Hold Love Strong (19 page)

T
here was only one wrong committed all night, only two wrongdoers: Donnel and Nice. Their wrong was neither a simple gaffe nor was it a misdemeanor or felony. The crime they committed was nothing punishable. It was worse. It was too great.

Neither laughed or smiled more than halfheartedly. Neither danced. Nice shrugged away Luscious's attempts to get him to join her for slow songs and stood against the wall, awkwardly greeting brothers and sisters he had once seamlessly loved, mechanically embracing those who embraced him, and stiffly refusing helpings of food, things to drink, and even the slightest taste of the marijuana sweetening the room. And when Luscious was not at his side, whispering in his ear, pointing out who was who and who was whose child and setting him at ease as much as she could, he scoured the room, dissected every brother and sister with an otherworldly, infernal mistrust, and followed Luscious's every move, his eyes twisted with suspicion and jealousy. Who was she talk
ing to? Who was that brother, that sister to her? How intimately did they know her? Why were they touching her the way they did? Were they lovers? Had they seen her naked, smelled her secret scents? And did they know who he was, or rather, who he had been? And who was he? In that room; at that party; amidst all of the brothers and sisters he had once awed and been worshipped by, he seemed lost.

And worse, throughout every moment of the celebration, he was scrutinized, scoured by the hateful glare of Donnel, seeming always to be leaning against the wall opposing Nice, nodding and shrugging when people joined him, darkly smoking blunts and drinking the same warm forty-ounce all night while measuring Nice, his musculature and failed attempt at a disaffected disposition. Not once did Nice and Donnel speak. Not once did they make eye contact. Matter-of-factly, but not specifically, Luscious had told Nice. She said Donnel was doing, you know, things; running, you know, the streets. Early in the night, Nice came to me for verification. And I said: “D? You know, he's good. He's all right.” And that's all I said. I took the Fifth against everything else Nice asked, against the very idea that Donnel was headed down the same path Nice had previously traveled and, just hours before, returned from.

So all night, Nice and Donnel shared just two things: nothing and critical judgment. And yet, my grandma wasn't having it. No. Such divisions would not exist in her home. And so, when the party's population finally dwindled to a few dozen exhausted brothers and sisters and the only people dancing were a handful of couples, my grandma, drunk herself, stormed over to DJ Q, pulled the headphone from his ear, and told him what she needed to hear. Then she marched across the room, snatched Donnel by the hand, and dragged him into the middle of the floor.

“Go ahead and leave this spot,” she blasted, her eyes and face ablaze with a murderous level of sincerity. “And you don't never come back! As God is my witness, just keep on vanishing!”

Then my grandma left Donnel, crossed the room, and snatched the
hands of my Aunt Rhonda, Doo-Doo, and Eric, and led them into the middle of the room to stand with Donnel.

“Luscious baby, Roosevelt,” she shouted, holding my Aunt Rhonda and Donnel by their wrists. “Let's go! Both of you! Come on over here.”

It took a moment, and something she whispered in his ear, and a gentle tug of his hand, but Luscious led my uncle into the middle of the room where my grandma and Eric and my Aunt Rhonda and Doo-Doo, and Donnel, slouching to demonstrate his defiance, stood.

I stood by the window with Kaya and I had been telling her things I could only say because that night was a celebration of my family, of whom I was born loving, and I had the courage of malt liquor and marijuana swelling my chest. She was beautiful. I had dreams about her. And I told her the secrets, how I had written her love letters when we were in middle school and written her letters apologizing for not giving her the letters; how I struggled with seeing her because of how deeply just the sight of her meant to me. I didn't know why. It just was what it was. Maybe because seeing her made me forget myself, forget the sadness I harbored. I wanted to take her to a movie. Did she want to go to a movie with me? How about to dinner? What about dinner and a movie and maybe some ice cream? What was her favorite flavor? Butter pecan. Wow. Me too. But not really though. So what type of cone, sugar or wafer?

“Abraham!” my grandma shouted. “Abraham, what you think you're special? Get over here!”

With a smile sweeter than anything a horn made of sugarcane could play, and with eyes shining her own inebriation, and although I couldn't quite believe I saw it there, some level of infatuation too, Kaya said: “Go. Your family needs you.”

I hesitated. Kaya took the beer I was nursing then gave my shoulder a gentle push.

“Go on,” she smiled. “You can come back.”

I crossed the room and joined my family. Stevie Wonder singing “Ribbon in the Sky” filled the apartment, everything and everyone in Ever. Then Mr. Goines tried to join us. He let his camera rest on his chest and approached. But my grandma held her hand up and stopped him.

“No,” she said. “Take a picture. What else you got that camera for? We taking it back to the beginning, back to how it should have always been.”

Mr. Goines's shining eyes went dull and wide, spread like ink seeping into a tissue. She'd hurt him, knocked the wind from his chest. His knees buckled. He rocked back on his heels. Desperately, he grabbed his camera with both hands and lifted it in front of his face, his hands fists around the camera's sides.

As if her body were suddenly made of rubber bands, my grandma stretched herself as far as she could and lashed her arms over our shoulders. She reined us in and she held us strong, and we breathed on, in, and with one another, and on my forehead and cheeks, and on the front and sides of my neck, the silent harmony of our breathing fell, following the rhythm my grandma made, the slow swaying of us left and right like she was a gentle ocean and we were the small boat it coaxed homeward.

“It's good,” she said. “Lord, ain't it so good.”

H
is name was Abdul Jalaal Najeeb, “the servant of the glory of the faith of noble descent.” He didn't want to be called Nice or Roosevelt any longer. Every morning he woke before dawn, unfurled himself from the couch, causing the groan and whine of its old springs to echo through our apartment. He folded the bedsheets and the blanket he used in perfect squares, washed his hands, mouth, face, and feet in the sink. Then he dressed in a salwar kameez, slid his feet into slippers, walked out of our apartment, and climbed the misery of the stairwell, the rank ascent of our building, a prayer mat under his arm. On the roof, he faced east and prayed. He touched his ears and knees and prostrated. On Fridays, he attended the mosque for jummah. He talked about one day going to Mecca, making hajj. He spoke about unity, brotherhood. He said he had no interest, no desire to touch a basketball. It was a white man's game: white lines around the edge of a court; a fence surrounding concrete; a cement yard; a crude contest where
one put a ball through a rim. It imprisoned us, glorious brothers and sisters such as we were.

Wherever he went, to parole, to find work, for long walks around Ever Park and its surroundings, he repeated the passage of the Qur'an he aimed to memorize or rememorize for that day. At night he quizzed himself, writing passages in both Arabic and English, underlining already highlighted passages, and crowding the already crowded edges of the pages with more notations, more considerations, more insights and questions. He didn't watch television. He didn't listen to hip hop stations on the radio. He said
As-salāmu ‘alaykum,
“Peace be upon you,” and reported to parole, gave them urine when they demanded it, and attended the drug and alcohol counseling program and anger management therapy, group, and one-on-one sessions that were the conditions of his release. He did it all with a self-assured humility, as if such subjugation paled in comparison to his manhood. He said freedom was not physical. It was cerebral and spiritual. No matter where his body may have been, no matter what walls or bars or confinements he was forced behind, no matter what sense of self-nothingness he was force-fed and ordered to abide by, he had been free ever since Islam came into his life.

“Because here,” he told me, touching his temple with a finger. “And here,” he added, touching his chest with the flat of his free hand. “No man can limit the vastness of Allah, peace and blessings be upon Him.”

And because he believed this with an incomparable degree of faith, he also believed that he had been free since he pronounced the Shahadah, his pledge of faith, two years to the day after being first locked down. And because he believed this, when his parole officer showed up at our apartment, my uncle welcomed him, introducing the stranger to me and Eric and my Aunt Rhonda as if a found member of our extended family had suddenly wandered into our home. Fellow Muslims, men with similar but not so severely humble dispositions who he had
befriended in prison, brothers his age who he had educated and older men who had enlightened and counseled him, visited our apartment and sat with him in the kitchen, dissecting ethics, politics, and the particulars of the sermons they heard at the mosque.

He listened and spoke softly and I couldn't believe him. He was too holy, too devout, so devoid of emotions and detached that I feared what might happen when something, someone, some fact slipped past his shield, the shroud and armor of his unwavering faith, and struck his foundation, piercing not Nice, but the heart of Roosevelt, that which was too soft and too huge, too much like a swollen red balloon inflated to capacity not to explode. Of course, I knew the truth that would do this. And so I feared the revelation, feared when I saw him talking to brothers and sisters he was close with before he was locked away, and feared when Luscious wanted to hold his hand, kiss him, sit on his lap, love him, envelop him with the affection he had once initiated, reciprocated, and basked in. He held her off, kept her love at a distance; never revealing a sliver of intimacy while they were in public. She would sit on the couch and he'd sit not fully beside her, maintaining a few inches of space between their thighs. She'd reach for his hand and he'd sneak it from her reach, slip it into his pocket or bury it by folding his arms across his chest. She teased him, poked and pushed him the way an awkwardly coy middle school girl might mess with the high school boy she liked. But he didn't respond, barely smiled. Instead, he laid awkward, uncomfortable, and somewhat disapproving eyes on her. His detachment wore at her patience. He frustrated her. Shortly after his return, they argued like an old tired couple who had grown sick of each other. She shouted, slammed her hand on her hip, and barked at him. He pretended to listen, nodding at inopportune times that proved he had heard nothing, and then he attempted to rationalize his thinking, his behavior with circuitous, unsubstantiated statements about Islam and love and respect. He was not the same young brother who'd left
Ever. He had faith, he said, guidance from Allah (peace and blessings be upon Him).

“Don't mistake me for just some brother in some ghetto thinking things that amount to all of nothing,” he said.

“Nigga,” scolded Luscious. “What you think, your shit don't stink?”

“No,” he said. “On the contrary. I know my stench.”

She left him, said it was over, and came back a few days later to try again. Then they fought and she said she couldn't take him again, that he was impossible, that loving him was killing her.

Then one day I was playing basketball at the basketball court and Luscious was standing on the sidelines talking to friends. My uncle marched down Columbus Avenue, marched up to her, and glared through her smile and hello.

“Baby, what?” she said, laughing uncomfortably. “Why you looking at me like that?”

He had found out whom Luscious had loved and who had loved her, and as if his arm were a sword he swung it through the air, clamped his grip around Luscious's neck, and thrust her against the chain-link fence, sending a rattle through the rusted metal. He pinned her there. Then, ignoring shouts and pleadings, ignoring everyone regardless of whether or not they called him Roosevelt or Nice or Jalaal or Nigga or Brother or Cousin or Son, or they cursed him like the devil, he raised his fist to batter her. I stood on the basketball court, frozen, suddenly out of breath. I had never once seen my uncle angry, never once seen him raise his voice. And there he was; his fist raised; paused; prepared to smash Luscious. But then, as if my silence were the world's loudest shout, my uncle glanced over his shoulder, made eye contact with me, and dropped his fist.

“You're dead to me,” he said, turning back to Luscious, giving one last squeeze to her throat and pushing her against the fence before letting go, marching away, leaving Luscious to fall into a heap of weeping.

“Roosevelt!” she shouted through the chain-link fence as he walked away. “Roosevelt, no!”

She was a shunned pile of shivering and crying, and although he said nothing of it, my uncle was heartbroken. His true foundation was shattered. Luscious, the real hope that had maintained him for seven years, was not fantasy but human, imperfect and impure just like him. He gave up on finding a job. He gave up on going outside. He gave up on Ever and himself, and for weeks, when he was not praying, and until all hours of the night, fueled by the thick black coffee he brewed, he sat in the kitchen, two feet back from the table, his legs crossed, his elbow balanced on the arm of the chair, looking out of the kitchen's small square window, drifting far off in thought, the Qur'an open on his lap, a pen sitting in the furrow between the left and right page.