Homegoing(97)

“Daddy, when did you know you liked Mama?” she asked at breakfast the next day. Her father had suffered from a heart attack two years before and now ate a bowl of oatmeal every day. He was so old that Marjorie’s teachers always assumed he was her grandfather.



He wiped his lips with his napkin and cleared his throat. “Who told you I like your mother?” he asked. Marjorie rolled her eyes as her father started to laugh. “Did your mother tell you that? Eh, Abronoma, you are too young to like anyone. Concentrate on your studies.”

He was out the door, headed to teach his history course at the community college, before Marjorie could protest. She had always hated it when her father called her Dove. It was her special name, the nickname born with her because of her Asante name, but it had always made Marjorie feel small somehow, young and fragile. She was not small. She was not young, either. She was old, so old her breasts had grown to the size of her mother’s, so large she sometimes had to carry them in her hands when walking naked through her bedroom to keep them from slapping against her chest.

“Who do you like?” Marjorie’s mother asked, coming into the room with fresh laundry in her hands. Though her parents had lived in America for nearly fifteen years, Esther still would not use a washing machine. She washed all the family’s undergarments by hand in the kitchen sink.

“No one,” Marjorie said.

“Has someone come to ask you to prom?” Esther asked, grinning widely. Marjorie sighed. Five years ago she had watched a 20/20 special on proms across America with her mother, and her mother had been delighted by it. She said that she had never seen anything like the girls in their long dresses and the boys in their suits. The thought that her daughter could be one of those special girls was a hope that flickered like light in Esther’s eye, just as it stung like dust in Marjorie’s. Marjorie was one of thirty black people at her school. None of them had been asked to prom the year before.

“No, Mama, God!”

“I am not God, and I have never been,” her mother said, pulling a lacy black bra from the depths of the sink water. “If a boy likes you, you have to make it known that you like him too. Otherwise, he will never do anything. I lived in your father’s house for many, many years before he asked me to marry him. I was a foolish girl, hoping he would see that I wanted the same thing he did, without ever making it known. Were it not for Old Lady’s intervention, who knows if he would have ever done anything. That woman has strong powers of will.”



That night, Marjorie tucked Graham’s poem under her pillow, hoping she had inherited her grandmother’s willpower, that the words he’d written would float up into her ear as she slept, blossom into a dream.

—

Mrs. Pinkston was putting on a black cultural event for the school, and she asked Marjorie if she would read a poem. The event, called The Waters We Wade In, was unlike anything the school had ever done before, and it was to take place at the beginning of May, well after Black History Month had passed.

“All you have to do is tell your story,” Mrs. Pinkston said. “Talk about what being African American means to you.”

“But I’m not African American,” Marjorie said.

Though she couldn’t exactly read the look on Mrs. Pinkston’s face, Marjorie knew instantly that she had said the wrong thing. She wanted to explain it to Mrs. Pinkston, but she didn’t know how. She wanted to tell Mrs. Pinkston that at home, they had a different word for African Americans. Akata. That akata people were different from Ghanaians, too long gone from the mother continent to continue calling it the mother continent. She wanted to tell Mrs. Pinkston that she could feel herself being pulled away too, almost akata, too long gone from Ghana to be Ghanaian. But the look on Mrs. Pinkston’s face stopped her from explaining herself at all.

“Listen, Marjorie, I’m going to tell you something that maybe nobody’s told you yet. Here, in this country, it doesn’t matter where you came from first to the white people running things. You’re here now, and here black is black is black.” She got up from her seat and poured them each a cup of coffee. Marjorie didn’t really even like coffee. It was too bitter; the taste clung to the back of her throat, like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to enter her body or be breathed out of her mouth. Mrs. Pinkston drank the coffee, but Marjorie just looked at hers. Briefly, for only a second, she thought she could see her face reflected in it.



That night Marjorie went to see a movie with Graham. When he came to pick her up, she asked him if he would park his car one street over. She wasn’t ready to tell her parents yet.

“Good idea,” Graham said, and Marjorie wondered if his father knew where he was.

When the movie ended, Graham drove her into a clearing in the woods. It was one of those places that other kids supposedly went to make out, but Marjorie had been through it a couple of times, and it was always empty.

It was empty this night. Graham had a bottle of whiskey in his backseat, and though she detested the taste of alcohol, Marjorie sipped from it slowly. While she drank, Graham pulled out a cigarette. After he lit it, he kept playing with the lighter, making the fire appear, then disappear again.

“Would you stop that, please?” Marjorie asked once he started waving the lighter around.

“What?” Graham asked.

“The lighter. Would you put it away, please?”