Homegoing(101)

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The only promise Old Lady, Akua, the Crazy Woman of Edweso, broke was the last one she made. She died in the middle of a sleep she used to fear. She wanted to be buried on a mountain overlooking the sea. Marjorie took the rest of the school year off, her grades so good it didn’t make much of a difference.

She walked with her mother behind the men who were tasked with carrying her grandmother’s body up. Her father had insisted on carrying too, though he was so old, his presence was more of a burden than a help. When they got to the grave site, the people began weeping. Everyone had been crying for days and days on end, but Marjorie had yet to.

The men began digging out the red clay. Two mounds stood on either side of the big rectangular hole, growing deeper. A woodworker had crafted Old Lady’s coffin in a wood the same color as the ground, and when the coffin was lowered, no one could tell where it ended and the earth began. They began to return the clay to the hole. They packed it in tight, patting it with the back of the shovel once they had finished. The sound echoed off of the mountain, into the valley.

Once they put a marker on the grave, Marjorie realized that she had forgotten to drop in her poem, built from the dream stories Old Lady used to tell when she walked Marjorie to the water. She knew her grandmother would have loved to hear it. She pulled the poem from her pocket, and her trembling hands made the words wave even though there was little wind.

Marjorie threw herself onto the funeral mound, crying finally, “Me Mam-yee, me Maame. Me Mam-yee, me Maame.”

Her mother came to lift her up off the ground. Later, Esther told her that it looked like she was going to fly off the cliff, down the mountain, and into the sea.





Marcus





MARCUS DIDN’T CARE FOR WATER. He was in college the first time he saw the ocean up close, and it had made his stomach turn, all that space, that endless blue, reaching out farther than an eye could hold. It terrified him. He hadn’t told his friends he didn’t know how to swim, and his roommate, a redhead from Maine, was already seven feet under the surface of the Atlantic before Marcus even stepped his toes in.

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.

When he was young, his father told him that black people didn’t like water because they were brought over on slave ships. What did a black man want to swim for? The ocean floor was already littered with black men.

Marcus always nodded patiently when his father said things like this. Sonny was forever talking about slavery, the prison labor complex, the System, segregation, the Man. His father had a deep-seated hatred of white people. A hatred like a bag filled with stones, one stone for every year racial injustice continued to be the norm in America. He still carried the bag.

Marcus would never forget his father’s early teachings, the alternative history lessons that got Marcus interested in studying America more closely in the first place. The two had shared a mattress in Ma Willie’s cramped apartment. In the evenings, lying on the mattress with springs like knives, Sonny would tell Marcus about how America used to lock up black men off the sidewalks for labor or how redlining kept banks from investing in black neighborhoods, preventing mortgages or business loans. So was it a wonder that prisons were still full of them? Was it a wonder that the ghetto was the ghetto? There were things Sonny used to talk about that Marcus never saw in his history books, but that later, when he got to college, he learned to be true. He learned that his father’s mind was a brilliant mind, but it was trapped underneath something.



In the mornings, Marcus used to watch Sonny get up, shave, and leave for the methadone clinic in East Harlem. It was easier to follow the movements of his father than it was to watch a clock. At six thirty he got up and had a glass of orange juice. By six forty-five he was shaving, and by seven he was out the door. He would get his methadone and then he would head over to work as a custodian at the hospital. He was the smartest man Marcus knew, but he never could get completely out from under the dope he used to use.

When he was seven, Marcus once asked Ma Willie what would happen if some part of Sonny’s schedule was to change. What would happen if he didn’t get the methadone. His grandmother just shrugged. It wasn’t until Marcus was much older that he started to understand just how important his father’s routine was. His entire life seemed to hang in this balance.

Now Marcus was near the water again. A new grad school mate had invited him to a pool party to celebrate the new millennium, and Marcus had, hesitantly, accepted. A pool in California was safer than the Atlantic, sure. He could lounge on the chair and pretend he was just there for the sun. He could make jokes about how he needed a tan.

Someone yelled, “Cannonball!” sending a cold, wet splash onto Marcus’s legs. He wiped it off, grimacing, after Diante handed him a towel.

“Shit, Marcus, how long we gon’ stay out here, man? It’s hot as hell. This some Africa heat right here.”



Diante was always complaining. He was an artist whom Marcus met at a house party in East Palo Alto, and even though Diante had grown up in Atlanta, something about him reminded Marcus of home. They’d been like brothers ever since.