Homegoing(78)

“Sure, I got an apple for you, Sonny,” Eli said, fishing one from his pockets.



“Don’t call him that,” Willie hissed through her teeth, remembering again the man she was trying to forget.

Eli’s face fell a little bit. He wiped at his eyes. “I’m sorry, Willie. Okay? I’m sorry.”

“My name’s Sonny!” Carson shouted. He bit into the apple. “I like to be Sonny!” he said, bits of juice squirting from his mouth.

Josephine started crying, and Willie grabbed her up and rocked her. “See what you done started?” she said, and Eli just kept wiping his eyes.

—

The kids grew older. Sometimes Willie would see Eli every day for a month. That’s when the poems were flowing and the money wasn’t too bad. Willie would come home from cleaning this or that house, and find scraps and stacks of papers all around the apartment. Some of the papers would have just one word on them like “Flight” or “Jazz.” Others would have whole poems. Willie found one that had her name on the top, and it had made her think that perhaps Eli was there to stay.

But then he would go. The money would stop. At first, Willie took baby Josephine to work with her, but she lost two jobs that way, so she started leaving her with Carson, whom she couldn’t ever seem to keep in school. They were evicted three times in six months, though by that time everyone she knew was getting evicted, living with twenty strangers in a single apartment, sharing a single bed. Each time they got evicted, she would move what little they had no more than a block down. Willie would tell the new landlord that her husband was a famous poet, knowing full well that he was neither husband nor famous. One time, when he’d come home for just a night, she had yelled at him. “You can’t eat a poem, Eli,” she said, and she didn’t see him again for nearly three months.

Then, when Josephine was four and Carson ten, Willie joined the choir at church. She had been wanting to do it since the first day she heard them sing, but stages, even those that were altars, made her remember the Jazzing. Then she’d met Eli and stopped going to church. Then Eli would leave and she’d start going again. Finally, she went to a rehearsal, but she would stand in the back, quietly, moving her lips but letting nothing escape them.

—



Willie and Carson were nearing the limits of Harlem. Carson crunched on his cone and looked up at her skeptically, and she just smiled back reassuringly, but she knew, and he knew, that they would have to turn soon. When the colors started changing, they would have to turn.

But they didn’t. Now there were so many white people around them that Willie started to feel scared. She took Carson’s hand in hers. The days of Pratt City mixing were so far behind her, she almost felt as though she had dreamed them. Here, now, she tried to keep her body small, squaring her shoulders in, keeping her head down. She could feel Carson doing the same thing. They walked two blocks like this, past the place where the black sea of Harlem turned into the white rush of the rest of the world, and then they stopped at an intersection.

There were so many people walking around them that Willie was surprised she noticed at all, but she did.

It was Robert. He was bent down on one knee, tying the shoe of a little boy of maybe three or four. A woman was holding the little boy’s hand on the other side of him. The woman had finger-curled blond hair cut short so that the longest strands just barely licked the tip of her chin. Robert stood back up. He kissed the woman, the little boy smushed between them for only a moment. Then Robert looked up and across the intersection. Willie’s eyes met his.

The cars passed, and Carson tugged on the end of Willie’s shirt. “We gon’ cross, Mama?” he asked. “The cars are gone. We can pass,” he said.

Across the street, the blond woman’s lips were moving. She touched Robert’s shoulder.

Willie smiled at Robert, and it wasn’t until that smile that she realized she forgave him. She felt like the smile had opened a valve, like the pressure of anger and sadness and confusion and loss was shooting out of her, into the sky and away. Away.

Robert smiled back at her, but soon he turned to talk to the blond woman, and the three of them continued on in a different direction.



Carson followed Willie’s gaze to where Robert had been. “Mama?” he said again.

Willie shook her head. “No, Carson. We can’t go any further. I think it’s time we go back.”

—

That Sunday, the church was packed. Eli’s book of poems was set to be published in the spring, and he was so happy that he had stayed put longer than Willie could remember him ever staying before. He sat in a middle pew with Josephine in his lap and Carson at his side. The pastor went up to the pulpit and said, “Church, ain’t God great?”

And the church said, “Amen.”

He said, “Church, ain’t God great?”

And the church said, “Amen.”

He said, “Church, I tell you God done brought me to the other side today. Church, I put down my cross and I ain’t never gon’ pick it back up.”

“Glory, hallelujah,” came the shout.

Willie was standing in the back of the choir holding the songbook when her hands began to tremble. She thought about H coming home every night from the mines with his pickax and his shovel. He would set them down on the porch and take his boots off before he came in because Ethe would give him an earful if he tracked coal dust into the house she kept so clean. He used to say the best part of his day was when he could put that shovel down and walk inside to see his girls waiting for him.