Riot Baby

III RIKERS

ELLA huffs as she hefts her bag deeper and deeper into the desert. She’s getting better at Traveling, but pinpointing locations far enough from people is still too high a bar to vault. Soon, though, she stops and tosses the bag to the ground. Dust erupts in a cloud around it. The flap of the bag opens on its own and out spin clear, lenticular discs containing ball bearings. They come out in an arc until they form a column she has to crane her neck to see. A shoulder-width circle etches itself into the dirt in front of her. She likes it out here, and if someone were to ask her why, she’d, half joking, tell them it’s because she can practice breaking things without hurting anyone. Out here with the rusted and abandoned military armament, the detached members and wings of aerial mobile suits and crabtanks and Guardians tall as apartment buildings lying like bones bleaching in the sun, she can pulverize and tear and shatter and not spill a drop of blood. But, really, it’s because of the contagion. She can’t stand to have their thoughts bleed into hers, to feel their insides and to hear their prejudice and their hate and their apathy pinball behind her eyes.

She raises her hand, grips a pinch of air between her fingers, then throws her hand down, as though she were pulling a cord under a trapdoor.

The bearings fly to the earth. The discs’ pieces scatter upon impact, darting toward the edge of the circle, where they freeze. For a second, Ella wonders if she froze not just the ball bearings but the whole world, too. A condor flaps its wings overhead. Dung beetles scuttle over rocks. The world still moves. She flicks her wrist, and the broken thing’s parts fly back together in a perfect reconstruction. After a beat, she steps back.

The column sweeps down to her eye level. She squints. The ball bearings rotate before her eyes. She frowns at the hairline fracture in one of the discs.

The bearings swim back into her pack.

A few bounding steps send her miles deeper into the desert, and she stops at the cliff’s edge. It overlooks the mesa, cracked clay, drained and baked, patches of desert floor covered in dust and rubblestone. The wind here whips her silver braids about her face. This is always her favorite part.

She spreads her arms out to be dramatic and leans forward and falls and falls and falls. Then, slowly, the wind shifts around her, twisted in invisible fingers, spins her, and spirals her up in a curve that shoots her back into the air, where she floats, legs bicycling, a giggle bubbling in her chest, before she arrow-darts forward, flying. And for the rest of the afternoon, she flies and flies and flies.

Something rings in her, and she stops, floating between canyon walls, and finds herself oriented eastward, and she knows, thousands of miles in front of her, at the end of her gaze, is a series of concrete buildings, a bundle of stone and metal and fluorescent light and blood and rust.

The first time she’d visited him, her brother had thought it was a dream. It’d been night after dinner and he’d been on the top bunk, unprotected from the too-bright light that buzzed loud enough to keep him awake, and he’d thought she was a hallucination, because what kind of person sees someone hovering at the end of their bed they haven’t seen in half a decade? But he’d known not to speak, otherwise his cellmate woulda started bothering him, and he remembered that Ella could do things, strange things, things that ate up her insides, but she looked healthy, even with her hair completely gray. And without moving her lips, she told him that she was getting a handle on it, figuring out her gift, and Kev had stared at her in mute wonder as Ella played her adventures in his head. Ella saw him imagine her throwing an armored personnel carrier into a battalion of cops tricked out in riot gear. She sees him wondering if this knowledge would be enough to get the COs to stop hassling him, to get other guys in Gen Pop to stop fucking with him. Like people who fight ugly people who don’t give a fuck about their face or how it’ll end up and so got nothing to lose by going to the mattresses as hard as possible. They’ll realize the girl who can throw an APC at a battalion of riot cops is his sister. That there’s no conceivable reason for Kev to still be behind bars if he’s got Ella on his team. And so it’s madness that Kev’s still here.

The first time she’d visited him, she’d seen that whole battle play across his face. You could get me out of here, but here is security and routine and a violence I already know too well. Then, at the end, a glimpse of old Kev as he throws a thought her way, more an aura of feeling and emotion and color than words. An admonition. Be careful, Ella. Don’t let them know what you can do.

Unspoken between them, what they’d do to Ella if they ever found out what she was. And Ella wanting desperately to tell Kev that, in time, it won’t matter. It won’t matter what they could do to her, because they won’t.

The light in his cell flickered, but by the time it came back on, she was gone. As Ella retreated to her New Haven apartment, she felt the aftermath of the visit hang like tendrils on her, the lingering navy-blue aura of grief, a tiny, whispering simulacrum of the feeling that had clung to Ella the first time she’d left them. When she’d seen fifty gunshots fired into Sean Bell’s car, and, without warning, vanished.

“I don’t want no ghost coming to see me,” Kev had said without moving his mouth. “If I see you, I wanna see you for real.”

“You ain’t gonna ask who did this?” Kev doesn’t need to point to the laceration at his temple and the bandage that struggles to cover the length of slice and can’t.

Ella leans back in her chair across the table from Kev while loved ones or family or friends or old classmates or people settling a grudge or people burying a hatchet do this visit thing. She has her arms crossed, posture all defiant. Anger, unfamiliar and slow, swirls at the bottom of her gut, creeps into the back of her brain. “Nope,” she says.

Kev leans forward and already has that conspiratorial convict hunch that cons have on TV or in movies. “You gonna read my mind or something? Scan one of the CO’s brains or something? I bet you could just put your hand to the floor and get all the stories that ever passed through this place.”

He’s not wrong. Ella’s mind had wandered into one of the female COs who stood by a wall with her baton cradled under her crossed arms. There’s one inmate, a black guy with tight cornrows meeting with another dude, probably a brother or cousin who repped the same set, that she has made it her duty not to look at, and Ella knows, can probably tell without Diving, that they’re fucking. Memories run like shards across her line of sight: the two of them on the outside, he with his crew when he was younger and she with her older cousin, both her and her cousin sporting big hoop earrings with their names in gold, walking back from the movies and passing the boy with his crew and the boy hollering at her and the big cousin telling the boy off in sharp, smooth, knife-blade Spanish. Then furtive sneaking from one’s house or the other’s to fuck after the girl’d gotten out of school, and the boy not doing well in class and his mother not around because she was working three jobs, and he couldn’t bear to see an eviction notice slide under their door like it did to the people one floor up, so he starts slanging, and when he hollers at the girl with his new kicks and his chain (that will be snatched in a week or so and that he’ll have to stomp someone out to get back), she smirks, and the cousin fights even harder to keep the girl away from that sweat-sheened, Carhartt-clothed, muscled, bejeweled embodiment of Trouble. More fucking, then the girl goes to college, and the guy goes to jail for dope and a parole violation from a prior, and there’s a guard shift and as he’s lined up with the other inmates on his block, he looks out the corner of his eye and sees homegirl walking down the line tapping her baton against thighs he remembers she used to wrap around his back when they got the springs in her bedframe to squeak and groan.

“It wasn’t her,” Kev says, and Ella realizes she’s been staring.

“I know.” But Ella can barely concentrate because an inmate three tables ahead has a shank wrapped up and shoved into his rectum and Ella feels herself boofing. And in that inmate’s mind’s eye and now Ella’s eye is an image, a flash, of tissue he stuck in the door’s locking mechanism so that he could jiggle it open even though it showed up as closed on the guard’s boards. Then a jagged, slow-motion clip of the inmate’s plan to pop his cell after lights out and join two others who’d done the same to knife an Aryan whose son, on the outside, put that guy’s son in the hospital at a Confederate flag rally.

“But that’s the thing about the hospital, you know? You get your little bit of freedom. That’s how you get it. That’s how you get the attention you been dying to get. Gets to be a bit like home after a while.”

“I ain’t been around much.” Ella dislikes that it feels like an apology. She hasn’t gotten to hate yet. “But you know how the fam is.”

When Kev finally looks up from his folded hands, there’s fear in his eyes. For the first time since Ella started visiting. In his brain are capsules, pills. Seroquel. Benadryl, drugs the medical staff give him, sometimes saved up so that he can just lie there and take a bunch at once and just wait for them to hit, only to wake up the next day and realize “Fuck, I can’t do this.” It’s all in Kev’s eyes, and Ella sees it, though her ephemeral fingers only touch the contours of that thought. And Kev asking her without opening his mouth: you could burn it down; you could just burn this motherfucker down, all of it; please, just burn it down.

She looks down, then up again and past her brother. There’s an inmate talking to his baby’s mother, and the inmate’s leg is bobbing up and down because earlier in the day, he splashed a CO, threw urine all over the guy’s face and soaked the front of his uniform, practically popped a balloon on him, then put his arms behind his head so that the cameras would see that he wasn’t resisting or striking the CO. He knew that guy and a bunch of his buddies would be waiting for him, maybe right outside the showers in the cameras’ blind spot, to put him in the hospital or maybe even kill him, and this might be the last time he sees his baby’s face ever again.

The metal table dips where Ella’s fingers press into it, and she realizes what she’s doing and takes her hand off and puts it in her lap.

An older man tells his grandson, brought in by his daughter, about how he’s learning chess so that when he gets out he can play his grandson, who’s getting really good, apparently. He says this, knowing he will not get out, that he will die either here or somewhere upstate where, he hears, the prisons are starting to turn more into hospices than anything else. But he still tells his grandson about how he’s learning to play in solitary, because that makes his situation seem less scary, though his daughter knows exactly what a stay in the Bing entails. And the older man’s words are brightly colored, even as Ella sees the man’s imagination, sees the man and the inmate in the cell next door both drawing the board on pieces of paper and screaming their moves out to each other, and the loneliness washes purple over the image and reminds the older man about how dirty his cell was when he first moved in and how the only way to get Sanitation to come in and clean it was to stuff the toilet with books he was sent and flood the cell or to break the toilet so that the cell became unusable.

Ella wants to tell Kev to just survive, as though that would be enough. Just survive. But, in her chest, it becomes a cruel thing to ask him to do.

She doesn’t want to reduce this entire compound—its ten jail facilities with approximately sixty beds in each, its eight-by-ten solitary confinement chambers, its hallways and the cameras placed so that there were blind spots where the bleeding happened, and its railings and its bars and its slatted windows and its shitty air-conditioning—all to dust. She wants to be able to go port back in time, reach her hand in and put it to Kev’s chest the night of that attempted armed robbery. Or to go back even further and stay closer to Kev for longer to keep him in that bubble of protection so that cops would leave him alone more often. Or to go back even further and keep him from becoming friends with Freddie, who would one day get picked up by cops for looking at one for too long and in the police van on the way to the station would get his spine severed. Because maybe if Kev didn’t know him as a friend, as a brother, almost, in Ella’s absence while Ella went to discover her powers where she couldn’t hurt people, maybe Kev might not be here. Or maybe reach back even further and nudge Mama to bring the family somewhere else where the land didn’t burn underneath them and catch fire, where they could settle and where white people were maybe a little less thirsty for his blood.

I’d stop time for you, Kev, she almost says.

The fear dampens in Kev’s eyes, and Ella realizes Kev heard her anyway.

Brother and sister smile across the table at each other.

Later, as Ella gets up to leave and walks back to the gate, she brushes past a young woman and pain spikes through her spine, and she sees it: sees the Latina with the dark, wavy hair and the little Dominican boy at her knee and sees them at home and sees the Latina woman in the kitchen on the phone screaming upon hearing that her child’s father has died and sees the Latina woman and the dead man’s mother and their lawyer poring over the autopsy reports saying he’d had ulcers and reports and memos that indicated that, when they’d ruptured, the other prisoners had called for help while the guard on duty sipped coffee at his desk down the hall and watched. Ella sees the woman and her son return to the jail to pick up the decedent’s things: a red Champ hoodie, his wallet, and a gray-red-and-black Bulls hat. The woman outside hugging herself against the cold and giving the sweater to her son, who is shivering.

Kev’s in his cell the next time Ella sees him.

“Come with me,” she says and takes his hand.

Night turns to day.

They don’t know where they are, one of those parts of the country that’s just open desert and brown-green shrub with mountains that are always far away and sky that is always blue, except when it’s diamond-threaded black. They’ve Jumped. Kev’s body is still in his cell. But with a single touch, Ella’s hand on Kev’s, his mind has been jettisoned elsewhere. She’s been practicing.

“The South might as well be Chechnya to me,” Kev says after he gets comfortable, and she wonders if he’s thinking of another inmate, his cellie maybe, or someone he met who lingers in his memory.

They’re leaning against motorbikes on a stretch of desert road, and Ella conjures a breeze and doesn’t even need her hands to do it anymore. She’s got them stuffed into the pockets of her ripped jeans, and all she needs is a cigarette for the picture to be perfect. Ella thinks of Malik and last night and how she discovered she could do this. On her mattress in the midst of an oppressively humid New York night, outlined in moonlight blue, they’d traveled at a stray thought from his twin mattress to a beach on the Dalmatian Coast. Feeling the mud of the shoreline in their toes, hearing the click of a woman’s heels against the cobblestones, seeing the clearest, purest blue of the Mediterranean. Then they were back.

Ella looks at Kev, doesn’t probe his mind, just looks at his face and the new grayness, the new hardness in it, the scars she can’t see but feel. He doesn’t look eighteen. If he thinks the South is like Chechnya, what does that make home?

Gray clouds circle far away and lightning forks down. A good two seconds later, they hear the boom.

The lightning strikes again, snaps at the earth with the recoil of a wet shower towel they used to whip each other with when they were just past being babies. Small fires puff to life.

Kev leans back against his bike and affects Ella’s posture, and with them mirrored like that their minds bleed into each other and they trade images of apocalyptic landscapes south of the Mason-Dixon. Florida is riddled with radiation, ribbed by it, and craggy with decay. The Gulf of Mexico burps toxic waste onto the sores that litter Louisiana. Arkansas and Tennessee have turned blue and white under blankets of vengeful snow that come out of nowhere just to fuck with the climate change deniers. Then they get to Mississippi and Ella pauses because Mama sometimes talked about Mississippi and Ella imagines warmth and mosquitoes and tallgrass, haze more than smoke and lounging on cars with the smell of weed making a blanket and somebody’s blasting Motown music out the open doors of their beat-up four-door and everybody is everybody’s cousin and barbecue sauce is suddenly on people’s fingers and bellies bulge with plenty. Maybe Mama didn’t say all those things when she said the word “Mississippi.” Maybe she didn’t mention the mosquitoes or the music. But it was the only time Ella ever saw her not look like she was made of iron.

The fire spreads outward in a line, but never goes beyond the boundaries of the cloud cover, like it’s trapped in a cylinder, and Ella thinks Kev’s humming, but she can’t tell ’cause of the wind. His eyes are closed, loosely. And he’s feeling the air against his face, smiling while he does it. Then wind wraps its fingers around the fire and squeezes, and the cloud cover vanishes, too quickly.

“Wake up!”

The prison guard bangs his baton on the bars to Kev’s cell, startling Ella and Kev out of the vision. Kev falls out of the dream and into his bed. Ella’s afterimage hangs in the air. It takes all of her effort to keep from lashing out at the guard and decapitating him or stopping his heart or crushing his head. Her hand, translucent, comes up off of Kev’s. Her astral projection lingers above his bed for only a moment before dissipating.

There are a million ways this can go, and Ella sees them all play out before her. In holographic projections that fill out and grow solid with wooden staircases that creak beneath boots and windows smudged so much you can barely see the rain or the snow or the sun outside, in the face that grows flesh and becomes warm to the touch, in the glint of sadness or joy or a mix of the two in the eyes.

She knew she would find herself back here. She didn’t know whether she was going to port directly to the kitchen and wait or whether she was going to stand at the door like she does now. She didn’t know if she was going to have to find another apartment or if what she was looking for would be in the same one she left all those years ago, but here it is, in front of her. The door, repaired and unmarked, like she had never lived in this place or walked up and down this stairwell when the elevator broke, lights flickering because the landlord will never repair the faulty electrical wiring.

She doesn’t know what she will say. Whether she’ll begin with an apology or whether she’ll tell Mama that she has learned how to fly. But she knows that going to see Kev was preparation for this. For seeing Mama again.

In one version, she knocks, softly, and Mama opens the door, and surprise supernovas in Mama’s eyes, and the two of them stand there, waiting for the worry that this is a dream to pass by, for the smoke to clear from the mirror. In another version, Mama guesses someone’s presence at the door, and opens it to find Ella and looks at her as though she’d left just yesterday, like it was the natural order of the universe that brought her daughter back, like she knew Ella would do this all along. In another, the shock gives way to fear, and it shoots enough hurt into Ella’s heart to remind her of what a bad idea this was and that she should never let Mama see her face again. In another version, Mama doesn’t spend a single moment stunned. Her bottom lip trembles. Her eyes glass over with tears. She knows exactly what she’s looking at, not a dream, not a nightmare wherein Ella stands before her one minute to be snatched away the next. She knows it’s Ella she sees, and she’s grateful, and she hugs Ella close to her chest, not forgetting that Ella could kill her with the wrong thought but trusting that she won’t. That all the good things Ella will tell her about, all the ways she’s brought her Thing under control, all the gifts she’s been able to bring Kev with it, are true. And she’ll sob tears of joy into Ella’s shoulder, darken her shirt with gratitude, and whisper an urgent prayer of thanks that she passed whatever test God had put in front of her this time. With this, her gifted daughter.

Ella raises her fist to knock.

There’s a bus called the Rikers bus.

Ella takes the M60-SBS from 125th Street. Usually she gets on at Lexington, sometimes before, depending on how late she was out the night before. Sometimes, after she moved to New Haven, she rises before the sun, beats it into New York, catching the beginnings of the sky’s gilding just before the train glides over the bridge. The M60 takes her to Astoria Boulevard, where she transfers to the Q101 at 23rd Road. Sometimes schoolchildren ascend the steps and clog the main thoroughfare of the bus. Sometimes it’s empty. Sometimes the only people on it other than Ella carry transparent plastic bags filled with the types of items permissible in the jail. And Ella knows exactly and immediately what they’re going to be doing this morning. There’s no camaraderie among the straphangers, no shared sense of enduring the city’s indignities or of annoyance at the jail’s security protocols or the idiosyncratic things that occasionally happen, like lockdown, when you’re trapped in the jail and kept isolated from whatever horrible and hateful thing is being done to an inmate, maybe the very person you’ve come to visit. There’s only a grim cloud hanging in the air between them, and they descend on Hazen and wait for the Q100, the Rikers bus, that will ferry them across the River Styx into the parallel, deathly reality that Rikers Island occupies. Where the circles of hell don’t radiate outward but rather populate the space like satellite orbits.

She worries sometimes, whenever she gets onto the Q101, that she’s turning into one of the other women or the other men coming to visit friends, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, guardians, godparents, bullies, victims, community pillars, the man who sold their mother crack. That deadness of the face. That unthinking that attends the packing of goods and materials to make sure no contraband is being brought into the jail facility.

When Kev and Ella sit in the visiting area, across the table from each other, Ella breathes a slow sigh. One time, they’d brought her to a different room where glass separated them and Kev had been escorted to his place in chains, having been dubbed that morning a problem inmate. There were no bruises on his face, yet, nor any discernible limp, but the shuffle very obviously masked some sort of hurt. Maybe his ribs.

This time, there are no chains. They let him walk freely, and his arms, though they don’t swing far or wide, speak of that freedom.

He talks about parole, about watching guys get out, but doesn’t sound too excited about it, because it’ll be no different on the outside than on the inside and he’s got some years before he’s eligible. If he can stay out of trouble. No consorting with known felons; well, that means he can’t even get a ride from Melo or Prodigy or anyone else on the block. Has to report regularly to his PO, and most POs are assholes and maybe this one won’t even pick up his phone. Has to regularly report any change of address, etc., etc., etc.

Ella knows she should be excited for the possibility of him being let out, but she has Oscar Grant’s murder in Oakland playing in her head and wonders if she would have the wherewithal to film Kev’s death and upload it live. She doesn’t know what she would do; maybe it is safer for Kev in here. And suddenly the thought of him on the outside, where so much has happened without him, terrifies her.

It’s early in what’s going to become a much longer stay than I ever expected. But I pick up things quick, have to, because I come in smaller than most of the others, and I start out in the juvenile ward, RNDC, before I get starred up and end up sharing a cell and a chow hall with the older niggas.

This old head named Ricky is standing over me taking hits from a Capri Sun in between bites from a chocolate chip cookie while I take my shit, and I got the palm of my hand against my eye to try and push back the headache that’s making me go practically blind. I can’t hear what Ricky’s saying, only the mosquito-buzz of this nigga’s incessant storytelling and supposed wisdom, and he says something about how jail sentences beget more jail sentences, and you’re only supposed to be in Rikers for short sentences or pretrial and it’s mostly niggas that can’t afford bail here and something about making poverty illegal, and I wanna tell him to shut the fuck up with the voice I used to use in Harlem, the loud, commanding, brimming-with-violence voice. I have a different voice in here. I ask questions like “We have a problem?” or “Nigga, you good?” and I can mean “Do you need help?” or “You want me to fuck you up?” and it’s like gang finger-shakes how people here immediately know the difference.

“Rick,” I whisper. “Please, be quiet.”

The headache lets up a little, but then I get dizzy, and I worry I’m gonna fall off this toilet with my jumpsuit around my ankles and my ass out in the air, and it’s gonna be a wrap for me because Ricky here, or whoever, isn’t gonna mind a little shit-dick. Ricky starts humming what sounds like an old Negro spiritual, a prison song, and I close my eyes tighter, and suddenly, I can feel Louisiana beneath me. A rush of color and sound and smell, then it’s all gone. Headache and everything.

Whispers skip down the line of cells, and I finish my shit, wipe, and go to the bars to see niggas twisting their fingers and notes getting passed. Shit.

Under my bed are a bunch of National Geographic magazines. I pull them out with a roll of duct tape and start taping the issues around my torso. Ricky’s got this sad look in his eyes, and I just tell him, without turning all the way around, “Stay in your cell for rec.” And I see suddenly past his look and into the mess of feelings wrestling behind his eyes, his sorrow that this is now a Young Man’s Game, that he has aged out of the everyday chaos of incarceration, gratefulness that this guy, Kev, NYSID Number 25768192Y, is looking out for him, wants to keep him safe, then the hard joy that comes with dodging the violence, a sort of glowing peace.

Out in the yard, we cluster. Eight by the pull-up bars, four on the basketball court, nine by the benches. One of the prisoners by the bench puts a leg up on the seat to mime tying his shoe and pulls out a homemade shank.

My group rushes them, and I feel nothing.

Rusty metal breaking jawline, fists smashing cheekbones and cracking ribs, someone getting a boot print stomped into their chest. It’s gravity that smashes us together, and then we turn into electrons being flung apart by stuff larger than ourselves. It’s all physics. The wild, swinging punches, the crumpling. The thwap of knuckles beating soft flesh, the dust rising to cover us, but unable to muffle the squawk of walkie-talkies and the foomp of the first gas canister being launched, and the coughing. The blood-rich coughing. All of this has the air of inevitability in it.

Burning takes my eyes and my face as I prowl for the rest of the fight, the tangle of bodies to get lost in. Someone’s blood has already crusted on my knuckles.

“Get the fuck on the ground!”

I ignore the command, because that’s how this is supposed to go.

The first volts seize through me, and I prepare to go down, but then I hear bones cracking. Through the smoke, the CO flying through the air to land on the ground somewhere in the distance. The earth rumbles beneath me, like it’s getting ready to swallow me up. A crater forms. Then more and more craters form, and COs are shouting and screaming, then I hear the rubber bullets. More gas canisters. Then, eventually, darkness.

When I wake up, I’m naked in a single-man cell with a yellow piece of paper on my chest. There’s a blue jumpsuit at the end of the green mat. The place still smells like the last three guys who got thrown here in AdSeg. Through the aching, I work my way into the jumpsuit, then, finally, pick up the paper to read it: “This prisoner is unmanageable in G.P. Loss of all privileges. No TV, no books, no sheets, no hygiene products, twenty-four-hour watch.”

I’m in solitary.

I try to think about the last parts of the riot, the sound of the ground getting pushed in, breaking against itself, the CO flying through the air, arms swimming, before landing on his back and not getting up. If I can only regulate my breathing, I’ll be all right. I just have to stay calm, but, because that’s not how this is supposed to go, my headache is back.

My nose has been bleeding.

Ella has the rice and beans steaming in two plates, ready for Mama when she comes home from the hospital still in her scrubs. Mama never seems tired coming back from an overnight shift. She has never fallen asleep on the subway, stays alert all through the trek home, always takes the stairs, and keeps her eyes open all through the meal. And Ella wonders once again at her strength. She had tried once to massage calm and peace into her mother’s mind, ease her into sleep, but Mama had shot back with a curt “Don’t do that,” before going to sleep on her own.

Mama takes her seat now in the kitchen and lets out a sigh. “Thank you for cleaning the bathroom.”

Ella smiles. It’s the least she can do, clean the place while Mama’s at work, but Ella knows that Mama says these things because she knows Ella needs sometimes to feel useful. “You workin’ again tonight?”

“Mmhmm,” Mama says around a mouthful of beans.

“Do you wanna do something when you have a night off? See a movie or something?”

Mama looks up, then frowns. Silence stills the air between them. Mama puts down her fork. “What’s in those boxes, Ella?”

Ella looks behind her, feigning surprise, at the shoe-boxes. When she turns back, she can’t look Mama in the face. “I just thought, you know, if you needed the money—”

“Where’d that money come from?”

Ella wants to snap at her, bark that she has a Thing that nobody else has, a gift that she can use and that all her life, she’s been giving and giving and giving and now why not take something somebody’s not gonna miss and it’s not like she took it all from one person or even like she’s robbing anyone they know. Ella wants to spit the words out, that she’s tired of skimming, of snatching food from supermarkets or making toilet paper vanish off bodega shelves. She can destroy an entire building, she can plumb the depths of any person’s mind and find their worries and their wants and she can twist them. She can make things fly. “Why don’t you want it?” It comes out as a hiss.

“I don’t need it.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Ella, I don’t need this.” She’s standing now, palms heavy on the table, arms shivering with the weight.

“Mama,” she growls. And in her mind, scenes replay. The chaos of the trauma ward, blood-slick tile floors that oiled gurney wheels squeak over, commands issued over the body of a man bleeding out from his gunshot wounds, Mama at the trauma surgeon’s side as the team opens up the patient’s abdomen, the gape the size of a basketball, Mama later sopping up the stomach acid leaking from the exposed intestines with gauze, then hooking the man up to a machine that sucks the acid out; Mama opening the door to another patient’s room to see two hulking men in T-shirts and shorts looming over the bed, Mama thinking they’re family. Then the men jumping back and telling her they’re plainclothes cops and this patient’s the suspected shooter. Mama wishing they’d leave the boy alone for just a little bit, not interrogate him and get ready to lock him up while the vertical incision from just below his nipple to his belly button was still fresh, while the kid was still reeling with just having had his kidneys removed and his spleen and part of his stomach, while the kid lies there as raw and open as the wound they can’t yet stitch back together. And how could Mama not want to leave all that behind?

“It’s wrong, Ella. And I don’t need wrong in this house.”

“You could buy a new one.”

Ella stands, snatches her jacket off the back of her chair, and leaves without another word. Outside, she lets visions wash over her. Of Mama attending to a little black boy shot in the arm, Mama assisting the surgeon as the surgeon massages the heart back to life. Then that same little black boy, not even six months older, back with a gunshot wound to his upper arm, his brachial artery almost bleeding out, almost dying again, then the boy before Mama’s eyes for a third time, shot in the head. Dead.

She’s halfway up the block to a nearby park when she stops. She can’t let herself get this angry. Not again. A couple deep breaths later, she heads back and is at the door again, but it opens without her key. Which means Mama never locked it.

“Mama?” Her “I’m sorry” dies on her lips.

Mama lies on the floor, her legs tangled beneath her, her arms splayed out, limp. Urgency radiates from her body. Even before Ella rushes to her side and fumblingly checks to see if she’s breathing and thanks God that she is and calls for an ambulance and helps them get Mama into the back without even bothering to hide the shoe boxes, crumpled and conspicuous, in their kitchen, even before getting to the hospital where she’ll watch over Mama as she recovers from what she’ll tell Ella was “just a fall,” Ella knows that as long as Mama’s alive, she can’t ever let herself get that angry again.

“I’m not leaving,” she says at Mama’s bedside. “Mama, I’m not leaving.”

Eyes closed, Mama squeezes Ella’s hand. Ella knows she should be thankful, but she can’t get herself all the way there, because she knows the only reason Mama’s squeezing her hand is because she knows Ella needs sometimes to feel useful.

“Have you ever been to a rodeo?” Kev asks. There’s quiet eagerness in his voice the next visit, a thin, fast-moving river. “You know. Horses, bulls?”

“No,” Ella manages behind her smirk. It’s good to see Kev animated like this. For a time, after his stint in solitary, he didn’t say much. Some visits, he said nothing, and it was always a tiny miracle that he took her visits to begin with. He could just as easily have refused. Or been denied.

“They had rodeos at the prison where I was held before they transferred me up here.” As he speaks, he does not look at Ella; he seems to look everywhere else, at the COs who walk alone or in pairs throughout the visiting room or along the hallways seen through the smudged glass of the entrance and exit doors or at the dust motes that, to Ella, would occasionally swirl to mimic the features of someone’s face, a loved one’s, an enemy’s, a passing stranger’s. “You know how it is down there. They couldn’t do it to slaves anymore, so they put collars around our necks and did it to us. Field niggas. Just hoein’ away. Pretty much picking cotton.” At her knee. “The sheriffs sit on horses with their shotguns at their shoulder.” At the floor. “The Passage.” Out the window. “And you got a lotta niggas locked up for petty shit. Larceny, that sort of thing. Property crimes.” At her. “They called it Angola. In case you forgot it all comes back to Africa.” Which makes Ella breathe a nervous chuckle.

Underneath the table, Kev shifts one of his pant legs up, touches the skin of his ankle to the skin of Ella’s.

Ella does not have to close her eyes to see what Kev sees; the vision, the memories, the past as he remembers it, all of it bleeds slowly then with increasing volume into Ella’s brain, as though a cord were connecting his mind to hers. It begins with sights: children dressed in Polo shirts and jeans and dresses with golden and brown and black hair, smiling or frowning or laughing with their blue, green, brown, black, morning-colored eyes in the front row of the stadium; the striped prison uniform; the black and white of one prisoner’s shirt as he stoops down, nappy hair shorn close to his skull, and pulls out a handful of identical shirts, stripes spraying in all directions, patterning him and the ground around him; other prisoners, elderly ones aged too quickly by what prison does to a person, their striped shirts tucked into stone-washed blue jeans, which are, in turn, tucked into knee-high leather boots. Then the sounds: the shimmering of a melody from the merry-go-round on the prison grounds, the hum of chatter between the incarcerated selling wares they had crafted in their workshops, magical and shining things, and the free folk who hold up those glimmering belt buckles to the light or who turn over the intricately detailed wood carvings in their fingers or who marvel at the necklace of beads held together by near-invisible thread, the creaking of a metal fence on which leans the chest of an inmate, her arms and tattooed hands dangling over, one of them bandaged and wrapped in gauze up past the wrist. Then the smells: the bull shit in the holding pens, the sweat-stink of prisoners unable to ask the air to press moisture into the skin, God unwilling to answer that prayer, sitting or standing motionless in their cages in the thick wool of their striped gowns and striped shirts; the perfume wafting off the girl whose long blond hair comes down in smooth threads to the small of her back, her face shaded by a large black cowboy hat, a black button-down shirt clinging to a shapely frame, tucked into tight jeans that raise her ass as she walks. Miss Rodeo Louisiana, making the rounds, waving to the families in the stands, waltzing past the cages that hold prisoners rendered hideous by the climate and their captivity.

“They had us stand in a circle in the middle of the ring,” Kev says. “Only the well-behaved got to do this part. We got to wear special rodeo outfits, the white shirts with the blue triangles on the shoulders and everything, tassels, glitter, all of it. We held hands around four prisoners who held up flags, America’s, Louisiana’s state flag, a Confederate flag, and one other one I never figured out, Aryan Nation or something. And one of us sang the National Anthem over the speakers, then afterward, we bowed our heads and a minister came and said a prayer over the loudspeakers. Everyone had their eyes closed and their heads bowed, everyone in the stands.”

The described world overwhelms Ella, all of its texture and scent and color invading her through her own empathetic touch, funneling into that space between her ears. She can see it all. She can feel, smell, taste, hear it all: four inmates, two of them with their silver hair in rattails, one of them with nappy hair and octogenarian eyes, one of them barely having finished being a child, their feet digging into the dirt, their legs bent slightly at the knees, hands open, fingers flexing, in a posture of readiness, attack, defense, toes light against the inner rims of the pink hula hoops at their feet. The gate clangs open and thundering toward them is the bull, eyes trained on the small coterie of collared prisoners, horns lowered, legs pumping, muscles rippling, dirt flecking its flanks, its hooves thudding against recently turned dirt and the compacted subsoil beneath. It flicks its head and one of the prisoners sails through the air, legs spread, a new gash torn through the side of his safety vest, his pain having pushed his face past contortion into an aspect of peace before he slams against the ground, body cracking in a way only he and the prisoners in the ring and Ella, who is there too, can hear. One of the others darts from the path of the bull while another manages to step aside with one foot, the other firmly planted, his whole bearing intent on winning, even as the bull’s skull crashes into another inmate. This one’s unable to breathe through newly broken ribs, grips the bull’s horns as tightly as can be managed, the bull throwing its head back and forth until the inmate’s grip slips. The bull rushes over him, crushing a leg and an arm before cruising toward that last prisoner. He sees he’s won the game of inmate pinball, runs for the edge of the ring and vaults to the top of the wall, just as the bull’s horns bong against the metal reinforcing the cushioned plastic.

Kev’s eyes are hot and glowing when Ella sees him again, across that table in the waiting room. He’s sweating, breathing heavily, smiling. Anguish pulls Ella’s heart into the floor. This is the other side of what solitary did to him. The agitation, the running straight into painful memories rather than barricading himself against them. Whatever destructive impulses propelled Kev that night of the attempted armed robbery now augmented by what twenty-three hours in a cell alone for six months will do to a man. Kev looks as though he is staring at the sun, intent on blindness.

Ella manages to make it onto the Rikers bus heading back into Queens before crying. Her heart shakes in her chest. Kev has never been to the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

She moves the blinds by the kitchen window and watches the police patrol the block. Up and down St. Nicholas, they amble. Stationed on one corner, an officer sits in his mini-tank and says something that the cop walking by laughs at. The guns on the small tank’s turret are angled toward the ground. Metal orbs float along the sidewalks above the streetlamps, close enough for people to see, not bothering to disguise themselves, but everyone has already gotten used to them. They’ve quieted the neighborhood. The park across the way holds only the rustling of empty burger wrappers and soda cups. Her hands are shaking against the window blinds, and she feels it coming. Small pulses matching her heartbeat that radiate out of her to rattle the cutlery and unsettle the grill on the stove. They’ll see her.

The smell of sulfur swallows her.

Her eyes burn and when she opens them again, above her, a gray sheet for sky, and before her, a sign showing she has arrived at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York, outside of the outside of the City, where there are houses and strip malls, where cars have space to breathe on the boulevards. On the jumbotrons in the main building, white college students in loafers, seersucker suits, and their dates in broad hats, watch the Kentucky Derby alongside bomber-jacketed South Asians.

Ella wanders to the clubhouse. Nobody turns her way. She’s Shielded.

The tents and the front terrace are spotted with families and bearded, potbellied middle-aged white men tipping back cans of Bud Light. The kids, baby-faced and gleefully, obnoxiously tipsy, must be from St. John’s, prancing as they do now like the horses about to race, while the girls, in their gowns and gaudy, wide-brimmed hats, pull beer coolers behind them like servants. Bow ties clinch necks, sleeves rolled up, sunglasses worn indoors.

In clusters, at various points in the clubhouse, like scattered molecules, close to the exit onto the track and below the grandstand, wait people who look like they’re from around here. Familiars. The thick two-hundred-page paper programs of the day’s races rolled up in their nicotine-stained fingers. Weathered jackets and sweats and jeans loose on them, some of them with shirts tucked into their pants, they all crane their necks in anxious penitence, some of them marking their programs absently, others clutching their betting slips. Weathered white faces, all of them. No fear of gun turrets or constant observation. This place doesn’t need to be watched. A burst of anger flames in her heart, a small one, swallowed up a moment later by pity. Wasting away, and if they saw Ella, they’d still think they were inherently better.

Everywhere has a patina of dirt and dark, even though the sun has finally beaten back the cloud cover outside. A few patrons light up cigarettes as they brush past her, still unaware of her presence. Ella shuffles to a booth, reaches over a counter, feet dangling off the ground, then comes back up with a beer.

A heavy-set man nearby in glasses and a goatee speaks urgently into a flip phone: “I’m tellin’ you; she can’t keep doing this. Every month she’s in jail. Every two weeks.” He drifts out of earshot.

Someone behind her shouts an epithet.

Even here, the inevitable violence.

Ella, a few gulps into her beer, goes back and makes herself a Bloody Mary. The ingredients pour themselves out of their bottles. The stirrer shimmies its way out of its plastic box container and dances inside the glass. A brief promenade out to the track and she sees more of the bedraggled track-dwellers. A few of them congregate around a bench and chat, catch up, wonder out loud about the tactile realities of their world. The game, the kids, the front lawn. Many of them don’t pay attention to the races, the track often unoccupied for long stretches of time. There are some kids in leather jackets and fitted caps playing reckless games of tag, hopping over the metal benches and their dividers. Other white kids either pick at their fathers’ collars when they’re being carried or crush empty beer cans beneath their feet.

How much of that little girl’s lunch money for the year had been put on a horse that will run in a few hours?

If you had an addiction, Ella says to the Kev in her thoughts, you wouldn’t let your kids get in the way.

Back on the terrace, Ella steals a program and, perched over a small table in the front courtyard, scans for the next race.

The program lists, for her race, seventeen horses, and Ella smirks when she sees their names. Morning Glory, Valley of Lillies, O’Doul’s Revenge, Corp d’Esprit, and on it goes, random phrases purloined from a number of languages, meaning nothing except what significance the phrase held for the horse’s wrinkled white owner. Ella had seen some of the horses out front on the track while another made a lazy trot around, its jockey swaying in the saddle. Testing the hooves maybe or engaged in some other esoteric ritual Ella can’t begin to understand.

These outings fill her with a gleeful cruelty. She’d walked around these white people invisible, on the racetrack, in the trailer park villages, outside the pubs, and seen nothing but squalor and waste. In some places, hypodermic needles litter the floor and babies, when they cry, reveal teeth rotted by the Mountain Dew that’s cheaper than the milk their mothers want to buy. She wants to show this to Kev. See how little they are, brother. Knowing that jail tries to tell someone that all their betters are on the outside. They’re not better than you out here, Kev. None of them are.

In the larger building, Ella lowers her shield to bet on an Irish horse to place and a French horse to win. If Kev were here, she’d tell him, “Logic says, you can win big but you can only lose small.” And Kev would take maybe two and a half seconds before pointing out the holes in her proof, the missteps. But you don’t go to a racetrack to win money, these white people have taught her. You go to lose money. And what did it matter? she would ask him. She’d get their money to magically reappear, stolen from someone else’s pocket, or maybe pulled from thin air with her Thing.

The French horse has the longest odds. But Ella doesn’t care, not yet. Her gray horse—already “hers”—puts in a stronger-than-expected showing, but finishes middle of the pack, not even enough to show, though she had bet on it to win. Ella approaches the betting machines and gives them more money, punches keys and presses buttons according to the day’s philosophy, which has been, and remains, that if you bet long you can only lose what you put in, and if you bet long, you could win so much more than that.

Ella found the first race more amusing than thrilling, but it has gotten her going, and she watches the next Derby race and the next Belmont race, both close, on screen. She’d chosen her Derby horse quickly. In a race with seventeen horses, there was no hope. The next Belmont race promises more. Ella vacillates between Number 1 and Number 3. Number 1 has 10–1 odds, and Number 3 starts out 6–1.

Trackside, she fishes a coin out of her pocket. For an instant, the sun peeks through the cloud cover to glint on the thing. Her smile has wickedness in it. She flips the coin, and it stays in the air longer than coins normally do. It lands in her palm, and she slaps it onto the back of her free hand. Number 1 it is.

She flips it again, not playing with it this time. Horse Number 1 again.

She returns to the machine and bets on Horse Number 3.

The race begins. All around her, faces spasm in ecstasy and panic. Fists pump, betting slips crinkle, backs seize, shoulders tense. Feet tap. Stomp. Knees jitter. When the race finishes, an obnoxious bow-tied frat boy runs to a white girl in a hoodie and shouts, “We just won one million dollars!” on a 5–2 horse.

“Fuck that guy,” Ella mutters.

Then she hears a ghost of Kev whisper in her ear, “To win a million on a 5–2 horse, you have to already bet more than you should have. They didn’t make that much,” he says, smirking like he’s seen this many times before.

How often now had she come to watch white misery and provincial white joy? She has the ease of someone who has walked through sewer water before, knows to take off her shoes and socks and roll up her pant legs, knows the routine of watching for detritus, for broken glass. How much time has she spent watching these people? With them but not of them? She feels suddenly assured. This is what I did when I vanished, she hopes she can eventually tell Kev. Show him.

Around her, people split $10 and $5 bets on a few horses, one to win and maybe a few others to show or place. The seasoned ones mark up their programs and have pockets stuffed with tickets that will later litter the floor in pieces.

The next Belmont race starts off and Number 3, around the halfway mark, slips back. Number 1 breaks ahead, snaps the tape by a sizable length, and Ella watches it gallop away with the $260 she would’ve won if she’d listened to that damn coin.

The sky has started to darken.

Back at her kitchen table with its view of the surveillance tower at the top of the hill and the mini-tank at the corner of 145th and St. Nicholas and the mechanized orbs doing their controlled flight over Sugar Hill, night has fallen.

Ella has seen nothing but hospital rooms. At Mama’s bedside, her hand on Mama’s while Mama sleeps, swimming deeper and deeper into Mama’s mind, then letting the current pull her wherever it wishes, she sees nothing but hospital rooms.

A sound. A beep. When Ella looks up, Mama’s on a table in a small, dark room with a monitor hooked to her, her swollen belly wet with gel, her face turned to the monitor where she watches the heartbeat beep and beep. Ella follows her gaze, watches the green lines trace mountain peaks and valleys, then slowly turn to chicken scratching. In the ultrasound, the grainy image of a fetus moves, then stops. A nurse leaves the room, but there’s someone else there, dressed in a multicolored gown with beads around her neck and wrists. She holds a bag, and the odor of lavender wafts luxuriously from it. The two of them, Mama and the black lady, stare at each other, and Ella watches the black lady smile reassurance into a Mama who looks younger than Ella ever remembers her being.

“I’m anxious,” Mama says. “But I’m ready.”

“You’re ready,” the lady says back. She reaches into her sack and pulls out papers covered in crayon scribblings. Affirmations like “I can do this” and “I am loved” and “I am strong.”

The doctor returns and says to the room, “We don’t want to wait. We’re going to get her out now.” And Ella follows the nurse and her mother and this other woman up several flights of stairs to the labor and delivery unit, and the woman changes into purple scrubs, her sack now filled with snacks she got from the vending machine on the ground floor.

Ella stands by the wall as the doctor, brisk and white, enters with a clipboard in his hands. “Have you had any children before?” the doctor asks without looking up.

The woman frowns. “Have you even read her file?” And the two of them glare at each other for a moment.

“A stillborn,” Mama says, and the air vanishes from Ella’s lungs. This is new. She has never been here before. She’d walked through so many of Mama’s memories that she could describe them down to the chipping on the walls: Mama leaving abusive partners, Mama at church, Mama at the club with girlfriends, Mama praying by her bed at their home in South Central, Mama as a kid running through Mississippi backyards. How deep Ella must have gone to get here. But she doesn’t try to leave, doesn’t try to force herself out of the memory. The current brought her here. Mama brought her here.

“The demise was last year?”

Mama stiffens at the word.

The woman touches the doctor’s arm and says, “May I speak to you outside?”

After a moment, Ella follows them, passing through the door as though it were a curtain, and she watches the woman tell the doctor to please make a note in Mama’s chart about the stillbirth, how every time she has to recite her trauma, Mama’s mind goes back to that place of anxiety and fear and heartbreak.

“She’s having a high-risk delivery,” the woman says. “I would hope that her care team would thoroughly review her chart before walking into her room.”

For a moment, the doctor is silent. Then he says, “You doulas shouldn’t even be here. You’re lucky I don’t call security.”

Ella follows the doula back into Mama’s room, and it’s as though time stretches like a rubber band before snapping in place, because now there are tired lines on Mama’s face and she groans like she hasn’t had a drop of water in hours.

“Can I get an epidural?” Mama murmurs to the anesthesiologist nearby, who shoots the doula a look that gets the doula out of the room.

Ella stays, then watches the white woman administer a spinal dose of anesthesia. Ella’s fists tighten at her sides when she watches her mother clench her own fists and grit her teeth. When the doula returns, Mama’s head shoots up from her pillow, and there’s rage in her eyes.

“I can’t feel my legs,” she hisses. Then her head falls back. “And my head.” That last comes out as a moan.

“What did you give her?” the doula asks the anesthesiologist.

Mama’s blood pressure rises. Ella can feel it like heat rising in her own face. She looks at the numbers on the screen, another heart rate, the baby’s heart rate. It’s dropping.

The doula crouches at Mama’s side and grips her hand in both of hers. “What happened was wrong,” she says in a whisper, “but for the sake of the baby, it’s time to let it go.”

Mama grits her teeth. She’s not ready to let it go.

“Close your eyes,” the doula tells her in the softest voice Ella has ever heard. “What’s the color of your stress?”

“Red.”

“What color relaxes you?”

Mama takes several mountainous breaths. “Lavender.”

The beeping stabilizes. Mama’s blood pressure drops. Ella’s fists unclench.

A team of three young female residents hurry into the room with the delivery nurse behind them, a flurry of white, then a man who looks like the attending physician, and he introduces himself briefly before plunging his hands between Mama’s legs, and the question shines bright in Mama’s eyes, through reflexive tears, and the doula sees it and says, “What happened to Dr. Rosenbaum? He was supposed to be here.” But the doctor doesn’t explain the switch, instead pulling his hands out and snapping off his gloves and saying, “She’s ready. Time to push.”

And they all get to work, a small hurricane of white while the doula, the only other black woman in the room, leans by Mama’s side and says, “You’re a rock star. You can do it. This is it. You can do it. You’re doing amazing. Push! You can do it!”

And Mama pushes and pushes, not taking her eyes off the doula. And Ella watches her own head appear, a slick cluster of black curls. And Mama pushes again, and the young resident takes baby Ella’s head and eases the slippery body out, and the residents all take turns between Mama’s legs, but when Ella looks up, the attending physician is gone, almost like he wasn’t here, and it’s only the young white women and the doula and Mama sobbing shaking laughing as she watches her baby girl, purple and wrinkled and stone-still, touch air for the first time.

A resident lays the baby on Mama’s chest. “Is she all right? She’s not moving. Is she okay?” Then, a second later, the baby’s tiny arms and legs tense, and she opens her mouth and lets out a cry.

“She’s perfect,” the doula tells Mama.

“I did it,” Mama breathes. “Oh, Ella,” she says, looking to the baby, as she touches a back slick with blood and amniotic fluid. “I did it.”

Ella blinks, and the room is empty. The residents have vanished. So has the doula. So has the baby.

Mama is older. She’s back to now.

Mama’s eyes flutter open. “Baby, why you crying?”

Ella dashes away the tears. She blubbers an apology.

“Oh, baby. It’s going to be all right.”

“I almost killed you.”

Mama puts her hand over Ella’s. “Baby, you ain’t never do no such thing.”

A few moments later, Ella calms her sobs enough to ask, “How come you never told me about… about the stillbirth?”

Pain glints in Mama’s eyes, but it’s gone the next instant. “That was a long time ago. And—” Headaches and light sensitivity bleed from Mama, through their intertwined hands, into Ella. She sees the argument with the boyfriend and him grabbing the knife and her screaming, “Back up! I have a baby,” and the police arriving. Feels the swollen hands and feet and face and the doctors telling her just to take some Tylenol, always more Tylenol, then the day before the baby shower when her aches had become too much and a doctor scribbling 143/86 in a chart during her appointment. And her doctor telling her to lie down then telling her that he was going on vacation and she could deliver the baby by C-section that day if she wanted, six weeks early, then the car ride a few days later on the way to her boyfriend’s and the wetness between her legs which is not water like she expects but blood. In the rush afterward, someone saying that elevated blood pressure had separated her placenta from her uterine wall, then haziness and Mama asking over and over again, “Is he all right? Is he all right?” Then the silence of the delivery room. The most deafening silence Ella has ever heard in her life.

It’s gone the next instant.

“It was so long ago,” Mama whispers. “I’d hoped to keep that from you.”

“But why, Mama?”

Mama looks to the ceiling. “You’re always so angry. I… I didn’t wanna add to your burden.”

“Just like you weren’t gonna tell me about your cancer?”

Mama flinches. Just enough for Ella to notice. “I don’t wanna fight it. I just—” Then she allows herself a moment of release, of bitterness. “These doctors ain’t gonna help me with that anyway.” Then she’s back. She pats Ella’s hand. “It’s just enough that you’re here.”

When Mama slips back into slumber, Ella slides her hand out from beneath her mother’s. It’s not until she exits the hospital, leaving behind a double to watch for any change in condition, that she realizes the gift Mama has just given her.

Mama had seen the look in Ella’s eyes when Ella had said “I almost killed you,” then she had let Ella see what she saw.

“They almost killed you.”

Mama’s only moment of bitterness. Of rage, of malice, of hurt. The only moment of truth into which she had let her daughter.

And it’s enough to set Ella free.

They don’t tell me why I finally got out of solitary, but I’m pretty sure it’s because there’s not enough space in the jail, and I gotta make room for another guy.

Routine snaps back with a quickness. There’s the heart attack or the epileptic fit, then suddenly, the body reasserts itself and starts working again. A little different than before, maybe a little slower. Maybe it has to engineer a few workarounds, but soon enough, I’m in a cell, and I got a cellmate, and I have a new job fixing computers for a local public school, because someone finally explained to a CO who told Administration why some of the inmates call me Techie.

The block gets called to breakfast at 7 a.m., and by 7:30, I’m working. But, today, unease gets my fingers twitching. Another heart attack’s coming. It’s late: 6:20, and the cell lock still hasn’t disengaged. I get up and look out down the walkway to see everyone else still locked in their cells.

“Deuce,” I say to the big guy still sleeping in his bed. “Deuce, the ninjas are coming.”

He slaps his gums. “Wake me up when they get here,” he says, then rolls all 275 pounds of his body over.

The tablet I usually use to scroll through and read up on what news comes through the few websites we get access to is propped up by the toilet, where I usually take care of another part of my morning routine, the privacy sheet taped up to one end so that it hangs diagonally over the halfway mark of our cell.

We don’t have much by contraband, but I make a mental note, just so we have something to give the COs when they come through. If the cell’s clean, they’ll stick around for too long, expecting to find real dirt. Give them a little of what they’re looking for, and they’ll stop looking, Terrell had told me once after I’d starred up and got moved out of RNDC.

The tablet. Shit. Thumper’s tablet. They find that and I’m back in AdSeg, then waiting for me when I get back out will be no job, no privileges, and no Deuce, who might be one of the only guys in here with a routine that doesn’t fuck with mine.

“Deuce, the fucking tablet.”

He’s up on the edge of his bed now and yawns. “Fuck it. Can’t do nothin’ ’bout it now, nigga.”

In the middle of the block, the support team is already setting up a table for paperwork. Empty boxes surround it.

Two-man teams go into each cell. A little Roomba goes in with them, sometimes before, to scan first for anything that might get them or anything they might miss. There’s been talk that these guys are Augments, wired up like comic book superheroes. An inmate’s entire history gets beamed into their system, so they know if you’re trouble, they can tell what privileges you’ve been granted, who’s ever visited you and what they might’ve smuggled to you. They know what you’ve boofed without having you strip and spread your cheeks. There’s no hiding from these niggas.

They’re getting closer. Cellies get out and get cuffed, then stand by and watch as their cell gets tossed. Papers, nudes taped to the wall, extra sheets, stuff out of commissary.

Deuce has already started stripping his bed, and I start on mine. We fold our sheets and blankets, unplug our fans and wrap up the cords. Deuce leaves a few of his issues of Hustler around in strategic locations so they’ll get found.

Then the beep as they reach our cell.

I try to get a read on them as Deuce and I walk out and get cuffed and the Roomba goes in. They look bored more than anything else, but even the bored niggas can decide to make an example out of you for no reason in particular and “search” your shit by dumping coffee all over your papers, then walking all over them. And even the bored guys might see the tablet on its stand there, looking at them like a middle finger, and strike us.

I’m dizzy with worry, waiting for a head to poke out.

Then, after what seems like an hour, the Roomba crawls out, and the two guys follow and uncuff us and let us back in. It’s still there.

Almost like someone had put a blanket over it. Shielded it.

The inmate-porters sweep up the mess and push the contraband left over closer to the cells so inmates can put a hook on a string, toss it under our doors, and pull back our shit.

They let us out into the yard later the next day, and I spot Terrell across the way, but before I can say what’s up, I hear the smack of knuckles against cheek and already a crowd has gathered around the fight breaking out.

I feel my hands ball into fists. I don’t know either of the cats duking it out, not the big guy, not the little nigga, but the fire warms in me nonetheless until a CO shouts, “All right, guys. Knock it off.”

A couple dozen guards fill the yard, but nobody moves, except for a few that have their pepper spray and their shock-sticks turned on.

The CO who called out earlier does it again, half-heartedly, bored. Four more guards come out, and the first guard, now with backup, gets closer just as the big guy goes down. The guards beat the smaller guy with their shock-sticks just as the big guy drops the shank he was holding.

I don’t know what it is about today, but I feel protected. Maybe it’s the tablet.

The fight cuts our rec time short, and pretty soon, we’re back in the hall, two officers behind us, one for each line we’ve formed, holding their shock-sticks.

We’re coming down a flight of stairs when one of the COs, a younger guy I don’t recognize, stops next to me and nods for me to go back up. The others stop at the bottom of the stairs. Everyone’s looking, and I see in their eyes the look of brothers making sure nothing evil gets done to their family. There’s a chaplain waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

“You have to call home,” he says, in a voice too kind for this place.

From the kitchen window, Ella can just barely catch the edge of the Baptist church two blocks down. They’d had immigrant neighbors above them when they lived in that apartment, and one day, Mama had started praying differently. She would pray like they did, like every step on American soil was sacrosanct. The type of prayer that enlisted her whole body. Ella remembers peeking at Mama when she was supposed to have closed her eyes and how it felt like she was looking at a superhero bathed in the light of the sun from which she’d gained her powers. It was how she’d prayed right before Kev caught that attempted armed robbery charge. It was how she’d prayed after Ella’s self-exile. And whenever Ella would return to the changing neighborhood and spy on Mama, she’d see that it was how she’d prayed after that white kid in Charleston, South Carolina, had walked through the doors of that church, joined a Bible study group just like Mama’s, and then pulled out a .45-caliber pistol before opening fire.

Ella hated that kind of prayer. Sounding like they should be grateful just to be here. She remembers reading about that kid who killed those churchgoers, and she remembers praying for revenge. Praying for frogs and locusts and for rivers of blood, for every Confederate flag to find its own funeral pyre.

She’d cried a lot back then.

The videos had been ubiquitous, some more explicit than others. Six shots into the back of a man fleeing arrest on a child support warrant, or two shots ringing out and cops standing over the prone bleeding body of a young man in the midst of protests commemorating the anniversary of another boy killed by a cop. After each one, Ella had Traveled. Straight to the site of the killing, and she’d touched the ground, breathed in the air, and sucked that history deep into her body. Inhaled the violence of the previous hours. Sometimes it felt pornographic. To go to that cul de sac in McKinley, Texas, where black kids younger than her sat on the ground, handcuffed, while their white neighbors jeered and one cop grabbed a girl in a bathing suit by the arm and hurled her to the ground, then dug his knee into her back while she wailed for her mother.

She’d returned from every trip with her head in her hands.

What if I’m the answer? she had asked herself. What if I’m the one we’ve been praying for?

Two blocks away, in an apartment across the street from the Baptist church, a phone rings.

There’s no one in the sergeant’s office when we get to it. The chaplain waits in the doorway and I want to smack that pitying look off his face, but then the door closes. I wait for someone to come in and tell me what to do or to hold out a phone for me to answer into, but nobody comes. I go to the phone on the wall, pick it up, and dial. It rings three times before something cold washes over me, and when I turn back to the desk, Ella’s holding herself, like she’s trying to keep from being torn apart.

I drop the phone.

“Ella, what… what are you doing here?”

“Nobody can hear us,” she says. Her doing. Her Thing.

This is it. The reason nervousness had spider-walked along my spine this morning. I steel myself. “Yeah?”

“Mama’s gone.”

My jaw twitches, and I fight to stand still. But my hands, my legs, my whole body is trembling. People don’t live forever. People die every day. Some of them die unlucky, they all die either way. And there’s no order to it, it happens to all of us, but this. Ella said they couldn’t hear us, but I know if I let go, they’ll hear me wail. They’ll have an idea what it’s about, and maybe some of them would understand, but they’ll hear it anyway, and I can’t let them hear it.

I close my eyes against the scream building in my throat. My whole body tenses. The ground shifts beneath me. Books shuffle along the shelf and nearly fall off. The paperweight on the sergeant’s desk dances to the edge. Chairs scrape along the floor.

“Kev.”

Someone’s calling my name, but all I see is black. All I hear is the roar in my ears.

“Kev.”

Tear this place down.

“Kev.”

I want to see her. I want to see her so bad, and maybe if this place is erased, maybe that’ll bring me closer. The dust in the air stills. Electricity sparks to life around me. I can hear it pop.

“Kev!”

Then it’s gone, and I’m cold again.

For a long time, we stare at each other.

“Aight, then,” I say. That’s it. I feel like it’s over, even though I have no idea what “it” is. Either way, something important is finished. Ain’t no reason to be here anymore. Ella takes a step closer, and I know she means to hug me, but I put an arm out to stop her. “You ain’t gotta do that. You’re a ghost too.”

I don’t wait for her to vanish before I open the door and walk back out into the hall.

“Take a walk, Deuce,” I tell him when I get back.

He peers up over the top of the Hustler he was thumbing through and looks me over, and I know he’s doing the calculations in his head, knows the news I got is the person-shattering kind and sees it, even though my words came out calm and measured. And he knows what I’m gonna do because he’s seen it before or, like all of us, has heard of it happening, and on the outside, maybe he would’ve tried to stop it, but because this is what happens in a place like Rikers, he merely folds his magazine back up, stuffs it under his mattress, and walks to the cell door, leans on a bar with his arms out and makes to start conversation with a neighbor.

My body moves like a machine. I take my sheet and tear it and, even though I’ve never done this before, I know just how to tie the knot and just how to get the sheet over the bar from which our privacy sheet hangs. I know how to test its strength without yanking the bar out, and I know how to make sure it’s all set up high enough that when I step off my bed, my feet won’t touch the floor.

In less than a minute, it’s all set up.

I’m up and have the makeshift noose around my neck, and I’m about to step into my blank future when I smell sulfur.

When I look up, I see a wood-paneled room. My hands go to my neck. There’s no noose, not even the burn of skin rubbed raw with me jerking as I hang from the ceiling. No, I’m standing on solid ground, and this feels too real to be whatever waits to grab you after you die. Too much like what I left behind. I can smell it, the Clorox, the mustiness that has come in waves off of all the bodies that have walked through here. And incense.

It’s a chapel.

Behind me is a green door, unlocked. Before me, pews, and a scratched wooden cube for an altar.

In front of the altar, two people: a woman in black slacks and a white button-down shirt, and a chaplain in those same colors. He’s got what looks like a portfolio in his hands. I start when I realize it’s the same chaplain that pulled me from the line earlier. His face is softer, still wrinkled, but looser. He’s smiling.

The chaplain whispers something to the woman, and she sits in the front pew.

They wait in silence for what feels like an uncomfortably long time, a Rikers minute, then the green door opens.

I step to the side, out of sight. I don’t know why I’m scared people will see me if this is the afterlife or a dream or something other. But I can’t kill instinct, I can only kill myself. So I cling to a shadow. The sound precedes them. The clink of shackles working against themselves. In walks a woman in Rikers beige with a CO holding her arm.

The woman in the pew stands at the sound of the door slamming shut, looks behind her, and immediately tears start falling down her face.

When the white inmate and the woman in the fancy clothes stand in front of each other by the altar, they hold hands. A strand of blond hair falls from the topknot on the inmate’s head, but she doesn’t bother to flick it away. The women can’t stop grinning at each other, like the chaplain’s joy is contagious. He puts their hands together. I now pronounce you wife and wife. The witness, a captain, signs the marriage license the chaplain pulls out of his portfolio.

My ears are buzzing. The world dissolves in a mess of colors. I’m crying.

I try to hang back, deeper into the shadows, but they’re certain to see me, and just when they get close enough for me to see the lipstick stain on the inmate’s jumpsuit, I’m standing on my bed again, breathing hard.

Deuce, still leaning on the door bars, lifts his head but doesn’t look all the way back.

I haven’t done it yet. I haven’t jumped.

My fingers are shaking, but something is different inside me. Like underground plates shifting, piecing themselves together or breaking apart or both. And suddenly, I don’t have the energy anymore. My fingers won’t stop shaking, and when Deuce looks back, for real this time, the features of his face slacken. I can’t keep my bottom lip from trembling. I can’t move. I don’t know how he knows to do this, but he walks back over and grabs me by the waist while my trembling fingers work the noose over my head. He lets me back down and I fall forward. He doesn’t push me away. He doesn’t cuss me out. He doesn’t size me up for a beating. He holds me, and what the fuck kind of place is this that can let me cry into this big nigga’s shoulder about my mama dying?

Banging wakes me up. Soon as I open my eyes, nothing but white. I know by now that it’s a flashlight. Brightest flashlight in the world. And my body moves before my mind does. I got ten minutes to get dressed. But I’m up and stretch out the pain in my back, and, in a few moments, I’m in my prison sweats.

In the beginning, being escorted by a guard down to the isolation cells at 1:30 in the morning would mean there was only pain waiting for me at the end. I’d been singled out for a beating or I was going into AdSeg on a write-up or some other horrible thing was about to happen. But I’m on my way to a job, and that kind of knowledge puts a strange feeling in a man. When you have purpose that doesn’t involve hurting someone else, it changes the way you walk. I’m not moving through here with a bounce in my step, nothing like that. But I don’t have the same tension knotting up my shoulders. I don’t have my head ducked and arms loose and ready for when I gotta swing on someone. You let that go when you’re on your way to work.

I get to the wing and in the anteroom, I strip down for the cavity search. Then, sweats back on, I’m in the corridor with a few of the guards, one of which is asleep with a contraband magazine on his belly. The one who’s awake looks up and gives me a perfunctory nod before returning to whatever part of the wall he was staring at before I came in.

My chair’s ready for me in front of the first cell. The cell door has bars enough for me to see through, but even if it didn’t, the lights are all the way on in the suicide ward. Nevernight, it gets called. And they say they keep the lights on because then guards can better see when an inmate on suicide watch is going to try something, but keeping someone in that nightmare from being able to sleep ain’t gonna help. It ain’t my place to tell them that, and a bunch of the guards, the smarter ones, probably know that already, but it ain’t their place to say it either.

I take my seat and watch the kid on the other side of the bars not stir in his suicide blanket. Sturdy, quilted, tear-proof nylon. I’ve seen others where it’s been turned into a smock. This collarless, sleeveless gown with adjustable shoulder openings and another opening down the front that gets closed with fasteners. That ain’t what this kid got, thank God. It’s just the blanket. The way he lies on his mattress, though, it’s like he’s dead already. But this is my job now: sit with suicidal prisoners and just talk.

So that’s what I do.

Introduce myself: name, no NYSID number, then make some crack about how “I didn’t do it” or something like that, not because it matters at this point but because, for the younger cats, maybe it helps to hear it come up. I used to talk about how shitty the food was but then I would remember what I used to get when I was in the Box, and I’d remember that their shit probably has worms in it. So instead, I tell him about the others. I tell him about Rick, who’s practically an institution he’s been here so long, and I talk about Bobby, who did a bid at Folsom in California and used to be a vegetable smuggler, like he actually worked on a garden with some other inmates on China Hill and they would sneak food back into the prison in their clothes: a jalapeño pepper wrapped in a sandwich bag and smushed in his left boot and in his right boot a bundle of tightly wrapped green onion shoots. One guy brought back a watermelon slice, another some tomatoes. And I tell the kid now about what Bobby once told me, which is that they weren’t supposed to garden per se, they were landscapers, but they weren’t gonna not garden on that grassy knoll.

And then I tell this kid who may or may not be asleep about the book club.

It’s not just a story about a buncha niggas reading a book but it’s also a story of some of those niggas being cats locked up for a backpack and some of those niggas being neo-Nazis. A story that makes you ask what’s the point of a neo-Nazi learning to treat a black person as a human if he’s just gonna die in a year and a half anyway, or maybe the lesson is that the only whites ready to look at black folk as human are the ones getting ready to die anyway. But then I chime in on this conversation I’m having out loud to myself, and say Rikers is weird like that. Jail’s weird like that. Prison’s weird like that. All types of absurd shit happens here, and you just need the patience to step back and watch it happen. Maybe that comes with time. Maybe not. Maybe you spend your entire sentence here getting the shit kicked outta you. Maybe they kill you in here. But maybe you make it out. Not out from behind bars, but out of wherever it is they try to put you when they put you behind bars.

I’m telling the kid about how everyone in the book club had to sit at separate tables, and you had to swivel around to talk to people so nobody felt left out. And if someone wanted to read something out of the book, you had to toss it to them and hope they caught it or it landed within reach.

“How long you been here?”

The kid’s so quiet that anybody not trained to listen for any little noise might have missed it, but I stop dead in the middle of my sentence.

“You sound like you been here long.” He’s drugged up. His words slur. He’s got that wooziness in him, drunk-tired.

“You just see a lot here pretty quickly,” I tell him. But then I add it all up. The arrest, the time in Central Booking, then my arrival at Rikers. Me trying to get my case tried separately from the niggas I was with at the time. Seventy-four days later is the first time I see a judge, and I hear my charges for the first time. Mama wasn’t there. Ella wasn’t there. But I knew it’d kill them both if I pled guilty, so I tell the room “not guilty,” and I get a trial date for six months after that. Two hundred and fifty-eight days later, I’m in court again, bigger from what RNDC has already done to me, and the prosecutor requests a deferment. “People Not Ready” like it takes more than just the DA to do what needs doing to me. Then more deferments, such that I ain’t even need to be in court. Two weeks, one week, one week, two weeks. Then fights with inmates and time in the Box and admin charges added to what ain’t even technically a sentence, and it blurs. In that blur are more fights, COs attacking us, COs trying to rape us, beating us in the showers, us fighting back, slashing, trying to get our ass-whoopings caught on camera. More time in the Box. “Eight years.”

“That’s gotta be some sort of record.”

I’m stunned. I’d never counted it out like that before. Makes me gulp and need to take a few deep breaths. “Yeah. But I’m getting out soon.” I don’t say I’m eligible for parole or that I got a hearing coming up, because there ain’t enough certainty in those sentences. I need to say I’m getting out. The kid needs to hear that it’s possible.

I need to hear that it’s possible.

“I’m getting out.”

The CO who’s still awake taps his shock-stick against the ground. Time’s up. I move my chair to the next cell and start talking.

The closer to Kev’s parole hearing they get, the more exaggerated his moods. Either he’s electric with hypomania or catatonic with depression. Their first of the two hugs they’re allotted is swift. Perfunctory. They sit down less like a sister traveling to visit her inmate brother and more like prospective business partners.

Kev fiddles with his fingers, forearms resting heavy on the table, his brows so furrowed they nearly cover his eyes.

Twice he tries to start speaking, but something swallows the words in his throat. Finally, “I wish I’d talked to Mama more.”

Confusion and sorrow war in Ella. She blinks her surprise, then flexes her toes.

Strands of white light peel out of thin air and wrap around her, spawning more threads, tree-branching until whole cloth covers her, bathes her in ivory that takes the sun’s light and makes her glow.

This is a new thing. Ella takes Kev’s hand and smiles. “Come with me, Kev. I want to show you something.”

Two steps forward take them into a field overgrown by weeds where, in the distance, railroad tracks cut through overgrowth. A ghost train, translucent against the blue sky, thunders past and Kev squints and sees in one of the compartments, a family, laden with a single suitcase, and sees within that suitcase the clothes and the bags of chicken that are meant to sustain the two children on their journey northward. He doesn’t know how he knows they are heading north, nor does he know how he knows where they stand, that it is the Delta, but the conviction rocks him. He watches in wonder as the train passes, its billowing smoke outlined in luminescence by the golden orb that gilds everything its light touches.

They walk through the fields. By now, Ella has let go of Kev’s hand, but Kev follows, trusting his older sister to lead him to security, to answers, to certainty. At a vacant lot, a still pool of water fills a parking lot so that the buildings lining the lot see their undisturbed reflections, the auto body shop whose sign is missing half its lettering, the red brick factory building hollowed out into nothing more than a husk with its broken windows like a tiger’s teeth. Telephone lines on which stand a murder of crows, the poles untouched but bulging with captured moisture. They walk further to find empty houses that stand in defiance of all natural law, the cement of sidewalks peeled away to reveal the toll of the battle waged between concrete and grassland. Paved roads made brown where the asphalt has vanished. Clouds swim above them. The buildings, homes, warehouses, a courthouse, all of it wears a coat of brown, varying shades, the color of sand or the color of mud, but all brown. The entire town coated in it.

If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.

A river runs.

Two hundred miles long and sixty miles wide, cutting through nineteen counties, its ebb and flow enriching the land it touches such that wealth could grow straight out of the topsoil that runs more than sixty feet deep, pregnant with life and black bodies. On the outskirts of the town, along a lonely stretch of road, phantasmal stalks of corn sprout, row after row after row, with spectral farming machinery, rusted and pitted, hanging over the entire enterprise.

The church is plain and white, and if Kev squints, he can see the cracks and rifts in the white paint of its steeple. But from where they stand, the place looks untouched, neat and orderly while the overgrown cemetery behind it holds tombstones like more broken teeth. Wisps of smoke rise from the air to become silhouettes of people working a field while a plantation house builds itself, ghostly tendril by ghostly tendril, out of the ground on its hilltop perch. Streams of black folk dressed in Sunday white flow in and out of the church. Mothers with their gloved hands holding their children’s. Husbands with their elbows out for their wives to wrap their arms through. Silent, but Kev strains to hear the giggling and the chatter and the warmth and the love nonetheless. Ella stoops as a ghost child comes by her and reaches out to touch the child’s cheek only to have it melt around her finger, then her hand, then vanish completely.

Dusk breeze cuts through the vision, and the people disappear, so that all that remains is the church. The heat settles on their shoulders like a blanket. Gnats and mosquitoes sing all over their legs and fingers.

A step forward, and they cross so much ground that Kev falls to his knees, sick, and finds he is kneeling in water. His head darts left and right, and he knows without knowing how he knows that it’s the Yazoo River that darkens his DOC-issued orange jumpsuit.

Looking up, he sees more ghosts. A minister with one hand cupped over a woman’s nose and mouth and another pressed against the small of her back, their waists rising out of the water, their white gowns pooled around them, and the minister dipping the woman back like they were dancing and no one else could see them, then bringing her back up out of the water, her gown soaked through and clinging to her angles and curves, her black hair curled and clumped about her ears and neck, her skin a-sheen, and Kev knows without knowing how he knows that he and that woman share blood. His hands go to his face, fingertips shivering against cheeks wet with tears. Then the wind takes the ghosts from them, and Kev’s gasp catches in his chest, and he stares while that spot transforms into a street in downtown Greenwood, two lone black boys in suspenders with books slung by straps over their shoulders, talking like no one else can hear them, none of the white store proprietors staring out through their windows or the man showing his neighbor’s son the contents of his toolbox, the box itself splayed open on a front porch. None of the girls walking back from school with their mothers suddenly wrapping them into forced silence with their arms, pulling them away so that wherever the black boys who share his blood go, the rest of the world spread apart from them, until the road empties and all that can be heard is the car that races toward them, full of white boys holding bats and chains, in full pursuit of the young black men who had dared to walk through their part of town without their permission. Kev knows what happens after without knowing how he knows: that the two boys, cousins to each other, have found sanctuary in a nearby river and how they nearly drown for holding their breath so long while the white boys with their lights search the bank, then the daring black boys getting home with their chests heaving from panic and effort to face a mother, an aunt, livid, purple with worry.

The images spin into stories, so many stories, so that he sees another young man working under the sun as a sharecropper on a plantation, finding a bumpy log on which to sit, taking his hat off and running his forearm along his forehead, then finding the water pump and pouring some into his hat’s brim to splash on his head and face. The overseer comes out without his whip because why would he need it? And from the porch, he shouts at the man on the log, and it’s as if Kev’s in the dream, he can’t hear the words only see the white mouth contort in disgust around them. The black man stands up, not quite to his full height, but instead of turning back to his hoe, he turns to the overseer and says something back. Kev can’t hear the words, but he can see the words straighten the man’s back, can see each syllable building pride inside him, and he’s not angry, he just wants the rest he’s earned. The wind churns, and it’s dusk, and the young man who dared to rest has fled to his grand-aunt’s clapboard house and his grand-uncle girds himself with a Winchester rifle and a long-nose .38, and sets on the front porch waiting for the mob to come after a man who dared to assert his worth.

The ritual: a social code broken, then fleeing to the sanctuary of family members who gather to protect the loved one on the run, the loved one now in danger, until plans can be made, slapped together, to spirit that person up north.

The ground falls out from beneath Kev. When he opens his eyes, he and Ella are standing on air. Ella looks as though she has not moved this entire time, as though she were a piece of furniture or a tree having withstood all manner of storm. Staring at this woman, Kev realizes what he has seen and feels anger and jealousy that this woman has gained access to more of their mother’s life than Kev had ever been granted, that so much of the mystery of Mama has been solved.

Shotgun shacks and unpaved roads and cotton fields. Young men “progueing,” strutting around and being seen, and rivers swollen with black bodies. Patchwork streetlamp grid that turns some neighborhoods into lightless blocks, churches set up to register neighborhood denizens to vote with lines stretching out the entrance and down the block and those churches being reduced to splinters on a night where it didn’t matter if there were people in it or not, just that what they wanted to say got said. A man putting on a white hood and mounting a horse and galloping to an agitator’s house to light a cross on fire on that front lawn, burn a crucifix into that grass when the wood falls, then finding himself the next morning at the State Capitol in a bespoke suit debating the merits of a piece of legislation. Men turned into pieces of meat, having been dragged by a car or a truck down backstreets where mosquitoes and alligators and gutter snakes roam. The smell of sweet barbecue sauce wafting up from a grill in a backyard while uncles and aunts slapped at their necks or their legs and where kids scurried underneath chairs or flirted or did the things people do when they’re no longer unfree.

“Mama,” Kev whispers.

He reaches a hand out and takes a step toward one of the little pig-tailed girls being bounced on an older woman’s knee.

“Mama.” Tears blur the vision. “Mama. Oh, Mama.”

It feels like forever, but it was only a few seconds. And in the visiting room, Ella sneaks her hand away before the guard can catch her.

Across the table, Kev smiles his thanks. Tears still pool in his eyes, and he lets them rest there for a moment before sniffing them away and becoming his hard self again.

“They’re really gonna let me out, aren’t they.” When Kev says it, it doesn’t sound like a question. It doesn’t sound like an acclimation. It sounds like an accusation. It sounds like Kev himself peering sideways into Ella’s head, a passenger in her mind as she spoke with Kev’s public defender and handed over the materials to help the defender make the case for parole with the review board—the proof of lodging, the contact info for Kev’s eventual employer, the location and admission requirements for nearby schools. It sounds like Kev watching her brush past every correctional officer whose path she crossed, grazing just enough to let her Thing flow through them and convince them of what a model inmate Kev has been. It sounds like Kev watching Ella cheat.

“When you get out,” Ella asked. “Where do you wanna go?”

For a while, he doesn’t say anything. Ella watches the potential answers wash across his face, watches him catch them, bounce them from hand to hand or turn them over, then toss them away. Watches him carry in his arms the whole time a simple desire to be away from violence. Until finally he comes to the one word Ella never wanted to hear again.

“West.”