Memphis: A Novel(35)

August understood that the summer meant blood. School was out. The heat was driving folk crazy. Intermittent gunshots could be heard throughout Douglass at all hours of the day. Late the night before, she had heard the phone ring. She heard Derek’s footsteps squeak across the old hardwood floors. She heard the click of the pearl-handled receiver leaving its hook on the rotary phone in the hallway. She could hear only one side of the conversation, and it was muffled at best. But she had heard enough.

Words like retribution and choppers and trunk and body.

Laments like We can’t let this shit just go, mane, unchecked and We hit back soon, mane, soon and with all our niggas and Fuck, mane, in front of my goddamn house, it’s a warning.

August heard the final declaration of Let’s show Orange Mound how real niggas live.

Heard the antique phone receiver slam down.

When Derek walked into the kitchen that morning, August had felt a pain in her rib cage, on the left, where her heart was. Every day, Derek looked more and more like his father. He was tall and dark and brooding. And every day, just like his father, he bored deeper into crime.

At first, it was petty stuff. August remembered the apologetic phone calls from Stanley informing her that Derek had lifted a honey bun or a can of Coke or, once, a pack of Kools. Things had been hell ever since Derek attacked Joan back in ’88. He broke a girl’s arm not two years later. For little to no reason. Broke it like a wishbone in the middle of his fifth-grade class.

The state had taken him away for a second time after that. The white folk at the Department of Children’s Services made plain the third taking would be permanent. A counseling program had been mandated—a revolving door of therapists and psychiatrists and social workers had all declared the child “problematic,” “aggressive.” One counselor going so far as to write “dissociative personality disorder” down on one of Derek’s countless evaluation forms.

August didn’t know what to think. Only what she had to do. The state had made clear that Derek would need twenty-four-hour “surveillance.” Constant, consistent monitoring and care. Monthly surprise home visits from state evaluators.

She’d agreed to the state’s strict terms. What choice did she have? Let strangers, detached white doctors, raise her son?

That night, she’d packed up her college textbooks—packed up her dream of attending Rhodes like her mother before her, of perhaps even becoming a doctor—and, like winter sweaters, stowed them away in her dead mother’s armoire. Went to the shelf in the kitchen Meer could never quite reach without straining, found the nearest bottle, and sat that whole night with the whiskey and her thoughts and her sobs. But by the time morning light had streaked into the kitchen’s windows, she had a plan.

Hair—the idea had hit her like a drunken husband. Singing, she knew, was not an actual plan. She knew she had a voice that could shame most angels, and she also knew she wasn’t classically trained. A single session with Al Green when she was all of six does not a Nina Simone make. And shit, she wasn’t prepared to go hungry for a gift that mostly annoyed her. She thought about sewing, turning the house into Hazel’s childhood home, but the thought of mending white women’s clothes almost made August spit out her drink. No. If she had to serve, had to work for her bread and butter, then, goddamnit, she’d serve her own.

Years of piano had made her fingers nimble and athletic. She had been the family’s informal hairdresser, pressing and setting her mother’s curls faithfully every Sunday evening. Had done up Meer to look like Diana Ross in the flesh. Hair it would be. A shop in the house. The basement in the back was the perfect place. Hardly used, off the kitchen. She could make a separate walkway around the side of the house easy. Lay a few stones. Use the last of her mother’s small inheritance to buy the chairs, the dryers.

Yes, August thought to herself with the kind of clarity that drunkenness brings. Yes, I can do this. Shit, I gotta.

At dawn that morning, donning her kimono and swaying from the whiskey, August had headed out into the back garden her mother died in and searched for stones for her new path. Around midmorning, she fell asleep in the same spot where five years before she had found her mother.

Derek was returned for the final time six months later, and though violence seemed to hum just underneath his skin, CPS hadn’t been called again. Within a year, August had become the most coveted, the busiest, the best hair stylist in all of North Memphis. She hoped more than anything that her mother, wherever she was, was proud.



* * *



—

Lost in her thoughts, August realized she had washed the same pot four times now. But she couldn’t get the morning’s events out of her head. Pumpkin pounding his car horn a few minutes after Derek walked in. He was coming to collect his new protégé. She knew Pumpkin well. Seventeen years old, the same age as Derek, Pumpkin was short and a bit thick and a golden-brown color; his nickname had stuck. He’d come to the house and walk Derek and the girls to Douglass. She let him. What choice did she have? She remembered the fierce argument with Miriam. It was their first in years. August remembered how it had come to screams.

“I’ll be goddamned if I get my girls messed up in this,” Miriam had said, pounding a fist on the table.

August was taken aback. Her sister rarely swore. When she did, August knew Miriam was not herself. But August struck back with her tongue: “Your God is dead, Meer. Where the fuck you think we live? This the hood. Our house is the hood now. There is a gang war in this place. They shoot children walking to school now.” August had stumbled around the last sentence. The word caught in her throat, and she fought back tears. “And not no one gives a single goddamn. Not no one. Not the police. No one. They’ll shoot them for wearing the wrong goddamned color, Meer. Think about that. Think about how absolutely fucked that is.”