Another Brooklyn (6 page)

Sister Loretta made us navy beans and eggplant Parmesan. She said no more collard greens or lima
beans and my brother and I said
I can dig that,
because we were learning to speak jive talk. She pulled us to her, looked into our eyes, and said jive talk would keep us uneducated and in the ghetto. We believed her and whispered jive only when she wasn't near. When she rang our bell, I took the stairs two at a time to be the first one to her. She hugged me quickly then pushed me away, saying there was so much work to do. The bags of raw peanuts my father brought home to boil and salt were erased. Our beloved boiled-and-spiced-ham heroes, our potatoes both sweet and white, all gone.
The white devil's poison,
she said.
The white devil's swine. Slave food,
she said.
And we're nobody's slaves anymore.
She came by way of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, messenger of Allah. She said Allah was God and when we said
God is white 'cause his son is Jesus
,
she shook her head, looked around at the layer of dust covering everything in our apartment, and shook her head again. She said,
I think I can handle this if this is what Allah has planned for me.

She came in the daytime, mop and bucket in hand, and showed me how to pull on yellow rubber gloves. Together we attacked the black dirt collecting between the moldings while I told her stories of SweetGrove, how beautiful my mother looked when she walked through the woods toward the water.
I used to walk with her,
I said, hearing again the sound of pine needles crunching under our feet.

You would like SweetGrove,
I said.
So much quieter there.

All is right with Allah,
Sister Loretta said.
With Allah, joy again is possible.

We kneeled together beside a bucket of Clorox-water, stiff brushes circling the linoleum until a pale green replaced the brown edges of the kitchen floor. In the late afternoon, we spread our prayer rugs and kneeled again toward Mecca.

Just as Sister Loretta promised, Allah healed us. The caterpillar of a keloid moving from the top of my brother's forearm nearly to his wrist faded to a reddish brown. He was proud of the scar, holding his thin arm up, his hand fisted like Huey Newton's.

It could have been worse, the Nation of Islam brothers told my father. Allah had prevailed. The shards of glass could have landed on others below. A vein could have been hit. My brother could have lost his arm. My father could have chosen that evening to take a long walk around the neighborhood, maybe stop after work for a drink.

We lived inside our backstories. The memory of a nightmare stitched down my brother's arm. My mother with a knife beneath her pillow. A white devil we could not see, already inside our bodies, slowly being digested. And finally, Sister Loretta, dressed like a wingless Flying Nun, swooping down to save us.

The children of Biafra faded into news images of children starving in the ghettos of Chicago, Los Angeles, New York. We stared at the TV, watching the news cameras pan over neighborhoods then close in on children who stared back, hungry and questioning. In New York, the cameras found Puerto Rican street gangs laughing and wrestling as a somber man warned us of their danger. At the window, my brother searched the block for cameras.

While my brother and I cleaned the wooden cabinet doors and polished the glass knobs, Sister Loretta made us bean pies and scalloped turnips with cheese sauce, beets with orange glaze, curried rice, broiled steaks, and asparagus. She came in the late afternoon with chicken she had bought from the kosher butcher and told us that only the Jews and the people of Allah knew how
to eat to live. We called her Sister Mama Loretta when we forgot our true mother was coming soon, and begged her to remove her hijab so we could see her hair. After searching for signs of my father and finding none, she pulled the black fabric back to show us the short natural living beneath it. She cornrowed my hair then wrapped my head and promised me I would grow up to be as beautiful as Lola Falana if I ate the right food, followed the messenger Elijah Muhammad, gave all praise to Allah, and remained modest. So I pressed my legs tight together, draped baggy shirts over my new breasts, and promised her I'd remain the sacred being Allah had created. But I was lying.

In the early mornings, I kneeled toward Mecca and prayed silently for my mother—that she would return to us in the darkness, kissing us out of sleep. I prayed that my own brain, fuzzy with clouded memory, would settle into a clarity that helped me to understand the feeling I got when I pressed my lips against my new boyfriend, Jerome's, his shak
ing hands searching my body. I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame—of everything.

Sister Loretta became my partner in prayer, the two of us together in a room separated from my father and brother. Honorable Elijah was God's chosen messenger. We were Allah's chosen people, clean living now, our heads covered during prayer, our bodies free of the foods that were killing us, our hearts and minds moving toward a deeper understanding.

When night came, she left us.

Still . . .

In Uganda, the Baganda people prepare a grave for each person when they are still children.

I refused to cover my head in public. Refused to walk through the world as a messenger of Allah's teachings, ate hot dogs and bacon when I was with my girls. My Muslim beliefs lived just left of my heart. I was leaving space for something more promising.
Let her be who she's trying to become,
my father said.
Yeah,
I said.
Let me be myself.

She was Sister Mama Loretta when our foreheads burned with fever, when our stomachs curled back over themselves and our heaving heads needed soft hands holding them. When we gathered over Monopoly boards and checker games we found
ourselves laughing at her stories and begging her
Tell us another one, Sister Mama Loretta
. But she was not my mother. We all knew this.

At breakfast, when WWRL played Dorothy Moore singing “Misty Blue,” my father fell silent over his food, his eyes furtive on the window, as though my mother would suddenly show herself, perched like a bird on the sill.
Oh, it's been such a long, long time. Look like I'd get you off of my mind.

But my mother didn't show herself. I imagined her crazy, wild-haired and wide-eyed now, not the woman we knew before her ghost brother came back, the woman who ironed her blouses and spread her lips across her teeth to apply red lipstick.

At night, I wrapped my head and kneeled alone, the apartment quiet with my brother and father at mosque where they prayed together, separate
from the women. I pressed my forehead against the floor, my arms stretched out above me. We would be women, one day, Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, and I. There wouldn't be the world we were walking through, arm in arm, the ear against thigh on an afternoon of hair combing. There wouldn't be the cheek placed against beating hearts, the 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 song of a double Dutch game. When we were women, there would be nothing. We couldn't be friends, my mother had said. We couldn't trust us. And everywhere I looked, I saw glass shattering into truth.

When I was nine years old, Jerome looked up at my window and winked at me from where he and his friends were playing in the street. I didn't know how to wink back. I didn't know how to look down on his dark face and see promise there. The worlds of SweetGrove and Brooklyn hadn't yet merged into one world. So years later, when he grabbed
my hand and said,
I know you
,
I looked up at the teenager standing there and remembered so many things.
One day, you and me gonna do that thing,
he said. At twelve, I thought sixteen-year-old boys said this to every girl, so I nodded and said,
Okay
. He leaned down then, and kissed me.

Who could understand how terrifying and perfect it is to be kissed by a teenage boy? Only your girls, I thought.

Only your girls.

Sylvia was the baby of four sisters. Piano lessons. Dance lessons. On Sunday afternoons, when the family returned home from church, a French woman waited for the girls in the living room.
You must walk like this,
the woman said in French.
You must cross your legs like this when you sit. This is the salad fork, the dessert spoon, the glass for Bur
gundy.
Angela, Gigi, and I watched from the doorway, stopped at entry by her mother's sharp eye. Beyond this point, the woman's brow said, you don't belong. Even here is too far. We heard the tone in the French words we did not understand. Crowded in that doorway, we were no longer lost and beautiful but ragged and ugly, made so by a flick of her mother's eye.

Still, Sylvia begged us to stay, begged her father with a girlish
Papá,
and then French words like a song falling from her mouth.

Photos of the four girls lined a room reserved just for sitting. There was a pool table in the basement, a refrigerator that dispensed ice. The two oldest sisters had already left for, as Sylvia's father called it,
University
. But Sylvia and her third sister each had a room painted the color of their choosing. Sylvia's room was pink. Her older sister's room was a pale gray. The older sister retreated to this room when we arrived, mysterious and evil. One Saturday she
emerged from her room simply to slap Sylvia for laughing too loudly. Sylvia held her cheek silently.
It's against the rules to laugh like that,
she said finally
. I'm supposed to know we're better than that.

But you always laugh that way,
we said.

Not always,
Sylvia said.
Not here.

The parents questioned us. Who were our people? What did they do? How were our grades? What were our ambitions? Did we understand, her father wanted to know, the Negro problem in America? Did we understand it was up to us to rise above? His girls, he believed, would become doctors and lawyers.
It's up to parents,
he said,
to push, push, push.

Once, as a young child, my mother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
A grown-up
,
I answered. She and my father laughed and laughed.
But listening to Sylvia's father, I felt myself straightening my back, tilting my chin up. Law, I wanted to say, like you. I want truth, I wanted to say. An absolute truth, or if not truth, reason—a reason for everything. But the hems of my bellbottoms were tattered. My socks in this shoeless house had holes in the heels. In the winter, because of my own absentmindedness, my hands and arms were often ashy. How could I even think of aspiring to anything when this was how I walked through the world? Sylvia's mother's flick of an eye said to us again and again,
Don't dream. Dreams are not for people who look like you.

So I wanted to be Sylvia. And because I wanted it so much, I told her about my secret love, how Jerome and I met in my vestibule some evenings, his hands everywhere, his lips on my mouth, neck, breasts. How I had to stand on the upper stair to reach him. How he looked outside for grown-ups before leaving my building.

Sylvia's world felt delicate and foreign. Mother and father in one city, one home. Each room spare and clean. Beds were always made. Bookshelves dusted. Pots and pans put away into what her mother referred to as the pantry. Unstreaked mirrors hung above dressers. Bathrooms smelled of Pine-Sol.

There was fresh baked bread in a bread box. Peas and rice in Tupperware in the fridge. There were white knee-high socks folded in drawers, pantsuits hanging in closets, platform shoes neatly arranged on shoe racks. There was a painting of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture above the piano, another of Biafran leader Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu between the velvet-curtained windows.

In the world of Sylvia's house, Angela, Gigi, and I sat with our feet crossed at the ankles, embarrassed suddenly by our bitten-down nails and frizzing hair. In this world, I wished for a head covering, a skirt that draped to the floor. We felt
we had snuck into a party we had not been invited to. We feared breaking the china plates lined along the mantelpiece, speaking too loudly, laughing with our mouths open. Each side-eye glance from Sylvia's mother reminded us of how truly unworthy we were.

We saw the little girl Sylvia became there and tried to become little girls again, too.

Don't try to act like a dusty, dirty black American,
Sylvia's sister said.

Sylvia's cheek reddened into her sister's handprint. It stayed that way for days and days.

Law. No one had this dream for me. No one held out a hand saying,
Here, take this
. So I told my secrets to Sylvia with the hope that I'd get something in return. I whispered how I fell in love slowly. First with the way Jerome called my name,
August,
so much breath around the sound that it
was hard not to feel the summer light pouring out through his voice.

I was thirteen the first time we went further than the kisses we stole in the dark of my vestibule. Only Sylvia knew. Give this back to me, I wanted to say to her. I want your promised future filling up the empty space ahead of me.