Brown Girl Dreaming (14 page)

From Rikers Island, my uncle is sent

to a prison upstate we can visit.

We don’t know what he’ll look like, how

much he’ll have changed. And because our mother

warns us not to, I don’t tell anyone he’s in jail.

When my friends ask, I say,
He moved upstate.

We’re going to visit him soon.

He lives in a big house,
I say.
With a big yard and everything.

But the missing settles inside of me. Every time

James Brown comes on the radio, I see Robert dancing.

Every time the commercial for the Crissy doll comes on

I think how I almost got one.

He’s my favorite uncle,
I say one afternoon.

He’s our ONLY uncle,
my sister says.

Then goes back to reading.

We board the bus when the sun is just kissing the sky.

Darkness like a cape that we wear for hours, curled into it

and back to sleep. From somewhere above us

the O’Jays are singing, telling people all over the world

to join hands and start a love train.

The song rocks me gently into and out of dreaming

and in the dream, a train filled with love goes on and on.

And in the story that begins from the song, the bus

is no longer a bus and we’re no longer going to

Dannemora. But there is food and laughter and

the music. The girl telling the story is me but

not me at the same time—watching all of this,

writing it down as fast as she can,

singing along with the O’Jays, asking everyone

to let this train keep on riding . . .

“riding on through . . .”

and it’s the story of a whole train filled

with love and how the people on it

aren’t in prison but are free to dance

and sing and hug their families whenever they want.

On the bus, some of the people are sleeping, others

are staring out the window or talking softly.

Even the children are quiet. Maybe each of them
is thinking

their own dream—of daddies and uncles, brothers
and cousins

one day being free to come on board.

Please don’t miss this train at the station

‘Cause if you miss it, I feel sorry, sorry for you.

The bus moves slow out of the city until we can see

the mountains, and above that, so much blue sky.

Passing the mountains.

Passing the sea

Passing the heavens.

That’s soon where I will be . . .

A song comes to me quickly, the words moving through

my brain and out of my mouth in a whisper but still

my sister hears, asks who taught it to me.

I just made it up,
I say.

No you didn’t,
she says back
. It’s too good. Someone

taught that to you.

I don’t say anything back. Just look out the window

and smile.

Too good,
I am thinking. The stuff I make up is
too good.

At the gate of the prison, guards glare at us, then slowly

allow us in.

My big brother is afraid.

He looks up at the barbed wire

puts his hands in his pockets.

I know he wishes he was home with his chemistry set.

I know he wants to be anywhere but here.

Nothing but stone and a big building that goes so far up

and so far back and forth that we can’t see

where the beginning is

or where it might end. Gray brick, small windows

covered with wire. Who could see

out from here? The guards check our pockets,

check our bags, make us

walk through X-ray machines.

My big brother holds out his arms. Lets the guards pat him

from shoulder to ankle, checking

for anything he might be hiding . . .

He is Hope Austin Woodson the Second, part of a long line

of Woodsons—doctors and lawyers and teachers—

but as quickly as THAT! he can become

a number. Like Robert Leon Irby is now

so many numbers across the pocket

of his prison uniform that it’s hard

not to keep looking at them,

waiting for them to morph into letters

that spell out

my uncle’s name.

When the guard brings our uncle to the waiting room

that is filled with other families

waiting, he is not

Robert. His afro is gone now,

shaved to a black shadow on his perfect skull.

His eyebrows are thicker than I remember, dipping down

in a newer, sadder way. Even when he smiles,

opens his arms

to hug all of us at once, the bit I catch of it, before

jumping into his hug, is a half smile, caught

and trapped inside a newer, sadder

uncle.

On the way home from visiting Robert,

I watch the mountains move past me

and slowly the mountain song starts coming again

more words this time, coming faster

than I can sing them.

Passing the mountains

Passing the sea

Passing the heavens

waiting for me.

Look at the mountains

Such a beautiful sea

And there’s a promise that heaven

is filled with glory.

I sing the song over and over again,

quietly into the windowpane, my forehead

pressed against the cool glass. Tears coming fast now.

The song makes me think of Robert and Daddy
and Greenville

and everything that feels far behind me now, everything

that is going

or already gone.

I am thinking if I can hold on to the memory of this song

get home and write it down, then it will happen,

I’ll be a writer. I’ll be able to hold on to

each moment, each memory

everything.

When anyone in the family asks

what I’m writing, I usually say,

Nothing

or

A story

or

A poem

and only my mother says,

Just so long as you’re not writing about our family.

And I’m not.

Well, not really . . .

Up in the mountains

far from the sea

there’s a place called Dannemora

the men are not free . . .

It is early spring

when my grandmother sends for us.

Warm enough to believe again

that food will come from the newly thawed earth.

This is the weather,
my mother says,
Daddy loved

to garden in.
We arrive

not long before my grandfather is about to take

his last breaths,

breathless ourselves from our first ride

in an airplane.

I want to tell him all about it

how loud it was when the plane lifted into the sky,

each of us, leaning toward the window,

watching New York

grow small and speckled beneath us.

How the meals arrived

on tiny trays—some kind of fish that none of us ate.

I want to tell him how the stewardess gave us wings

to pin to our blouses and shirts and told Mama

we were beautiful and well behaved. But

my grandfather is sleeping when we come to his bedside,

opens his eyes only to smile, turns so that my grandmother

can press ice cubes against his lips. She tells us,

He needs his rest now.
That evening

he dies.

On the day he is buried, my sister and I wear white dresses,

the boys in white shirts and ties.

We walk slowly through Nicholtown, a long parade
of people

who loved him—Hope, Dell, Roman and me

leading it. This is how we bury our dead—a silent parade

through the streets, showing the world our sadness, others

who knew my grandfather joining in on the walk,

children waving,

grown-ups dabbing at their eyes.

Ashes to ashes,
we say at the grave site

with each handful of dirt we drop gently onto his
lowering casket.

We will see you in the by and by,
we say.

We will see you in the by and by.

Even the silence

has a story to tell you.

Just listen. Listen.

After Daddy dies

my grandmother sells the house in Nicholtown

gives the brown chair to Miss Bell,

Daddy’s clothes to the Brothers at the Kingdom Hall,

the kitchen table and bright yellow chairs

to her sister Lucinda in Fieldcrest Village.

After Daddy dies

my grandmother brings the bed our mother was born in

to Brooklyn. Unpacks her dresses

in the small empty bedroom

downstairs,

puts her Bible,
Watchtower
s and
Awake
s,

a picture of Daddy

on the little brown bookshelf.

After Daddy dies

spring blurs into summer

then winter comes on too cold and fast,

and my grandmother moves a chair to the living room

window

watches the tree drop the last of its leaves

while boys play skelly and spinning tops in the middle

of our quiet Brooklyn street.

After Daddy dies

I learn to jump double Dutch slowly

tripping again and again over my too-big feet. Counting,

Ten, twenty, thirty, forty
deep into the winter until

one afternoon

gravity releases me and my feet fly free in the ropes,

fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety . . .

as my grandmother watches me.

Both of our worlds

changed forever.

A mimosa tree, green and thin limbed, pushes up through

the snow. My grandmother brought the seeds with her
from
back home.

Sometimes, she pulls a chair to the window, looks
down over the yard.

The promise of glittering sidewalks feels a long time
behind us now, no diamonds anywhere to be found.

But some days, just after snow falls,

the sun comes out, shines down on the promise

of that tree from
back home
joining us here.

Shines down over the bright white ground.

And on those days, so much light and warmth fills

the room that it’s hard not to believe

in a little bit

of everything.

You can buy a box of bubble-gum cigarettes for a dime

at the bodega around the corner.

Sometimes, Maria and I walk there,

our fingers laced together, a nickel

in each of our pockets.

The bubble gum is pink with white paper

wrapped around it. When you put it in your mouth

and blow, a white puff comes out.

You can really believe

you’re smoking.

We talk with the bubble-gum cigarettes

between our fingers. Hold them in the air

like the movie stars on TV. We let them dangle

from our mouths and look at each other

through slitted eyes

then laugh at how grown-up we can be

how beautiful.

When my sister sees us

pretending to smoke, she shakes her head.

That’s why Daddy died,
she says.

After that

me and Maria peel the paper off,

turn our cigarettes into regular bubble gum.

After that

the game is over.

You’ve got your daddy’s easy way,

my grandmother says to me, holding

the picture of my grandfather

in her hands.
I watch you with

your friends and see him all over again.

Where will the wedding supper be?

Way down yonder in a hollow tree . . .

We look at the picture without talking.

Sometimes, I don’t know the words for things,

how to write down the feeling of knowing

that every dying person leaves something behind.

I got my grandfather’s easy way. Maybe

I know this when I’m laughing. Maybe

I know it when I think of Daddy

and he feels close enough

for me to lay my head against his shoulder.

I remember how he laughed,
I tell my grandmother

and she smiles and says,

Because you laugh just like him.

Two peas in a pod, you were.

Two peas in a pod we were.