But I am washed clean and I do forgive my father and my father dies and my grandparents forgive my mother for her bad marriage. I am fifteen. It’s November, still warm in Virginia but not in Boston, which is where we’re going, on the train, with my grandfather, who is kind enough but doesn’t know us, who won’t come inside our house, who’s brought a suitcase full of clothes we have to wear and shoes that hurt our feet. He and Granny Booker mean to save us, mean to compensate. They say we can be anything. But all I want to be is the music, all I want to hear is the sound. Doctor Booker means I can be like him, and I think about that, the sharp razor’s edge of his scalpel, all his delicate knives. I feel his clamps. I touch speculum and forceps, imagining how precisely he opens the body, what he finds there when he does. I see the familiar brown spatters on shirt cuffs and pants legs, his never-clean clothes, and I think, For all your pride, you’re no better than my father, no different, and the distance from his house to yours is only the space in which a man turns around.
I remember my father crying. It frightened me more than anything, more than the bull, more than the water where I thought I’d drown. And this is all it was: scarecrow on a fence. He must have been going blind even then. He thought it was another one, body tangled in barbed wire. But it was only clothes stuffed with rags, pillowcase head tied off at the neck, straw hat and empty sleeves blowing in hot wind.
In prison I learned that my body itself is the enemy, my skin so black it reflects you. You want to take it from me. I terrify. Even when I am one and you are twenty. Even when I am cuffed and you have clubs. Even when I show you my empty hands and you show me your guns. I alarm you. I do what any animal will do: no matter how many times you strike, I try to stand. I mean to stay alive.
Which is why the girl in the street scared me. I thought, Maybe she’s not a crackhead. Maybe she’s just a woman from the other side, lost in another country, running deeper into it because once you’re here you can’t see your way out. Cross a road, walk under a bridge; that’s how far. No signs, no stone wall, but the line’s as tight as a border crossing. If you close your eyes it glitters like broken glass, pale and blue, a thousand shattered windshields. Here, every gesture is a code. Boys patrol their turf, four square blocks, pretend they own something. They travel in packs and arm themselves because they’re more afraid than any of us, because every time they look up the sky is falling, so they’re rapping about the cops they’re gonna dust, the cities they’re gonna torch. The little brothers are spinning on their heads, like this is some dance, some game — their bodies twist in ways they were never meant to bend, and then everybody in the street just falls down dead.
And the old men like me sit in the bars, drinking whiskey, going numb, talking about snatch and getting even all in the same breath, and we sound just like our own pitiful mamas, saying, Judgment Day gonna come, righteous gonna be raised up, and the wicked gonna suffer, rich or poor, don’t make no difference. Except the men, the justice they’re talking don’t have nothing to do with God. They’re full of the old words, saying, We can’t come in the house we’re gonna knock it down; then they sound just like the boys in the street, only tired and slurred, and the boys out there, they’re quick, they got matches and gasoline, they talk fast as spit and don’t ever need to sleep. But the flames burst at their backs, and they’re the ones on fire.
We know the rules. Mess with white folks, you pay. Kill a white man, you hang. Kill a black man? That’s just one more nigger off the street. So when I think about that girl, when I think, If she’s still out there, she’s in trouble, when I think even my mama would tell me I should go, I remind myself, I already done enough time for a white girl. I know how they are, how she’d be scared of me even if I said, I just want to help you. And I know how it would look in the alley — big black man’s got his hands on a skinny white girl. Just my luck the boyfriend would come looking, shoot me dead. Nobody’d ask him why.
I think, Maybe she’s already dead and I’ll find her, touch her once and leave the perfect print of my hand burned on her thigh. I don’t have a phone, and anyway, too late to call. They’d wanna know Why’d you wait so long? and I’d be gone.
Last time they found a white woman dead on this hill police turned into a lynch mob, got the whole city screaming behind them. Roadblocks and strip searches. Stopped every dark-skinned man for miles if he was tall enough and not too old. Busted down doors, emptied closets, shredded mattresses, and never did find the gun that was already in the river. But they found the man they wanted: tall, raspy voice, like me. He’s got a record, long, shot a police officer once. He’s perfect. He can be sacrificed. No education, string of thefts. Even his own people are glad to turn him over, like there’s some evil here and all we got to do is cut it out. I’m thinking, Nobody kills the woman and leaves the man alive. Even an ignorant nigger. But the police, they don’t think that way. They need somebody. Turns out the husband did it. Shot his wife. Pregnant, too. Months later, white man jumps, bridge to river, January, he’s dead, then everybody knows. But that black guy, he’s still in jail. Violating parole. Some shit like that. Who knows? They got him, they’re gonna keep him.
I hear two voices, and they both sound like my mama. One tells me, She’s human, go. And one whispers, You got to keep yourself alive. One’s my real mama and one a devil with my mama’s voice.
Something howled. I thought it was the wind. I wanted to lean into it, wrap my arms around it. I wanted it to have a mouth, to swallow me. Or I wanted to swallow it, to cry as it cried, loud and blameless.
It was nearly dawn and I was ashamed, knowing now which voice belonged to my mama. I held the girl in my mind. She was light as a moth, bright as a flame. I knew she was dead. It was as if she’d called my name, my real one, the one I didn’t know until she spoke it. I felt her lungs filling under my hand. She said, There’s one warm place at the center of my body where I wait for you.
Stray finds her. Mangy wolf of a dog. Smells her. Even in this cold, he knows. And it’s like he loves her, the way he calls, just whining at first, these short yelps, high and sad, and when nobody comes he starts howling, loud enough to wake the dead, I think, but not her. And it’s day, the first one.
We’re out there in the cold, nine of us in the alley, hunched, hands in pockets, no hats, shivering, shaking our heads, and one guy is saying, Shit, shit, because he remembers, we all remember, the last time.
I see her close, thirty-five at least but small, so I thought she was a girl, and I think of her that way now. I kneel beside her. Her eyes are open, irises shattered like blue glass. Wind ruffles her nightgown, exposes her. Snow blows through her hair, across bare legs, between blue lips. I see bruises on her thighs, cuts on her hands, a face misaligned, and I think, I have bones like these, broken, healed, never the same. My hand aches in the cold.
I know now what happened, why she’s here. I see her keeper. She smokes his cigarettes, he whacks her. She drinks his beer, he drags her to the toilet, holds her head in the bowl. He’s sorry. I’ve heard the stories. I’ve seen the women. And I’ve been slammed against a cement wall for looking the man in the eye. I’ve been kicked awake at three A.M. because some motherfucker I offended told the guards I had a knife. The keepers make the rules, but they’re always shifting: we can’t be good enough.