Memphis: A Novel(47)

The wind picked up, working the leaf from its branch, and it fell out of sight. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, thinking about how when Derek was still living with us, I sometimes felt a rage so strong I believed I could kill. Maybe I wasn’t so different from Daddy. An unpleasant thought. Maybe he’d even made me this way, I realized, angrily. But my rage came partly from fear. That reassured me until I considered, with a start, that maybe that wasn’t so different from my father, after all. When Derek got me angry, especially when we first moved to Memphis, it would take all of me not to break something—to pick up some antique in the house and throw it against the wall. I had to learn to control this rage. I would walk away, argue with myself. I’d leave the table and eat alone on the porch, cooling off. Why on earth could my father not do the same? What did my daddy have to be afraid of, anyway?

“Joanie!”

I snapped my head to the front of the room, confused. That wasn’t Mr. Harrison’s voice—and nobody in that classroom ever called me “Joanie.”

Mya had appeared. In the classroom’s doorway. Her hair was disheveled. Auntie August made sure our hair was neatly parted and combed every morning, but Mya’s looked undone now. Her eyes were large and—my heart sped up—she was crying.

But Mya could not have been there; that was not possible. Mya should have been in Orchestra, her first-period class at Douglass Middle. The middle school was located just a block down the street from Douglass High. But there she was, breathless, scanning the crowded room for my seat. I could see the middle school Orchestra teacher, Ms. Oakley, behind her. The students sat in curious silence, all eyes on my sister.

I stood up. Mya ran to me. She nearly knocked me over. She buried her face against my shoulder, and I felt hot tears dampen my shirt.

“My, talk to me,” I whispered in her ear. “What’s wrong?”

I didn’t know if she would be able to talk; her shoulders were convulsing in sobs. But everyone in that classroom, everyone on that floor—shit, every soul in North Memphis likely heard Mya as she tilted her head up to look at me and wailed that planes were dropping from the skies and that one had hit Daddy’s work.





CHAPTER 21


Joan


2002


I’d been taking art classes at Rhodes after school this fall, just like I did during my junior year. Rhodes displayed all the art students’ work in a small show each year, and last spring mine was included for the first time. I was the only high school student featured in the showcase. I don’t know for sure, but I had to think that was part of the reason they’d offered me a full ride for the following year. There was no way I’d have been able to go otherwise—it was a dream come true. And that would never have happened without Professor Mason. You got grit, girl, he’d say, standing behind me as I painted. He’d stroke his long white beard and repeat it: You got grit.

One Saturday, he asked me to stay behind.

“Joan?”

Students were filing out of the now-dark studio and into the fading fall light. I was bent over my large portfolio, packing up my pencils.

“Professor Mason?”

He leaned on an intricately carved ebony cane. He threw up a free hand. “Call me Bartram.”

“I’m not doing that; Mama would fillet me.” I smiled.

“Listen, Joan, where are you going after this?”

“Home,” I said.

“You know damn well what I meant.”

“You know where I’m going,” I said warily. I went back to packing up my things.

Rhodes. The argument with my mother, though it had happened the month before, still brewed hot in my thoughts. I could still hear her voice: pleading, defiant. Same as mine.

“They offered you a full ride, Joan,” she’d said. “You’re going.”

We were all in the kitchen—me, Mama, My, and Auntie August, who was plating the Friday meatless dinner: pan-fried perch with a side of buttered green beans Mya and I had picked from the back garden after school.

“I know Rhodes’s art program like I know myself, Mama. I won’t learn anything there.”

“You’ll learn how to be a goddamn doctor!”

I had never heard my mother curse. She had pounded her fist on the counter as she said it, emphasizing the finality of her argument.

Mya burst out in tears. My, for all her pranks and sass, had a sensitive side. She hated when Mama and I fought, but fight we did. And more and more often, it seemed.

“Y’all stop; look what y’all doing to My,” Auntie August said, and stopped dishing fried fillets onto My’s plate. She sat down beside her at the kitchen booth and wrapped her arms around her.

Mama let out an exasperated sigh. At the counter, she could not look at any of us when she said, slow and tired, enunciating each syllable, “I just don’t want you to be poor, Joanie. You can draw. Lord knows, you can draw. But if a man up and leaves you…or you up and leave him, how will you survive? Selling sketches in the streets? Name me one successful artist with a dark face. With breasts. Name one Black woman famous artist. Go on. I’ll wait. Be a doctor, Joan. For Christ’s sake. Be a doctor.” She’d paused for a few seconds, then she said in a whisper, “However nice they are, don’t matter a lick. No daughter of mine going to press food stamps into white hands.”