We were at Wally’s, me and Leo Stokes, listening to the music, jazz — we liked the music. Mostly I’m listening to the drummer, thinking he don’t got it right. He thinks he’s too important. He don’t know the drums are supposed to be the sound underneath the sound. That’s why I’m good, that’s why I want to play — I got a gift. I hear a sound below horn and piano, the one they need, like I did back in Virginia living in one room — Mama and Daddy, Bernice and Leroy and me, and there were lots of sounds all the time, but I’m always listening for the one sound, like at night when Mama and Daddy are fighting and her voice keeps climbing higher and higher like it’s gonna break, and his is low and hard and slow, and then they’re tangled together and the words don’t make sense, but I’m not scared, no matter how bad it gets, because I’m listening. I hear a whippoorwill or grasshoppers, the wings of cicadas in July, a frenzy of wings rubbing, trying to wear themselves down, and I know what they want — I know what we all want — and it’s like that sound is holding everything else together, so even if Mama starts crying, and even if Daddy leaves and don’t come back till afternoon the next day, and even if they stop arguing and the other sounds start, even if Daddy has to put his hand over Mama’s mouth and say, Hush now, the children, even if they get so quiet I can’t hear their breathing, I know everything’s okay and I’m safe, because the cicadas are out there, and they’ve been there all along, even when I didn’t know I was hearing them — that one sound’s been steady, that one sound’s been holding everything tight. So I’m listening to the music, thinking, This drummer don’t know his place. He thinks he’s got to get on top of things. And I hear Leo say, Luck or trouble, little brother, heading this way, and then she’s there, standing too close, standing above me. She’s saying, Spare a cigarette? She’s whispering, Got a light? And then she’s sitting down with us and she’s got her hand on my hand while I light her cigarette and I’m thinking she’s pretty — in a way, in this light — and she’s older, so I think she knows things — and I ask myself what’s the harm of letting her sit here, and that’s when I laugh to make the boy’s breath and my mama’s voice go away.
Then later that night I’m looking at my own dark hand on her thin white neck and it scares me, the difference, the color of me, the size, and she says, What color is the inside of your mouth, the inside of your chest? She says, Open me — do I bleed, do my bones break? She says, Kiss me, we’re the same. And I do. And we are. When we’re alone, we are.
She came to see me once. Cried, said she was sorry, and I sat there looking like I had stones in my stomach, ashes in my chest, like I didn’t want to put my hands around her neck to touch that damp place under her hair. I told myself, She’s not so pretty anymore. She looked old. The way white women do. Too skinny. Cigarettes and sun making her skin crack. Purple marks dark as bruises under her green eyes. I said, Look, baby, I’m tired, you get on home. I’m acting like I can’t wait to get back to my cell, like I’m looking forward to the next three thousand nights smelling nothing but my own rotten self, like I’ve got some desire to spend nine years looking at the bodies of men, like I haven’t already wondered how long it’s gonna be before I want them. She says she didn’t know, she didn’t mean to make it worse for me, and I say, Where you been living, girl? What country? She’s not crying then, she’s pissed. She says, You know what they did to me when I came in here? You know where they touched me? And I say, One day. One friggin’ hour of your life. I live here, baby. They touch me all the time. Whenever they want. Wherever.
I’m not saying she stuck the needle in my arm and turned me into a thief. I’m saying I wasn’t alone. Plenty of things I did I shouldn’t have. I paid for those. Three burglaries, nine years, you figure. So yeah, I paid for a dozen crimes they never slapped on me, a hundred petty thefts. But the man don’t mind about your grandfather’s gold pocket watch; he don’t worry when the ten-dollar bill flies out of your mama’s purse and floats into your hand. He don’t bother you much if he sees you shoving weed on your own street. But that was different. Back when I was peddling for Leo I had a purpose, doing what I had to do to get what I needed. Then things turned upside down with Rita, and I was robbing my own mama, stealing to buy the dope instead of selling it, smack instead of grass. Rita said, Just once — you won’t get hooked, and it’s fine, so fine, better than the music, because it’s inside. She was right — it was better than the music, and it was inside: it made me forget the sound and the need.
Now my mama is singing me to sleep, humming near my ear, Bless the child, and I’m waking as a man twenty-one years old, and I’m going to Walpole till I’m thirty. Sweet-faced Rita has scrubbed herself clean for the trial. She says it was all my idea and she was afraid, who wouldn’t be? Seven men see their own wives, their own daughters, and pray no man like me ever touches their pretty white things. They think they can put me away. They think locked doors and steel bars keep them safe. Five women see their own good selves and swear they’d never do what Rita did if not by force.
I want to tell them how different she can be, how she looks when she’s strung out, too jittery to talk, when her jaw goes so tight the tendons pop in her neck. I want to tell them how she begged me, Please Jimmy please, how she said it was so easy, her old neighborhood, her own people, habits she could predict, dogs she could calm. I want to ask them, Do black men drive your streets alone? I want to tell them, I was in the back, on the floor, covered by a blanket. She drove. She waited in the car, watching you, while I broke windows, emptied jewelry boxes, hunted furs.
Next thing I know I’m in prison and she’s on probation and Mama’s telling me, You got to stay alive. Ninety-two times she says it. Once a month for eight years, then one month she doesn’t show, and the next week Bernice comes, says Mama’s sick and aren’t I ashamed. Then Mama comes again, three more times, but she’s looking yellowish, not her high yellow but some new dirty yellow that even fills her eyes. She’s not losing her weight but it’s slipping down around her in strange ways, hanging heavy and low, so when she walks toward me, she looks like a woman dragging her own body. My baby. That’s all she says. But I know the rest. Then Bernice is there again, shaking her head, telling me one more time how Mama gave up her life to give us a decent chance and she’s got reason to be proud — little Leroy a schoolteacher, Bernice a nurse. I mean to remind her, You feed mashed-up peas to old ladies with no teeth. You slip bedpans under wrinkled white asses. Wearing a uniform don’t make you no nurse, Bernice. But I just say, Lucky for Mama the two of you turned out so fine. I grin but Bernice isn’t smiling; Bernice is crossing her big arms over her big chest. I see her fall to her knees as if her body is folding under her. I see her face crumple as if she’s just been struck. And I’m not in prison. I’m free, but just barely, and I see my own dark hands in too-small white gloves, five other men like me, lifting the box and Mama in it, the light through stained glass glowing above us and that terrible wailing, the women crying but not Mama, the women singing as if they still believe in their all-merciful God, as if they’ve forgotten their sons: sacrificed, dead, in solitary, on the street, rotting in a jungle, needles in their arms, fans tied around their necks, as if they don’t look up at Jesus and say, What a waste.