Homegoing

  “She say she want you to come home for Sunday dinner.”

  “Where you going?” he asked Amani. He didn’t like it when she got dressed up. She had promised him a long time ago that she would never give up her body for dope, and, in the beginning, Sonny hadn’t believed she would be able to keep her promise. A dope fiend’s word didn’t count for much. Sometimes, for assurance, he would follow her as she walked around Harlem on those nights when she did her hair up, put makeup on her face. Every time he did, it ended the same sad way: Amani begging a club owner to let her sing again, just once more. They almost never did. One time, the dingiest joint in all of Harlem had said yes, and Sonny had stood in the back as Amani got up onstage to blank stares and silence. Nobody remembered what she used to be. All they could see was what she was now.

  “You should go see your mama, Sonny. We could use some money.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Amani. You know she ain’t gon’ give me nothing.”

  “She might. If you cleaned yourself up. You could use a shower and a shave. She might give you something.”

  Sonny went up to Amani. He stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her belly, felt the firmness of its weight. “Why don’t you give me something, baby?” he whispered into her ear.

  She started to wriggle, but he held firm and she softened, leaned into him. Sonny had never loved her, not really. But he had always wanted her. It took him a while to learn the difference between those two things.

  “I just did my hair, Sonny,” she said, but she was already offering him her neck, bending it to the left so that he could run his tongue along the right side. “Sing me a li’l something, Amani,” he said, reaching for her breast. She hummed at his touch, but didn’t sing.

  Sonny let his hand wander down from her breast, down to meet the tufts of hair that awaited him. Then she started. “I loves you, Porgy. Don’t let him take me. Don’t let him handle me and drive me mad.” She sang so softly it was almost a whisper. Almost. By the time his fingers found her wet, she was back at the chorus. When she left that night to go out to the jazz clubs, they wouldn’t let her sing, but Sonny always did.

  “I’ll go see my mama,” he promised when she left the front door swinging.

  —

  Sonny kept a glassine bag of dope in his shoe. It was a reassurance. He walked the many blocks between his house and his mother’s house with his big toe clenched around the bag as though it were a small fist. He’d clench it, then release it. Clench it, then release it.

  As Sonny passed the projects that filled the distance between his apartment and Willie’s, he tried to remember the last time he’d really spoken to his mother. It was 1964, during the riots, and she had asked him to meet her in front of her church so that she could lend him some money. “I don’t want to see you dead or worse,” she’d said, passing Sonny what little change hadn’t made it into the offering plate. As he took the money, Sonny had wondered, What could be worse than dead? But all around him, the evidence was clear. Only weeks before, the NYPD had shot down a fifteen-year-old black boy, a student, for next to nothing. The shooting had started the riots, pitting young black men and some black women against the police force. The news made it sound like the fault lay with the blacks of Harlem. The violent, the crazy, the monstrous black people who had the gall to demand that their children not be gunned down in the streets. Sonny clutched his mother’s money tight as he walked back that day, hoping he wouldn’t run into any white people looking to prove a point, because he knew in his body, even if he hadn’t yet put it together in his mind, that in America the worst thing you could be was a black man. Worse than dead, you were a dead man walking.

  Josephine answered the door. She cradled her baby girl in one arm and her son held her other hand. “You get lost or somethin’?” she asked, shooting him a dirty look.

  “Behave,” his mother hissed from behind her, but Sonny was glad to see his sister treating him the same way she always had.

  “You hungry?” Willie asked. She took the baby from Josephine and started walking toward the kitchen.

  “I’ma use the bathroom first,” Sonny said, already making his way over. He closed the door and sat on the commode, pulling the bag from his shoe. He hadn’t been there a minute, but he was already nervous. He needed something to tide him over.

  When he came back out, his mother had already fixed him a plate. His mother and sister watched him while he ate.

  “Why you ain’t eating?” he asked them.

  “Because you ’bout an hour and a half late!” Josephine said through gritted teeth.

  Willie put an arm on Josephine’s shoulder, then pulled a little money out from inside her bra. “Josey, why don’t you run go get these kids something?” she said.

  The look Josephine sent Willie hurt Sonny more than anything she had said to him yet. It was a look that asked if Willie would be safe left alone with him, and the uncertain nod Willie gave back just about broke Sonny’s heart.

  Josephine collected her children and left. Sonny had never seen the baby before, though his mother had come to tell him about the birth. The toddler Sonny had seen once, when he passed Josephine on a quiet street one day. He’d kept his head down and pretended not to see them.

  “Thanks for the food, Mama,” Sonny said. He was almost finished with his food, and he was starting to feel a little sick from eating so fast. She nodded and heaped another helping onto his plate.

  “How long it been since you ate something proper?” she asked.

  Sonny shrugged and his mother continued to watch him. He was uncomfortable again; the small hit he took was wearing off too quickly, and he wanted to excuse himself to go do more, but too many trips to the bathroom would only make her suspicious.

  “Your father was a white man,” Willie said calmly. Sonny nearly choked on the chicken bone he had been working over. “You used to ask me about him, long time ago, and I ain’t never told you nothing, so I’m tellin’ you now.”

  She got up to pour a glass from the pitcher of tea she kept by the sink. She drank the whole glass of tea while Sonny watched her back. When she finished that glass, she poured herself another and took it back to the table.

  “He didn’t start out white,” she said. “He was black when I met him, more yellow than black, really. But still, he was colored.”

  Sonny coughed. He started fingering the chicken bone. “Why you ain’t told me before?” he asked. He could feel himself getting angry, but he held it back. He had come here for money, and he couldn’t fight with her now. Not now.

  “I thought about tellin’ you. I did. You saw him once. Day we walked all the way to West 109th Street, you remember that? Your daddy was standing across the street with his white woman and his white baby, and I thought maybe I should tell Carson who that man is, but then I figured it’d be better just to let him go. So I let him go, and we went back to Harlem.”

  Sonny snapped the chicken bone in half. “Mama, you shoulda stopped him. You shoulda told me, and you shoulda stopped him. I don’t know why you always lettin’ people walk all over you. My father, Eli, the goddam church. You ain’t never fought for nothin’. Not nothin’. Not a day in your life.”

  His mother reached across the table, put her hand on his shoulder, and squeezed hard until he had to look her in the eyes. “That ain’t true, Carson. I fought for you.”

  He returned his eyes to the two pieces of chicken bone on his plate. He toed the bag in his shoe.

  “You think you done somethin’ cuz you used to march? I marched. I marched with your father and with my li’l baby all the way up from Alabama. All the way to Harlem. My son was gon’ see a better world than what I saw, what my parents saw. I was gon’ be a famous singer. Robert wasn’t gon’ have to work in a mine for some white man. That was a march too, Carson.”

  Sonny started looking toward the bathroom. He wanted to excuse himself and finish up the bag in his shoe. He knew it would probably be the last he could afford for a long, long wh
ile.

  Willie cleared his plate and refilled her tea. He could see her standing at the sink, drinking in long, deep breaths, her chest and back rising and falling as she tried to collect herself. She came back and sat down right in front of him, looking at him all the while.

  “You was always so angry. Even as a child, you was angry. I used to see you lookin’ at me like you was like to kill me, and I didn’t know why. Took me a long time to figure out that you was born to a man who could choose his life, but you wouldn’t never be able to choose yours, and it seemed like you was born knowing that.”

  She took a sip of her drink and stared off into space. “White men get a choice. They get to choose they job, choose they house. They get to make black babies, then disappear into thin air, like they wasn’t never there to begin with, like these black women they slept with or raped done laid on top of themselves and got pregnant. White men get to choose for black men too. Used to sell ’em; now they just send ’em to prison like they did my daddy, so that they can’t be with they kids. Just about breaks my heart to see you, my son, my daddy’s grandson, over here with these babies walking up and down Harlem who barely even know your name, let alone your face. Alls I can think is this ain’t the way it’s s’posed to be. There are things you ain’t learned from me, things you picked up from your father even though you ain’t know him, things he picked up from white men. It makes me sad to see my son a junkie after all the marchin’ I done, but makes me sadder to see you thinkin’ you can leave like your daddy did. You keep doin’ what you doin’ and the white man don’t got to do it no more. He ain’t got to sell you or put you in a coal mine to own you. He’ll own you just as is, and he’ll say you the one who did it. He’ll say it’s your fault.”

  Josephine came back in with the kids. They had ice cream smeared on their shirts and contented little smiles on their faces. Josephine didn’t wait to hear more. She just took the kids straight into the bedroom to lay them down to sleep.

  Willie pulled a wad of cash out from between her breasts and slapped it on the table in front of him. “This what you came for?” she asked.

  Sonny could see tears forming in her eyes. He kept toeing the glassine bag, his fingers itching to get at the money.

  “Take it and go if you want to,” Willie said. “Go if you want to.”

  What Sonny wanted was to scream, to take the money, take what was left in the bag in his shoe and find somewhere to go shoot up until he could no longer remember the things his mother had told him. That was what he wanted to do. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he stayed.

  Marjorie

  “ESS-CUSE ME, SISTAH. I take you see Castle. Cape Coast Castle. Five cedis. You come from America? I take you see slave ship. Juss five cedis.”

  The boy was probably around ten years old, only a few years younger than Marjorie herself was. He had been following her since she and her grandmother’s housekeeper got off the tro-tro. The locals did this, waiting for tourists to disembark so that they could con them into paying for things Ghanaians knew were free. Marjorie tried to ignore him, but she was hot and tired, still feeling the sweat of the other people who had been pressed against her back and chest and sides on the nearly eight-hour tro-tro ride from Accra.

  “I take you see Cape Coast Castle, sis. Juss five cedis,” he repeated. He wore no shirt, and she could feel the heat radiating off of his skin, coming toward her. After all the traveling, she couldn’t stand another strange body so near hers, and so she soon found herself shouting in Twi, “I’m from Ghana, stupid. Can’t you see?”

  The boy didn’t stop his English. “But you come from America?”

  Angry, she kept walking. Her backpack straps were heavy against her shoulders, and she knew they would leave marks.

  Marjorie was in Ghana visiting her grandmother, as she did every summer. Some time ago, the woman had moved to Cape Coast to be near the water. In Edweso, where she had lived before, everyone called her Crazy Woman, but in Cape Coast they knew her only as Old Lady. So old, they said, she could recite the entire history of Ghana from memory alone.

  “Is that my child coming to me?” the woman asked. She was leaning on a cane made of curved wood, and her back mimicked that curve, rounding down so that the woman looked like she was in constant supplication. “Akwaaba. Akwaaba. Akwaaba,” she said.

  “My Old Lady. I’ve missed you,” Marjorie said. She hugged her grandmother too forcefully and the woman yelped.

  “Eh, have you come to break me?”

  “Sorry, sorry.”

  Old Lady called her house boy to take Marjorie’s bag, and slowly, gingerly, Marjorie pulled the straps from her aching shoulders.

  Her grandmother saw her wince and asked, “Are you hurt?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  The response was a reflex. Whenever her father or grandmother asked her about pain, Marjorie would say she had never known it. As a young child, someone had told her that the scars her father wore on his face and her grandmother on her hands and feet were born of great pain. And because Marjorie had no scars that resembled those, she could never bring herself to complain of pain. Once, when she was just a little girl, she had watched a ringworm on her knee grow and grow and grow. She’d hidden it from her parents for nearly two weeks, until the worm overtook the curve where thigh met calf, making it difficult for her to bend. When she’d finally shown her parents, her mother had vomited, and her father had snatched her in his arms and rushed her to the emergency room. The orderly who came to call them back had been startled, not by the worm, but by her father’s scar. She’d asked if he was the one who needed help.

  Looking at her grandmother’s hands now, it was almost impossible to distinguish scarred from wrinkled skin. The whole landscape of the woman’s body had transformed into a ruin; the young woman had been toppled, leaving this.

  They took a cab back to Old Lady’s house. Marjorie’s grandmother lived in a big, open bungalow on the beach, like the kind the few white people who lived in town had. When Marjorie was in third grade, her father and mother had left Alabama and returned to Ghana in order to help Old Lady build it. They stayed for many months, leaving Marjorie in the care of a friend of theirs. When summer came and Marjorie was finally able to go visit them, she fell in love with the beautiful house with no doors. It was five times the size of her family’s tiny apartment in Huntsville, and its front yard was the beach, not a sad slab of dying grass like the yard she had always known. She spent that whole summer wondering how her parents could leave a place like this.

  “Have you been good, my own child?” Old Lady asked, handing Marjorie some of the chocolate she kept in the kitchen. Marjorie had a sweet tooth reserved for chocolate. Her mother often joked that Marjorie must have been birthed from a cocoa nut, split open and wide.

  Marjorie nodded, accepting the treat. “Are we going to the water today?” she asked, her mouth full, the chocolate melting.

  “Speak Twi,” her grandmother answered sharply, knocking Marjorie on the back of her head.

  “Sorry,” Marjorie mumbled. At home in Huntsville, her parents spoke to her in Twi and she answered them in English. They had done this since the day Marjorie had brought a note home from her kindergarten teacher. The note read:

  Marjorie does not volunteer to answer questions. She rarely speaks. Does she know English? If she doesn’t, you should consider English as a Second Language classes. Or perhaps Marjorie would benefit from special care? We have great Special Ed classes here.

  Her parents were livid. Her father read the note aloud four times, shouting, “What does this foolish woman know?” after each repetition, but from then on they had quizzed Marjorie on her English every night. When she tried to answer their questions in Twi, they would say, “Speak English,” until now it was the first language that popped into her head. She had to remind herself that her grandmother required the opposite.

  “Yes, we will go to the water now. Put away your things.”

  Going to the b
each with Old Lady was one of Marjorie’s favorite things in the world to do. Her grandmother was not like other grandmothers. At night, Old Lady spoke in her sleep. Sometimes she fought; sometimes she paced the room. Marjorie had heard the stories about the burns her grandmother carried on her hands and feet, about the one on her father’s face. She knew why the Edweso people had called her Crazy Woman, but to her, her grandmother had never been crazy. Old Lady dreamed dreams and saw visions.

  They walked to the beach. Old Lady moved so slowly, it was like she wasn’t moving at all. Neither of them wore shoes, and when they got to the edge of the sand, they waited for the water to come up and lick the spaces between their toes, clean the sand that was hidden there. Marjorie watched as her grandmother closed her eyes, and she waited patiently for the old woman to speak. It was what they had come for, what they always came for.

  “Are you wearing the stone?” her grandmother asked.

  Instinctively, Marjorie raised her hand to the necklace. Her father had given it to her only a year before, saying that she was finally old enough to care for it. It had belonged to Old Lady and to Abena before her, and to James, and Quey, and Effia the Beauty before that. It had begun with Maame, the woman who had set a great fire. Her father had told her that the necklace was a part of their family history and she was to never take it off, never give it away. Now it reflected the ocean water before them, gold waves shimmering in the black stone.

  “Yes, Old Lady,” she said.

  Her grandmother took her hand and once more they fell silent. “You are in this water,” she finally said.

  Marjorie nodded her head soberly. The day she was born, thirteen years ago, all the way across the Atlantic, her parents had mailed her umbilical cord to Old Lady so that the woman could put it into the ocean. It was Old Lady’s only request, that if her son and daughter-in-law, both old themselves by the time they decided to get married and move to America, ever had a child they would send something of that child back to Ghana.