My Monticello(13)

Unearth Pop’s ancient gramophone and crank it until warbled music lifts from his dusty records. His Ella. His Billie. His Earth, Wind & Fire. Sing along with Ray Charles, “Take me home, country roads,” as if to mimic Pop’s baffling nostalgia for places that never once welcomed him: the VA hospital that put off his procedure until his legs withered and died beneath him. His blighted stumps, the tick of fever, a stench like stagnant water. It always begins with a gasping breath in and ends with a shallow breath out.

Bundle Baby Girl’s coarse watercolor papers, along with your gleaned sewing kits and Ma’s rust-tinged pinking shears. Try hard to remember that all of it hangs together, how each wavering piece connects or clings on to some other. When you bolt awake to blackness, try hard to divine where the tears will run first and deepest. Picture how you (and your sweet girl, if only she answers) might hide from the damage a little longer.

Look for hardwood floors and hardwood trees, an arbor raising vines. Look for a patch of sun that might nourish a kitchen garden. Turn on the nearest faucet: How long does it take for the water to run hot?

Beg Baby Girl’s forgiveness for missing the reception for her first big exhibition, even if you were stalled in traffic. Even if she claimed that it was “fine.” Nineteen and still those flush, plump cheeks, the restless way her limbs swing from a black tank top and tattered cutoffs. Her clear brown skin, darker than yours, her hair tie-dyed at the edges. The haphazard way she divides it, twin braids flung out to either side like a Black Pippi Longstocking. Study her old posts for a vestige of hope: her stitched paper sculptures, her swaying installations, though she hasn’t updated them in months.

Learn how to build a fire, clean a wound, skin and gut and say grace for a small once-living thing. Practice those old self-defense moves, a series of katas, like dancing. Remember that one bracing hold that extracted a rare look of shock from your ex’s features. Sometimes you can subvert a thing by using its own brute force against it—though this might not be one of them. Ask yourself, do you want these last goodish years to be your bitch-be-cray-cray Sarah Connor years; or would you rather go out with the heady extravagance everyone in lit windows along Hanover seems to still be relishing?

Liberate your hair as soon as you are able, as soon as the shelves at the Farm Fresh go fallow and your office shutters its doors. Consider braids, like your daughter wears, or a tufted fro like Angela Davis in her seventies Wanted posters. Wear Birko-Flor sandals with mossy-green Army surplus socks—because, by now, why the fuck not? Because, by now, you may as well be free. Lay your hand on your new luna moth tattoo, the one that young brother at the parlor embossed over your heart. Remember how he set each fine, searing line, how whole moments later, the marks raised themselves like Lazarus.

Vote, but don’t expect it to save you.

March, but don’t expect it to save you.

Pray, but don’t expect it to save you.

Beg Baby Girl’s forgiveness for marrying her father when you were so young, younger even than she is now. Beg forgiveness for bringing her into a world where the man who swore to love you set crimson bruises around your throat. Plead forgiveness for her hide-and-seek childhood, the couches you slept on that smelled either of mildew or of smoke. The bus depots and vending-machine meals, though now, in hindsight, it all feels like a kind of training.…

Beg forgiveness that you failed to pray or march or vote or work soon enough or hard enough to afford her a chance to own something of her own someday: a home, verdant and wild, that might sustain and shelter her.

Find a house on a hill, while the interest is low. Breathe in, check the listings. Refresh, refresh, refresh.





THE KING OF XANDRIA




Mr. Attah thinks of this exiled place as Xandria because Alex is the name of his only son, his last best hope. The boy is thirteen, still in junior middle, but Mr. Attah has a daughter as well. Justina works double shifts at the paper store, leaving their flat in drab trousers and polished loafers as if she were a man. Whenever Mr. Attah sees her, a hummingbird quivers in his throat. His baby girl mired in that lowly job, and yet her job has grown superior to his, because Mr. Attah has lost his—although he must not let his children know.

Back home outside of Lagos, before his wife was torn from this earth, when Justina still covered her hair in bright fabric and Alex donned his school uniform: Mr. Attah was patriarch then. He would arrive to work barrel-chested and angle himself behind his polished mahogany desk. He remembers the potted geranium near the window, the one Mrs. Ibeh would water before bringing his tea. Mr. Attah mourns all of it, the squeak of the window fan even, his oscillating view of lagoon. Now he and his children are stranded here in Xandria, here in this new and baffling place. Justina has grown as petulant and fat as a steer; whenever she surveys him, Mr. Attah feels weak beneath her gaze.

But there is still Alex: his son.

Alex shot up this summer and Mr. Attah cannot help but admire his son’s fine new lankness. A line of pimples dots the boy’s perfect brown skull where his ball cap perches like a crown. “Snapback, Papi,” Alex corrects. “Not ‘ball cap’—snapback.” The boy’s lilting accent is fast fading, his new stories peppered with adages that Mr. Attah cannot decipher. Still, if Alex can manage to shine here, then perhaps Mr. Attah can reclaim some thread of dignity, and become the man he once imagined himself to be.