Another Brooklyn (5 page)

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 between 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 be
lieved 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!

We pretended to believe we could unlock arms and walk the streets alone. But we knew we were lying. There were men inside darkened hallways, around street corners, behind draped windows, waiting to grab us, feel us, unzip their pants to offer us a glimpse.

We had long lost our razor blades and none of us had ever truly stopped chewing on our nails. But still . . .

I and I and I and I,
we chanted.
We and we and we and we
.

We hand-songed
Down down baby, down by the roller coaster. Sweet, sweet baby I'ma never let you go
because we wanted to believe we were years and years away from sweet, sweet babies. We wanted to believe we would always be connected this way. Sylvia, Gigi, and Angela had moved far past my longest fingernail, all the way up my arm. Years had passed since I'd heard my mother's voice. When she showed up again, I'd introduce my friends to her. I'd say,
You were wrong, Mama. Look at us hugging. Look at us laughing. Look how we begin and end each other.

I'd say,
Can you see this, Mama? Can you?

A man who used to be a boy on our block walked the streets in his army uniform, armless. He'd learned how to hold a syringe between his teeth and use his tongue to shoot the dope into the veins near his armpit.

My brother and I watched him at night from our window, watched his head dipping down like a bird tucking itself beneath its own wing.

Don't ever do dope,
my brother said to me.

You either.

I won't,
my brother said.

My brother and I woke to the smell of another house burning somewhere too far away to see, and he said he'd be a fireman maybe. Or an astronaut. Or a scientist, a cop, a drummer in a rock band, a farmer.

A farmer. Because once in SweetGrove, there had been a farm.

I watched my brother watch the world, his sharp, too-serious brow furrowing down in both angst and wonder. Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.

August,
my brother said again and again.
Look there. And there. And there.

We still shared the one bedroom in our apartment, our twin beds only feet apart. We searched for each other first thing in the morning.
Hey,
we said.
Hey yourself. Hay is for horses.
Love you. Love you, too
,
we whispered each night before we closed our eyes. We reached across the space and entwined our fingers, our hands growing sweaty in the dark. We held on.

What's in that jar, Daddy?

You know what's in that jar.

You said it was ashes. But whose?

You know whose.

Clyde's?

We buried Clyde.

Mine?

This is memory.

That was the summer the lights went out in New York City and people looted the stores on Broadway then rode through our neighborhood in convertibles, the tops down, holding boxes of shoes and television sets and pawned fur coats over their heads. My brother and I watched them from our window. The streets, my father said again and again, were too dangerous for anyone in their right mind. We lit candles, heated up cans of SpaghettiOs on the stove, the food in our fridge going bad as my father searched the neighborhood stores for bags of ice. If Biafra and Vietnam were more dangerous than my brother and I understood, the Blackout felt like the end of the world. We heard the horns and
sirens moving through the night, saw the hawkers holding their stolen boxes into the air, shouting out prices. In the morning, our father let us go as far as the front gate, where we watched an old woman carrying an armful of looted dry-cleaned clothes up the block, the plastic glistening, her wide grin nearly toothless. We saw two boys sharing a pair of new roller skates, one still carrying the box beneath his arm. We saw teenagers running toward Broadway and asked again and again if we could go.
It's stealing,
my father said.
We don't steal.

We had heard for years that the shop owners on Broadway were white and lived in fancy houses in places like Brentwood, Rego Park, Laurelton. We knew that financing meant watching neighbors throw broken couches and torn mattresses into the alley between houses long before they were paid off. So as we watched the looters move through the neighborhood selling TVs and radios and shoes and dry cleaning they'd taken from window-smashed stores, my brother and I felt a
longing to be a part of the free stuff spilling out along Broadway. Still, my father warned us not to leave the front gate. And meant it.

That was the summer every park and every school building gave out Free Lunch—brown paper bags holding plastic-wrapped bologna sandwiches and sugar-sweetened orange juice in foil-sealed cups. We watched hungry kids line up in the heat, waiting for food, hoping a neighbor was volunteering who would sneak them an extra bag. In the hot refrigerator-less days with my father broke from the work lost at Abraham & Straus, my brother and I stood on a line that wrapped around the park and leaned against the chain-link fence as we slowly moved forward. I looked for Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi—afraid I'd see them, hungry and hot like us. Reaching for the brown bags with ashamed and ashy hands.

The last of the white people began fading. We didn't know the German woman's name. She was
snow-haired, small and thick, with adult sons who used to come with their children on Sundays. The children, three boys, would not play with us. In the summer, they sat on their grandmother's stoop in their collared shirts and blond crew cuts watching the brown boys in the street spin wooden tops wrapped with graying string. Their fathers had the same cuts, the same pastel-colored collared shirts. In the late afternoon, when the fathers appeared at the top of the stoop, the boys rose and they all made their way to identical station wagons parked one behind the other at the sidewalk. As the cars pulled away, the boys stared at us. Sometimes, the littlest one waved.

The brown boys who had moved to the sidewalk to let the cars pass ran back to the middle of the street and resumed their game. But with the pastel boys gone now, it was hard not to see the brown boys differently in their cutoffs and dirty white T-shirts, ashy kneed, chipped wooden tops violently spinning.

We didn't know the Italian family or the Irish sisters who dressed alike and left their building each morning, pulling identical shopping carts, returning each evening with A&P bags. We didn't know the man who yelled at the boys in the street in a language none of them understood or the curly redheaded family with the mother who always looked as though she'd just had a good cry.

But we knew their moving vans. We knew their cars. We knew the people who came to help, checked their cars many times, then glared at the boys in the street. We knew the sticks for stickball games weren't weapons. We knew the spikes at the bottom of wooden spinning tops weren't meant to hurt anything but other spinning tops. We knew the songs the boys sang
Ungawa, Black Power. Destroy! White boy!
were just songs, not meant to chase white people out of our neighborhood.

Still, they fled.

They left driving their cars. They left in the backseats of the cars of sons and daughters. They put
FOR SALE
signs on their homes but left before the buildings sold. They rented to single mothers and junkies, Puerto Ricans and Blacks, anyone with the deposit, the first month's rent, and the promise of a job somewhere. They put mattresses and broken-legged tables and boxes of old books out on the street.

Their cars and vans and trucks parted the brown boys, signaled right at the corner, and left our neighborhood forever.

My brother had discovered math, the wonder of numbers, the infinite doubtless possibility. He sat on his bed most days solving problems no eight-year-old should understand.
Squared,
he said,
is absolute. No one in the world can argue algebra or geometry. No one can say pi is wrong.

Come with me
,
I begged.

But my brother looked up from his numbers and said,
She's gone, August.
It's absolute.

Late in the autumn, the woman returned for Jennie's children. She carried the little one out in her arms, the older one, skipping ahead, not looking back, the baby screaming.

What the hell is going on?
My father asked.

They're taking Jennie's children.

I had oiled and braided the older one's hair. Three cornrows front to back tied with a blue Goody ribbon. I had fed them cereal and pastrami sandwiches, grits and eggs. I had put Vaseline on their arms and legs, used a wet washcloth to wipe milk from around their mouths and sleep from the corners of their eyes. I had read to them and sang to
them, dampened toilet tissue to wipe crust from their noses. When the girl smiled, her teeth were stunningly white.

The girl, ribbon gone now, skipped around the corner and disappeared. Long after they were out of sight, my brother swore he could hear the baby crying.

I imagined the women my father brought home taking a place until my mother returned. Each
Shhh, my kids are sleeping.
Each
Oh lord, look at your precious babies!
brought her closer. I lay in bed and listened as the clink of ice in glasses and the hushed laughter gave way to sighs and moans. I imagined waking up with a new woman, her hair in curlers, holding her robe closed with one hand, asking if I wanted pancakes or cereal, scouring the cabinets for the last of the Aunt Jemima Syrup, sprinkling a bit of cinnamon and
sugar when there was none. I imagined strong, sure hands pulling my hair into tight cornrows, telling my brother to take his thumb out of his mouth, kissing my father on the lips as he headed off to work.

I imagined four of us at the kitchen table, the thick stink of boiling chitterlings gone, replaced by hot sauce and white rice and the woman who came to stay until my mother returned asking if I wanted a little or a lot.

Years later, I would tell this to Sister Sonja, wanting her to know that I had dreamed our family whole again. That I believed wholeness was on its way.

In a jar on the counter of Poncho's store there were pickled pig's feet that he'd scoop out into brown paper. When you said,
I want to choose my own,
Poncho said,
No choosing! I choose!
his old-man
eyes moving over your body. And if you were hungry enough, you let him.

I imagined the four of us—brother, father, new woman, me—sucking the last of the pickled meat from the pig's-foot bone, wrapping cartilage and bone back into the brown paper, washing it down with Dr Pepper.

Pork rinds were packaged and sold for fifteen cents. With hot sauce sprinkled into the plastic bag, you almost had a meal. My brother ate his without the sauce, sometimes adding more salt.

On good days, our father took us around the corner and let us buy ham-and-cheese heroes, the boiled ham cut into thin slices and layered over Italian bread already spread thick with mayo. Some days my brother preferred the square cuts of spiced ham with its tiny speckles of white fat.

That was before.

The woman who came didn't tiptoe through our room in the night, didn't ask for
just a taste
when my father offered his whiskey, didn't sit with us eating pig's feet and spiced ham. She came by way of the Nation of Islam, her head wrapped, her dark dress draping down below her ankles. She said,
My name is Sister Loretta,
her body a temple, covered and far away from my father's, her thin face free of the swine-filled makeup with which unenlightened women painted their faces. She said
I know how amazing and lovely I am
. When she looked down at us and smiled, her dark face broke into something open and hungry and beautiful.

She said,
Your father is ready to change his life.
She said,
The food you're eating is the white devil's plan to kill our people.

She came into our apartment on a Sunday morning, pulling down dusty pots and pans from the cabinet to wash in warm, soapy water, humming
softly as she worked, my father at the table, reading from the Qur'an, a watery Brooklyn sunlight falling over the pages. Her hands were large and moved as though they'd always known our tiny kitchen with its yellowing sink and peeling linoleum counter. I watched them, imagining they were my mother's hands and that we were again in SweetGrove with our broken stove and dusty bookshelves. I sat in the kitchen doorway, my knees pulled up to my chin, eyes lifted toward her. Her breasts were heavy beneath the dark dress but she wasn't a heavy woman. Still, her body seemed to hold promises of curves, of the soft and deep spaces I was just beginning to understand. One day I'd have full breasts, hips, and large hands. One day, my body would tell the world stories beneath the fabric of my clothes.