Homegoing(87)

For Sonny, the problem with America wasn’t segregation but the fact that you could not, in fact, segregate. Sonny had been trying to get away from white people for as long as he could remember, but, big as this country was, there was nowhere to go. Not even Harlem, where white folks owned just about everything an eye could see or a hand could touch. What Sonny wanted was Africa. Marcus Garvey had been onto something. Liberia and Sierra Leone, those two efforts had been a good thing, in theory at least. The problem was that in practice things didn’t work the way they did in theory. The practice of segregation still meant that Sonny had to see white people sitting at the front of every bus he took, that he got called “boy” by every other snot-nosed white kid in sight. The practice of segregation meant that he had to feel his separateness as inequality, and that was what he could not take.

“Carson, I’m talking to you!” Willie shouted. Sonny knew he was never too old for a knock on his head, and so he turned to face his mother.

“What?”

She gave him a hard look, and he gave it right back. For the first few years of his life, it had just been him and Willie. Try as hard as he might, Sonny could never conjure up a picture of his father, and he still hadn’t forgiven his mother for that.

“You’s a hardheaded fool,” Willie said, pushing past him now. “You need to stop spendin’ time in jail and start spendin’ it with your kids. That’s what you need to do.”



She muttered the last part so that Sonny could barely hear her, but he would have known what she said even if she hadn’t said it. He was mad at her because he didn’t have a father, and she was mad at him because he’d become as absent as his own.

—

Sonny was on the housing team at the NAACP. Once a week, he and the other men and women on the team went around to all the different neighborhoods in Harlem to ask people how they were faring.

“We got so many roaches and rats, we got to keep the toothbrushes in the fridge,” one mother said.

It was the last Friday of the month, and Sonny was still nursing Thursday night’s headache. “Mm-hmm,” he said to the woman, sweeping a hand over his brow, as though he could mop up a bit of the pain that pulsed there. While she talked, Sonny pretended to take notes in his notepad, but it was the same thing he’d heard at the last place, and the one before that. In fact, Sonny could have not gone to a single apartment and he still would have known what the tenants would say. He and Willie and his sister, Josephine, had lived in conditions like these and much worse.

He could remember with clarity a time when his mother’s second husband, Eli, left and took the month’s rent with him. Sonny had held baby Josephine in his arms while they all went from block to block, begging anyone who would listen to take them in. They’d ended up in an apartment that had forty people living in it, including a sick old woman who’d lost control of her bowels. Every night the woman would sit in a corner, shaking and crying and filling her shoes with her own shit. Then the rats would come to eat it.

Once, when his mother was desperate, she’d taken them to stay in one of the Manhattan apartments that she cleaned while that family was on vacation. The apartment had six bedrooms for only two people. Sonny didn’t know what to do with himself with all that space. He spent the whole day in the smallest room, too scared to touch anything, knowing that his mother would have to dust off his fingerprints if he was to leave them.



“Can you help, mister?” a boy said.

Sonny dropped his notepad down and looked at him. He was small, but something about the look in his eyes told Sonny that he was older than he looked, maybe fourteen or fifteen. The boy came up to the woman and put a hand on her shoulder. He stared at Sonny longer, and so Sonny had time to study his eyes. They were the biggest eyes Sonny had ever seen on a man or a woman, with eyelashes like the long, glamorous legs of a terrifying spider.

“You can’t, can you?” the boy said. He blinked twice quickly, and, watching his spider-leg lashes entangle, Sonny was suddenly filled with fear. “You can’t do a single thing, can you?” the boy continued.

Sonny didn’t know what to say. He just knew he had to get out of there.

The boy’s voice rang in Sonny’s head for the rest of that week, month, year. He’d asked to be moved off the housing team, lest he see him again.

“You can’t do a single thing, can you?”

Sonny was arrested at another march. And then another. And then another. After the third arrest, when Sonny was already handcuffed, one of the police officers punched him in the face. As his eye started to swell shut, Sonny puckered his lips as if to spit, but the officer just looked him in his one good eye, shook his head, and said, “Do that and you’ll die today.”

His mother saw his face and started to weep. “I didn’t leave Alabama for this!” she said. Sonny was supposed to go to her house for Sunday dinner, but he skipped it. He skipped work that week too.

“You can’t do a single thing, can you?”

Reverend George Lee of Mississippi was fatally shot while trying to register to vote.

Rosa Jordan was shot while riding a newly desegregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was pregnant.

“You can’t do a single thing, can you?”

Sonny kept skipping out on work. Instead, he sat on a bench next to the man who swept the barbershops on Seventh. Sonny didn’t know the man’s name. He just liked to sit and talk to him. Maybe it was the fact that the man held a broom like his mother did. He could talk to him in a way he’d never been able to talk to her. “What do you do when you feel helpless?” Sonny asked.