“You want to act like a stranger, we treat you like one,” he says.
For a few nights I’m home by dark. A week passes, then another one. Even Tempe’s back. She don’t mention Christian. She mostly talks to you while you sleeping, watches me, or hangs over Lillian’s shoulder. Before the month ends I’m back at it. Me and Christian get more and more reckless. We get closer and closer to the imaginary line dividing the black folks from the white ones. Only, it ain’t really imaginary. There’s a thick row of trees keeping us apart. I done been on the other side. Worked in some of them grand houses where I had to walk past a city block full of trees just to get to the other side and then up some slope to a house where I had to come in through the back door. I hate those damned trees. Don’t seem able to stop hating them. Some nights, when Tempe ain’t around, Christian and me flip through the book. He laughs and makes faces when I tell him the truth so I make up stories about running away, rebellions.
“Your master ever take you?” he asks. He’s angry, mad at me for something I couldn’t have kept from happening in the first place.
I shake my head no.
“You sure?”
His mind’s already made up so I don’t bother trying to change it. I don’t answer no more. I don’t share the book with him no more neither. When he asks me about it, I tell him the past makes me sad. Pretty soon he stops asking.
Over time we make friends with a few other folks who ready to take charge anyway we can. It’s time we take what’s ours, they say. To hear them tell it, the only thing keeping us down is the white man and the only thing he got that we don’t is them trees. We sit around in basements talking about sawing them down. Sometimes we talking about the trees, sometimes we ain’t. I ain’t never heard of no quiet saw. “How you gonna down something with nobody noticing?” I ask.
The point ain’t for nobody not to notice, the point is just to cut them down, they say. I don’t see how we gonna get close enough to cut one down let alone all of them. The closer we get to that line, the closer the police get to us. As long as we causing trouble on our own streets, don’t seem to matter none. But bust a window down on Main Street and it makes the news.
“I’m gonna make the front page,” Christian says.
I tell myself I’m doing it for you and for Tempe and Mama, for all of us. We been talking for hours about not taking this and not doing that, setting boundaries. I’m tired of talking. “I got an idea,” I say.
In less than an hour, we in front of them trees and they burning. The thick trunks and branches are lit up, pure fire. Burning branches catch the grass and soon the grass is on fire too. We stand back. The wind picks up. Burning leaves kiss dry flowers and soon all of Grammercy, white and black, is burning.
We run. Christian and me make it almost all the way home before we realize we the only two running.
“They must have gone another way,” he says.
In the morning we hear how people was pulled from their houses for all-night questioning. How they was beaten and broken even if they didn’t know nothing. I’m waiting for a knock on the door. Tempe’s pacing back and forth. She stops every few steps to shake her head at me.
You better not leave my boy. She says like I got a choice in it.
“I’ll run and take him with me.”
Run where?
“Take me with you. Take me where you go when you ain’t with me.” I’m begging her.
I don’t want my boy to end up like me.
“Dead?” I ask.
With no place to go. Only thing keeping me alive is you.
“I don’t know what to do,” I say. I’m crying.
I’ll take care of it. Just stay here.
I don’t go nowhere for weeks. Lose my jobs. I take in washing. Between shifts, Franklin delivers it for me. I’m there when Lillian’s throwing up blood. I need to get Sable to keep you and to send Christian for a doctor.
“Mama?” you ask. You looking straight at Lillian. I’m about to correct you.
“I’m alright, baby,” she says. “He calls me that. I don’t mind.” Blood’s bubbling up through her mouth.
I’m banging on the front door with you in my arms.
“He’s been gone for weeks,” Sable says, “left for New York looking for work. Coulda sworn he would have told you.”
She don’t say nothing about it but I know she knows about us. “Can the baby stay with you?” I ask.
She opens her arms. “Mama!” you squeal.
“Say bye to your mama,” Sable says.
“Bye, Spring,” you say.
The door closes. I’m knocking on another door asking somebody to send for a doctor. I get back and Lillian’s passed out on the floor. Tempe’s sitting beside her, holding her hand.
“What you doing?” I ask.
Waiting.
By the time the doctor gets there, Franklin’s home and Lillian’s sitting up saying she feels so silly to have fell out and how a little bit of blood ain’t cause for alarm. The doctor talks to Franklin in private. I’m holding her other hand, making plans for when the baby come. I’m telling her I’m gonna be home more.
“Stop all that busting stuff up,” she says. “Please. That baby needs you. This one too.”
For a few weeks everything’s fine. We have a routine. You and me get up early, just after Franklin sets off for work for the day. I get a nice bath ready for Lillian while you and Tempe sit with her. Sable comes over with breakfast. I teach you shapes and colors. When she’s up to it, Lillian recites songs for you. Sable teaches you stories. After supper we sit out on the front steps. After dinner we go out back. I do Lillian’s hair while you play in the yard. I bathe you, feed you, and put you to bed. You fall asleep in my arms.
“Night, Mama,” you say one night.
That night, the fire stops burning. All I have, I have for you. I ain’t just Sister or Spring no more. Seems like that night, I become a mother. You don’t stop calling Lillian and Sable mama but at least you calling me mama too.
It’s a few nights later and we already in bed when Lillian’s screams wake us. The baby. Franklin’s yelling he’ll be back and running out the front door. You and me run down to her room and Lillian’s laying on the floor sweating and moaning. I’m holding one hand, Tempe’s holding the other. I can tell you can see her too from the way you smiling up at her.
You ain’t afraid. Don’t seem odd to you that you can see through her body, assuming you can. She running a hand through your hair, patting you on the head, she can’t stop touching you.
Just this once, she says.
I know that if Lillian wasn’t dying, she wouldn’t be able to touch Tempe and Tempe wouldn’t be able to touch you. Tempe scoops you up in her arms. She holds you for a second before you slip through her. I catch you before you fall. The midwife comes in saying this ain’t no place for a baby. She hands you to Franklin and shuts you both out.
“We ain’t got much time,” she says.
The baby pushes out. The midwife puts her to Lillian’s blue lips for “a kiss for safekeeping.”
The Mourning Committee makes burial arrangements, does the baking and cooking and the washing. Takes weeks to get them out of my house. They trying to help but they always underfoot. They set up a schedule for them to take turns caring for you and your sister so I can take in more work. For a few weeks, we’re a cause. They spinning clothes, creating pamphlets, organizing bake sales. They got bags full of baby clothes, blankets, and books. All donated from the folks of Grammercy. I’m starting to get used to them cooking and praying and dusting and singing till somebody round the corner dies and they gone.
I’m surprised to find that I miss them. Christian is back with a wife taking up Sable’s time. We don’t see much of her. Some nights I can hear her laughing through the living-room wall. If I set out in the hall, I can hear whole conve
rsations. I don’t do it often, but I’m there getting ready to go out and sweep the front steps when Christian tells her he’s moving to Canada where a black man can make a “decent living.” She’s fussing about not seeing him or his wife. She’s telling him to wait and see, things will get better here. She’ll give him that whole house if only he’ll stay. She’ll move in next door and he won’t have to see no more of her than he wants to. He’ll be the man of his own house and for a year he is.
I can’t stand to listen no more, so I creep back inside. The next morning she lets herself in. She takes the back room of the second floor. I take on more jobs and with Buddy and Franklin working and saving too, we buy the house in a few years. She cooks the breakfast, I cook supper, we both fix dinner. She takes care of Franklin like he’s her son, he lets her do it. From time to time when Buddy comes, she don’t ask why he sleeps in the front room if I’m all the way up on the third floor. She don’t say nothing about creaks on the stairs, the smell of cinnamon burning, my talking to Tempe, Tempe talking back to me. And a year later when she slips out of my house for the last time, after Christian is buried and her daughter-in-law moves back to her people, Sable locks herself in where no one can hurt her but ghosts.
Chapter 24
4:00 a.m.
The glow from the streetlamps below casts shadows against the walls. A pitchfork here, a sinister-looking ghost in a pointed hat there. I can hardly trust my eyes. The bed creaks. The other beds are empty now. Patients must have moved on some way or the other. Edward’s the only one left.
Hush.
It’s Jacob. He’s wearing shoes but I recognize his shuffle. “I hope you don’t mind, ma’am,” he says. “But I was in the room next door and thought I’d pay Edward a visit.” His lip is split. He smells of blood, sweat, and sweet mint.
“How you get busted up like that in the hospital?” I ask.
He looks at me like I don’t know more people get broken up in here than outside of here. “Officers had some questions they wanted to ask me.”
He’s close now. Breathing up all my good air. Wasting the little time I got left.
“Did you have answers?” I ask.
“That’s the thing. Seems like ain’t nothing I have to say, nothing they want to hear. All they want to know is if Edward is working with the railway to bust up the strike or if he’s working with the unions to strengthen it.”
I sit there rubbing the wood of the book. Tempe’s standing behind him. Can he smell her burning?
“Don’t you want to know?” he asks.
“I don’t see how it would make much difference either way,” I say. “He’s my boy, no matter what side he was on. And you can take the opportunity to remind me that my boy ain’t no boy like I don’t see he’s a full-grown man and I’ll take the time to remind you that no matter how old he is, he’s my boy.”
“Ma’am, I just meant, Edward’s made some decisions that only a man can make.”
“Like what?”
“Like changing his future.”
I look from him to the bandages they tell me is my boy. He’s under there somewhere, waiting.
“Changing his future? Or changing yours? See, if you or somebody put him up to some sort of plan to break the strike or start one, if he come up with it or didn’t, if he’s working for the union or against it, if he was aiming for the store or swerving away from it, my boy’s still going to die for it.”
“Then let him die a hero.”
“The death of a hero is no different than the death of an average man.”
“Average men are forgotten. Heroes aren’t.”
“I’m going to make the headlines.” It’s like sitting here all these years ago with Christian talking about spilling fire like blood through the streets. I’m blinking but I can’t stop seeing his face. If Sable hadn’t convinced him to stay in Grammercy, he wouldn’t have ended up lynched, swinging from some tree. He’d be alive now, laughing about hot-blooded men and the women that love them. Would he look at my boy and say, Just like his mama? Hot-headed. Would he be down there holding Lil’s hand, patting Gideon on the shoulder, staring into silence with Buddy and Franklin? Or out there raising hell with the police and the protesters? Maybe he would have led Edward into the riots.
Either way, we here now.
“Can I talk to him, alone?” Jacob’s asking. Tempe’s nodding yes.
I lean over and kiss Edward’s forehead. Tears stain the bandage. “I love you, son. Always will,” I say.
Jacob’s sliding the curtain behind me. I’m in Tempe’s arms. I feel her holding me up before I realize what it means. I’m holding her tight.
“Man,” he says, “you right about your mama. She’s a bird and a half. I see why you want to do right by her. I don’t know why you don’t want to let her in on nothing, though. Seems like she can handle the truth. If you want her to think this got something to do with the riots, I’ll go right on letting her think it. Police sure don’t seem to have no problem with it. Neither side do either. The union all riled up calling for the police to round up all the scabs, railways calling for blood and legislation, strikers going wild. They stealing trolleys and setting them on fire. This is the start of something big and there you are in the middle of it. You ought to see it. You in the papers and everything. Couldn’t have been me. You a hero, man, no matter how you want me to tell it.”
Tempe’s looking excited. She’s all lit up.
“No,” I say. “Not yet. Please.” I pull the screen away, push Jacob aside. I hold Edward’s hands tight. I’m thinking, Don’t go, don’t leave me, but I don’t say it. “Remember,” I say. I got my head to his mouth listening for breathing, words, something.
I’m still holding his hand when the doctor declares the time of death: 4:37 a.m. Lil’s there when I get back down to the waiting room. They all are: her, Gideon, Buddy, and Franklin, even Sable and the Mourning Committee. Picketers are gone to another march. The police decided Edward can’t cause no trouble, they’re off to another emergency. Other than us, there are only a few people on the streets this time of morning. I’m burning. I’m so angry that I’m surprised when I look down and see my feet don’t leave scorch marks on the road. There’s a high-pitch sound in my head, wailing. I cover my mouth but it ain’t coming from me. The chorus. They singing about saviors and warriors and heroes and wanderers. Somewhere, Edward and Tempe are singing together, arm in arm, all the way home.
Acknowledgments
My life has been made richer in part thanks to the stories that have come before mine. I can only hope to do the same for those who come after me. Thank you to all the writers, storytellers, and dreamers for making it possible for my book to be published. I would like to thank Gran for leading by example and loving me fiercely. Special thanks to my mother and sister for listening to my stories when I was a child, feeding my imagination always, and supporting my pursuit of me. My heartfelt thanks to my children, Amira, Marat, and Noah for traveling across the world in pursuit of my dreams, for your inexhaustible support and love, and for providing beacons of hope for the future that will always lead me home. Thank you all for inspiring me to be a better me. You three are my joy.
Remembered began with a series of questions. Thank you to Lancaster University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for funding my research and allowing me the space, resources, and time for practice-based research so that I could explore where the questions led. Thank you, Jenn Ashworth, thesis supervisor, colleague, and friend, for challenging me to write painful stories, crying as I cried, and for your support, editorial and otherwise. Thank you to the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing for years of supporting my creativity, research, and projects, and for the many colleagues who were generous with time, information, and feedback. Thank you, Jonathan Taylor and George Green, for carefully reading my thesis and believing it should be published. Thank you to my dear friend
Naomi Kruger for your close reading, for answering questions late in the night, and for your translations. Thank you, Wanda Sosa Hawkins, Peace Toleito, and Candace Hantouche for years of friendship and support no matter where I am in the world. Thank you to the Society of Authors. The Authors’ Foundation Grant awarded me precious support and space to write when I needed it most.
As I prepared for life post-PhD, thank you, New Writing North. The Northern Writers’ Award for fiction provided me with support to buy time to edit the novel and afforded me opportunities to engage in the wider writing community. Thanks to you, I met my wonderful agent, Elise Dillsworth. Thank you, Elise, for championing my writing even before you read the complete manuscript, for your editorial eye, and for your patience in the face of my impatience. Special thanks for walking first in front of the world’s largest canine and putting your life at risk. And a warm thank-you for knowing Remembered would be at home with Dialogue Books in the UK and in hands of the lovely Sharmaine Lovegrove.
Thank you to Caskie Mushens and to Jenny Bent of the Bent Agency for helping Remembered find a home with Blackstone.
Thank you to the team at Blackstone for welcoming me as one of your authors and for bringing Remembered to readers in the US and Canada. It means so much to me. Thank you to my editor, Deirdre Curley, for your eye for detail and close reading.
Finally, a warm thank-you to readers everywhere for spending time with my characters and their stories. May all of us find our way home.
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