Marcus left the party soon after Diante, making up some excuse about work. He walked the six miles home, and when he got there he was sweating through his shirt. He got into the blue-tiled shower and let the water beat over his head, never lifting his face up toward it, still scared of drowning.
—
“Your mama says hi,” Sonny said.
It was their weekly phone call. Marcus made it every Sunday afternoon, when he knew his aunt Josephine and all the cousins would be in Ma Willie’s house cooking and eating after church. He called because he missed Harlem, he missed Sunday dinners, he missed Ma Willie singing gospel at the top of her voice, as if Jesus would be there in ten minutes if she would only just summon him to come fix a plate.
“Don’t lie,” Marcus said. The last time he’d seen Amani was his high school graduation. His mother had dressed up in some outfit Ma Willie had given her, no doubt. It was a long-sleeved dress, but when she lifted her arm to wave at him while he crossed the stage to get his diploma, Marcus was almost certain he could see the tracks.
“Humph” was all Sonny replied.
“Y’all doing good over there?” Marcus asked. “The kids an’ ’em all okay?”
“Yeah, we good. We good.”
They breathed into the phone for a bit. Neither wanting to speak, but neither wanting to hang up the phone, either.
“You still straight?” Marcus asked. He didn’t ask often, but he asked.
“Yeah, I’m good. Don’t you worry ’bout me. Keep yo head in dem books. Don’t be thinkin’ ’bout me.”
Marcus nodded. It took him a while to realize that his father wouldn’t be able to hear that, and so he said, “Okay,” and they finally hung up the phone.
Afterward, Diante came by to get him. He was dragging Marcus to a museum in San Francisco, the same one where Diante had met the girl.
“I don’t know why you sweating this girl, D,” Marcus said. He didn’t really enjoy art museums. He never knew what to make of the pieces that he saw. He would listen to Diante talk about lines and color and shading. He would nod, but really, it all meant nothing to him.
“If you saw her, you’d understand,” Diante said. They were walking around the museum, and neither of them was really taking in any of the art.
“I understand she must look good.”
“Yeah, she look good, but it ain’t even about that, man.”
Marcus had already heard it before. Diante had met the woman at the Kara Walker exhibit. The two of them had paced the floor-to-ceiling black paper silhouettes four times before their shoulders brushed on the fifth pass. They’d talked about one piece in particular for nearly an hour, never remembering to get each other’s name.
“I’m telling you, Marcus. You gon’ be at the wedding soon. Alls I gotta do is find her.”
Marcus snorted. How many times had Diante pointed out “his wife” at a party only to date her for a week?
He left Diante to himself and wandered the museum alone. More than the art, he liked the museum’s architecture. The intricate stairways and white walls that held works of vibrant colors. He liked the walking and the thinking that the atmosphere allowed him to do.
He had been to a museum once on a class field trip back in elementary school. They’d taken the bus, then walked the remaining blocks on the buddy system, each child holding the next child’s hand. Marcus could remember feeling awed by the rest of Manhattan, the part that wasn’t his, the business suits and feathered hair. In the museum, the ticket taker had smiled at them from way up in the glass booth. Marcus had been craning his neck in order to see her, and she’d rewarded his efforts with a little wave.
Once they’d gone inside, their teacher, Mrs. MacDonald, had led them through room after room, exhibit after exhibit. Marcus was at the end of the line, and LaTavia, the girl whose hand he held, had dropped his in order to sneeze, and so Marcus had taken the opportunity to tie his shoe. When he lifted his head again, his class had moved on. Thinking back, he should have been able to find them quickly, a line of little black ducklings in the big white museum, but there were so many people, and all so tall, that he couldn’t see his way around them, and he quickly grew too frightened to move.
He was standing there, paralyzed and quietly crying, when an elderly white couple found him.
“Look, Howard,” the woman said. Marcus could still remember the color of the woman’s dress, a deep bleeding red that only served to scare him even more. “Poor thing’s probably lost or something.” She studied him carefully, said, “He’s a cute one, isn’t he?”
The man, Howard, was carrying a slender cane, and he tapped at Marcus’s foot with it. “You lost, boy?” Marcus didn’t speak. “I said, you lost?”
The cane kept hitting at his foot, and for a second Marcus had felt as though at any moment the man would lift the cane all the way up toward the ceiling and send it crashing over his head. He couldn’t guess why he felt that way, but it had scared him so badly, he could start to feel a wet stream traveling down his pant legs. He’d screamed and ran from one white-walled room to another to another, until a security guard had chased him down, called the teacher over the intercom, and sent the whole class back out into the street, back onto the bus, back home to Harlem.
Diante found him after a while. “She ain’t here,” he said. Marcus rolled his eyes. What did he expect? The two of them left the museum.
—
A month passed, and it was time again for Marcus to return to his research. He had been avoiding it because it wasn’t going well.
Originally, he’d wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H’s life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction—the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the ’60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the ’80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.” And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.
When Marcus started to think this way, he couldn’t get himself to open even one book.
He couldn’t remember exactly when the need for studying and knowing his family more intimately had struck him. Maybe it was during one of those Sunday dinners at Ma Willie’s house, when his grandmother had asked that they all hold hands and pray. He would be shoved between two of his cousins or his father and Aunt Josephine, and Ma Willie would begin one of her prayers with a song.
His grandmother’s voice was one of the wonders of the world. It was enough to stir in him all of the hope and love and faith that he would ever possess, all coming together to make his heart pulse and his palms sweat. He’d have to let go of someone’s hand in order to wipe his own hands, his tears.
In that room, with his family, he would sometimes imagine a different room, a fuller family
. He would imagine so hard that at times he thought he could see them. Sometimes in a hut in Africa, a patriarch holding a machete; sometimes outside in a forest of palm trees, a crowd watching a young woman carrying a bucket on her head; sometimes in a cramped apartment with too many kids, or a small, failing farm, around a burning tree or in a classroom. He would see these things while his grandmother prayed and sang, prayed and sang, and he would want so badly for all the people he made up in his head to be there in that room, with him.
He’d told his grandmother this after one of the Sunday dinners, and she’d told him that maybe he had the gift of visions. But Marcus never could make himself believe in the god of Ma Willie, and so he’d gone about looking for family and searching for answers in a more tangible way, through his research and his writing.
Now Marcus jotted down a few notes and headed out to meet Diante. His friend’s mission to find the mysterious woman from the museum had ended, but his taste for parties and outings had not.
They ended up in San Francisco that night. A lesbian couple Diante knew had opened up their house into a gallery night/Afro-Caribbean dance party. When they walked in, they were greeted by the tinny sound of large steel drums. Men with brightly colored kente cloths wrapped around their waists held drum mallets with round pink tips. A woman stood at the end of this row of men, wailing out a song.
Marcus pushed farther in. The art on the walls frightened him a little, though he would never admit it to Diante if, or more likely when, his friend asked his opinion. The piece Diante had contributed was of a woman with horns strung around a baobab tree. Marcus didn’t understand it at all, but he stood under it for a short while, his head tilted to the left, nodding slightly whenever someone appeared next to him.
Soon the person next to him was Diante. His friend poked him in the shoulder repeatedly, all the jabs in quick succession, so that he had finished before Marcus could tell him to stop.
“What, nigga?” Marcus said, turning to look at him.
It was like Diante didn’t even realize someone else was there. His body was angled away, and he suddenly turned it back toward Marcus.
“She’s here.”
“Who?”
“The fuck you mean, who? The girl, man. She’s here.”
Marcus turned his gaze toward where Diante was pointing. There were two women standing side by side. The first was tall and skinny, light-skinned like Marcus himself was, but with dreadlocks that drifted down past her ass. She was playing with her locs, twirling them around her finger or taking the whole lot of them and piling them onto the very top of her head.
The woman next to her was the one who caught Marcus’s eye. She was dark—blue-black, they would have called her on playgrounds in Harlem—and she was thick with sturdy, large breasts and a wild Afro that made her look as though at some point very recently she had been kissed by lightning.
“C’mon, man,” Diante said, already walking toward the women. Marcus walked a little bit behind him. He could see Diante trying to play it cool. The calculated slouch, the careful lean. When they got to the women, Marcus waited to see which one was the one.
“You!” the woman with the dreadlocks said, slapping Diante’s shoulder.
“I thought I recognized you, but I couldn’t remember where I woulda known you from,” Diante said. Marcus rolled his eyes.
“We met at the museum, a couple of months ago,” the woman said, smiling.
“Right, right, of course,” Diante said. He was on his best behavior now, standing straight and smiling. “I’m Diante, and this is my friend Marcus.”
The woman flattened her skirt and picked up another loc, started to twirl it around her finger. Preening, it seemed. The woman next to her hadn’t said a word yet, and her eyes were mostly trained on the ground, as though if she didn’t look at them, she could pretend they weren’t there.
“I’m Ki,” the dreadlocked woman said. “And this is my friend. Marjorie.”
At the mention of her name, Marjorie lifted her head, the curtain of wild hair parting to reveal a lovely face and a beautiful necklace.
“Nice to meet you, Marjorie,” Marcus said, extending his hand.
*
When Marcus was just a little boy, his mother, Amani, had taken him for the day. Stolen him, really, for Ma Willie and Sonny and the rest of the family had no idea that Amani, who had asked just to say hi, would lure him away from the apartment with the promise of an ice cream cone.
His mother couldn’t afford the cone. Marcus could remember her walking with him from one parlor to another shop to another and another in the hope that the prices would be better at a place just a little bit farther down. Once they reached Sonny’s old neighborhood, Marcus knew two things with certainty: first, that he was somewhere he was not supposed to be, and second, that there would be no ice cream.
His mother had dragged him up and down 116th Street, showing him off to her dope fiend friends, the broke jazz crew.
“Dis your baby?” one fat, toothless woman said, squatting so that Marcus was looking straight down the barrel of her empty mouth.
“Yep, dis Marcus.”
The woman touched him, then waddled on. Amani kept navigating him through a part of Harlem that he knew only through stories, through the salvation prayers the church congregants put up each Sunday. The sun got lower and lower in the sky. Amani started crying, and yelling at him to walk faster though he was going as fast as his little legs could carry him. It was nearly dusk before Ma Willie and Sonny found him. His father had snatched his hand and tugged him away so fast, he thought his arm would escape its socket. And he’d watched as his grandmother struck Amani hard across the face, saying loud enough for anyone to hear, “Touch this child again and see what happens.”
Marcus thought about that day often. He was still amazed by it. Not by the fear he’d felt throughout the day, when the woman who was no more than a stranger to him had dragged him farther and farther from home, but by the fullness of love and protection he’d felt later, when his family had finally found him. Not the being lost, but the being found. It was the same feeling he got whenever he saw Marjorie. Like she had, somehow, found him.
Months had passed, and Diante and Ki’s relationship fizzled, leaving only Marcus and Marjorie’s friendship as evidence of its ever having been. Diante teased Marcus about Marjorie constantly, saying, “When you gon’ tell that girl you into her?” But Marcus couldn’t explain to Diante that it wasn’t about that, because he didn’t really understand himself what it was about.
“So this is the Asante Region,” Marjorie said, pointing to a map of Ghana on her wall. “This is technically where my family’s from, but my grandmother moved down to the Central Region, right here, to be closer to the beach.”
“I hate the beach,” Marcus said.
At first Marjorie smiled at him, like she was going to start laughing, but then she stopped, and her eyes turned serious. “Are you scared of it?” she asked. She let her finger drift slowly from the edge of the map down to the wall. She rested her hand against the black stone necklace she wore every day.
“Yeah, I guess I am,” Marcus said. He had never told anyone before.
“My grandmother said she could hear the people who were stuck on the ocean floor talking to her. Our ancestors. She was kind of crazy.”
“That don’t sound crazy to me. Shit, everybody in my grandma’s church caught a spirit at one point or another. Just because somebody sees or hears or feels something other folks can’t, doesn’t mean they’re crazy. My grandma used to say, ‘A blind man don’t call us crazy for seeing.’ ”
Now Marjorie gave him a real smile. “You want to know what I’m scared of?” she asked, and he nodded. He had learned not to be surprised by how forthcoming she was. How she never gave in to small talk, just dove right into deep waters. “Fire,” she said.
He had heard the story of her father’s scar in the first week of meeting Marjorie. Her answer didn’t surprise him.
“My grandmother used to say we were born of a great fire. I wish I knew what she meant by that.”
“You ever get back to Ghana?”
“Oh, I’ve been busy with grad school and teaching and all of that.” She paused and looked into the air, counting. “I haven’t been back since my grandmother died, actually,” she said softly. “She gave me this. A family heirloom, I guess.” Marjorie pointed to the necklace.
Marcus nodded. So that was why Marjorie never took it off.
It was getting late, and Marcus had work to do, but he couldn’t move from this particular spot in Marjorie’s living room. There was a large bay window that let in so much light that his shoulder felt brushed with warmth. He wanted to stay for as long as he could.
“She would have hated to know that it’s been so long. Almost fourteen years. When my parents were alive, they used to try to make me go, but it was too painful, losing her. And then I lost my parents, and I guess I just didn’t see the point anymore. My Twi’s so rusty, I don’t know if I could even get around anyway.”
She forced a laugh, but looked away as soon as it escaped her lips. She hid her face from him for what seemed like a long stretch of time. The sun finally reached a place where the window couldn’t catch its light. Marcus could feel the heat lifting off of his shoulder, and he wanted it back.
—
Marcus spent the rest of the school year avoiding his research. He couldn’t see the point anymore. He had gotten a grant that would take him to Birmingham so that he could see what was left of Pratt City. He went with Marjorie, and all they’d been able to find was a blind, and probably crazy, old man who claimed he knew Marcus’s great-grandpa H when he was just a boy.
“You could do your research on Pratt City,” Marjorie had suggested when they left the man’s house. “Seems like an interesting town.”
When the old man had heard Marjorie’s voice, he said he wanted to feel her. That this was how he got to know a person. Marcus had watched, amazed and somewhat embarrassed, as she let the man run his hands along her arms and, finally, her face, like he was reading her. It was her patience that had amazed him. In the short time that he’d known her, he could already tell that she had enough patience to take her through almost any storm. Marcus sometimes studied with her in the library, and he would watch out of the corners of his eyes as she devoured book after book after book. Her work was in African and African American literature, and when Marcus asked her why she chose those subjects, she said that those were the books that she could feel inside of her. When the old man touched her, she had looked at him so patiently, as though while he read her skin, she was also reading him.