Another Brooklyn

16

In the autumn of my sixteenth year, my father took us back to SweetGrove. We rode the train to Tennessee then rented a car and drove an hour to where our land had once been. The leaves were beginning to turn, but the air was still thick with heat. We arrived in the early evening. My brother and I slammed out of the car like we were children again, running down the long dirt road that lead to the house. But where our house had once been, there were weeds now, taller than any of us and thick as poles. From where we had stopped, I could smell the briny water. We stood there, silent. In the silence, we could hear the soft lap of the lake. I took my brother’s hand and together, silently, we walked toward it. Orange signs were nailed to the trees around us. NO TRESPASSING. PRIVATE LAND. DO NOT CROSS. But we kept on walking. The water was dark, near black against the brightly colored trees.

When did you realize your mother was actually dead, Sister Sonja would ask again months later.

Never. Every day. Yesterday. Right at this moment.

When my father took us back to the water.

I could hear our father approaching. Even here, so far away from Brooklyn, his soft, slow steps were as familiar as time.

Way out, I could see a person in a canoe, gently paddling along the line of pine trees. At its deepest point, the water dropped down to twenty feet. I’ve only ever put my toes in, my mother would say. I just needed to feel it against my feet, that’s all. And be close by.

At the diner, after my father’s funeral, my brother suddenly asked, Why did you always say that? Why did you always tell me she was coming tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?

For a long time, I said nothing, then finally, Because I believed it was true. That one of these tomorrows, she’d get here.

Someplace off the coast of South Carolina, a tribe of Ibo people brought over by slave catchers tossed themselves into the water. They believed that since the water had brought them here, the water would take them home. They believed going home to the water was far better than living their lives enslaved.

When I see Angela again, I am in my first year at Brown, sitting in my room on a Friday night. A boy I am planning to sleep with has his head on my lap. She appears suddenly on the television screen, darker than I remember her, her hair long and straightened. But her face is the same, angled and beautiful. The movie is about a dancer hungry for the lead role in La Sylphide, as her fiancé runs off and her own real life mirrors the story. Angela is stunning as she dances across the stage, her body thinner than I remember, but muscled and able. When she dances toward the camera, I call out to her.

Angela!

The boy asks if I know her.

She’s hot, he says.

Angela, I whisper. You made it.

Behind my brother and me, my father was saying that it was time to move on now, but none of us moved from where we were standing.

Wind came up, shuddering the leaves. The person in the canoe had stopped paddling and now cast a line into the water. Perch. Trout. Maybe catfish but I’m not sure.

This is memory.

I watched the water slowly lap back and forth against the shore. The sun was beginning to set. I took my brother’s hand and held it. We had no people left in Tennessee. We’d stay the night in a hotel, buy some souvenirs somewhere. In the late afternoon tomorrow, we’d get back into our rented car and begin the long journey home to Brooklyn.

I lifted my head to look up into the changing leaves, thinking how at some point, we were all headed home. At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory.