For the gift of having a father around for her children, something the rest of this thieving country took as natural as rain, so much else suffered. There was never music playing when my peoples walked into the living room. You could not catch them on old choppy home videos, making out under a summer tree, laughing, holding up their protesting hands as the lenses closed in. They were not for the smoky jazz clubs, dinner reservations, or walks down at the harbor. They barely marked anniversaries. As for me and that time, there were the facts my mother laid down to me from the day I could talk — that people were people and their covenants were sealed with subterfuge, conspiracy, and denial. When my father opened his marriage, when he explained this new joining in that brown Honda Accord, it was just another bizarre step in our bizarre lives. It was how I was raised. It was what I’d come to expect.
I never talked to Kier about any of this, though I was told that he’d been informed. What I saw of him and my father continued as normal — Dad would hand him parables from Up from Slavery, or Kier would perfect his imitation of Dad’s ’70s cadence. By then, Kier had chosen the glittering path. I always thought he had what mattered — the cool hand, the fresh Ewings, Champion hoodie, the badass dimes. Yet he craved frenzy, life on the random and quick. Like all boys, I saw the appeal. I would not live on lucky numbers but a long blessed grind. I thought Kier labored in the shadow of his father’s death, and even today I’m not sure that Dad helped. By the time that last summer came, the footprints we left were hardening in the sun.
But soon I’d be loose from it all, and I felt the freedom of eighteen on the approach. I was a high-school senior, with an assigned dorm room. Everything in front of me was green sky.
All year, I’d been working toward better drumming, showing up early for classes, teaching young children, and tinkering with the threading and tightness of my own djembe. I bought a third drum, decked out with carvings of the Continent, a brown stain, and a polyurethane glow. By March, even my breath was a djembe beat, and everything revolved around my next rehearsal, drum class, or show. In the meantime, Sankofa was prepping for our biggest concert of the year, the spring recital.
The spring recital was always a coming out — we wore different sets of costumes, tied fabric around our heads, or wore leather helmets with straw spiking out like Mohawks. Dancers and drummers spanned all the ages, from five to seventy-five. This year was bigger, because demand had grown so much that two concerts had been scheduled on two different nights. At the last spring recital, I was young with this, and when they called me out to solo during drum call, all I could do was amble to the middle of the stage, bend slightly forward, and murmur something that got some polite applause but didn’t rupture time and space. Now my hands had been cleaned by practice in the breezeway, shaving goatskins in the basement, and the simple rigors of repetition.
Spring recital came on the week of my driver’s ed classes, and as much as I loved drumming, driving was too old a fantasy to sacrifice for Sankofa rehearsals. The dream crystallized back in middle school. One day I spotted Big Bill’s homeboy Anthony while I was standing on Garrison waiting for the number 91. Anthony was an MC in my brother’s high-school collective, nasty with the lyrics, the sort of odd, quiet kid who sits off in the corner, nodding his head, then grabs a mic and unveils the Cain Marko. Whenever I saw him, I heard his signature couplet—“So they’ll read in the morning with papers delivered / Another whack rapper found dead in the river.”
Anthony’s parents had sprung for a neon-green Jeep with a brown retractable hood, which he later crashed. I was enamored when he offered me a ride, and noted how his system shook the roof and, more than usual, robbed our small talk of any real point. The whip made him limitless. He could have driven to Old Crow and never looked back. From then on, in my feature dreams, I cruised down Garrison pumping Maxi Priest and Shabba, unleashing the base, until I caught the eye of an original Spinderella, Isis, or Terrible T, her tennis skirt fluttering over matching slouch socks, all-white Classics, or pink Air Force Ones.
For driver’s ed, I missed almost every drumming rehearsal that week, which tore my heart and left me mourning in the back of class, while my instructor went off on rights of way, the exact distances from curbs, stop signs, fire hydrants, the weight of a cop’s hand versus red lights. I just placed my palms on my thighs in ready position, leaned back in my wooden chair until I was five hundred years away, until I stood in the court of Mansa Musa, in a kufi and a dark robe. My djembe hung from my shoulders, and when the Lion of Mali nodded, my hands fired and called across the Sahel. The teacher would lower the lights and show films on driver safety. But I would play lead on my lap, imagining dancers who kicked and leaped through the dark like great black flamingoes.
That whole week I felt sidelined and disarmed. I didn’t think about Ebony, pretty boy, or the prom. I didn’t think about my dorm room awaiting me at Morgan or Ma lobbying the Mecca for my admission. In the back of class, I traced my fingers like maps. Back on Tioga they had teased me, said I had the hands of a very glamorous blonde. But now my palms were Himalayas. Callous skin shielded my joints. I was harder now. I could play the traditional rhythm for the dance, Lamba, for hours, just me, a lead, and a djun-djun. I could sit in my father’s basement armed with rope, goatskin, and wood, and yank and pull until spirits said my name.
On Friday, our last day, they gave us a driving test so easy that even I, with all my day-tripping, managed to ace. Ma scooped me up and headed straight for the studio on Eager Street. At yellow lights I exhorted her on — Go, go, go. She laughed and looked cockeyed — Boy, you gonna cause an accident. She dropped me off at the door and I dashed up the staircase in doubles, and now I could hear the drums roaring, and young sisters singing in tongues that they did not understand. But that was always irrelevant. The whole point was to reach beyond the coherent and touch what we were, what we lost, when the jackboots of history pinned us down.
The drumming was so loud when I entered the studio that when the mamas and babas smiled and greeted — they always smiled for me — I could only see them mouthing above the din. The brothers were working the prelude to Mandiani, which is slow like the gathering of warning clouds. Salim, the youthful master, was playing my drum, which normally was nothing, but I was in the mode of a full fiend and had just put on a new slamming off-white skin with a few black freckles. He saw me and stood up and offered me a space and the lead. I sat down and promptly went out of my head. I snowballed high above everything and drove the pace like a warhorse pushed into pursuit.
By the time the sisters got to solos, I’d sweated through my red Sankofa tee. I was standing, my djembe suspended from my waist by my long white strap. They were all lined up, banging their feet in rhythm against the wooden dance floor. They extended their hands like pharaohs, waiting for me to summon them one at a time with a break. But I showed off first, because what Sankofa taught me was that deep down, I loved the crowd, that after days of Dad’s isolationism, I simply could not get enough of the people. I wish I could remember the order in which I brought the dancers out. It must have been by age. It’s all now a blur of images — Milcah’s attitude, me playing slaps and pointing to the floor; Elishibah’s hands reaping the air, her long dreads pulled back on her head and spraying out like a crown of snakes. I know Menes was off somewhere and Salim finished us all up, and afterward we laughed and gave dap.