Marjorie reached for the stone at her neck. Her ancestor’s gift. “Promise me you won’t leave until I can see you again,” Marjorie said. Behind her, Yaw placed a hand on her shoulder.
“I promise I will never leave you,” Old Lady said.
Marjorie handed the phone back to her father, who gave her a strange look. She went back to her room. On her desk, the piece of paper that was supposed to hold a poem simply said, “Water. Water. Water. Water.”
—
Marjorie and Graham went on another date, this time to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. Graham had never been before, but Marjorie and her parents went once a year. Her mother liked to look at all the pictures of astronauts that lined the halls and her father loved to walk through the museum, examining every rocket as though he were trying to learn how to build one himself. In some ways, Marjorie thought, her parents had already traveled through space, landing in a country as foreign to them as the moon.
Graham didn’t heed the Do Not Touch signs. He left ghostly fingerprints on fiberglass cases, prints that disappeared almost as soon as he left them.
“America wouldn’t have a space program if it weren’t for the Germans,” Graham said.
“Do you miss Germany?” Marjorie asked. Graham hardly ever talked about the place where he had done most of his growing up. He didn’t wear the country on his sleeve the same way she wore Ghana on hers.
“Sometimes, but military brats get used to moving around.” He shrugged and pressed his fingers against a case that held a space suit. Marjorie pictured his hand pushing through the glass, lifting his body into the case, fitting him into the suit, then losing gravity until his body started to float up, up.
“Marjorie?”
“What?”
“I said, would you ever move back to Ghana?”
She thought for a moment, of her grandmother and the sea, the Castle. She thought of the frantic commotion of cars and bodies on the streets of Cape Coast, the wide-hipped women selling fish out of large silver bowls, and the young girls whose breasts had not yet come in walking down the road’s median, pressing their faces into the windows of the taxis, saying “Ice water,” and “Please, I beg.”
“I don’t think so.”
Graham nodded and started to move forward, on to the next case. Marjorie took his hand just as he was lifting it to press it against the fiberglass. She stopped him, and said, “I mostly just feel like I don’t belong there. As soon as I step off the airplane, people can tell that I’m like them but different too. They can smell it on me.”
“Smell what?”
Marjorie looked up, trying to capture the right word. “Loneliness, maybe. Or aloneness. The way I don’t fit here or there. My grandmother’s the only person who really sees me.”
She looked down. Her hand was shaking, so she let go of Graham’s, but he took it back. And when she looked up again, he was leaning down, pressing his lips to hers.
—
For weeks, Marjorie waited for word about her grandmother. Her parents had hired a new caretaker to watch her every day, which only seemed to infuriate her. She was getting worse. Marjorie didn’t know how she knew, but she knew.
At school, Marjorie was quiet. She didn’t raise her hand in any of her classes, and two of her teachers stopped her to ask if everything was all right. She brushed them off. Instead of eating lunch in the English lounge or reading in the library, she sat in the cafeteria, at the corner of a long rectangular table, daring anyone who passed by to do their worst. Instead, Graham came over and sat across from her.
“You okay?” he asked. “I haven’t really seen you since…”
His voice trailed off, but Marjorie wanted him to say it. Since we kissed. Since we kissed. That day, Graham was wearing the school’s colors—an obnoxious orange, calmed, only slightly, by a soothing gray.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You worried about your poem?” he asked.
Her poem was a collection of fonts on a piece of paper, an experiment in box lettering, cursive, all caps. “No, I’m not worried about that.”
Graham nodded carefully, and held her gaze. She had come to the cafeteria because she wanted to be alone while surrounded by people. It was a feeling she sometimes liked, like stepping off the plane in Accra and being met by a sea of faces that looked like her own. For those first few minutes, she would capture that anonymity, but then the moment would drop. Someone would approach her, ask her if he could carry her bag, if he could drive her somewhere, if she would feed his baby.
While she stared back at Graham, a brunette girl Marjorie recognized from the hallways approached them. “Graham?” she asked. “I don’t normally see you here at lunch. I would remember seeing you.”
Graham nodded, but didn’t say anything. The girl had yet to notice Marjorie, but Graham’s lack of attention pulled her glance away from him, toward the person who had won it.
She looked at Marjorie for only a second, but it was long enough for Marjorie to notice the wrinkle of disgust that had begun to form on her face. “Graham,” she whispered, as though lowering her voice would keep Marjorie from hearing. “You shouldn’t sit here.”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t sit here. People will start to think…” Again, a quick glance. “Well, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Just come sit with us,” she said. At this point, she was scanning the room, her body language turning anxious.
“I’m fine where I am.”
“Go,” Marjorie said, and Graham turned toward her. It was as if he had forgotten whom he had been arguing for in the first place. As if he’d been fighting simply for the seat, and not the girl who sat across from it. “Go, it’s fine.”
And once she had said it, she stopped breathing. She wanted him to say no, to fight harder, longer, to take her hand across the table and run his reddened thumbs between her fingers.
But he didn’t. He got up, looking almost relieved. By the time Marjorie noticed the brunette girl slipping her hand into his to pull him along, they were already halfway across the room. She had thought Graham was like her, a reader, a loner, but watching him walk away with the girl, she knew he was different. She saw how easy it was for him to slip in unnoticed, as though he had always belonged there.
*
Prom was themed The Great Gatsby. In the decorating days that preceded it, the school’s floors were littered with sparkles and glitter. The night of prom, Marjorie was sandwiched between her parents on their couch, watching a movie on the television. She could hear her parents whispering about her when she got up to make popcorn.
“Something’s not right,” Yaw said. He had never been good at whispering. At regular volume his voice was a boom from the belly, deep and loud.
“She’s just a teenager. Teenagers are like this,” Esther said. Marjorie had heard the other LPNs at the nursing home where Esther worked talk like this, as if teenagers were wild beasts in a dangerous jungle. Best to leave them alone.
When she came back, Marjorie tried to look brighter, but she couldn’t tell if she was succeeding.
The phone rang, and she rushed to pick it up. She had asked her grandmother to call her once a month as an assurance, even though she knew it was cumbersome for the old woman to have to do so. But, when she answered the phone, she was greeted by Graham’s voice.
“Marjorie?” he asked. She was breathing into the phone, but she had yet to speak. What was there to say? “I wish I could take you. It’s just that…”
His voice trailed off, but it didn’t matter. She’d heard it before. He was going to go with the brunette. He had wanted to take Marjorie, but his father didn’t think it would be proper. The school didn’t think it was appropriate. As a last defense, Marjorie had heard him tell the principal that she was “not like other black girls.” And, somehow, that had been worse. She had already given him up.
“Can I still hear your poem?” he asked.
“I
’m reading it next week. Everyone will hear it.”
“You know what I mean.”
In the living room, her father had started snoring. It was the way he always watched movies. She pictured him leaning down onto her mother’s shoulders, the woman’s arms wrapped around him. Maybe her mother was sleeping too, her own head leaning toward Yaw’s, her long box braids a curtain, hiding their faces. Theirs was a comfortable love. A love that didn’t require fighting or hiding. When Marjorie had asked her father again when he had known he liked Esther, he said he had always known. He said it was born in him, that he breathed it in with the first breeze of Edweso, that it moved in him like the harmattan. There was nothing like love for Marjorie in Alabama.
“I have to go,” she said to Graham on the phone. “My parents need me.” She clicked the phone onto its receiver and went back into the living room. Her mother was awake, staring ahead at the television, though she wasn’t watching it.
“Who was that, my own?” she asked.
“No one,” Marjorie said.
—
The auditorium sat two thousand. From backstage, Marjorie could hear the other students filing in, the insistent chatter of their boredom. She was pacing the room, too scared to look out past the curtain. Beside her, Tisha and her friends were practicing a dance to music that played faintly from the boom box.
“You ready?” Mrs. Pinkston asked, startling Marjorie.
Her hands were already shaking, and she was surprised she didn’t drop the poem she was holding.
“No,” she said.
“Yes, you are,” Mrs. Pinkston said. “Don’t worry. You’ll be great.” She kept moving, off to check on all the other performers.
When the program started, Marjorie’s stomach began to hurt. She had never spoken in front of so many people before, and she was ready to attribute the pain to that, but then it settled more deeply. A wave of nausea accompanied it, but soon both passed.
This feeling came from time to time. Her grandmother called it a premonition, the body registering something that the world had yet to acknowledge. Marjorie sometimes felt it before receiving a bad test score. Once, she got it before a car accident. Another time, she got it only moments before she realized she had lost a ring her father had given her. He argued that these things would have happened whether she had felt the feeling or not, and perhaps that was true. All Marjorie knew was that the feeling told her to brace herself.
And so, bracing herself, she stepped onto the stage once Mrs. Pinkston introduced her. She knew the lights would be bright, but she had not factored in their heat, like a million brilliant suns shining down on her. She began to sweat, passed a palm across her forehead.
She set her paper down on the podium. She had practiced a million times, under her breath in class, in front of the mirror in her bathroom, in the car while her parents drove.
The sound of silence, cut by the occasional cough or shuffling of feet, taunted Marjorie. She leaned into the mic. She cleared her throat, and then she read:
Split the Castle open,
find me, find you.
We, two, felt sand,
wind, air.
One felt whip. Whipped,
once shipped.
We, two, black.
Me, you.
One grew from
cocoa’s soil, birthed from nut,
skin uncut, still bleeding.
We, two, wade.
The waters seem different
but are same.
Our same. Sister skin.
Who knew? Not me. Not you.
She looked up. A door had creaked open, letting more light in. There was enough light for her to see her father standing in the doorframe, but not enough for her to see the tears running down his face.
—
The only promise Old Lady, Akua, the Crazy Woman of Edweso, broke was the last one she made. She died in the middle of a sleep she used to fear. She wanted to be buried on a mountain overlooking the sea. Marjorie took the rest of the school year off, her grades so good it didn’t make much of a difference.
She walked with her mother behind the men who were tasked with carrying her grandmother’s body up. Her father had insisted on carrying too, though he was so old, his presence was more of a burden than a help. When they got to the grave site, the people began weeping. Everyone had been crying for days and days on end, but Marjorie had yet to.
The men began digging out the red clay. Two mounds stood on either side of the big rectangular hole, growing deeper. A woodworker had crafted Old Lady’s coffin in a wood the same color as the ground, and when the coffin was lowered, no one could tell where it ended and the earth began. They began to return the clay to the hole. They packed it in tight, patting it with the back of the shovel once they had finished. The sound echoed off of the mountain, into the valley.
Once they put a marker on the grave, Marjorie realized that she had forgotten to drop in her poem, built from the dream stories Old Lady used to tell when she walked Marjorie to the water. She knew her grandmother would have loved to hear it. She pulled the poem from her pocket, and her trembling hands made the words wave even though there was little wind.
Marjorie threw herself onto the funeral mound, crying finally, “Me Mam-yee, me Maame. Me Mam-yee, me Maame.”
Her mother came to lift her up off the ground. Later, Esther told her that it looked like she was going to fly off the cliff, down the mountain, and into the sea.
Marcus
MARCUS DIDN’T CARE FOR WATER. He was in college the first time he saw the ocean up close, and it had made his stomach turn, all that space, that endless blue, reaching out farther than an eye could hold. It terrified him. He hadn’t told his friends he didn’t know how to swim, and his roommate, a redhead from Maine, was already seven feet under the surface of the Atlantic before Marcus even stepped his toes in.
There was something about the smell of the ocean that nauseated him. That wet salt stink clung to his nose and made him feel as though he were already drowning. He could feel it thick in his throat, like brine, clinging to that place where his uvula hung so that he couldn’t breathe right.
When he was young, his father told him that black people didn’t like water because they were brought over on slave ships. What did a black man want to swim for? The ocean floor was already littered with black men.
Marcus always nodded patiently when his father said things like this. Sonny was forever talking about slavery, the prison labor complex, the System, segregation, the Man. His father had a deep-seated hatred of white people. A hatred like a bag filled with stones, one stone for every year racial injustice continued to be the norm in America. He still carried the bag.
Marcus would never forget his father’s early teachings, the alternative history lessons that got Marcus interested in studying America more closely in the first place. The two had shared a mattress in Ma Willie’s cramped apartment. In the evenings, lying on the mattress with springs like knives, Sonny would tell Marcus about how America used to lock up black men off the sidewalks for labor or how redlining kept banks from investing in black neighborhoods, preventing mortgages or business loans. So was it a wonder that prisons were still full of them? Was it a wonder that the ghetto was the ghetto? There were things Sonny used to talk about that Marcus never saw in his history books, but that later, when he got to college, he learned to be true. He learned that his father’s mind was a brilliant mind, but it was trapped underneath something.
In the mornings, Marcus used to watch Sonny get up, shave, and leave for the methadone clinic in East Harlem. It was easier to follow the movements of his father than it was to watch a clock. At six thirty he got up and had a glass of orange juice. By six forty-five he was shaving, and by seven he was out the door. He would get his methadone and then he would head over to work as a custodian at the hospital. He was the smartest man Marcus knew, but he never could get completely out from under the dope he used to use.
When he was seven,
Marcus once asked Ma Willie what would happen if some part of Sonny’s schedule was to change. What would happen if he didn’t get the methadone. His grandmother just shrugged. It wasn’t until Marcus was much older that he started to understand just how important his father’s routine was. His entire life seemed to hang in this balance.
Now Marcus was near the water again. A new grad school mate had invited him to a pool party to celebrate the new millennium, and Marcus had, hesitantly, accepted. A pool in California was safer than the Atlantic, sure. He could lounge on the chair and pretend he was just there for the sun. He could make jokes about how he needed a tan.
Someone yelled, “Cannonball!” sending a cold, wet splash onto Marcus’s legs. He wiped it off, grimacing, after Diante handed him a towel.
“Shit, Marcus, how long we gon’ stay out here, man? It’s hot as hell. This some Africa heat right here.”
Diante was always complaining. He was an artist whom Marcus met at a house party in East Palo Alto, and even though Diante had grown up in Atlanta, something about him reminded Marcus of home. They’d been like brothers ever since.
“We ain’t been here but ten minutes, D. Chill,” Marcus said, but he was starting to feel restless too.
“Naw, nigga. I ain’t about to burn up in this damn heat. Let me catch you later.” He got up and shot a small wave to the people in the pool.
Diante was always asking to go to school events with Marcus and then leaving almost as soon as they arrived. He was looking for a girl he’d met at an art museum once. He couldn’t remember her name, but he told Marcus that he could tell she was a schoolgirl, just from the way she talked. Marcus didn’t feel the need to remind him that there were about a million universities in the area. Who could say the girl would end up at one of his parties?
Marcus was getting his Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford. It was something he would never have been able to imagine doing back when he was splitting a mattress with his father, and yet, there he was. Sonny had been so proud when he told him he’d been accepted to Stanford that he cried. It was the only time Marcus had ever seen him do it.