Hold Love Strong (15 page)

I
t was April, spring break, and I had a week off from school. The sun was out. The sky was perfectly blue and perfectly clear. Seagulls honked, pigeons cooed; a few birds I'd never heard sang like frolicking children in a city pool. With my basketball, I walked out of my building. A small brown bird with a red chest was perched on the nearest telephone wire. A robin,
Turdus migratorius.
Mr. Goines had told me about them. I stopped and watched the robin for a few moments. Then I picked up a piece of gravel and threw it at the bird, missing it but causing it to fly away.

I continued walking. It was 7:00 a.m., early enough for me to be sure that there wasn't going to be anyone at the basketball court. I walked along the avenue dribbling my basketball, bouncing it from my left hand to my right, between my legs, and around my back. I passed the liquor store, the bodega, and the Holy Name, Pastor Ramsey's dilapidated storefront church that had not held a service since Jeremiah's funeral. It's doors and windows were covered by a rusted steel
gate. I made moves, spin moves and crossovers to get past the world around me. I went around the garbage can overflowing with garbage, a sodden cardboard box of discarded housewares, rusted pots, pans, and a toaster sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. I dribbled around shadows, faked out broken glass, and pounded the ball between cracks in the concrete. I imagined I was on my way to a championship game. I created the entire scenario, fantasized about the season that had led to that imagined game. My team? We were the underdogs. But I possessed a particular conviction, an imagined fact that let me know my team would win the game. It was our time to rise up. Nothing, not even fate could stop us.

Just behind Ever there were railroad tracks, and a train heading into Manhattan from Long Island rumbled by. I stopped dribbling and watched it. All of my life, trains had been coming and going, interrupting Ever's daily life with their loud disregard. Sometimes I counted the cars. Sometimes I wondered who was on the other side of the glinting windows. But on that morning, I did something that I don't recall ever doing, although I might have done it when I was a very small child. I waved. I don't know why, but I felt a sudden urge to be recognized. So I raised my hand over my head and wagged it back and forth, and only when the train was no longer in sight did I lower it and start walking and dribbling my basketball again.

When I got close to the basketball court, I saw that there was someone sitting against the inside of the fence. I stopped. I planted the ball on my hip. I squinted. But I couldn't make out the person. So, slowly, I walked forward until I crossed the line between blurry vision and clarity. The person sitting against the fence was a woman. I took two more steps. Then, although I couldn't see all of her features, although I couldn't make out the exact beginnings and endings of her nose or her lips and mouth, I knew that the woman, the body slumped against the fence, was my mother because I knew her shapes,
how those shapes rested, and the body inside of her body, that body I spent nine months inside and grew up grabbing and clinging to. It was a miracle. I had not seen her all summer and through the fall, seven months. It was grief. And seeing her was also finding out that seven months meant nothing when compared to the pain of seeing her right then.

My mother's arms were spread and her fingers were hooked in the fence. Her head was tilted. The sun shone on her. And she was soaking it in, bathing in the warmth and light as if it were a lover kissing her neck and the underside of her chin. I took a few more steps. Then I stopped. I didn't want to believe it was her, but I had no doubt. She loved the sun and the summer. She loved wearing tank tops and looking in the mirror at how brown her shoulders got after a day of being outside. She had a soiled grey coat on that I'd never seen before and it was unzipped. Suddenly, I remembered how, when I was young, my mother never let me go outside with my coat open, how she used to say
Ain't no one gonna think I'm sending my baby out to catch a cold and die.
For a fleeting moment, I wanted to go to her, zip her coat, and carry her home. Then I thought about my grandma, and what she might say or do; how would she handle the sudden discovery of my mother? I dribbled my ball once. Then I returned my ball to its station on my hip. Why was my mother on my court on a morning that was mine?

I considered throwing my ball at her, hurling it into the fence so the impact, the rattle of the ball crashing into the rusted fence would scare her, cause her to leap to her feet and run for her life. And then, there was the part of me that wanted to press the basketball against my stomach, curl over the ball like a shell and squeeze it until everything, even me, disappeared. But I didn't move. The shock of seeing my mother paralyzed me. I stood with the ball on my hip for a long time. I stared, glared; my eyes burned before I blinked.

She didn't feel my gaze. She didn't glance over her shoulders with the sense that someone was there. All my mother knew was the sun. She rolled her head from one side of the coat's thick collar to the other. She dragged her arm under her nose. She hooked her fingers in the fence again and tilted her head back, her arms spread. Yet, because she was either at the end of a high or in the slow syrup before the rush of its beginning, there was nothing wanting about her pose. All of her wishes were sated. All of her wounds were tended to. I thought about going over and talking to her, sitting beside her, resting my head in her lap like I did when I was a little kid because although she was a crackhead and desperate, although I could muster no more love than numb hate, she was my mother, the sanctuary and savior I knew before I knew life, and she, in birthing me, had presented me with my first essential freedom. Outside of the womb, a baby could be heard. She had given me voice. I wanted to shout. I wanted to weep, wail, testify. I wanted to call down the sky, turn off the sun. With my voice, I wanted to lift Ever up, shake it free, then lay it back down, carefully place it where and how it should be. I wanted to run to her, sing to her, whisper
I love you
in her ear.

But I couldn't. I had nothing to say, no song to sing. I owned not a single word, not a guttural syllable. No matter what I claimed, what I learned in school, how I loved to jump and run, how I played basketball for hours with friends, and alone in the dark of night against imaginary defenders, no matter how I watched TV for hours: I was not free. The absence of my creators enslaved me. And not just me; there were armies of brothers, so many children, like me. So I did what I had to do. I did what plenty of other brothers did too. I looked down, spit on the ground, and stopped myself from crying. Hell no; Lord knows, I would not break. From then on, I would be a dam; a dam that dammed a dam. Nothing would leak from me. Nothing would slip in.

O
n December 18th, 1996, a week shy of Christmas, my mother was found dead behind my building, stabbed three times, once in the chest, once in the neck, and once in the soft spot at the back of her head. She was twenty-seven and it happened late at night, and her body wasn't found until early in the morning, just when the sun was lifting the cold off Queens. I was fourteen, a freshman, and I was on my way to school. I came out of my building and saw the police cars and the first and only thing I thought was: here we go again; once more, they're giving someone a hard time. So I cursed them. Then I jammed my hands into my coat pockets and followed the puffs of my breath to school. My mother was found facedown, stuck in a frozen pool of her own blood, and the police had to pour hot water on her so they could peel her from the concrete. They never caught who killed her. If asked, I would have bet they didn't even try. She was a crackhead. So they probably thought the world was better off without her.

My grandma was the one to go down to the morgue and identify my mother's body and when she came home, she turned the TV off, stood in the middle of the room, and calmly told me where she'd been.

“Abraham,” she said. “Your mother's gone to join Jesus. May God have mercy on her soul.”

My grandma turned on the TV again, slowly walked to her room, and closed the door. I sat silent on the couch. The five o'clock news was on and the meteorologist was giving the weather report. The next day was going to be a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky over the entire East Coast from Florida to Maine. Suddenly, my grandma began to wail as if all of her organs were squeezing through her pores, fighting, clawing, and jamming their way through holes too small for anything other than a bead of sweat to slip through. I couldn't take the sound, the grinding howl of a hymn incongruously interrupted by coughs and gasps for air. Without thinking of anything, I stood up and walked the four steps across the room to my grandma's door. I didn't knock on the door when I got there. I didn't pause or hesitate. I gripped the knob, turned it, and walked in.

My grandma was on the floor in the fetal position by the foot of the bed. Her red, ankle-length winter coat was still on. She looked like a lump of clotted blood. She shivered and buckled. She choked. She heaved. She wheezed. She didn't notice I was there. I looked down at her and thought: my mother is dead.

I was an orphan. And there was my grandma: broken on the floor. I lay down behind her and wrapped my arm around her, spooned her as if she were my wife, the woman I loved, the woman I would forever die for. I held my grandma as best as I could. I held her so she knew I was there, so she knew I wasn't leaving.

“Shhh,” I whispered. “Shhh.”

“My baby,” my grandma wept. “My little girl.”

She punched the floor with the side of her fist.

“Why?” she screamed. “Why?”

She wrenched her body as if she were trying to bore herself into the floor. I strained to keep my arm over her. I refused to let her go. In her crying, everything my grandma had in her body, everything she'd ever swallowed and held in, everything that had ever plagued her and abused her and offered her only silence when she demanded justifications and answers broke out.

The door opened. I glanced over my shoulder. Donnel came into the apartment. He walked toward us. Then he stopped behind me, a step from the doorway of my grandma's room.

“Nigga,” he whispered sadly.

Donnel knew what happened. He knew my mother was dead. Never in my life had I seen him look so feeble. His firm, full lips bent. Donnel was headstrong, arrogant in his assumption of immortality and defiant when confronted with talk of death, but there, looking over my grandmother and me, he was not just confronted by death, he was absorbed by it. My grandma quaked. She erupted. She screamed in tongues. Once again, she was overtaken by wretchedness and rage. Her crying was the siren of a woman drowning in fire, gulping for air, kicking, flailing, so damn desperate. Donnel looked left, then right. I feared he was going to leave. I couldn't watch him. I turned my face and pressed it into my grandma's back. I clenched my eyes and squeezed her as tightly as I could. Then Donnel was on his knees behind me. Then he lay across my grandma and me, wrapped us, enveloped us, held us in his arms.

“I got you,” he said. “Don't worry. I got you.”

T
he alarm clock blared rap music, but its off button was broken so I fought out of sleep and pulled its plug from the wall. Then, as if gathered by a hopeless breeze determined to be hopeful, I sat up, put my feet on the floor, rubbed my eyes and face, and mentally prepared myself to rise from bed. It was Tuesday, January 21, 1997, the day after Martin Luther King Day. Behind me, Donnel slept with his back to me. And on the floor on the other side of the bed, just feet from the white wall, Eric slept on the kid-sized mattress. They breathed deeply. Their sound balanced between snoring and the wind of last breaths. It was 6:00 a.m. Eric was still officially enrolled in school but never attended. Donnel and the notion of school were as foreign to each other as snow and fire. Then there was me. I was getting up. And even if I stood and collapsed, I'd stand again. I had to go to school. It was inexplicable. I would have sworn I never learned anything. And I would have passed a polygraph when saying I hated it, despised everything about school from the way
the broken bell didn't ring but rattled between periods to the teachers, all of them, from the exuberant, white neophytes who came to save every brown child in the room to the black ones, those whose conviction swelled when confronted by the tumultuous brown sea that could be their children and those whose frustration seemed to drown them. Yet there was something inside of me, some dogged compulsion that made it a moral imperative for me to be in school. Was it my subconscious, those promises I made my grandma and my mother? Was it the memories of those nights I sat up with my mother doing my homework? Or was it the absence of Nice? Was it because I wanted to be a basketball star just like him? I didn't know. Maybe that's why I was going. Because I was full of questions and voids, and wasn't school the place one went to discover?

So I took a deep breath. I stood. And then that sound hit me, that thumping of a helicopter flying over Ever and the neighborhood. It was a familiar and hated sound. The police were looking for someone. Suddenly, I was a nail and that thumping was a hammer on my head. Then its spotlight crashed through the window, trampled across the floor, stomped on the bed and up the walls and left me wilted. All of my life, every whisper of my breath, the strength in my muscles, the rigidity of my bones, even the potency of my morning breath was stripped from me. I wanted to lie back down, curl into a ball, and pull the covers over my head. I wanted to bury myself. Because that thumping and spotlight caused me to recall that afternoon when Lindbergh gave my mother and me one of his helicopters while we waited for the bus when I was six and so sick I coughed and spit green mud. Once again, as if it were a fact I didn't already own, I knew my mother was dead. And my grandma had her shift changed at work so I also knew that she had left for work an hour earlier. And my Aunt Rhonda had gotten a job working the overnight shift for the city cleaning buses so I knew that she was not home either. So it was just us, Donnel, Eric, me, and
that police helicopter and spotlight thumping us, three young men who had no say in when they had to be men. And perhaps there it was, the reason why I had to go. I wasn't fearless like Donnel. And I didn't have Eric's imagination so I couldn't lose myself in fantastical cartoons and superheroes scribbled in a notebook. I needed a say, a voice. And maybe school was where I'd find it. So school it was. But then I didn't think that my attendance might change anything. It was simpler, more basic and naïve than that. There was a basketball team and a chair for me, a place to sit near a window to look out of. So for periods of forty-eight minutes I could get away. I could be. And I could want. And I could open my notebook and write about each one and it would look like I was taking copious notes, like I really wanted to be there, like I was some hungry student, which, in the end, in my heart of hearts, beneath all of my sadness and frustration and any of the refusing I might have hurled and claimed, is what I really was.

I dragged my feet across the cold floor. I took the clothes I was to wear that day from the dresser, my towel from the nail on the wall, and left the room, quietly closing the door as if my slight sound might disturb my cousins.

All of the lights in the apartment were off but the approaching dawn lay blue through the room so I saw them and knew I had been mistaken. Donnel, Eric, and I were not the only ones home. Two bodies lay beneath a bedsheet on the couch. I studied the bodies. Who were they? One looked like my Aunt Rhonda. I wondered why she wasn't at work. Had she gotten off early? Had she been fired? Or had she quit? And the body beside her? All I could see was that it was the body of a man whom she had welcomed into our home like he was worthy of sleeping where we lived. I couldn't believe it, but then I could. It was not the first time I had met one of my Aunt Rhonda's newest lovers this way. Still, I stared at them. Despite my mother's death, life had not changed. It had grown no greater or worse. But because I was fourteen
and caught in the throes of growing from a childish, self-centered perspective to the recognition that I was one of billions, a speck in a world of specks, the fact that everything was status quo hurt. If my mother was dead, shouldn't something have occurred? Shouldn't I at least have had an angel?

I don't know how long I stood there. And no description can describe how deeply I buried my grieving. But when the pale light of the day's first sun eased into the room and Nice's golden trophies came into view, I stared at them for a moment, then stepped toward the bathroom. Then I stopped again. Two black garbage bags and a few shoeboxes of my mother's belongings sat against the wall to the left of the front door. It had been a little more than a month since she'd died. While we slept, my grandma must have filled the bags, tied them off, then left them for someone else to muster the courage to take out. I considered the bags, then all of it, my Aunt Rhonda and the unknown man on the couch, Nice's trophies, and how my grandma must have looked filling and tying the bags and dragging them to the door. I thought nothing and everything at precisely the same time. I breathed the room in. My heart was in those bags. I looked at the trophies. It was in them too. I had to be something, somebody. But who?

I started across the room again. I shuffled my bare feet across the hard carpet and stepped onto the cold of the bathroom's linoleum floor. I turned on the light and closed the door, and squinting through the bathroom's white brightness, I pushed the opaque white plastic shower curtain out of the way and turned on the shower. Then, holding one hand beneath the water, I turned to my left, kicked the black toilet seat up, and urinated in the white porcelain bowl as I waited for the shower to get warm. In the morning cold, the shower always took too long to heat up. I stopped urinating, took my hand from beneath the shower, and looked at my reflection in the mirror above the white sink. I studied my face, scrutinized my blemishes, sought out any new pimples that
had arrived on my cheeks overnight. Then I leaned back a bit. For the first time in my life, I was shocked with the sudden recognition of my own appearance. I looked at myself good and long. My face was simple, but not plain. My features were equal with each other but not necessarily balanced. My nose was not the nose of a Roman king nor was it squat, flat and rounded. Its bridge was wide; its end was a triangular drip angled slightly downward, as if casually pointing to my lips, full and thick with a subtle crest in the middle. I took a moment more to look at my lips. The top and bottom lip shared an equal weight and significance that made it seem one could not exist without the other. Gently, I pinched them together with my index finger and thumb. I tried to blow. My cheeks filled with air. Then I let my lips go and the breath rushed out. I touched my cheeks, then my cheekbones and the angle of my jaw. I looked at the reflection of my eyes, first one, then the other, each brown bulb boxed in by the fan of upper and lower eyelashes. Sometimes I was mistaken for Dominican or half Puerto Rican. Once, someone told me I must be Guyanese. Sometimes I let people's pronouncements of my ancestry become my identity.
Yeah
, I'd say,
that's it, that's exactly what I am.
What did I know? My father's sperm could have held DNA from anywhere. So if someone said I looked Haitian then maybe my father was related to Toussaint Louverture and I had revolution in my blood. And if someone said I looked Nigerian then maybe my father's father or mother or maybe his great-great-grandparents were from Lagos, the descendants of tribal leaders. And if a sister swore I had Cherokee in me because she had a grandfather who was half Cherokee so she knew the look then maybe my father's father was a full-blooded chief. All of this is to say that my ignorance made me a specific type of young man. That is, I could either see myself as a nonentity, or I could see myself as whatever I wished to be, like a star, born from the bang of nothing or a dream.

Finally, the water was warm. I stepped beneath the shower, closed my
eyes, and let the water run over my head. I lifted my chin and the water ran down my face, neck, chest, and the rest of my body. I breathed. I soaped. Then there was a knock on the bathroom door. It was Donnel.

“Nigga,” he said, “you in?”

I was surprised to hear him but I tried to speak as if I weren't surprised at all. “Yeah,” I said, “I'm in.”

The door opened. Cold air swelled into the bathroom. Then Donnel closed the door.

“I got to go,” he said, peeing in the toilet.

I looked around the edge of the shower curtain. Donnel had his back to me. He was fully clothed. He wore a hooded sweatshirt, a pair of jeans. I wondered why he was awake and dressed so early in the morning. Where was he going? What did he need? He finished urinating and flushed the toilet.

“D,” I scolded. “Nigga, damn!”

“Shit,” he said. “Sorry. My bad.”

Water pressure dissappeared and the shower became nothing more than a trickle of water. Without turning around, Donnel turned on the sink to brush his teeth, wetting his toothbrush beneath the dribble of water from the faucet. I positioned myself beneath the weak drip from the showerhead, my futile but only source of heat.

“Where you going?” I asked.

“Nowhere,” he said.

“Then why you dressed?” I pressed.

“Cause,” he said.

His answer wasn't good enough. I wavered on the edge of frustration. “Cause why?”

“Cause,” he began. Then he erupted. His voice was loud. But it was not anger. He was demanding, ordering. He was leaving no room for me to think of anything to contradict him with. He threw the shower curtain open. He was fully clothed. I was naked.

“Cause that's it! Shit!” he shouted. “Cause what's with the questions? Cause I could walk out of here and—”

I heard the word
die
before he said it and interrupted him. “Nigga, you ain't going nowhere,” I said.

“Says who?” he asked.

“Says me.”

“Ain't that what Beany's sister would've said?” he asked angrily. “And what Pastor Ramsey would've told Jeremiah? Shit, ain't that what Grans would've said about Nice? And you too? Nigga, it could happen anytime.”

“I'm talking about right now,” I said. “You ain't going. Get back in bed. Go to sleep.”

There was a moment of silence and I realized I was naked. But my nudity was not why I was silent. I could not believe I gave Donnel an order. Suddenly, I was nervous. What was he going to do? How would he respond? He was silent. Was he preparing to lash out at me, strike me? I snatched my towel from its place draped over the top of the curtain rod and wrapped it around my waist. The bathroom wasn't big enough for two people to stand in unless one's ass was pressed against the sink while the other stood with his calves pressed against the side of the bathtub and they were kissing passionately, clearly on their way to making love.

“Move,” I ordered.

A thin veil of steam hung in the air between Donnel and me. He reached his hand up and tried to touch my face but I flinched and pulled my head back. He responded calmly. A short breath of laughter fell from him. Then he placed his hand on the side of my neck.

“Always,” he whispered. “Always remember, you loved.”

I
put on my black winter coat, my Yankee cap, and shouldered my backpack. I felt exhausted. Leaving our apartment, my hands jammed in the pockets of my coat, my chin tucked behind the zipped collar, my Yankee cap pulled down tight and twisted a bit to the right, my bones were water, my muscles, air. I walked along Columbus Avenue, kept my eyes on the few feet of concrete directly before me. I could not look up. I did not meet a face, a pair of eyes, my reflection in a window, or the distance before me. By the time I had come out of the bathroom, Donnel was gone.

I came to a line, a river of teenagers against a fence, determinations waiting, deserving; wonders, marvels, freaks, virtuosos. It was cold. Some made fists and blew their breath through them. Some bounced on their toes to stay warm. Others laughed and talked and breathed flowers of breath. Some took drags off cigarettes. There were young men smacked with too much cologne and young women
sharing cups of hot chocolate, tea, and coffee. Some were huddled together, others stood a step away from the crowd.

Before us stood our high school, a three-story redbrick building with windows that were covered by metal grates, ceilings that leaked, rats and roaches that went where they pleased, and textbooks that were torn, scribbled upon, and populated by references and innuendos that implied our ancestral history was not worth being studied until Africans were “discovered.” To our right, walking past us along the edge of the sidewalk, went our teachers, one by one and in small groups, those whose hopeless idealism made them romantic and slightly delusional, those who gave passionate rants against right-wing politics, those who empathized too much and not enough, those who believed our attendance was necessary no matter how improperly guided and ill provided our education was, and those who came solely for the paycheck and their beloved, unequaled vacation time. As for how we, the students, felt about our school, the general sentiment was: who were we to complain? School had always been this way, even worse for our parents and grandparents. So the injustice was not just what our generation got. It was our culture; that is, it was the only history we were exposed to.

Titty, Yusef, and Precious stood at the back of the line. I greeted them and then traced my eyes along the length of students.

“What's this about?” I asked.

For a moment, they said nothing. Then, working chewing gum with his back teeth and looking straight ahead, Yusef said: “Metal detectors ain't working.”

“They searching niggas by hand,” added Titty.

Yusef spit his gum out. “Slavery,” he huffed. “That's what this shit is.”

“How long you all been waiting?” I asked.

“Forever,” said Yusef. “For far too fucking long.”