Brown Girl Dreaming (9 page)

No Halloween.

No Christmas.

No birthdays.

Even when

other kids laugh as we leave the classroom

just as the birthday cupcakes arrive

we pretend we do not see the chocolate frosting,

pretend we do not want

to press our fingertips against

each colorful sprinkle and lift them,

one by sweet one

to our mouths.

No voting.

No fighting.

No cursing.

No wars.

We will never go to war.

We will never taste the sweetness of a classroom

birthday cupcake

We will never taste the bitterness of a battle.

The rain here is different than the way

it rains in Greenville. No sweet smell of honeysuckle.

No soft squish of pine. No slip and slide through grass.

Just Mama saying,
Stay inside today. It’s raining,

and me at the window. Nothing to do but

watch

the gray sidewalk grow darker,

watch

the drops slide down the glass pane,

watch

people below me move fast, heads bent.

Already there are stories

in my head. Already color and sound and words.

Already I’m

drawing circles on the glass, humming

myself someplace far away from here.

Down south, there was always someplace else to go

you could step out into the rain and

Grandma would let you

lift your head and stick out your tongue

be happy.

Down south already feels like a long time ago

but the stories in my head

take me back there, set me down in Daddy’s garden

where the sun is always shining.

While our friends are watching TV or playing outside,

we are in our house, knowing that begging our mother

to turn the television on is useless, begging her for

ten minutes outside will only mean her saying,

No.
Saying,

You can run wild with your friends anytime. Today

I want you to find another way to play.

And then one day my mother

comes home with two shopping bags

filled with board games—Monopoly, checkers, chess,

Ants in the Pants, Sorry, Trouble,

just about every game we’ve ever seen

in the commercials between

our Saturday morning cartoons.

So many games, we don’t know

where to begin playing, so we let Roman choose.

And he chooses Trouble

because he likes the sound the die makes

when it pops inside

its plastic bubble. And for days and days,

it is Christmas in November,

games to play when our homework is done,

Monopoly money to count

and checkers to slam down on boards, ants to flip

into blue plastic pants,

chess pieces to practice moving until we understand

their power

and when we don’t, Roman and I argue

that there’s another way to play

called
Our Way.
But Hope and Dell tell us

that we’re too immature to even begin to understand

then bend over the chessboard in silence, each becoming

the next chess champ of the house, depending on the day

and the way the game is played.

Sometimes, Roman and I leave Hope and Dell alone

go to another corner of the room and become

what the others call us—
the two youngest,

playing games we know the rules to

tic-tac-toe and checkers,

hangman and connect the dots

but mostly, we lean over their shoulders

as quietly as we can, watching

waiting

wanting to understand

how to play another way.

Everyone knows my sister

is brilliant. The letters come home folded neatly

inside official-looking envelopes that my sister proudly

hands over to my mother.

Odella has achieved

Odella has excelled at

Odella has been recommended to

Odella’s outstanding performance in

She is gifted

we are told.

And I imagine presents surrounding her.

I am not gifted. When I read, the words twist

twirl across the page.

When they settle, it is too late.

The class has already moved on.

I want to catch words one day. I want to hold them

then blow gently,

watch them float

right out of my hands.

There is only one other house on our block

where a father doesn’t live. When somebody asks why,

the boy says,
He died.

The girl looks off, down the block, her thumb

slowly rising to her mouth. The boy says,

I was a baby.
Says,
She doesn’t remember him

and points to his silent sister.

Sometimes, I lie about my father.

He died,
I say,
in a car wreck
or

He fell off a roof
or maybe

He’s coming soon.

Next week
and

next week
and

next week
 . . . but

if my sister’s nearby

she shakes her head. Says,

She’s making up stories again.

Says,

We don’t have a father anymore.

Says,

Our grandfather’s our father now.

Says,

Sometimes, that’s the way things happen.

Uncle Robert has moved to New York City!

I hear him taking the stairs

two at a time and then

he is at our door, knocking loud until our mother
opens it,

curlers in her hair, robe pulled closed, whispering,

It’s almost midnight, don’t you wake my children!

But we are already awake, all four of us, smiling
and jumping around

my uncle:
What’d you bring me?

Our mama shushes us, says,

It’s too late for presents and the like.

But we want presents and the like.

And she, too, is smiling now, happy to see her
baby brother who lives all the way over

in Far Rockaway where the ocean is right there

if you look out your window.

Robert opens his hand to reveal a pair of silver earrings,

says to my sister,
This is a gift for how smart you are.

I want

to be smart like Dell, I want

someone to hand me silver and gold

just because my brain clicks into thinking whenever

it needs to but

I am not smart like Dell so I watch her press
the silver moons into her ears

I say,
I know a girl ten times smarter than her. She gets
diamonds every time she gets a hundred on a test.

And Robert looks at me, his dark eyes smiling, asks,

Is that something you made up? Or something real?

In my own head,

it’s real as anything.

In my head

all kinds of people are doing all kinds of things.

I want to tell him this, that

the world we’re living in right here in Bushwick isn’t

the only place. But now my brothers are asking,

What’d you bring me,
and my uncle is pulling gifts
from his pockets,

from his leather briefcase, from inside his socks.
He hands

my mother a record, a small 45—James Brown,
who none of us

like because he screams when he sings. But my mother
puts it on the record player, turned way down low
and then even us kids are dancing around—

Robert showing us the steps he learned
at the Far Rockaway parties. His feet are magic

and we all try to slide across the floor like he does,

our own feet, again and again,

betraying us.

Teach us, Robert!
we keep saying.
Teach us!

When he takes us to the park, Uncle Robert tells us,

If you catch a dandelion puff, you can make a wish.

Anything you want will come true,
he says as

we chase the feathery wishes around swings,

beneath sliding boards,

until we can hold them in our hands,

close our eyes tight, whisper our dream

then set it floating out into the universe hoping

our uncle is telling the truth,

hoping each thing we wish for

will one day come true.

The stories start like this—

Jack and Jill went up a hill,
my uncle sings.

I went up a hill yesterday,
I say.

What hill?

In the park.

What park?

Halsey Park.

Who was with you?

Nobody.

But you’re not allowed to go to the park without anyone.

I just did.

Maybe you dreamed it,
my uncle says.

No, I really went.

And my uncle likes the stories I’m making up.

. . .
Along came a spider and sat down beside her.

I got bit by a spider,
I say.

When?

The other day.

Where?

Right on my foot.

Show us.

It’s gone now.

But my mother accuses me of lying.

If you lie,
she says,
one day you’ll steal.

I won’t steal.

It’s hard to understand how one leads to the other,

how stories could ever

make us criminals.

It’s hard to understand

the way my brain works—so different

from everybody around me.

How each new story

I’m told becomes a thing

that happens,

in some other way

to me . . . !

Keep making up stories,
my uncle says.

You’re lying,
my mother says.

Maybe the truth is somewhere in between

all that I’m told

and memory.

We start each meeting at Kingdom Hall with a song

and a prayer

but we’re always late,

walking in when the pink songbooks are already open,

looking over shoulders, asking Brothers and Sisters

to help us find our place.

If it’s a song I like, I sing loud until my sister shushes me

with a finger to her mouth.

My whole family knows I can’t sing. My voice,

my sister says, is just left of the key. Just right

of the tune.

But I sing anyway, whenever I can.

Even the boring Witness songs sound good to me,
the words

telling us how God wants us to behave,

what he wants us to do,

Be glad you nations with his people! Go preach
from door to door!

The good news of Jehovah’s kingdom—

Proclaim from shore to shore!

It’s the music around the words that I hear

in my head, even though

everyone swears I
can’t
hear it.

Strange that they don’t hear

what I hear.

Strange that it sounds so right

to me.

The Sunday sermons are given by men.

Women aren’t allowed to get onstage like this,

standing alone to tell God’s story. I don’t

understand why but I listen anyway:

On the first day, God made the heavens and the earth

and He looked at it, and it was good.

It’s a long story. It’s a good story.

Adam and Eve got made,

a snake appeared in a tree. A talking snake.

Then Eve had to make a choice—the apple the snake
wanted her to eat

looked so good—just one bite. But it was the only apple
in a kingdom full of apples

that God had said
Don’t touch!

It’s the best apple in all the world,
the snake said.

Go ahead and taste it. God won’t care.

But we know the ending—in our heads, we scream,

Don’t do it, Eve!
That’s the Devil inside that snake!
He’s tricking you!

But Eve took a bite. And so here we are,

sitting in a Kingdom Hall

on a beautiful Sunday afternoon

hoping that God sees it in His heart to know

it wasn’t our fault. Give us another chance

send that snake back and we promise

we’ll say no this time!

In all our moving, we’ve forgotten our family in Ohio,

forgotten our father’s voice, the slow drawl

of his words,

the way he and his brother David made jokes

that weren’t funny

and laughed as though they were.

We forget the color of his skin—was it

dark brown like mine or lighter like Dell’s?

Did he have Hope and Dell’s loose curls or my

tighter, kinkier hair?

Was his voice deep or high?

Was he a hugger like Grandma Georgiana holding us

like she never planned to let go or

did he hug hard and fast like Mama,

planting her warm lips to our foreheads where

the kiss lingered

long after

she said I love you, pulled her sweater on and left

for work each morning.

In Brooklyn there are no more calls from Ohio.

No more calls from our father or Grandpa Hope

or Grandma Grace

or David or Anne or Ada or Alicia.

It is as if each family

has disappeared from the other.

Soon, someone who knows someone in Ohio
who knows the Woodsons

tells my mother that Grandpa Hope has died.

At dinner that evening, our mother gives us the news but

we keep eating because we hadn’t known

he was still alive.

And for a moment, I think about Jack . . . our father.

But then

quickly as it comes

the thought moves on.

Out of sight, out of mind,
my brother says.

But only a part of me believes this is true.