Another Brooklyn Read online

  We pretended to believe we could unlock arms and walk the streets alone. But we knew we were lying. There were men inside darkened hallways, around street corners, behind draped windows, waiting to grab us, feel us, unzip their pants to offer us a glimpse.

  We had long lost our razor blades and none of us had ever truly stopped chewing on our nails. But still . . .

  I and I and I and I, we chanted. We and we and we and we.

  We hand-songed Down down baby, down by the roller coaster. Sweet, sweet baby I’ma never let you go because we wanted to believe we were years and years away from sweet, sweet babies. We wanted to believe we would always be connected this way. Sylvia, Gigi, and Angela had moved far past my longest fingernail, all the way up my arm. Years had passed since I’d heard my mother’s voice. When she showed up again, I’d introduce my friends to her. I’d say, You were wrong, Mama. Look at us hugging. Look at us laughing. Look how we begin and end each other.

  I’d say, Can you see this, Mama? Can you?

  A man who used to be a boy on our block walked the streets in his army uniform, armless. He’d learned how to hold a syringe between his teeth and use his tongue to shoot the dope into the veins near his armpit.

  My brother and I watched him at night from our window, watched his head dipping down like a bird tucking itself beneath its own wing.

  Don’t ever do dope, my brother said to me.

  You either.

  I won’t, my brother said.

  My brother and I woke to the smell of another house burning somewhere too far away to see, and he said he’d be a fireman maybe. Or an astronaut. Or a scientist, a cop, a drummer in a rock band, a farmer.

  A farmer. Because once in SweetGrove, there had been a farm.

  I watched my brother watch the world, his sharp, too-serious brow furrowing down in both angst and wonder. Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.

  August, my brother said again and again. Look there. And there. And there.

  We still shared the one bedroom in our apartment, our twin beds only feet apart. We searched for each other first thing in the morning. Hey, we said. Hey yourself. Hay is for horses. Love you. Love you, too, we whispered each night before we closed our eyes. We reached across the space and entwined our fingers, our hands growing sweaty in the dark. We held on.

  What’s in that jar, Daddy?

  You know what’s in that jar.

  You said it was ashes. But whose?

  You know whose.

  Clyde’s?

  We buried Clyde.

  Mine?

  This is memory.

  8

  That was the summer the lights went out in New York City and people looted the stores on Broadway then rode through our neighborhood in convertibles, the tops down, holding boxes of shoes and television sets and pawned fur coats over their heads. My brother and I watched them from our window. The streets, my father said again and again, were too dangerous for anyone in their right mind. We lit candles, heated up cans of SpaghettiOs on the stove, the food in our fridge going bad as my father searched the neighborhood stores for bags of ice. If Biafra and Vietnam were more dangerous than my brother and I understood, the Blackout felt like the end of the world. We heard the horns and sirens moving through the night, saw the hawkers holding their stolen boxes into the air, shouting out prices. In the morning, our father let us go as far as the front gate, where we watched an old woman carrying an armful of looted dry-cleaned clothes up the block, the plastic glistening, her wide grin nearly toothless. We saw two boys sharing a pair of new roller skates, one still carrying the box beneath his arm. We saw teenagers running toward Broadway and asked again and again if we could go. It’s stealing, my father said. We don’t steal.

  We had heard for years that the shop owners on Broadway were white and lived in fancy houses in places like Brentwood, Rego Park, Laurelton. We knew that financing meant watching neighbors throw broken couches and torn mattresses into the alley between houses long before they were paid off. So as we watched the looters move through the neighborhood selling TVs and radios and shoes and dry cleaning they’d taken from window-smashed stores, my brother and I felt a longing to be a part of the free stuff spilling out along Broadway. Still, my father warned us not to leave the front gate. And meant it.

  That was the summer every park and every school building gave out Free Lunch—brown paper bags holding plastic-wrapped bologna sandwiches and sugar-sweetened orange juice in foil-sealed cups. We watched hungry kids line up in the heat, waiting for food, hoping a neighbor was volunteering who would sneak them an extra bag. In the hot refrigerator-less days with my father broke from the work lost at Abraham & Straus, my brother and I stood on a line that wrapped around the park and leaned against the chain-link fence as we slowly moved forward. I looked for Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi—afraid I’d see them, hungry and hot like us. Reaching for the brown bags with ashamed and ashy hands.

  The last of the white people began fading. We didn’t know the German woman’s name. She was snow-haired, small and thick, with adult sons who used to come with their children on Sundays. The children, three boys, would not play with us. In the summer, they sat on their grandmother’s stoop in their collared shirts and blond crew cuts watching the brown boys in the street spin wooden tops wrapped with graying string. Their fathers had the same cuts, the same pastel-colored collared shirts. In the late afternoon, when the fathers appeared at the top of the stoop, the boys rose and they all made their way to identical station wagons parked one behind the other at the sidewalk. As the cars pulled away, the boys stared at us. Sometimes, the littlest one waved.

  The brown boys who had moved to the sidewalk to let the cars pass ran back to the middle of the street and resumed their game. But with the pastel boys gone now, it was hard not to see the brown boys differently in their cutoffs and dirty white T-shirts, ashy kneed, chipped wooden tops violently spinning.

  We didn’t know the Italian family or the Irish sisters who dressed alike and left their building each morning, pulling identical shopping carts, returning each evening with A&P bags. We didn’t know the man who yelled at the boys in the street in a language none of them understood or the curly redheaded family with the mother who always looked as though she’d just had a good cry.

  But we knew their moving vans. We knew their cars. We knew the people who came to help, checked their cars many times, then glared at the boys in the street. We knew the sticks for stickball games weren’t weapons. We knew the spikes at the bottom of wooden spinning tops weren’t meant to hurt anything but other spinning tops. We knew the songs the boys sang Ungawa, Black Power. Destroy! White boy! were just songs, not meant to chase white people out of our neighborhood.

  Still, they fled.

  They left driving their cars. They left in the backseats of the cars of sons and daughters. They put FOR SALE signs on their homes but left before the buildings sold. They rented to single mothers and junkies, Puerto Ricans and Blacks, anyone with the deposit, the first month’s rent, and the promise of a job somewhere. They put mattresses and broken-legged tables and boxes of old books out on the street.

  Their cars and vans and trucks parted the brown boys, signaled right at the corner, and left our neighborhood forever.

  My brother had discovered math, the wonder of numbers, the infinite doubtless possibility. He sat on his bed most days solving problems no eight-year-old should understand. Squared, he said, is absolute. No one in the world can argue algebra or geometry. No one can say pi is wrong.

  Come with me, I begged.

  But my brother looked up from his numbers and said, She’s gone, August. It’s absolute.

  Late in the autumn, the woman returned for Jennie’s children. She carried the little one out in her arms, the older one, skipping ahead, not looking back, the baby screaming.

  What the hell is going on? My father asked.
/>
  They’re taking Jennie’s children.

  I had oiled and braided the older one’s hair. Three cornrows front to back tied with a blue Goody ribbon. I had fed them cereal and pastrami sandwiches, grits and eggs. I had put Vaseline on their arms and legs, used a wet washcloth to wipe milk from around their mouths and sleep from the corners of their eyes. I had read to them and sang to them, dampened toilet tissue to wipe crust from their noses. When the girl smiled, her teeth were stunningly white.

  The girl, ribbon gone now, skipped around the corner and disappeared. Long after they were out of sight, my brother swore he could hear the baby crying.

  I imagined the women my father brought home taking a place until my mother returned. Each Shhh, my kids are sleeping. Each Oh lord, look at your precious babies! brought her closer. I lay in bed and listened as the clink of ice in glasses and the hushed laughter gave way to sighs and moans. I imagined waking up with a new woman, her hair in curlers, holding her robe closed with one hand, asking if I wanted pancakes or cereal, scouring the cabinets for the last of the Aunt Jemima Syrup, sprinkling a bit of cinnamon and sugar when there was none. I imagined strong, sure hands pulling my hair into tight cornrows, telling my brother to take his thumb out of his mouth, kissing my father on the lips as he headed off to work.

  I imagined four of us at the kitchen table, the thick stink of boiling chitterlings gone, replaced by hot sauce and white rice and the woman who came to stay until my mother returned asking if I wanted a little or a lot.

  Years later, I would tell this to Sister Sonja, wanting her to know that I had dreamed our family whole again. That I believed wholeness was on its way.

  In a jar on the counter of Poncho’s store there were pickled pig’s feet that he’d scoop out into brown paper. When you said, I want to choose my own, Poncho said, No choosing! I choose! his old-man eyes moving over your body. And if you were hungry enough, you let him.

  I imagined the four of us—brother, father, new woman, me—sucking the last of the pickled meat from the pig’s-foot bone, wrapping cartilage and bone back into the brown paper, washing it down with Dr Pepper.

  Pork rinds were packaged and sold for fifteen cents. With hot sauce sprinkled into the plastic bag, you almost had a meal. My brother ate his without the sauce, sometimes adding more salt.

  On good days, our father took us around the corner and let us buy ham-and-cheese heroes, the boiled ham cut into thin slices and layered over Italian bread already spread thick with mayo. Some days my brother preferred the square cuts of spiced ham with its tiny speckles of white fat.

  That was before.

  The woman who came didn’t tiptoe through our room in the night, didn’t ask for just a taste when my father offered his whiskey, didn’t sit with us eating pig’s feet and spiced ham. She came by way of the Nation of Islam, her head wrapped, her dark dress draping down below her ankles. She said, My name is Sister Loretta, her body a temple, covered and far away from my father’s, her thin face free of the swine-filled makeup with which unenlightened women painted their faces. She said I know how amazing and lovely I am. When she looked down at us and smiled, her dark face broke into something open and hungry and beautiful.

  She said, Your father is ready to change his life. She said, The food you’re eating is the white devil’s plan to kill our people.

  She came into our apartment on a Sunday morning, pulling down dusty pots and pans from the cabinet to wash in warm, soapy water, humming softly as she worked, my father at the table, reading from the Qur’an, a watery Brooklyn sunlight falling over the pages. Her hands were large and moved as though they’d always known our tiny kitchen with its yellowing sink and peeling linoleum counter. I watched them, imagining they were my mother’s hands and that we were again in SweetGrove with our broken stove and dusty bookshelves. I sat in the kitchen doorway, my knees pulled up to my chin, eyes lifted toward her. Her breasts were heavy beneath the dark dress but she wasn’t a heavy woman. Still, her body seemed to hold promises of curves, of the soft and deep spaces I was just beginning to understand. One day I’d have full breasts, hips, and large hands. One day, my body would tell the world stories beneath the fabric of my clothes.

  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 messenge
r 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 shaking 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.

  9

  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.