Another Brooklyn

10

But Gigi was the first to fly. A woman in white patent leather go-go boots came and got her from school one day so she could audition for a performing arts school in Manhattan.

Everybody, Gigi said. Meet my mom.

Hey, we said, struck silent by a woman so young and beautiful she could have been on the cover of Ebony or a centerfold in Jet magazine.

Hey yourselves, Gigi’s mother said.

At the audition, Gigi told us she had to say the same lines over and over—Hey Big Daddy, ain’t you heard. . the boogie-woogie rumble of a Dream Deferred?

Gigi said her lines again and again for us, her voice deeper, strange, our Gigi but different, standing in front of us inside someone else’s skin.

They said I had something. A white lady there said, You could be someone.

Then, suddenly, as though Sylvia’s father looked closely at us and saw every single thing he hated, we were no longer Sylvia’s friends but ghetto girls. When we arrived late in the afternoon, he stood at the door. No company today, he said to us. Sylvia needs to get ready for her new school.

Go home, he said. Study. Become somebody better than you are.

We could have blamed his stinging words on his stilted English. We could have said Fuck you, man—become who he thought we already were. But we were silent.

None of us asked, what new school. Or why. He was tall and thick, his hatred for us a deep wrinkle between his eyebrows.

We turned away from Sylvia’s door, said good-bye to each other at the corner, each of us sinking into an embarrassed silence, ashamed of our skin, our hair, the way we said our own names. We saw what he saw when we looked at each other. So we looked away and headed home.

In class, Sylvia’s empty seat reminded us of her father, his arms folded across his chest, his glare a reminder of a power that was becoming more and more familiar to us. A power we neither had nor understood.

When we saw Sylvia again a week later, she was wearing a St. Thomas Aquinas uniform, her older sister’s arm tight around her shoulder. She glanced at us, mouthed, Park later. I squeezed Gigi’s hand and nodded.

That evening, Sylvia pulled a joint from her coat pocket, let it slowly disappear into her mouth then pulled it out again, To seal it, she said. None of us asked where she’d gotten the joint or the Winston matchbook. We circled around her and watched her take the smoke deep into her lungs, hold it, then exhale. We followed her lead, the smoke hot and hard against the back of my throat. We had seen teenagers doing this, crowded together tight as fists, their eyes closed against the smoke. We coughed our way through, laughing at our own ignorance until the laughter and the smoke seemed to release everything impossible in the world.

It was winter again and Angela had lost herself in dance, Gigi in lead role after lead role at the performing arts high school she now attended.

I spent my days watching people move, both outside our building and inside, too. Jennie was replaced by Carla, who stayed only a month before the police came and took her away. Carla was replaced by Trinity, a small, girlish man who spoke French to the men who followed behind him up the stairs in the evening.

At mosque the sisters asked, What about their mother? their eyes taking in my father’s thin mustache, his thick close-cut head of hair, his broad shoulders. The manicured nails on his eight remaining fingers promised them damage, imperfection, and, they hoped, need.

Their mother is gone, my father answered.

Their mother’s gone, Sister Loretta echoed.

What’s in the urn, Daddy?

You know what’s in that damn urn, August!

At night, I spoke to my mother, apologized for the lies my father told, promised her there’d come a day when he’d be less afraid. He’d take us back to Tennessee then, back to SweetGrove. I told her to be patient, that with Allah, all things were possible.