“In hell. Here. This country. How about you, Joseph?” Her eyes were deep and broken. Something was wrong with her arms. She hadn’t seen me for even longer than I hadn’t seen her.
“I’ve missed you.” Almost chant.
“Why come back now, Joey? Black men are killed every week. Why did you wait until it was…?”
For you, Ruth. I came back for you. Nothing else big enough to bring me.
A young boy, maybe a fifth grader, materialized on the lawn beside us. I didn’t see him come up, and the sudden apparition scared me. He was dark, closer to Michael than to Ruth or me. Michael got out of the car and I turned to him. Happy for the deflection, I waved toward the boy. “Yours?”
Michael laughed. “You’re stuck on the escalator, man. You’re in a time hole. My oldest daughter has one of her own almost this old!”
“Mine,” Ruth said.
“Not yours,” the boy told her.
My sister sighed. “Kwame. This is Joseph. Your uncle.” The boy looked as if we were collaborating to cheat him out of his inheritance. He didn’t say, Not my uncle. He didn’t have to. Ruth sighed again. “Oakland. That’s where we’ve been. Oakland.” The word went up my spine like prophecy. “Community organizing. Working.”
“Then the cops killed my dad,” Kwame said.
I put my hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. Ruth put her hand where mine had been, and he suffered it, but believing nothing. Ruth steered her child toward the house, and we men followed.
My mother’s father waited just inside the door. His close-cropped hair was Niagara white. The air around him, like the high-tide mark on a beach, still registered how large a man he’d been. He wore a steel gray suit. Everyone had dressed for this occasion except me. He tilted his head back to get me in the bottom pane of his bifocals. “Jonah Strom.”
“Joseph,” I said, holding out my hand.
My objection angered him. “I still don’t see why she had to give you boys the same name. Never mind. Es freut mich, Herr Strom. ” He took my hand, even as I shrank. “Heißen Sie willkommen zu unserem Haus.”
I stood there gaping. Uncle Michael chuckled as he dragged my bags upstairs. “Don’t let him fool you. He’s been practicing for the last three days.”
“He can make hotel reservations and change your currency for you, too,” Ruth said.
Dr. Daley threatened to break forth in Sturm und Drang. “Sie nehmen keine Rücksicht auf andere.” Something more than three days’ practice.
Ruth put her arm around him. “It’s okay, Papap. He’s not an other. He’s one of us.”
From the hall to my right came crying. A startling sound: the wail of a creature wholly dependent on the unknown. Ruth moved toward the cry almost before I heard it. She slipped into the distant room, murmuring as if to herself. When she came back, she held a dozen-pound squirming infant trying to fling itself free to safety or death.
“Also mine,” Ruth said. “This is little Robert. Five months. Robert, this is your uncle Joey. Haven’t told you about him yet.”
Michael set me up in an upstairs room. “This was my brother’s. We’re moving Kwame into the twins’ old room.” I was violating a sanctuary. But there was no place else to go. “Sleep,” my uncle told me. “You probably need it.” And then he left for his own home.
Ruth came by to check on me. She held little Robert, who every so often stabbed out with his arm to prove my existence. My sister talked to him steadily, sometimes words, sometimes just pitched phonemes. She stopped only to ask, “You good?”
“I am now.”
She shook her head, looking at her baby but talking to me. “Can I get you anything?”
“You call him Papap.”
Little Robert stared at me. His mother wouldn’t. “I do. Kwame, too. We’ve called him that for years.” Then she turned: You have a problem with that? “That’s what he said you used to call him.”
“Ruth?”
“Not now, Joey. Maybe tomorrow. Okay?”
Then she went slack, some tendon cut. She hunched over, as if the baby had swelled to tremendous weight. She lowered herself to the foot of the bed. I sat next to her and put my arm on her back. I couldn’t tell if she wanted it there or not. She began to heave, her muscles lifting and falling in rhythm. Her shaking was tight and small, softer than winter branches scraping a roof. Only when little Robert began to cry, too, did she pull herself up into words.
“It’s so old, Joey. So old.” Her calm was forced. She might have meant anything. Every human nausea was older than she could say.
“The license plate was hanging down. He was driving back on Campbell on a Thursday night. Not even that late — nine-thirty-five. Not even in an especially bad neighborhood. Coming home from a council meeting. He was trying to get a shelter built. The man worked all the time. I was home with Kwame and…” She lifted little Robert, her face twisted. I pressed her shoulders: tomorrow would be fine. Or never.
“Two policemen pulled him over. One white, one Hispanic. Because the rear license plate was hanging down a little. Robert told me the day before that he was going to fix it. He got out of the car. He always got out when the police stopped him. He always wanted to take the issue back to them. He got out of the car to tell them he knew all about the license plate. But they knew all about the license plate, too. It came out at the hearing. They ran the number through their system while they were pulling him over. So what those two cops saw was a big, belligerent former Panther with a record coming out of the car at them. Robert always carried his wallet in his front coat pocket. Said he didn’t like to sit on his fortune. He reached into his coat pocket to get his wallet, and these two cops swung into covered positions behind their doors, guns drawn, yelling at him to freeze. He whipped his hand out of the coat to get it up in the air. I know it. He knew exactly…”
Ruth handed me the baby. She jerked her hands in the air in the oddest way. No place to put them. She wrapped them around her head and pressed, forcing back what was left of her brain.
“Why do I even have to say this? You know before I tell you. So old. Oldest song in the whole sick hymnal.” Her words were stale paste. I strained to hear her. “Nothing you can do with your life, but this country’s going to make you a cliché. The shining emblem of your kind.”
Little Robert began to shriek. I had no clue what to do. I hadn’t held a baby for twenty years. I bounced him, a dotted rhythm, and it helped a little. I hummed, long and low, a ground bass. My nephew put his hand to my chest in wonder. He felt the note there, and his wails turned into startled laughter. The sound brought Ruth back. She stood and traced small circles around the bed. Little Robert squealed, hand to my chest, demanding more.
“The thing was, Joey, they didn’t kill him. If they’d killed him, we might have had an uprising, even in Oakland. They did exactly what years of training primed them to do. They aimed for the legs with rubber riot-control bullets, and managed to shatter his right kneecap. Knocked him to the pavement, where he lay screaming. When he got through the pain, he started cursing them out with American history. They probably wanted to put a metal bullet through his skull just for naming them. The paramedics came. Twenty-two and a half minutes after they were called. They got him on the operating table and cut open his knee. According to the autopsy, he died of complications due to anesthesia.”
She stopped and took little Robert back from me. He started wailing again, reaching for my chest. He was ready to nose-dive out of her arms for a chance to feel those vibrations again. Only when Ruth hummed would he calm down. I listened to her notes. Untrained, a little hoarse. But full as the ocean when the moon pulled.