Another Brooklyn (4 page)

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.

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.

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 ni
ñ
os 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.