thick braids falling against her back. And sometimes, she said, they look so damn beautiful to me. I don’t even know which thing is the truth.
We circled her, undoing her braids until her hair fell in black coils across her shoulders, then rebraiding and unbraiding them again, telling her how lucky she was to have such thick wavy hair and eyes like a Chinese girl.
When I’m an actress, Gigi said, I’ll be everywhere—TV, movie screen, onstage. Who’s that? Who’s that?
When it wasn’t wavering around doubt, her voice was deep and sure, and we wanted that, too—Who’s that? Who’s that? we echoed, laughing, our hands on her head, in her hair. That’s that big star, Gigi. Chocolate China Doll!
What keeps keeping us here? Gigi asked one day, the rain coming down hard, her shirt torn at the shoulder. We didn’t know that for weeks and weeks, the lock had been broken on her building’s front door. We didn’t know about the soldier who slept behind the darkened basement stairwell, how he had waited for her in shadow. We were twelve.
I can’t tell anybody but you guys, Gigi said. My mom will say it was my fault.
We twisted the long braids up into a crown, used oil and a comb to etch the fine baby hair over her forehead. Dabbed our fingers against our tongues and smoothed out her eyebrows. We wanted to make her broken self know she was still beautiful. It wasn’t you, we said again and again. We can kill him, we said.
We sat on Sylvia’s bed counting out what change we had, ran the blocks to Poncho’s for a small box of Gillette razor blades, then spent the afternoon practicing how Gigi would hold them when she slashed the soldier. We had heard that Pam Grier slipped them into her hair in Coffy and imagined Gigi pulling the blades from her braids just as the soldier stepped out from the darkness.
It’ll always be the four of us, right, y’all? Gigi asked.
Of course, we said. You know that’s right, we said. Sisters, we said. We said, Always.
But when the soldier finally emerged from behind Gigi’s stairs, it was not with a single-edged blade protruding from his neck but with a needle clinched and dripping from his left hand. He had been dead three days when the super found him.
Angela’s skin was so light you could see blue veins moving through it. She had seen Josephine Baker and Lena Horne and Twyla Tharp on television. Whenever a good song came on, she swayed like water being poured and we watched her, breath caught in our throats, the sadness in her body so deep we had no idea what it was or what it meant or how it got to be there. She was all muscle and sinew. On Saturday afternoons, she showed up on the block with her Joe Wilson’s School of Dance bag, her black leotard and tights sweaty and smelly inside it. My mom was a dancer, she told us, then quickly grew silent.
Does she still dance, we asked. But
Angela turned away from us. Shrugged. Said, Why you have to be all up in my business? Said, Kind of. Said, Damn, why’s it all have to be so complicated, you know? She put her face in Gigi’s hair and shook until she cried. We said, We love you, Angela. We said, You’re so beautiful. Said, Just keep dancing. That’s all.
We tried to understand without asking if Mother plus Dance equals Sadness. We waited for her hands to curl into fists. In Sylvia’s pink bedroom, we lay down and pressed our ears to her thin chest, listening to the quickening of her heart. Angela, what is it? we begged. Tell us. Please, please tell us. We have blades, we said. We can cut somebody.
We had blades inside our kneesocks and were growing our nails long. We were learning to walk the Brooklyn streets as though we had always belonged to them—our voices loud, our laughter even louder.
But Brooklyn had longer nails and sharper blades. Any strung-out soldier or ashy-kneed, hungry child could have told us this.
I wanted to step inside of Sylvia’s skin. Beneath the sweet copper, there lived something diamonded over, brilliant. When we walked, Angela, Gigi, and I vied to be the ones whose arms brushed Sylvia’s. When she reached for a hand, ours shot out, lacing our fingers desperately into hers. She was sloe-eyed and wide-mouthed, a beauty that could have just as easily not been so. But hers was all straight teeth and full lips, all green eyed and new. Long before we were teenagers, her voice was deep, graveled, a woman’s voice on a young girl. Still, it wasn’t the skin or the eyes or the voice I wanted. I simply wanted to be Sylvia, to walk through the world as she did, watch the world through her eyes. Is that girl laughing at us, my brother had asked that first time. And now I knew Sylvia was laughing at us, because she was laughing at everyone. The same way she had laughed when her father said We’re going to America, his broken English a joke to her, a puppet’s mouth moving over newly learned words. Forever.
What’s with America, she asked him. This America thing you keep talking and talking about.
At four, Sylvia was reading books assigned to her eight-year-old sister. At five, she was made to stay after school with ten-year-olds, cracking codes in long division, searching Latin word origins. While her father quoted French philosophers, Sylvia stood in front of her dolls, asking her unblinking jury if they could look into the heart of her client and see the innocence there.
My father said study law first, Sylvia told us. Then everything I love can follow that.
When we asked, What do you love? Sylvia looked around her perfectly pink room and said, I’m not the boss of me. How the hell would I even know.
Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone—adults promising us their own failed futures. I was bright enough to teach, my father said, even as my dream of stepping into Sylvia’s skin included one day being a lawyer. Angela’s mom had draped the dream of dancing over her. And Gigi, able to imitate every one of us, could step inside anyone she wanted to be, close her eyes, and be gone. Close her eyes and be anywhere.
6
In 1968, the children of Biafra were starving. My brother was not yet born and I was too young to understand what it meant to be a child, to be Biafran, to starve. Biafra was a country that lived only inside my mother’s admonitions—Eat your peas, there are children starving in Biafra—and in the empty-eyed, brown, big-bellied children moving across my parents’ television screen. But long after Biafra melted back into Nigeria, the country from which it had fought so hard to secede, the faces and swollen bellies of those children haunted me. In a pile of old magazines my father kept on our kitchen table in Brooklyn, I found a copy of Life with two genderless children on the cover and the words STARVING CHILDREN OF BIAFRA WAR blared across the ragged white garment of the taller child.
How do we dream ourselves out of this?
I stared at the cover of Life. The children’s distrusting eyes stared back at me, too large for their small, brown heads, too small for their protruding bones and distended bellies. My mother hadn’t lied. There were indeed children suffering. Here was proof. Here they were on the cover of Life magazine. I spent hours stroking their nearly bald heads, running my fingers across their almost beatific faces. If angels truly existed, I thought, they had come to earth as Biafran children, haunting and only halfway here.
No, we were not poor like this. Our bellies were filled and taut. Our legs were thin but muscled. Our hair was oiled, clean.
But still.
One day a woman wearing a sky-blue skirt suit showed up in front of our building. She had two small children with her, dark brown like Jennie and younger than my brother, who had just turned eight. My babies, we heard Jennie yell as she ran down the stairs. Ay, Dios mío, mis niños han llegado a casa. When the woman left again, Jennie knocked on our door. Please watch them, she whispered. I go get food.
The children were tiny and silent, staring up at my brother and me with huge dark eyes. The girl might have been four and the boy not yet two. The girl wore a frilly pink dress, too short and too small. Her shoes were white patent leather. Her feet, sockless. The boy wore a T-shirt and pair of cutoff shorts, a diaper bulging beneath. His white high-top leather baby-shoes had the front cut out to expose his small overhanging toes. I pulled them into our apartment and relocked the door. After a few moments had passed, both started crying. My brother fed them from his bag of potato chips, which they devoured hungrily. We gave them apples and nuts, slices of bologna and Jell-O. Whatever we put in front of them, they ate.
Hours passed. When Jennie finally returned, she was sleepy-eyed, scratching at her arms and legs, her wig at a strange angle. We watched her enter our building, waited for her to come up to our floor. After a long while, we took the children down to her apartment, watched her take them inside absently and close the door. Later, through the floorboards, we could hear them crying.
I went over to our radio, turned the dial until music rose up above every other sound.
7
That year, every song was telling some part of our story. We crowded around the small radio in Sylvia’s room and listened. When Gigi’s mother wasn’t home, we went there after school, waited while Gigi used the key that hung from her neck to unlock the door. There was no couch in the one-room kitchenette, so we sat on the floor around her Close’N Play record player—the volume turned down low. We leaned in to listen as Al Green begged us to lay our heads upon his pillow and Tavares asked us to please remember what they told us to forget. And Minnie Riperton and Sylvia hit notes so high and long, it felt like the world was ending.
The world was ending. We had been girls, wobbling around the apartment in Gigi’s mother’s white go-go boots and then and then and then.
Little pieces of Brooklyn began to fall away. Revealing us.
We envied each other’s hair, eyes, butts, noses. We traded clothes and shared sandwiches. Some days we laughed until soda sprayed from our noses and hiccups erupted in our chests.
When boys called our names, we said, Don’t even say my name. Don’t even put it in your mouth. When they said, You ugly anyway, we knew they were lying. When they hollered, Conceited! we said, No—convinced! We watched them dip-walk away, too young to know how to respond. The four of us together weren’t something they understood. They understood girls alone, folding their arms across their breasts, praying for invisibility.
At eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, we knew we were being watched.
So we warned each other about the shoe repair on Gates Avenue, how the old man who reminded us of Geppetto made you wait on the hard wooden seat in the little booth so he could steal glances at your legs and bare feet. Take somebody with you, we said. Don’t wear dresses when you go there. He’ll offer you a quarter to see your panties.
When we weren’t practicing walking in Gigi’s mother’s shoes, we were little girls in Mary Janes and lace-up sneakers. When the heels wore down or the soles flapped away from the tops, we were given a dollar and sent to Gates Avenue. Just a little, the man said. Please, the quarter, held up and gleaming bet
ween his thumb and pointer finger as we shook our heads No and embarrassed tears we didn’t yet understand sprang forward.
The pastor at my church comes up behind me sometimes when I’m singing in choir, Gigi said. I can feel his thing on my back. Don’t sing in your church choir. Or if you sing in it, go to another place while you sing. And she whispered how she was the queen of other places. Close my eyes and boom, I’m gone. I learned it from my mother, she told us. So many days you look in that woman’s eyes and she isn’t even there!
But when she is, Gigi said, she reminds me to go to Hollywood. Tells me I’ll be safe there.
We didn’t know to ask Safe from what? Safe from whom? We thought we knew.
We promised her she’d be more famous than anyone ever was. We told her no other brown girl had her strange eyes and crazily long hair. We believed ourselves when we said That’s what Hollywood wants, and I can’t wait to see you on television, and You’ll be more famous than Diahann Carroll.
Don’t trust the altar boys, Sylvia warned her, if you’re the only altar girl.
When she opened her mouth to sing Nina Simone’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” our throats throbbed, our teeth locked together. Sylvia lived deep inside of those notes, halfway hidden from all of us. They got some hungry women there and man, they’ll really make a mess out of you. . . .
You have to be a singer, we said. You have to!
After law, Sylvia said.
We tried to hold on. We played double Dutch and jacks. We chased the ice cream truck down the block, waving our change-filled fists. We frog-jumped over tree stumps, pulled each other into gushing fire hydrants, learned to dance the Loose Booty to Sly and the Family Stone, hustled to Van McCoy. We bought T-shirts with our names and zodiac signs in iron-on letters.
But still, as we slipped deeper into twelve our breasts and butts grew. Our legs got long. Something about the curve of our lips and the sway of our heads suggested more to strangers than we understood. And then we were heading toward thirteen, walking our neighborhood as if we owned it. Don’t even look at us, we said to the boys, our palms up in front of our faces. Look away look away look away!
Another Brooklyn Page 3
