Homegoing: List 4

So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth?

He could cook a few dishes for himself competently enough.

And the nebulous, mysterious object of his anger was his mother, a woman whose face he could barely remember, but a face reflected in his own scar.

One of the girls, the tallest and most slender, sat before a great big mortar. The boy held the pestle, which was nearly twice his height. He held it straight up and then would send it crashing down just as the girl’s hand finished turning the fufu in the mortar, barely escaping the impact.

She continued, undeterred by the anger in his voice.

“What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home. I’m sorry you have suffered. I’m sorry for the way your suffering casts a shadow over your life, over the woman you have yet to marry, the children you have yet to have.”

“What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home. I’m sorry you have suffered. I’m sorry for the way your suffering casts a shadow over your life, over the woman you have yet to marry, the children you have yet to have.”

Every time he felt the futility of his work for the NAACP, he’d finger the well-worn pages of that book, and it would strengthen his resolve.

While Sonny looked at the pristine building, clean and shiny, with smartly dressed white children entering and exiting as calmly as can be, he’d thought about his own schools, the ones in Harlem that had the ceiling falling in and smelled of some unnameable funk, and he was surprised that both things could even be called “schools.”

He didn’t tell her where he was working because he already knew she didn’t approve of jazz or any other kind of secular music.

It wasn’t her slow gait or the fact that her voice had reminded him of his favorite memory of his mother.

“Lord, I know you can deliver him from what ails him. Bless him and keep him.” Deliverance was exactly what Sonny wanted.

One time, the dingiest joint in all of Harlem had said yes, and Sonny had stood in the back as Amani got up onstage to blank stares and silence.

The news made it sound like the fault lay with the blacks of Harlem. The violent, the crazy, the monstrous black people who had the gall to demand that their children not be gunned down in the streets.

He had been following her since she and her grandmother’s housekeeper got off the tro-tro. The locals did this, waiting for tourists to disembark so that they could con them into paying for things Ghanaians knew were free.

Her parents were livid. Her father read the note aloud four times, shouting, “What does this foolish woman know?” after each repetition, but from then on they had quizzed Marjorie on her English every night.

She was so engrossed in the book that she didn’t realize that the chicken she had pierced with her fork hadn’t made it into her mouth until she tasted air.

They sat only inches apart at a big, long table that could have seated thirty or more, the many empty seats giving them no excuse to explain their proximity.

I lived in your father’s house for many, many years before he asked me to marry him. I was a foolish girl, hoping he would see that I wanted the same thing he did, without ever making it known. Were it not for Old Lady’s intervention, who knows if he would have ever done anything.

She feared that the nightmares would come for her too, that she too would be chosen by the ancestors to hear their family’s stories, but the nightmares never came, and so, with time, her fear of fire had waned.

In the weeks they had spent getting to know each other, Marjorie had become more and more enamored with the blue of his eyes.

Every character in those books was hopelessly in love. All the men were wooing, all the women being wooed. It was easier to see what love looked like then, the embarrassingly grand, unabashed emotion of it.

She had asked her grandmother to call her once a month as an assurance, even though she knew it was cumbersome for the old woman to have to do so.

There was something about the smell of the ocean that nauseated him. That wet salt stink clung to his nose and made him feel as though he were already drowning. He could feel it thick in his throat, like brine, clinging to that place where his uvula hung so that he couldn’t breathe right.

And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction—the stints in prison, the criminal record?

He couldn’t remember exactly when the need for studying and knowing his family more intimately had struck him.

In that room, with his family, he would sometimes imagine a different room, a fuller family. He would imagine so hard that at times he thought he could see them. Sometimes in a hut in Africa, a patriarch holding a machete; sometimes outside in a forest of palm trees, a crowd watching a young woman carrying a bucket on her head; sometimes in a cramped apartment with too many kids, or a small, failing farm, around a burning tree or in a classroom.

His friend poked him in the shoulder repeatedly, all the jabs in quick succession, so that he had finished before Marcus could tell him to stop.

The woman flattened her skirt and picked up another loc, started to twirl it around her finger. Preening, it seemed.

He had learned not to be surprised by how forthcoming she was. How she never gave in to small talk, just dove right into deep waters.

For all they knew, they were standing on top of what used to be a coal mine, a grave for all the black convicts who had been conscripted to work there.

How could he explain to Marjorie that he wasn’t supposed to be here? Alive. Free. That the fact that he had been born, that he wasn’t in a jail cell somewhere, was not by dint of his pulling himself up by the bootstraps, not by hard work or belief in the American Dream, but by mere chance.

In fact, many of the British soldiers married local women, and their children, along with other local children, would go to school right here in this upper level. Other children would be sent to England for school and they would come back to form an elite class.

He watched her run, headlong, into the crashing waves of the water, watched her dip under until he lost her and all he could do was wait for her to resurface.

When he finally lifted his head up from the sea to cough, then breathe, he looked out at all the water before him, at the vast expanse of time and space.