Homegoing(88)

The man took a long drag off his Newport. “This helps,” he said, waving the cigarette in the air. He pulled out a small glassine bag from his pocket and placed it in Sonny’s hand. “When that don’t help, this do,” he said.

Sonny fingered the dope for a while. He didn’t speak, and soon the barber sweep took up his broom and left. Sonny sat on that bench for nearly an hour, just running that small bag from finger to finger, thinking about it. He thought about it as he walked the ten blocks home. He thought about it as he fried an egg for dinner. If nothing he did changed anything, then maybe he was the one who would have to make a change. By midafternoon the next day, Sonny had stopped thinking about it.

He called up the NAACP and quit his job before flushing the bag down the toilet.

—

“What are you gonna do for money?” Josephine asked Sonny. He couldn’t keep his apartment now that he didn’t have an income, so he was staying at his mother’s house until he could figure things out.

Willie stood over the sink, washing dishes and humming her gospel tunes. She hummed loudest when she wanted to appear as though she wasn’t listening in.

“I’ll figure something out. I always do, don’t I?” His voice was a dare, and Josephine didn’t accept, leaning back into her seat and becoming, suddenly, silent. His mother hummed a little louder and started to dry the dishes in her hands.

“Let me help you with that, Mama,” Sonny said, hopping up.

Immediately, she started in on him so that he knew that she had been listening. “Lucille came by here yesterday asking for you,” Willie said. Sonny grunted. “Seem like maybe you should give the girl a call.”



“She know how to find me when she want to.”

“What about Angela or Rhonda? They know how to find you too? Seem like they only know how to get to my house on days you ain’t here.”

Sonny grunted again. “You don’t got to give ’em nothing, Mama,” he said.

His mother snorted. She stopped humming and started singing instead. Sonny knew he had to get out of the apartment, and fast. If his women were after him and his mama was singing gospel, he had better find himself a place to be.

—

He went to see his friend Mohammed about a job. “You should join the Nation of Islam, man,” Mohammed said. “Forget the NAACP. They ain’t doing shit.”

Sonny accepted a glass of water from Mohammed’s eldest daughter. He shrugged at his friend. They’d had this conversation before. Sonny couldn’t join the Nation of Islam as long as his mother was a devout Christian woman. He would never hear the end of it. Besides, his days of sitting in the back of his mother’s church had not left him immune to ideas about the wrath of God. It was not the kind of thing you wanted to attract. “Islam ain’t getting shit done neither,” he said.

His friend Mohammed used to be named Johnny. They’d met shooting hoops in courts all around Harlem when they were boys, and they’d kept up their friendship, even as their basketball days ended and their midsections grew.

When they’d met, Sonny had still gone by “Carson,” but on the court he liked the quickness, the ease of “Sonny,” and so he’d adopted that name as his own. His mother hated it. He knew it was because his father used to call him that, but Sonny didn’t know a thing about his father and there was no sentimental pull to the name for him other than the sound of the other kids saying “Yeah, Son! Yeah, Sonny!” when he sunk one.

“It’s dry out there, Sonny,” Mohammed said.

“You gotta know somethin’. Anything, man.”



“How much school you had?” Mohammed asked.

“Couple years,” Sonny said. In truth, he couldn’t remember finishing one year in any one place, so much had he skipped school, moved around, gotten kicked out. One year, out of sheer desperation, his mother had tried to get him into one of the fancy white schools in Manhattan. She’d marched into the office wearing glasses and carrying her best pen. 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.” Sonny could remember how the white school officials had asked his mother if she wanted some coffee. They’d told her that it just wasn’t possible for him to go there. It just wasn’t possible. Sonny could remember Willie squeezing his hand with one of hers as they walked back to Harlem, wiping away tears with the other. To comfort her, Sonny said he didn’t mind his schools because he never went, and Willie said the fact that he never went was what was wrong with them.

“That ain’t enough for the one thing I heard about,” Mohammed said.

“I gotta work, Mohammed. I got to.”

Mohammed nodded slowly, thinking, and the next week he gave Sonny the number of a man who had left the Nation and now owned a bar. Two weeks later Sonny was taking drink orders at Jazzmine, the new jazz club in East Harlem.

Sonny moved his things out of his mother’s house the night he found out he got the job. 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. She sang for the church, used her voice for Christ, and that was it. Sonny had asked her once if she had ever wanted to be famous like Billie Holiday, singing so sweet that even white people had to pay attention, but his mother just looked away and told him to be careful of “that kind of life.”