Homegoing (34 page)

“Smell what?”

Marjorie looked up, trying to capture the right word. “Loneliness, maybe. Or aloneness. The way I don’t fit here or there. My grandmother’s the only person who really sees me.”

She looked down. Her hand was shaking, so she let go of Graham’s, but he took it back. And when she looked up again, he was leaning down, pressing his lips to hers.

For weeks, Marjorie waited for word about her grandmother. Her
parents had hired a new caretaker to watch her every day, which only seemed to infuriate her. She was getting worse. Marjorie didn’t know how she knew, but she knew.

At school, Marjorie was quiet. She didn’t raise her hand in any of her classes, and two of her teachers stopped her to ask if everything was all right. She brushed them off. Instead of eating lunch in the English lounge or reading in the library, she sat in the cafeteria, at the corner of a long rectangular table, daring anyone who passed by to do their worst. Instead, Graham came over and sat across from her.

“You okay?” he asked. “I haven’t really seen you since…”

His voice trailed off, but Marjorie wanted him to say it. Since we kissed. Since we kissed. That day, Graham was wearing the school’s colors—an obnoxious orange, calmed, only slightly, by a soothing gray.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You worried about your poem?” he asked.

Her poem was a collection of fonts on a piece of paper, an experiment in box lettering, cursive, all caps. “No, I’m not worried about that.”

Graham nodded carefully, and held her gaze. She had come to the cafeteria because she wanted to be alone while surrounded by people. It was a feeling she sometimes liked, like stepping off the plane in Accra and being met by a sea of faces that looked like her own. For those first few minutes, she would capture that anonymity, but then the moment would drop. Someone would approach her, ask her if he could carry her bag, if he could drive her somewhere, if she would feed his baby.

While she stared back at Graham, a brunette girl Marjorie recognized from the hallways approached them. “Graham?” she asked. “I don’t normally see you here at lunch. I would remember seeing you.”

Graham nodded, but didn’t say anything. The girl had yet to notice Marjorie, but Graham’s lack of attention pulled her glance away from him, toward the person who had won it.

She looked at Marjorie for only a second, but it was long enough for Marjorie to notice the wrinkle of disgust that had begun to form on her face. “Graham,” she whispered, as though lowering her voice would keep Marjorie from hearing. “You shouldn’t sit here.”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t sit here. People will start to think…” Again, a quick glance. “Well, you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Just come sit with us,” she said. At this point, she was scanning the room, her body language turning anxious.

“I’m fine where I am.”

“Go,” Marjorie said, and Graham turned toward her. It was as if he had forgotten whom he had been arguing for in the first place. As if he’d been fighting simply for the seat, and not the girl who sat across from it. “Go, it’s fine.”

And once she had said it, she stopped breathing. She wanted him to say no, to fight harder, longer, to take her hand across the table and run his reddened thumbs between her fingers.

But he didn’t. He got up, looking almost relieved. By the time Marjorie noticed the brunette girl slipping her hand into his to pull him along, they were already halfway across the room. She had thought Graham was like her, a reader, a loner, but watching him walk away with the girl, she knew he was different. She saw how easy it was for him to slip in unnoticed, as though he had always belonged there.

Prom was themed The Great Gatsby. In the decorating days that
preceded it, the school’s floors were littered with sparkles and glitter. The night of prom, Marjorie was sandwiched between her parents on their couch, watching a movie on the television. She could hear her parents whispering about her when she got up to make popcorn.

“Something’s not right,” Yaw said. He had never been good at whispering. At regular volume his voice was a boom from the belly, deep and loud.

“She’s just a teenager. Teenagers are like this,” Esther said. Marjorie had heard the other LPNs at the nursing home where Esther worked talk like this, as if teenagers were wild beasts in a dangerous jungle. Best to leave them alone.

When she came back, Marjorie tried to look brighter, but she couldn’t tell if she was succeeding.

The phone rang, and she rushed to pick it up. She had asked her grandmother to call her once a month as an assurance, even though she knew it was cumbersome for the old woman to have to do so. But, when she answered the phone, she was greeted by Graham’s voice.

“Marjorie?” he asked. She was breathing into the phone, but she had yet to speak. What was there to say? “I wish I could take you. It’s just that…”

His voice trailed off, but it didn’t matter. She’d heard it before. He was going to go with the brunette. He had wanted to take Marjorie, but his father didn’t think it would be proper. The school didn’t think it was appropriate. As a last defense, Marjorie had heard him tell the principal that she was “not like other black girls.” And, somehow, that had been worse. She had already given him up.

“Can I still hear your poem?” he asked.

“I’m reading it next week. Everyone will hear it.”

“You know what I mean.”

In the living room, her father had started snoring. It was the way he always watched movies. She pictured him leaning down onto her mother’s shoulders, the woman’s arms wrapped around him. Maybe her mother was sleeping too, her own head leaning toward Yaw’s, her long box braids a curtain, hiding their faces. Theirs was a comfortable love. A love that didn’t require fighting or hiding. When Marjorie had asked her father again when he had known he liked Esther, he said he had always known. He said it was born in him, that he breathed it in with the first breeze of Edweso, that it moved in him like the harmattan. There was nothing like love for Marjorie in Alabama.

“I have to go,” she said to Graham on the phone. “My parents need me.” She clicked the phone onto its receiver and went back into the living room. Her mother was awake, staring ahead at the television, though she wasn’t watching it.

“Who was that, my own?” she asked.

“No one,” Marjorie said.

The auditorium sat two thousand. From backstage, Marjorie could hear
the other students filing in, the insistent chatter of their boredom. She was pacing the room, too scared to look out past the curtain. Beside her, Tisha and her friends were practicing a dance to music that played faintly from the boom box.

“You ready?” Mrs. Pinkston asked, startling Marjorie.

Her hands were already shaking, and she was surprised she didn’t drop the poem she was holding.

“No,” she said.

“Yes, you are,” Mrs. Pinkston said. “Don’t worry. You’ll be great.” She kept moving, off to check on all the other performers.

When the program started, Marjorie’s stomach began to hurt. She had never spoken in front of so many people before, and she was ready to attribute the pain to that, but then it settled more deeply. A wave of nausea accompanied it, but soon both passed.

This feeling came from time to time. Her grandmother called it a premonition, the body registering something that the world had yet to acknowledge. Marjorie sometimes felt it before receiving a bad test score. Once, she got it before a car accident. Another time, she got it only moments before she realized she had lost a ring her father had given her. He argued that these things would have happened whether she had felt the feeling or not, and perhaps that was true. All Marjorie knew was that the feeling told her to brace herself.

And so, bracing herself, she stepped onto the stage once Mrs. Pinkston introduced her. She knew the lights would be bright, but she had not factored in their heat, like a million brilliant suns shining down on her. She began to sweat, passed a palm across her forehead.

She set her paper down on the podium. She had practiced a million times, under her breath in class, in front of the mirror in her bathroom, in the car while her parents drove.

The sound of silence, cut by the occasional cough or shuffling of feet, taunted Marjorie. She leaned into the mic. She cleared her throat, and then she read:

Split the Castle open,

find me, find you.

We, two, felt sand,

wind, air.

One felt whip. Whipped,

once shipped.

We, two, black.

Me, you.

One grew from

cocoa’s soil, birthed from nut,

skin uncut, still bleeding.

We, two, wade.

The waters seem different

but are same.

Our same. Sister skin.

Who knew? Not me. Not you.

She looked up. A door had creaked open, letting more light in. There was enough light for her to see her father standing in the doorframe, but not enough for her to see the tears running down his face.

The only promise Old Lady, Akua, the Crazy Woman of Edweso,
broke was the last one she made. She died in the middle of a sleep she used to fear. She wanted to be buried on a mountain overlooking the sea. Marjorie took the rest of the school year off, her grades so good it didn’t make much of a difference.

She walked with her mother behind the men who were tasked with carrying her grandmother’s body up. Her father had insisted on carrying too, though he was so old, his presence was more of a burden than a help. When they got to the grave site, the people began weeping. Everyone had been crying for days and days on end, but Marjorie had yet to.

The men began digging out the red clay. Two mounds stood on either side of the big rectangular hole, growing deeper. A woodworker had crafted Old Lady’s coffin in a wood the same color as the ground, and when the coffin was lowered, no one could tell where it ended and the earth began. They began to return the clay to the hole. They packed it in tight, patting it with the back of the shovel once they had finished. The sound echoed off of the mountain, into the valley.

Once they put a marker on the grave, Marjorie realized that she had forgotten to drop in her poem, built from the dream stories Old Lady used to tell when she walked Marjorie to the water. She knew her grandmother would have loved to hear it. She pulled the poem from her pocket, and her trembling hands made the words wave even though there was little wind.

Marjorie threw herself onto the funeral mound, crying finally,
“Me Mam-yee, me Maame. Me Mam-yee, me Maame.”

Her mother came to lift her up off the ground. Later, Esther told her that it looked like she was going to fly off the cliff, down the mountain, and into the sea.

MARCUS DIDN’T CARE
FOR WATER.
He was in college the first time he saw the ocean up close, and it had made his stomach turn, all that space, that endless blue, reaching out farther than an eye could hold. It terrified him. He hadn’t told his friends he didn’t know how to swim, and his roommate, a redhead from Maine, was already seven feet under the surface of the Atlantic before Marcus even stepped his toes in.

There was something about the smell of the ocean that nauseated him. That wet salt stink clung to his nose and made him feel as though he were already drowning. He could feel it thick in his throat, like brine, clinging to that place where his uvula hung so that he couldn’t breathe right.

When he was young, his father told him that black people didn’t like water because they were brought over on slave ships. What did a black man want to swim for? The ocean floor was already littered with black men.

Marcus always nodded patiently when his father said things like this. Sonny was forever talking about slavery, the prison labor complex, the System, segregation, the Man. His father had a deep-seated hatred of white people. A hatred like a bag filled with stones, one stone for every year racial injustice continued to be the norm in America. He still carried the bag.

Marcus would never forget his father’s early teachings, the alternative history lessons that got Marcus interested in studying America more closely in the first place. The two had shared a mattress in Ma Willie’s cramped apartment. In the evenings, lying on the mattress with springs like knives, Sonny would tell Marcus about how America used to lock up black men off the sidewalks for labor or how redlining kept banks from investing in black neighborhoods, preventing mortgages or business loans. So was it a wonder that prisons were still full of them? Was it a wonder that the ghetto was the ghetto? There were things Sonny used to talk about that Marcus never saw in his history books, but that later, when he got to college, he learned to be true. He learned that his father’s mind was a brilliant mind, but it was trapped underneath something.

In the mornings, Marcus used to watch Sonny get up, shave, and leave for the methadone clinic in East Harlem. It was easier to follow the movements of his father than it was to watch a clock. At six thirty he got up and had a glass of orange juice. By six forty-five he was shaving, and by seven he was out the door. He would get his methadone and then he would head over to work as a custodian at the hospital. He was the smartest man Marcus knew, but he never could get completely out from under the dope he used to use.

When he was seven, Marcus once asked Ma Willie what would happen if some part of Sonny’s schedule was to change. What would happen if he didn’t get the methadone. His grandmother just shrugged. It wasn’t until Marcus was much older that he started to understand just how important his father’s routine was. His entire life seemed to hang in this balance.

Now Marcus was near the water again. A new grad school mate had invited him to a pool party to celebrate the new millennium, and Marcus had, hesitantly, accepted. A pool in California was safer than the Atlantic, sure. He could lounge on the chair and pretend he was just there for the sun. He could make jokes about how he needed a tan.

Someone yelled, “Cannonball!” sending a cold, wet splash onto Marcus’s legs. He wiped it off, grimacing, after Diante handed him a towel.

“Shit, Marcus, how long we gon’ stay out here, man? It’s hot as hell. This some Africa heat right here.”

Diante was always complaining. He was an artist whom Marcus met at a house party in East Palo Alto, and even though Diante had grown up in Atlanta, something about him reminded Marcus of home. They’d been like brothers ever since.

“We ain’t been here but ten minutes, D. Chill,” Marcus said, but he was starting to feel restless too.

“Naw, nigga. I ain’t about to burn up in this damn heat. Let me catch you later.” He got up and shot a small wave to the people in the pool.

Diante was always asking to go to school events with Marcus and then leaving almost as soon as they arrived. He was looking for a girl he’d met at an art museum once. He couldn’t remember her name, but he told Marcus that he could tell she was a schoolgirl, just from the way she talked. Marcus didn’t feel the need to remind him that there were about a million universities in the area. Who could say the girl would end up at one of his parties?

Marcus was getting his Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford. It was something he would never have been able to imagine doing back when he was splitting a mattress with his father, and yet, there he was. Sonny had been so proud when he told him he’d been accepted to Stanford that he cried. It was the only time Marcus had ever seen him do it.

Marcus left the party soon after Diante, making up some excuse about work. He walked the six miles home, and when he got there he was sweating through his shirt. He got into the blue-tiled shower and let the water beat over his head, never lifting his face up toward it, still scared of drowning.

“Your mama says hi,” Sonny said.

It was their weekly phone call. Marcus made it every Sunday afternoon, when he knew his aunt Josephine and all the cousins would be in Ma Willie’s house cooking and eating after church. He called because he missed Harlem, he missed Sunday dinners, he missed Ma Willie singing gospel at the top of her voice, as if Jesus would be there in ten minutes if she would only just summon him to come fix a plate.

“Don’t lie,” Marcus said. The last time he’d seen Amani was his high school graduation. His mother had dressed up in some outfit Ma Willie had given her, no doubt. It was a long-sleeved dress, but when she lifted her arm to wave at him while he crossed the stage to get his diploma, Marcus was almost certain he could see the tracks.

“Humph” was all Sonny replied.

“Y’all doing good over there?” Marcus asked. “The kids an’ ’em all okay?”

“Yeah, we good. We good.”

They breathed into the phone for a bit. Neither wanting to speak, but neither wanting to hang up the phone, either.

“You still straight?” Marcus asked. He didn’t ask often, but he asked.

“Yeah, I’m good. Don’t you worry ’bout me. Keep yo head in dem books. Don’t be thinkin’ ’bout me.”

Marcus nodded. It took him a while to realize that his father wouldn’t be able to hear that, and so he said, “Okay,” and they finally hung up the phone.

Afterward, Diante came by to get him. He was dragging Marcus to a museum in San Francisco, the same one where Diante had met the girl.

“I don’t know why you sweating this girl, D,” Marcus said. He didn’t really enjoy art museums. He never knew what to make of the pieces that he saw. He would listen to Diante talk about lines and color and shading. He would nod, but really, it all meant nothing to him.

“If you saw her, you’d understand,” Diante said. They were walking around the museum, and neither of them was really taking in any of the art.

“I understand she must look good.”

“Yeah, she look good, but it ain’t even about that, man.”

Marcus had already heard it before. Diante had met the woman at the Kara Walker exhibit. The two of them had paced the floor-to-ceiling black paper silhouettes four times before their shoulders brushed on the fifth pass. They’d talked about one piece in particular for nearly an hour, never remembering to get each other’s name.

“I’m telling you, Marcus. You gon’ be at the wedding soon. Alls I gotta do is find her.”

Marcus snorted. How many times had Diante pointed out “his wife” at a party only to date her for a week?

He left Diante to himself and wandered the museum alone. More than the art, he liked the museum’s architecture. The intricate stairways and white walls that held works of vibrant colors. He liked the walking and the thinking that the atmosphere allowed him to do.

He had been to a museum once on a class field trip back in elementary school. They’d taken the bus, then walked the remaining blocks on the buddy system, each child holding the next child’s hand. Marcus could remember feeling awed by the rest of Manhattan, the part that wasn’t his, the business suits and feathered hair. In the museum, the ticket taker had smiled at them from way up in the glass booth. Marcus had been craning his neck in order to see her, and she’d rewarded his efforts with a little wave.

Once they’d gone inside, their teacher, Mrs. MacDonald, had led them through room after room, exhibit after exhibit. Marcus was at the end of the line, and LaTavia, the girl whose hand he held, had dropped his in order to sneeze, and so Marcus had taken the opportunity to tie his shoe. When he lifted his head again, his class had moved on. Thinking back, he should have been able to find them quickly, a line of little black ducklings in the big white museum, but there were so many people, and all so tall, that he couldn’t see his way around them, and he quickly grew too frightened to move.

He was standing there, paralyzed and quietly crying, when an elderly white couple found him.

“Look, Howard,” the woman said. Marcus could still remember the color of the woman’s dress, a deep bleeding red that only served to scare him even more. “Poor thing’s probably lost or something.” She studied him carefully, said, “He’s a cute one, isn’t he?”

The man, Howard, was carrying a slender cane, and he tapped at Marcus’s foot with it. “You lost, boy?” Marcus didn’t speak. “I said, you lost?”

The cane kept hitting at his foot, and for a second Marcus had felt as though at any moment the man would lift the cane all the way up toward the ceiling and send it crashing over his head. He couldn’t guess why he felt that way, but it had scared him so badly, he could start to feel a wet stream traveling down his pant legs. He’d screamed and ran from one white-walled room to another to another, until a security guard had chased him down, called the teacher over the intercom, and sent the whole class back out into the street, back onto the bus, back home to Harlem.

Diante found him after a while. “She ain’t here,” he said. Marcus rolled his eyes. What did he expect? The two of them left the museum.

A month passed, and it was time again for Marcus to
return to his research. He had been avoiding it because it wasn’t going well.

Originally, he’d wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H’s life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction—the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the ’60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the ’80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.” And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.

When Marcus started to think this way, he couldn’t get himself to open even one book.

He couldn’t remember exactly when the need for studying and knowing his family more intimately had struck him. Maybe it was during one of those Sunday dinners at Ma Willie’s house, when his grandmother had asked that they all hold hands and pray. He would be shoved between two of his cousins or his father and Aunt Josephine, and Ma Willie would begin one of her prayers with a song.

His grandmother’s voice was one of the wonders of the world. It was enough to stir in him all of the hope and love and faith that he would ever possess, all coming together to make his heart pulse and his palms sweat. He’d have to let go of someone’s hand in order to wipe his own hands, his tears.

In that room, with his family, he would sometimes imagine a different room, a fuller family. He would imagine so hard that at times he thought he could see them. Sometimes in a hut in Africa, a patriarch holding a machete; sometimes outside in a forest of palm trees, a crowd watching a young woman carrying a bucket on her head; sometimes in a cramped apartment with too many kids, or a small, failing farm, around a burning tree or in a classroom. He would see these things while his grandmother prayed and sang, prayed and sang, and he would want so badly for all the people he made up in his head to be there in that room, with him.

He’d told his grandmother this after one of the Sunday dinners, and she’d told him that maybe he had the gift of visions. But Marcus never could make himself believe in the god of Ma Willie, and so he’d gone about looking for family and searching for answers in a more tangible way, through his research and his writing.

Now Marcus jotted down a few notes and headed out to meet Diante. His friend’s mission to find the mysterious woman from the museum had ended, but his taste for parties and outings had not.

They ended up in San Francisco that night. A lesbian couple Diante knew had opened up their house into a gallery night/Afro-Caribbean dance party. When they walked in, they were greeted by the tinny sound of large steel drums. Men with brightly colored kente cloths wrapped around their waists held drum mallets with round pink tips. A woman stood at the end of this row of men, wailing out a song.