Memphis: A Novel(27)

Maybe it was the fact that they were all together again—North women underneath one roof. Maybe it was seeing Joan’s drawing and the rush of love and protection that had welled up in her in that moment. Wanting Joan to always cherish her gift made her want to honor her own. August couldn’t rightly explain it herself, but she figured her mother would have been right proud. So, maybe she did it for her.

How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.





CHAPTER 12


Joan


1997


The honk of a car horn sounded in the driveway, startling us all. Auntie August lurched forward with a start, and coffee spilled from her cup. Mya had been in between bites of cheesy grits but paused with her spoon midway to her mouth. I sat next to her with my sketchbook in my lap, and my pencil swerved on the page. Derek had one hand on the refrigerator door and another holding a pint of buttermilk.

Two years. It had been two years since my mom, Mya, Wolf, and I had filed into our white Chevy Astro van filled with all we had—each other. We arrived at Grandma Hazel’s house exhausted, hungry, AC broken, hair untamed, remembering every sin a Black man had committed against us.

My mom was still in the bath. From my spot in the kitchen booth, I could hear the water running. She would soon start her day by rushing off to class with a half-eaten bagel stuffed in her mouth. She had gotten into Rhodes College, the same college and the same nursing program her mother had attended. Mya, Mom, and I would sit at the kitchen table on Sunday evenings and finish our respective homework. Mama had even snagged a part-time job at the college library, shelving periodicals and sorting microfiche far past the library’s closing hours. It wasn’t much, but it was something. I had never seen my mom so busy and so content.

The morning had been a typical one. I had been sketching the vase of flowers on the kitchen table, but my mind was elsewhere. It was summer vacation, and I planned to spend mine drawing as much as possible. In the two years since we moved to Memphis, even my hate for Derek could not blind me from the beauty of my new city, my new home. I had never seen summers so lush and green, never been this hot before in my life. Back at Camp Lejeune, we had the cool of the Atlantic that touched our brows, chilled our sweat even in the midday. Here, the ladies in Douglass did not leave the house without a paper hand fan with a church program printed on the back. We climbed trees to escape the heat—me, Mya, and the cats. Too hot for the stone of the porch, the cats had moved to the magnolia in front, the plum tree on the side, and lounged sleepily from branches, and we followed.

I wanted to paint it all. The church fans, every color of the rainbow. The women of all shades who had come to Auntie August’s shop not for their usual presses, but for the relief of cornrows and Bantu knots and box braids. I wanted to draw Mya and the cats in the green trees.

Now that school was out and there was no math homework for Mama to hound me about, my goal for the summer was to compile a series of sketches of women from the neighborhood I had grown to love. My weekly sessions on Miss Dawn’s porch had added to my skills as an artist. I had pages and pages of her hands moving this way and that. Only if the weather would allow, the heat being near-suffocating, I’d take a whole easel and sit out there for hours with her. Seemed as if we could talk even Wolf’s ears off. Often, Wolf would place her huge head in my lap and sleep like that.

Drawing was my refuge. I could escape into my sketchbook. I didn’t see much of Derek because I chose not to. Yes, he was there in the house living with me. But I behaved as if he were a house cat I didn’t much like and who did not much like me. If he entered a room, I left it. If he spoke to me—rare—I hissed back. There had been more than a few Mexican standoffs in our kitchen. Always soundless. Dinners, the one meal all five of us shared together, were tense and awkward. My stomach twisting so that I’d lose my appetite. Most nights, I’d ask to leave the table and retreat to the front porch, bringing my plate of food with me. It was hell batting off the cats and the flies and the bees and the birds that all seemed to want what was on my plate: mashed potatoes with gravy, turnip greens, candied yams, neck bones smothered in hot sauce. I’d swat them all away and scoop quick mouthfuls as I brought out my sketchbook, rested it on my knees, and began to do what I loved most. If I concentrated on the sketch at hand, Derek would fade into the background of my life.

The car in our driveway honked again, longer this time.

“Nigga, go,” I said.

“Hear, hear,” Mya said, her British inflection slightly muffled through her mouthful of grits. But behind Mya’s humor, her eyes were ice cold. She’d asked me that first night we arrived, and not one time since, what had happened between me and Derek. She didn’t need to know the details to know whose side she was on. Mya could annoy the shit out of me the way only younger sisters can. Her constant jokes. Always checking my forehead. The way she looked over my shoulder while I was doing geometry homework and shouted out the correct answers in her Mary Poppins voice before I got even halfway through understanding the question. But she’d fight Satan for me, tiny fists balled up and unafraid.

“Joan,” Auntie August said with a sigh. She sounded tired. The coffee had spilled down the front of her robe, and she reached for a paper towel.

Derek took one long pull from the pint of buttermilk and then placed it back and closed the refrigerator door.

“Goddamnit, Derek, don’t go,” Auntie August said.