Another Brooklyn (2 page)

My brother drove me to the subway, kissed my forehead, and hugged me hard. When had he become a man? For so long, he had been my little brother, sweet and solemn, his eyes open wide to the world. Now, behind small wire-rimmed glasses, he looked like a figure out of history. Malcolm maybe. Or Stokely.

I'll be by day after tomorrow to help you out, cool?

I'm good!

What—you got a man over there you don't want me to meet?

I laughed.

Still doing the Devil, I bet.

I slapped at him and got out of the car.
Love you.

Love you, too, August.

On the subway heading back to the old apartment, I looked up, startled to see Sylvia sitting across the aisle reading the
New York Times
. She had aged beautifully in the twenty years since I'd last seen her. Her reddish brown hair was cut short now, curly and streaked with gray. Her skin, still eerily bronze against those light eyes, was now etched through with fine wrinkles. Maybe she felt me watching her because she glanced up suddenly, recognized me, and smiled. For several slow seconds, the years fell away and she was Sylvia again, nearly fifteen in her St. Thomas Aquinas school uniform—green and blue plaid skirt, white blouse, and plaid cross bow tie, her belly just beginning to round. As my body seized up with silence again, I remembered Sister Sonja, her hijabbed head bent over her notebook, her fingers going still the first time I cried in her office.

Sylvia.

Oh my God! August!
she said.
When did you get back to Brooklyn?

The child would be a young woman now. I remember hearing she had Sylvia's reddish hair, and that as a newborn, her eyes had been gray.

Somehow I knew the train was pulling into Atlantic Avenue. But the station and everything around me felt far away. Somehow, I rose from my seat. Voice gone again. Body turning to ash.

Maybe Sylvia thought I was coming toward her, ready to hug away the years and forget. Maybe she had already forgotten, the way years allow us to.

You look good,
girl,
she said.

The train doors opened. It wasn't yet my stop.

But I got off anyway.

Years erase us. Sylvia sinking back into the dust of the world before I knew her, her baby gone, then her belly, then breasts, and finally only the deep gap in my life where she had once been.

Angela fading next, across the years, just a faint voice on the answering machine when I was home on college break.
I only just heard about Gigi. So awful. Were you there?
Promises to reconnect when both of us were next in New York. Promises she'd find me again. So much air around the lies distance allowed us to tell as she sank back into the world she had become a part of, a world of dancers and actors—redrawn into royalty without a past.

Gigi.

Each week, Sister Sonja said,
Start at the beginning,
her dark fingers bending around a small black notebook, pen poised. Many moments passed be
fore I opened my mouth to speak. Each week, I began with the words
I was waiting for my mother . . .

The office was small, ivy cascading down from a tiny pot on an otherwise stark windowsill. Maybe it was the ivy that kept me coming back. Every week, I spent forty minutes, my eyes moving from the ivy to Sister Sonja's hijab to her fingers closed around the notebook and pen. Maybe I spoke only because each week I was allowed to look into the brown, angled face of a woman and believe again that my mother was coming soon.

I know when I get there,
my brother and I used to sing.
The first thing I'll see is the sun shining golden. Shining right down on me . . .

How did I get there, to that moment of being asked to start at the beginning? Who had I become?

She's coming,
I'd say.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
.

What about your friends?
Sister Sonja asked.
Where are they now?

We're waiting for Gigi,
I'd say.
Everyone's waiting for Gigi.

Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, August. We were four girls together, amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone.

This is memory.

In eastern Indonesia, families keep their dead in special rooms in their homes. Their dead not truly dead until the family has saved enough money to pay for the funeral. Until then, the dead remain with them, dressed and cared for each morning, taken on trips with the family, hugged daily, loved deeply.

The year my mother started hearing voices from her dead brother Clyde, my father moved my own brother and me from our SweetGrove land in Tennessee to Brooklyn. It was the summer of 1973 and I was eight years old, my younger brother four, his thumb newly moving to his mouth in the hot city, his eyes wide and frightened.

The small apartment was on the top floor of a three-story building. My brother and I had never been this high up, and we spent hours staring past the painted-shut windows down to the street below. The people passing beneath us were all
beautiful in some way—beautifully thin, beautifully obese, beautifully Afroed, or cornrowed, or bald. Beautifully dressed in bright African dashikis and bellbottomed jeans, miniskirts and halters.

The green of Tennessee faded quickly into the foreign world of Brooklyn, heat rising from cement. I thought of my mother often, lifting my hand to stroke my own cheek, imagining her beside me, explaining this newness, the fast pace of it, the impenetrable gray of it. When my brother cried, I shushed him, telling him not to worry.
She's coming soon,
I said, trying to echo her.
She's coming tomorrow.
And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

It was during this summer that I first saw Sylvia, Gigi, and Angela. The three of them walked down our block, dressed in halter tops and shorts, arms linked together, heads thrown back, laughing. I
watched until they disappeared, wondering who they were, how they . . .
became
.

My mother had not believed in friendships among women. She said women weren't to be trusted.
Keep your arm out,
she said.
And keep women a whole other hand away from the farthest tips of your fingernails
. She told me to keep my nails long.

But as I watched Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi walk past our window, I was struck with something deeply unfamiliar—a longing to be a part of who they were, to link my own arm with theirs and remain that way. Forever.

Another week passed and they appeared again, this time stopping below our window, untwining and doubling a long line of telephone cable, Gigi and Angela turning as Sylvia stood just outside the double ropes, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet before jumping in. I watched them, my mouth slightly open, intrigued by the
effortless flow of them, how each one moved so that the other could continue moving.

My father, brother, and I were different from this. I went through my days connected to them, but inside myself, holding my brother, laughing with my father, always deeply aware of their presence. But it was a presence in shadow, a presence etched in DNA. When I watched my brother and father bending toward each other to speak, I'd see their fluid connection, a
something
I was on the outside of. Maybe this was how my mother and I bent into each other. When she returned, we'd bend this way again. In the meantime, I pressed my face against the hot glass, palms flat against the window, wanting to be on the inside of Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi's continuum.

In late July, my father took a knife to the top window frame, wedging it along the lines of thick green paint until the frame gave in and the sound of the city finally wafted up toward us.

A tinny radio from somewhere on the block seemed to play “Rock the Boat” all day long, and sometimes my brother sang the lyrics around his thumb.
So I'd like to know where, you got the notion. Said I'd like to know where . . .

From that window, from July until end of summer, we saw Brooklyn turn a heartrending pink at the beginning of each day and sink into a stunning gray-blue at dusk. In the late morning, we saw the moving vans pull up. White people we didn't know filled the trucks with their belongings, and in the evenings, we watched them take long looks at the buildings they were leaving, then climb into station wagons and drive away. A pale woman with dark hair covered her face with her hands as she climbed into the passenger side, her shoulders trembling.

My brother and I were often alone. My father's job in the Men's Section at Abraham & Straus Department Store was downtown, and he left just
after sunrise to take the B52 bus. We had never been on that bus or any city bus. Buses were as foreign to us as the black and brown boys on the street below, shooting bottle caps across chalk-drawn numbers, their hands and knees a dusty white at the end of the day. Sometimes the boys looked up at our window. More than once, a beautiful one winked at me. For many years, I didn't know his name.

Early one morning, as my brother and I took our place by the window, cereal bowls in our laps, a young boy pulled a wrench from his pocket, used it to remove the cap from the fire hydrant below us, then turned the top of the hydrant until white water pounded into the street. We watched the water for hours. Children we didn't know but suddenly hated with a jealousy thick enough to taste ran through it, their undershirts and cutoffs sticking to their brown bodies. I saw Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi again that day, pulling each other into the water, their voices floating up to our window.

Is she laughing at us?
my brother asked.
That red-haired girl. She just looked up at our window and laughed.

Shush,
I said.
She isn't even anybody.

I was beginning to hate them. I was beginning to love them.

Sometimes, Angela stood apart from the others, biting fiercely at her nails, her short Afro dripping. The high yellow of her skin was as familiar as Tennessee to me. At the small church our mother took us to sometimes, four sisters who looked like Angela sat up front, their hair straightened, braided, and white-ribboned, their backs straight. As their father preached, I watched them, wondering what it was like to walk the edge of holy.
For God so loved the world,
their father would say,
he gave his only begotten son
. But what about his daughters, I wondered. What did God do with his daughters?

My father had grown up in Brooklyn but joined the military at eighteen and was stationed at a base near Clarksville, Tennessee. Then Vietnam. Then my mother and SweetGrove. He was missing a finger on each hand, the pinky on his left, and on his right hand, the thumb. When we asked him how it happened, he wouldn't answer, so my brother and I spent hours imagining ways to lose two fingers in a war—knives, bombs, tigers, sugar-diabetes, the list went on and on. His parents had grown old and died only a block from where we now lived. That summer, when we begged him to let us go outside during the day, he shook his head.
The world's not as safe as you all like to believe it is,
he said.
Look at Biafra,
he said.
Look at Vietnam.

I thought of Gigi, Sylvia, and Angela walking arm in arm through the streets below our window.
How safe and strong they looked. How impenetrable.

One Sunday morning, on the way to the small church my father had found for us, a man wearing a black suit stopped him.
I've been sent by the prophet Elijah,
in the name of Allah,
he said,
with a message for you, my beautiful black brother.

The man looked at me, his eyes moving slowly over my bare legs.
You're a black queen,
he said.
Your body is a temple. It should be covered.
I held tighter to my father's hand. In the short summer dress, my legs seemed too long and too bare. An unlocked temple. A temple exposed.

The man handed my father a newspaper and said,
As-Salaam Alaikum
. Then he was gone.

In church behind the preacher, there was a picture of our Lord Jesus Christ, white and holy, his
robe pulled open to show his exposed and bleeding heart.

The Psalm tells us,
the preacher said,
I call on the Lord in my distress and he answers me.

Gold light poured in through a small stained glass window. My father lifted his gaze, saw what I saw—the way the light danced across the folding chairs, the rows of laps, the buckling hardwood floor. Then the sun shifted, melting the light back into shadow. What was the
message for you, my beautiful black brother,
in all that church light? What was it for any of us?

Behind me, an old woman moaned an Amen.

The streetlights had come on and from our place at the window, my brother and I could see chil
dren running back and forth along the sidewalk. We heard them laughing and shouting
Not it! Not it! Not it!
We could hear the Mister Softee ice cream truck song weaving through it all. My brother begged again and again for the world beyond our window. He wanted to see farther, past the small, newly planted tree, past the fire hydrant, past the reflection of our own selves in the darkening pane.

If anyone had looked up just that minute before, they would have seen the two of us there, as always, watching the world from behind glass. I was ten and my brother was six. Our mother was still in SweetGrove. Our words had become a song we seemed to sing over and over again
. When I grow up. When we go home. When we go outside. When we. When we. When we.
Then my brother's palms were against the window, pushing it out instead of up, shattering it, a deep white gash suddenly pulsing to bright red along his forearm.

How did my father suddenly appear, a thick towel in his hands? Had he been just a room away? Downstairs? Beside us? This is memory. My father's mouth moving but no sound, just my brother's blood pooling on the sill, dripping down onto the jagged glass glinting at our feet. The red lights of an ambulance but no sound. My father lifting my paling brother into his arms but no sound. The trail of silent blood. The silent siren. The silent crowd gathering to watch the three of us climbing into the van.

In the bright white of the hospital room, sound returned, bringing with it taste and smell and touch. The room was too cold. We had not yet eaten dinner. Where was my little brother? A nurse handed me a paper cup of red juice and a Styrofoam plate filled with Nilla wafers. I wanted water. Milk. Meat. There was blood dried to a
burnt brown on my T-shirt. Blood on my cutoff shorts. Blood on my light blue Keds. I pressed the cookies together in pairs, chewed slowly.

My mother said Clyde hadn't died in Vietnam. They had the wrong man.
So many brown and black men, who could know?
my mother said.
It could have been anybody.
He told me.