After spending enough time, Sovereign realized that the color of the walls was similar but not the same as in his father’s den. Those walls were antique white but the new borders were brighter. Here and there were doodads and little photographs from Winifred’s current life in South Carolina. There was a photograph of one of the serving boys when he was six or seven, mugging for the camera.
These differences lent a stronger sense of reality to the home. It was as if life had continued in the home of his childhood. During his long absence the family had gone on.
Mother and son sat side by side on a sofa upholstered in animal skin. Solar James used to say this was the skin of a lion he’d killed in the Kenyan desert. The children all believed him until Drum-Eddie one day said that there were no hairy brown lions in the World Book Encyclopedia.
“It’s so good to see you, Eddie, um, I mean Sovy,” the slightly distracted older black woman said.
“Eagle wasn’t Papa’s real father,” Sovereign replied.
Winifred’s skin had begun graying as her hair had obviously done over the years. This lightening process made her seem less tangible, like a fading dream in the material illusion of the South Carolinian home.
She squinted and finally said, “No?”
“He was impotent. I guess she was fooling around.”
“Eagle told you about that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m raisin’ three hogs two miles out of town on my old friend Georgia’s farm. I go out there almost every morning to feed and visit them. When they hear me comin’ they get all excited and grunt and squeal.”
“You raise ’em for meat?” Sovereign asked while looking across the shelves.
Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Booker T. Washington, LeRoi Jones, Zora Neale Hurston, and a hundred other black literary lights filled out the library. Sovereign had rarely, if ever, asked his father about these books. But now, in the displaced San Diego library, he realized that his entire life had been governed by the content and impact of books that he’d never read.
“No, baby,” Winifred said. “I mean, I guess that was my intention at first, but after a while I just started to love ’em.”
“What?”
“The hogs. Clyde, Mr. North Hampton, and Earl. They rely on me even though I had at one time planned to kill ’em.”
“Are you all right, Mama?”
“Eddie says that he wants to take you down South America. I think you should go with him.”
“What about you?” Sovereign asked.
“It’s too hot down there for me,” she said, casting a casual gaze at the window. “And Spanish makes my head hurt. I mean, it’s a beautiful language but I don’t know it.”
“Portuguese.”
“What?”
“That’s what they speak in Brazil.”
“You’re young enough that you could learn, baby.”
“What do you think about Eagle and Dad?”
“Father is just a word, baby. We all related when you come right down to it — the sharks and dogwoods, snails and men.”
“And sea anemone,” Sovereign the Second uttered.
“Say what?”
“It’s an animal that acts like a plant,” he said. “It anchors itself to a rock or crevice and then waits for food to come by.”
Winifred pried her gaze from whatever she’d seen outside. Her eyes were pale brown, maybe, Sovereign thought, a little occluded. But they saw him well enough.
“The only problem is the air,” she said after the long, noncompetitive test of wills.
“What about it?”
“It’s heavy with moisture. Solar can’t be here because the air is wrong. But I can still remember him. Sometimes I forget but then I’ll be standing in one a’ his old rooms and it hits me. I see him passin’ by a door or hear him clearing his throat somewhere in the house. That’s always a little second of happiness for me. That’s how I am — jumpin’ from one little spot of happiness to the other and raisin’ my hogs.”
“It’s time to go, JJ.”
Drum-Eddie was standing at the door to Solar’s displaced den.
“Oh,” Winifred said.
“Yes, it is,” Sovereign said.
He leaned over to kiss his mother. She pulled away at first and then stayed in place long enough for her son to plant an awkward kiss along her jawline.
She put a hand on his knee and said, “You’ll come back to see me now and then, won’t you, son?”
“Yes, Mama. I just gotta get this court thing settled.”
“Do what Eddie tells you, baby. He knows about the law.”
Zenith was waiting outside the front door. She carried a brown paper bag and a nine-by-twelve-inch folder of black leather. Drum-Eddie and his brother approached their older sister. Behind her was Theodore, standing at the side of his teal Caddy.
“Mom made you some pork sandwiches and banana bread,” she said, handing the bag to Drum. “And I put together this little album of pictures, Sovy. It’s the boys mostly — over the years, growing up.”
She handed the folder to Sovereign and moved forward, toward the front door. In this way she handed him the book and went past at the same time, not giving him a chance to even thank her.
She was going into the house as he was turning.
Sovereign searched for the words to stop his sister, the incantation to make her into someone who might someday love him. But the spell eluded him.
“Z got a whole lotta problems, JJ. It ain’t you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Excuse me, sirs,” Theodore said, “but if we want to make your flight we will have to go.”
In the backseat Sovereign stared out the windows until the little town his mother had colonized was out of sight. He settled back down, looking at his hands in his lap.
Seeing his hands was part of the recurring revelation of sight. It was a touchstone of awareness of the blessing (yes, he thought, the blessing) of the magic of vision. This moment of grace — when it happened, sporadically after he’d tried to murder Lemuel Johnson — usually opened a door to some other miracle or near-miracle.
At that moment it was his mother and her replication of a life with a man who’d died thousands of miles away. Through Winifred he felt a sense of history that changed with the moments and years that passed. This history, Sovereign felt while gazing at the creases in his pinkish-brown palms, was like the ocean: undeniable and yet never the same.
“You can’t take it personally,” Drum-Eddie said, breaking into the reverie.
“What?”
Sovereign looked up at his brother then. He noticed that even though Eddie wore an elegant lightweight tan suit and a dark blue linen shirt, his belt was two lengths of rough hemp rope knotted together at the front.
“I don’t know what it’s like for other families, Jimmy J, but we, all of us James kids, got one thing in common.”
“What’s that?”
“Kinda like that movie I liked so much when I was a kid.”
“The Wizard of Oz?”
“That’s it. Here you got a scarecrow, robot man, and a lion, and all of ’em wantin’ sumpin’ they ain’t got. Every one of ’em all magic and shit but they still out there searchin’ for stuff don’t mean a thing.”
“What’s Z missing?”
“Love.”
“You mean she doesn’t know how?”
“That might be true, but no, that’s not what she after. Z come an’ see Mama six times a year, but all Mama want is to see you and me — and Pops too, even though he’s dead. Mama think Z’s there for the men. And Daddy took Zenith for granted. Just ’cause she did everything he said, he didn’t really seem to care about her.”
“But she has her own family.”
“Yeah,” Eddie agreed. “Maybe it’s different there, but when she comes here everything looks the same.”