Homegoing (35 page)

Marcus pushed farther in. The art on the walls frightened him a little, though he would never admit it to Diante if, or more likely when, his friend asked his opinion. The piece Diante had contributed was of a woman with horns strung around a baobab tree. Marcus didn’t understand it at all, but he stood under it for a short while, his head tilted to the left, nodding slightly whenever someone appeared next to him.

Soon the person next to him was Diante. His friend poked him in the shoulder repeatedly, all the jabs in quick succession, so that he had finished before Marcus could tell him to stop.

“What, nigga?” Marcus said, turning to look at him.

It was like Diante didn’t even realize someone else was there. His body was angled away, and he suddenly turned it back toward Marcus.

“She’s here.”

“Who?”

“The fuck you mean, who? The girl, man. She’s here.”

Marcus turned his gaze toward where Diante was pointing. There were two women standing side by side. The first was tall and skinny, light-skinned like Marcus himself was, but with dreadlocks that drifted down past her ass. She was playing with her locs, twirling them around her finger or taking the whole lot of them and piling them onto the very top of her head.

The woman next to her was the one who caught Marcus’s eye. She was dark—blue-black, they would have called her on playgrounds in Harlem—and she was thick with sturdy, large breasts and a wild Afro that made her look as though at some point very recently she had been kissed by lightning.

“C’mon, man,” Diante said, already walking toward the women. Marcus walked a little bit behind him. He could see Diante trying to play it cool. The calculated slouch, the careful lean. When they got to the women, Marcus waited to see which one was
the
one.

“You!” the woman with the dreadlocks said, slapping Diante’s shoulder.

“I thought I recognized you, but I couldn’t remember where I woulda known you from,” Diante said. Marcus rolled his eyes.

“We met at the museum, a couple of months ago,” the woman said, smiling.

“Right, right, of course,” Diante said. He was on his best behavior now, standing straight and smiling. “I’m Diante, and this is my friend Marcus.”

The woman flattened her skirt and picked up another loc, started to twirl it around her finger. Preening, it seemed. The woman next to her hadn’t said a word yet, and her eyes were mostly trained on the ground, as though if she didn’t look at them, she could pretend they weren’t there.

“I’m Ki,” the dreadlocked woman said. “And this is my friend. Marjorie.”

At the mention of her name, Marjorie lifted her head, the curtain of wild hair parting to reveal a lovely face and a beautiful necklace.

“Nice to meet you, Marjorie,” Marcus said, extending his hand.

When Marcus was just a little boy, his mother, Amani, had
taken him for the day. Stolen him, really, for Ma Willie and Sonny and the rest of the family had no idea that Amani, who had asked just to say hi, would lure him away from the apartment with the promise of an ice cream cone.

His mother couldn’t afford the cone. Marcus could remember her walking with him from one parlor to another shop to another and another in the hope that the prices would be better at a place just a little bit farther down. Once they reached Sonny’s old neighborhood, Marcus knew two things with certainty: first, that he was somewhere he was not supposed to be, and second, that there would be no ice cream.

His mother had dragged him up and down 116th Street, showing him off to her dope fiend friends, the broke jazz crew.

“Dis your baby?” one fat, toothless woman said, squatting so that Marcus was looking straight down the barrel of her empty mouth.

“Yep, dis Marcus.”

The woman touched him, then waddled on. Amani kept navigating him through a part of Harlem that he knew only through stories, through the salvation prayers the church congregants put up each Sunday. The sun got lower and lower in the sky. Amani started crying, and yelling at him to walk faster though he was going as fast as his little legs could carry him. It was nearly dusk before Ma Willie and Sonny found him. His father had snatched his hand and tugged him away so fast, he thought his arm would escape its socket. And he’d watched as his grandmother struck Amani hard across the face, saying loud enough for anyone to hear, “Touch this child again and see what happens.”

Marcus thought about that day often. He was still amazed by it. Not by the fear he’d felt throughout the day, when the woman who was no more than a stranger to him had dragged him farther and farther from home, but by the fullness of love and protection he’d felt later, when his family had finally found him. Not the being lost, but the being found. It was the same feeling he got whenever he saw Marjorie. Like she had, somehow, found him.

Months had passed, and Diante and Ki’s relationship fizzled, leaving only Marcus and Marjorie’s friendship as evidence of its ever having been. Diante teased Marcus about Marjorie constantly, saying, “When you gon’ tell that girl you into her?” But Marcus couldn’t explain to Diante that it wasn’t about that, because he didn’t really understand himself what it
was
about.

“So this is the Asante Region,” Marjorie said, pointing to a map of Ghana on her wall. “This is technically where my family’s from, but my grandmother moved down to the Central Region, right here, to be closer to the beach.”

“I hate the beach,” Marcus said.

At first Marjorie smiled at him, like she was going to start laughing, but then she stopped, and her eyes turned serious. “Are you scared of it?” she asked. She let her finger drift slowly from the edge of the map down to the wall. She rested her hand against the black stone necklace she wore every day.

“Yeah, I guess I am,” Marcus said. He had never told anyone before.

“My grandmother said she could hear the people who were stuck on the ocean floor talking to her. Our ancestors. She was kind of crazy.”

“That don’t sound crazy to me. Shit, everybody in my grandma’s church caught a spirit at one point or another. Just because somebody sees or hears or feels something other folks can’t, doesn’t mean they’re crazy. My grandma used to say, ‘A blind man don’t call us crazy for seeing.’ ”

Now Marjorie gave him a real smile. “You want to know what I’m scared of?” she asked, and he nodded. He had learned not to be surprised by how forthcoming she was. How she never gave in to small talk, just dove right into deep waters. “Fire,” she said.

He had heard the story of her father’s scar in the first week of meeting Marjorie. Her answer didn’t surprise him.

“My grandmother used to say we were born of a great fire. I wish I knew what she meant by that.”

“You ever get back to Ghana?”

“Oh, I’ve been busy with grad school and teaching and all of that.” She paused and looked into the air, counting. “I haven’t been back since my grandmother died, actually,” she said softly. “She gave me this. A family heirloom, I guess.” Marjorie pointed to the necklace.

Marcus nodded. So that was why Marjorie never took it off.

It was getting late, and Marcus had work to do, but he couldn’t move from this particular spot in Marjorie’s living room. There was a large bay window that let in so much light that his shoulder felt brushed with warmth. He wanted to stay for as long as he could.

“She would have hated to know that it’s been so long. Almost fourteen years. When my parents were alive, they used to try to make me go, but it was too painful, losing her. And then I lost my parents, and I guess I just didn’t see the point anymore. My Twi’s so rusty, I don’t know if I could even get around anyway.”

She forced a laugh, but looked away as soon as it escaped her lips. She hid her face from him for what seemed like a long stretch of time. The sun finally reached a place where the window couldn’t catch its light. Marcus could feel the heat lifting off of his shoulder, and he wanted it back.

Marcus spent the rest of the school year avoiding his research.
He couldn’t see the point anymore. He had gotten a grant that would take him to Birmingham so that he could see what was left of Pratt City. He went with Marjorie, and all they’d been able to find was a blind, and probably crazy, old man who claimed he knew Marcus’s great-grandpa H when he was just a boy.

“You could do your research on Pratt City,” Marjorie had suggested when they left the man’s house. “Seems like an interesting town.”

When the old man had heard Marjorie’s voice, he said he wanted to feel her. That this was how he got to know a person. Marcus had watched, amazed and somewhat embarrassed, as she let the man run his hands along her arms and, finally, her face, like he was reading her. It was her patience that had amazed him. In the short time that he’d known her, he could already tell that she had enough patience to take her through almost any storm. Marcus sometimes studied with her in the library, and he would watch out of the corners of his eyes as she devoured book after book after book. Her work was in African and African American literature, and when Marcus asked her why she chose those subjects, she said that those were the books that she could feel inside of her. When the old man touched her, she had looked at him so patiently, as though while he read her skin, she was also reading him.

“That’s not the point,” he said.

“What is the point, Marcus?”

She stopped walking. For all they knew, they were standing on top of what used to be a coal mine, a grave for all the black convicts who had been conscripted to work there. It was one thing to research something, another thing entirely to have lived it. To have felt it. How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it—not apart from it, but inside of it.

How could he explain to Marjorie that he wasn’t supposed to be here? Alive. Free. That the fact that he had been born, that he wasn’t in a jail cell somewhere, was not by dint of his pulling himself up by the bootstraps, not by hard work or belief in the American Dream, but by mere chance. He had only heard tell of his great-grandpa H from Ma Willie, but those stories were enough to make him weep and to fill him with pride. Two-Shovel H they had called him. But what had they called his father or his father before him? What of the mothers? They had been products of their time, and walking in Birmingham now, Marcus was an accumulation of these times. That was the point.

Instead of saying any of this, he said, “You know why I’m scared of the ocean?”

She shook her head.

“It’s not just because I’m scared of drowning. Though I guess I am. It’s because of all that space. It’s because everywhere I look, I see blue, and I have no idea where it begins. When I’m out there, I stay as close as I can to the sand, because at least then I know where it ends.”

She didn’t speak for a while, just continued walking a little bit ahead of him. Maybe she was thinking about fire, the thing she had told him she most feared. Marcus had never seen so much as a picture of her father, but he imagined that he had been a fearsome man with a scar covering one whole side of his face. He imagined that Marjorie feared fire for the same reasons he feared water.

She stopped beneath a broken lamppost that flickered an eerie light on and off and on and off. “I bet you would like the beach in Cape Coast,” she said. “It’s beautiful there. Not like anything you would see in America.”

Marcus laughed. “I don’t think anyone in my family’s ever left the country. I wouldn’t know what to do on a plane ride that long.”

“You mostly just sleep,” she said.

He couldn’t wait to get out of Birmingham. Pratt City was long gone, and he wasn’t going to find what he was looking for in the ruins of that place. He didn’t know if he would ever find it.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Ess-cuse me, sah! You want go see slave castle? I take
you see Cape Coast Castle. Ten cedis, sah. Juss ten cedis. I take you see nice castle.”

Marjorie was rushing him through the tro-tro stop, hurrying them toward a cab that would take them to their beach resort. Days before, they had been in Edweso, paying respects to her father’s birthplace. Only hours before, they’d been in Takoradi, doing the same for her mother’s.

Everything was brilliant here, even the ground. Everywhere they went, Marcus would notice sparkling red dust. It coated his body by the end of every night. Now there would be sand to join it.

“Don’t mind them,” Marjorie said, moving Marcus past the group of young boys and girls who were trying to draw him toward them to buy this or that, take him here or there.

He stopped Marjorie. “You ever seen it? The Castle?”

They were in the middle of a busy street, and cars were blaring their horns, though it could have been at anyone—the many thin girls with buckets on their heads, the boys selling newspapers, the whole, entire country with skin like his, hustling about, making driving near impossible. Still, they found a way to pass.

Marjorie clutched at her backpack straps, pulled them away from her body. “No, actually. I’ve never been. That’s what the black tourists do when they come here.” He lifted an eyebrow at her. “You know what I mean,” she said.

“Well, I’m black. And I’m a tourist.”

Marjorie sighed and checked her watch, though they had nowhere they needed to go. They had come for the beach, and they had all week to see it. “Okay, fine. I’ll take you.”

They took a cab to their resort to set down their things. From the balcony, Marcus caught his first real glimpse of the beach. It seemed to stretch for miles and miles. Sunlight bounced off of the sand, making it shimmer. Sand like diamonds in the once gold coast.

There was almost no one milling around the Castle that day, save for a few women who were gathered around a very old tree, eating nuts and plaiting each other’s hair. They looked at Marcus and Marjorie as the two of them walked up, but they didn’t move. Marcus started to wonder if he was really seeing them in the flesh. If ever there was a place to believe was haunted, this was it. From the outside, the Castle was a glowing white. Powder white, like the entire thing had been scrubbed down to gleaming, cleansed of any stains. Marcus wondered who made it shine like that, and why. When they entered, things started to look dingier. The dirty skeleton of a long-past shame that held the place together began to show itself in blackening concrete, rusty-hinged doors. Soon a man so skinny and tall he looked like he was made from stretched rubber bands greeted them and the four others who had signed up for the tour.