Another Brooklyn

15

When I stepped off the bus in Providence, Rhode Island, I was alone. I had wanted this — to step outside of Brooklyn on my own, no past, just the now and the future.

Auggie, I corrected the professor on my first day. My name is Auggie. I’m here because even when I was a kid, I wanted a deeper understanding of death and dying.

That’s crazy, the white devil of a boy who would become my first lover turned to me and said, his skin so pale I could see the blue veins running through it. Me, too.

How do you begin to tell your own story? The first time I heard the Art Ensemble of Chicago, I called out Gigi’s name. How could any of us have known? Roscoe Mitchell on saxophone, Lester Bowie on trumpet, the stumbling together of horns and drums and bells into music until so much beauty rose into the world breathing had to be remembered again, forced. How had Sylvia’s philosophy-spouting father missed this? How had my own father, so deep inside his grief, not known there were men who had lived this, who knew how to tell his story? How had the four of us, singing along to Rod Stewart and Tavares and the Hues Corporation, not turned our radio just that much to the right or left and found Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis?

And when we pressed our heads to each other’s hearts how did we not hear Carmen McRae singing? In Angela’s fisted hands, Billie Holiday staggered past us and we didn’t know her name. Nina Simone told us how beautiful we were and we didn’t hear her voice.

I spent my twenties sleeping with white boys in photo-less rooms filled with jazz. As I pushed their resistant heads down, I thought of Brooklyn, of Jerome and Sylvia and Angela and Gigi. I cried out to the sounds of brown boys cursing and Bowie’s trumpet wailing. When I pulled my lovers into me, my eyes closed tight against the faces I had grown up believing belonged to the devil, I imagined myself home again, my girls around me, the four of us laughing. All of us alive.

In the Philippines, a beautiful brown man pressed his lips to my feet again and again, saying, Always begin here. In Wisconsin, I promised my housemate turned lover that I’d stay with her always. Months later, as the scattered pages of my dissertation lay finished and approved on the floor beneath us, I kissed her slightly parted lips as she slept and left in the night. In Bali, I waited at night for a beautiful black man from Detroit to show up in the dark. Say it, he begged, our bodies moving against each other with such a hunger, we laughed out loud. It’s just three damn words.

I turned thirty in Korea, cried for a week because I thought I was pregnant. Then cried for another when it was certain I was not. In the background, Abbey Lincoln sang “It’s Magic” and I saw again the view of our block from a high-up window, the children playing below my brother and me.

Once in a café in San Francisco the woman I had lived with for eight months asked why did I sleep with fisted hands.

Do I?

Yeah, you do, she said.

Once I came very close to saying For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet. But didn’t.