Homegoing

  “I gotta work, Mohammed. I got to.”

  Mohammed nodded slowly, thinking, and the next week he gave Sonny the number of a man who had left the Nation and now owned a bar. Two weeks later Sonny was taking drink orders at Jazzmine, the new jazz club in East Harlem.

  Sonny moved his things out of his mother’s house the night he found out he got the job. He didn’t tell her where he was working because he already knew she didn’t approve of jazz or any other kind of secular music. She sang for the church, used her voice for Christ, and that was it. Sonny had asked her once if she had ever wanted to be famous like Billie Holiday, singing so sweet that even white people had to pay attention, but his mother just looked away and told him to be careful of “that kind of life.”

  Jazzmine was too new to attract the big-time clients and players. Most days, the club was half-empty, and the workers, many of whom were musicians themselves, hoping to be seen by the kind of people who could make their careers, quit before the club was even six months old. It wasn’t long before Sonny became head bartender.

  “Gimme a whiskey,” a muffled voice called to Sonny one night. He could tell it was a woman’s voice, but he couldn’t see her face. She was sitting all the way down at the end of the bar, and her head was in her hands.

  “Can’t serve ya if I can’t see ya,” he said, and slowly she lifted her head. “Why don’t you come on down here and get your drink?”

  He had never seen a woman move that slowly. It was like she had to wade through deep and mucky waters to get to him. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen years old, but she moved like a world-weary old woman, like sudden movements would break her bones. And when she plopped herself down on the stool in front of him, she still seemed in no hurry.

  “Long day?” Sonny asked.

  She smiled. “Ain’t all days long?”

  Sonny got her the drink, and she sipped it just as slowly as she had done everything else.

  “My name’s Sonny,” he said.

  She slipped him another smile, and her eyes grew amused. “Amani Zulema.”

  Sonny chuckled. “What kind of name is that?” he asked.

  “Mine.” She stood up, and with the same slow stroll took her drink across the bar and up onto the stage.

  The band that had been playing seemed to bow before her. Without Amani needing to say anything at all, the pianist stood up to give her the stool and the others cleared the stage.

  She set her drink on top of the piano and started running her hands along the keys. Here, on the piano, was the same lack of urgency that Sonny had noticed before, just fingers lazily ambling along.

  It was when she started singing that the room grew really quiet. She was a small woman, but her voice was so deep, it made her look much larger. There was a gravelly quality to the sound too, like she had been gargling with pebbles to prepare herself. She swayed while she sang. First one way, then a cock of the head before moving the other way. When she started to scat, the small crowd grunted and moaned and even shouted “Amen!” once or twice. A few people came in off the street and stood in the doorway, just trying to catch sight of her.

  She ended in a hum, a sound that seemed to come from the fullest part of her gut, where some said the soul lived. It reminded Sonny of his childhood, of the first day his mother sang out in church. He was young, and Josephine was just a baby bopping on Eli’s knee. His mother had dropped her songbook on the ground and the whole congregation had been startled by the noise, looking up at her. Sonny felt his heart catch in his throat. He remembered that he had been embarrassed for her. Back then, he was always angry at or embarrassed by her. But then she had started to sing. “I shall wear a crown,” she sang. I shall wear a crown.

  It was the most beautiful thing Sonny had ever heard, and he loved his mother then, like he had never loved her before. The congregation said, “Sing, Willie” and “Amen” and “Bless God,” and it seemed to Sonny then that his mother didn’t have to wait for Heaven for her reward. He could see it; she was already wearing her crown.

  Amani finished her humming and smiled at the crowd as they started to roar with clapping and praise. She picked her drink up from the top of the piano and drank it all the way down. She walked back toward Sonny and set the empty glass in front of him. She didn’t say another word as she made her way out.

  —

  Sonny was staying in some projects on the East Side with some folks he kind of knew. Against his better judgment, he had given his mother his address, and he knew she had given it to Lucille when the woman showed up holding his daughter.

  “Sonny!” she shouted. She was standing on the sidewalk outside the apartment building. There could have been upwards of a hundred Sonnys in Harlem. He didn’t want to admit that this one was him.

  “Carson Clifton, I know you up there.”

  There was no back door to the apartment, and it would only be a matter of time before Lucille figured out a way up.

  Sonny leaned the top half of his body out of his third-floor window. “Whatchu want, Luce?” he asked. He hadn’t seen his daughter in nearly a year. The child was big, too big to be cocked against her tiny mother’s hip, but Lucille had always had strength enough to spare.

  “Come let us up!” she hollered back, and he sighed one of what Josephine called his “old lady sighs” before going down to get them.

  Lucille wasn’t in the room but ten seconds before Sonny regretted letting her in.

  “We need money, Sonny.”

  “I know my mama been payin’ you.”

  “What I’m supposed to feed this child? Air? Air can’t grow a child.”

  “I ain’t got nothin’ for you, Lucille.”

  “You got this apartment. Angela told me you gave her somethin’ just last month.”

  Sonny shook his head. The lies these women told each other and themselves. “I ain’t seen Angela in longer than I seen you.”

  Lucille harrumphed. “What kind of father are you!”

  Sonny was angry now. He hadn’t wanted any children, but somehow he had ended up with three. The first was Angela’s girl, the second Rhonda’s, and the third was Lucille’s girl, who had come out a little slow. His mother gave them all some money each month even though he had told her to stop and told each of his women to stop asking her. They didn’t listen.

  When Angela had given birth to their daughter, Etta, Sonny was only fifteen years old. Angela was only fourteen. They’d said they were gonna get married and do things the right way, but when Angela’s parents found out she was pregnant and that the baby was Sonny’s, they’d sent her down to Alabama to stay with her family there until the baby was born, and then they wouldn’t let him see either girl when Angela came back up.

  Sonny really had wanted to do right by Angela, by his daughter, but he was young and unemployed, and he figured Angela’s parents were probably right when they said he was basically good for nothing. It nearly broke his heart the day Angela married a young pastor who worked the revival circuits down south. The pastor would leave Angela in Harlem for months at a time, and Sonny thought if he could have her, he would never leave her.

  But then he’d look at himself in the mirror sometimes, and he’d see features he didn’t recognize from his mother’s face. His nose wasn’t hers. Nor were his ears. He used to ask his mother about these features when he was young. He used to ask her where his nose, his ears, his lighter skin came from. He used to ask her about his father, and all she would say was that he didn’t have a father. He didn’t have a father, but he had turned out all right. “Right?” he would tease the man in the mirror. “Right?”

  “She ain’t even a baby no more, Lucille. Look at her.”

  The girl was hobbling around the apartment on her little sea legs. Lucille shot Sonny a killing look, snatched the child up, and left.

  “And don’t go calling my mama for money now neither!” he shouted after her. He could hear her stomping all the way down the stairs and out into the street.
br />   —

  Two days later, Sonny was back at Jazzmine. He had asked the other folks who worked there when Amani would be back, but none of them knew.

  “She go where the wind blow,” Blind Louis said, wiping down the bar. Sonny must have sighed a little, because soon Louis said, “I know that sound.”

  “What sound?”

  “You don’t want none, Sonny.”

  “Why not?” Sonny asked. What could an old blind man possibly know about wanting a woman just from the sight of her?

  “Ain’t just about the way a woman look, you gotta think about what’s in ’em too,” Louis answered, reading his mind. “Ain’t nothin’ in that woman worth wanting.”

  Sonny didn’t listen. It took three more months for him to see Amani again. By that time he’d gone looking for her, dropping in at club after club, waiting to see some slow stroll make its way up to the stage.

  When he found her, she was sitting at a table in the back of the club, sleeping. He had to get close to know this, so close he could hear the inhale and exhale of her breath as she snored. He looked around the room, but Amani was in a dark corner of the bar, and no one seemed to be looking for her. He pushed her arm. Nothing. He pushed her arm again, harder this time. Still nothing. On the third push, she rolled her head to one side so slowly, it was like a boulder moving. She blinked a couple of times, a slow, deliberate movement that brought her heavy lids and thick eyelashes together.

  When she looked at him finally, Sonny could see why she might need to blink. Her eyes were bloodshot, the pupils dilated. She blinked twice more, this time quickly, and watching her, it suddenly occurred to Sonny that he hadn’t considered what he would do once he’d found her.

  “You singing tonight?” he asked meekly.

  “Do it look like I’m singing?”

  Sonny didn’t answer. Amani started to stretch her neck and shoulders. She shook her whole body out. “What do you want, man?” she asked, seeing him again. “What do you want?”

  “You,” Sonny admitted. He had wanted her since the day he saw her sing. It wasn’t her slow gait or the fact that her voice had reminded him of his favorite memory of his mother. It was that he had felt something in himself open up when she started singing that night, and he wanted to capture just a little bit more of that feeling, keep it for himself.

  She shook her head at him and smiled a little. “Well, come on.”

  They went out into the street. Sonny’s stepfather, Eli, liked to walk, and when he was around he used to take Sonny and Willie and Josephine all around town. Maybe that was how his mother had grown to like walking too, Sonny thought. He still remembered the day that she had walked with him all the way down into the white part of the city. He’d thought they would keep on going forever and ever, but she had stopped suddenly, and Sonny found himself disappointed, though he hadn’t been able to figure out why.

  With Amani, Sonny passed by places he knew from his days on the housing team, jazz joints for the down-and-out, cheap food stands, barbershops, all with junkies on the street holding hats outstretched in their hands.

  “You ain’t told me ’bout your name yet,” Sonny said as they stepped over a man lying in the middle of the street.

  “Whatchu want to know?”

  “You Muslim?”

  Amani laughed at him a little. “Naw, I ain’t Muslim.” Sonny waited for her to speak. He had already said enough. He didn’t want to keep pressing her, showing her his desire, his weaknesses. He waited for her to speak. “Amani means ‘harmony’ in Swahili. When I started singing, I felt like I needed a new name. My mama named me Mary, and ain’t nobody gonna hit it big with a name like Mary. And I ain’t into all that Nation of Islam and Back to Africa business, but I saw Amani and I felt like it was mine. So I took it.”

  “You ain’t into the ‘Back to Africa business,’ but you using an African name?” Sonny had put his politics behind him but could feel them creeping up. Amani was nearly half his age. The America she was born into was different from the one he had been born into. He resisted the urge to wag his finger at her.

  “We can’t go back, can we?” She stopped walking and touched his arm. She looked more serious than she had all night, like she was only just considering that he was a real person and not someone she had dreamed up when he found her asleep. “We can’t go back to something we ain’t never been to in the first place. It ain’t ours anymore. This is.” She swept her hand in front of her, as though she were trying to catch all of Harlem in it, all of New York, all of America.

  They finally got to a housing project way out in West Harlem. The building wasn’t locked, and when they entered the hallway, the first thing Sonny noticed was the row of dope fiends lining the walls. They looked like dummies, or like the corpse Sonny had seen when he walked into a funeral home to find the mortician manipulating a body, hooking the elbow up, turning the face left, bending the body at its back.

  No one was manipulating these bodies in the hallway—no one that Sonny could see—but he knew immediately that it was a dope house, and suddenly what he hadn’t wanted to know about Amani’s slow, sleepy movements, her dilated pupils, became all too apparent. He grew nervous, but swallowed it down, because it was important to him that Amani not see that the longer he was with her, the more he began to feel that he had no control over himself.

  They entered a room. A man cradling his own body curled up against the wall on a dirty mattress. Two women were tapping their arms, readying themselves for the needle a second man was holding. They didn’t even look up as Sonny and Amani entered.

  Everywhere he looked, Sonny saw jazz instruments. Two horns, a bass, a sax. Amani set her things down and sat next to one of the girls, who finally looked up, nodded at them. Amani turned to Sonny, who was still hanging back, his hand still grazing the doorknob.

  She didn’t say anything. The man passed the needle to the first girl. That girl passed the needle to the second. The second passed the needle to Amani, but she was still looking at Sonny. She was still silent.

  Sonny watched her plunge the needle into her arm, watched her eyes roll back. When she looked at him again, she didn’t have to speak for him to hear her say, “This is me. You still want it?”

  *

  “Carson! Carson, I know you in there!”

  He could hear the voice, but at the same time, he couldn’t hear it. He was living in his own head, and he could not tell where that ended and where the world began, and he didn’t want to answer the voice until he was sure he knew which side of things it was coming from.

  “Carson!”

  He sat quietly, or at least what he thought was quietly. He was sweating, his chest heaving up and down, up and down. He would need to go score soon to keep himself from dying.

  When the voice outside the door started praying, Sonny knew it was his mother. She had done it a few times before, when he was still mostly sober, when dope was still mostly fun and he felt like he had some control over it.

  “Lord, release my son from this torment. Father God, I know he done gone down to Hell to take a look, but please send him back.”

  Sonny might have found it soothing if he weren’t feeling so sick. He heaved, nothing at first, but soon he was vomiting in the corner of the room.

  His mother’s voice grew louder. “Lord, I know you can deliver him from what ails him. Bless him and keep him.”

  Deliverance was exactly what Sonny wanted. He was a forty-five-year-old dope fiend, and he was tired but he was also sick, and the sickness of trying to come off the dope outweighed his exhaustion with staying on it every single time.

  His mother was whispering now, or maybe Sonny’s ears were no longer working. Soon he couldn’t hear anything at all. Before long, somebody would be home. One of the other fiends he lived with would come in and maybe they would have scored something, but probably they wouldn’t have and Sonny would have to begin the ritual of trying to score himself. Instead, he began it now.

  He pushe
d himself up off the ground and put his ear against the door to make certain his mother had gone. Once he knew, he went out to greet Harlem.

  Harlem and heroin. Heroin and Harlem. Sonny could no longer think of one without thinking of the other. They sounded alike. Both were going to kill him. The junkies and the jazz had gone together, fed each other, and now every time Sonny heard a horn, he wanted a hit.

  Sonny walked down 116th Street. He could almost always score on 116th Street, and he had trained himself to spot junkies and dealers as quickly as possible, letting his eyes scan the folks walking by until they landed on the people who had what he needed. It was a consequence of living inside his own head. It made him aware of others who were doing the same thing.

  When Sonny came across the first junkie, he asked if she was holding, and the woman shook her head. When he came across the second one, he asked if he would let him carry, and the man shook his head too, but pointed him along to a guy who was dealing.

  Sonny’s mother didn’t give him money anymore. Angela sometimes did if her Bible-slinging husband had made some extra cash on the revival circuit. Sonny gave the dealer every last dollar he had, and it bought him so little. It bought him next to nothing.

  He wanted to shoot it before going back just in case Amani was there. She would take him for the next to nothing he had. Sonny went into the bathroom of a diner and shot up, and instantly he could feel the sickness moving away from him. By the time he made it back home, he felt almost well. Almost, which meant that he would have to score again soon to get a little closer, and again to get a little closer, and again, and again.

  Amani sat in front of a mirror, braiding her hair. “Where you been?” she asked.

  Sonny didn’t answer. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and started rummaging around the fridge for food. They lived in the Johnson Houses on 112th and Lexington, and their door was never locked. Junkies came and went, from one apartment to the next. Someone was passed out on the floor in front of the table.

  “Your mama was here,” Amani said.

  Sonny found a piece of bread and ate around the mold. He looked at Amani as she finished her hair and stood up to look at herself. She was getting thick around the middle.