Homegoing(105)

“Yeah, I guess I am,” Marcus said. He had never told anyone before.

“My grandmother said she could hear the people who were stuck on the ocean floor talking to her. Our ancestors. She was kind of crazy.”

“That don’t sound crazy to me. Shit, everybody in my grandma’s church caught a spirit at one point or another. Just because somebody sees or hears or feels something other folks can’t, doesn’t mean they’re crazy. My grandma used to say, ‘A blind man don’t call us crazy for seeing.’?”

Now Marjorie gave him a real smile. “You want to know what I’m scared of?” she asked, and he nodded. 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. “Fire,” she said.

He had heard the story of her father’s scar in the first week of meeting Marjorie. Her answer didn’t surprise him.

“My grandmother used to say we were born of a great fire. I wish I knew what she meant by that.”

“You ever get back to Ghana?”

“Oh, I’ve been busy with grad school and teaching and all of that.” She paused and looked into the air, counting. “I haven’t been back since my grandmother died, actually,” she said softly. “She gave me this. A family heirloom, I guess.” Marjorie pointed to the necklace.

Marcus nodded. So that was why Marjorie never took it off.

It was getting late, and Marcus had work to do, but he couldn’t move from this particular spot in Marjorie’s living room. There was a large bay window that let in so much light that his shoulder felt brushed with warmth. He wanted to stay for as long as he could.

“She would have hated to know that it’s been so long. Almost fourteen years. When my parents were alive, they used to try to make me go, but it was too painful, losing her. And then I lost my parents, and I guess I just didn’t see the point anymore. My Twi’s so rusty, I don’t know if I could even get around anyway.”

She forced a laugh, but looked away as soon as it escaped her lips. She hid her face from him for what seemed like a long stretch of time. The sun finally reached a place where the window couldn’t catch its light. Marcus could feel the heat lifting off of his shoulder, and he wanted it back.

—



Marcus spent the rest of the school year avoiding his research. He couldn’t see the point anymore. He had gotten a grant that would take him to Birmingham so that he could see what was left of Pratt City. He went with Marjorie, and all they’d been able to find was a blind, and probably crazy, old man who claimed he knew Marcus’s great-grandpa H when he was just a boy.

“You could do your research on Pratt City,” Marjorie had suggested when they left the man’s house. “Seems like an interesting town.”

When the old man had heard Marjorie’s voice, he said he wanted to feel her. That this was how he got to know a person. Marcus had watched, amazed and somewhat embarrassed, as she let the man run his hands along her arms and, finally, her face, like he was reading her. It was her patience that had amazed him. In the short time that he’d known her, he could already tell that she had enough patience to take her through almost any storm. Marcus sometimes studied with her in the library, and he would watch out of the corners of his eyes as she devoured book after book after book. Her work was in African and African American literature, and when Marcus asked her why she chose those subjects, she said that those were the books that she could feel inside of her. When the old man touched her, she had looked at him so patiently, as though while he read her skin, she was also reading him.

“That’s not the point,” he said.

“What is the point, Marcus?”

She stopped walking. 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. It was one thing to research something, another thing entirely to have lived it. To have felt it. How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it—not apart from it, but inside of it.



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. He had only heard tell of his great-grandpa H from Ma Willie, but those stories were enough to make him weep and to fill him with pride. Two-Shovel H they had called him. But what had they called his father or his father before him? What of the mothers? They had been products of their time, and walking in Birmingham now, Marcus was an accumulation of these times. That was the point.

Instead of saying any of this, he said, “You know why I’m scared of the ocean?”

She shook her head.

“It’s not just because I’m scared of drowning. Though I guess I am. It’s because of all that space. It’s because everywhere I look, I see blue, and I have no idea where it begins. When I’m out there, I stay as close as I can to the sand, because at least then I know where it ends.”

She didn’t speak for a while, just continued walking a little bit ahead of him. Maybe she was thinking about fire, the thing she had told him she most feared. Marcus had never seen so much as a picture of her father, but he imagined that he had been a fearsome man with a scar covering one whole side of his face. He imagined that Marjorie feared fire for the same reasons he feared water.