Memphis(50)

I dreaded all mention of him. Would switch the radio to Smooth Jams whenever I heard Three 6, his favorite, blaring. My called me old, always listening to old-folk music. But Whitney and Anita and Chaka never made me want to break something.

But my efforts to erase Derek from this earth were limited. There were still pictures of him throughout the house. On the bathroom wall, there were still pencil marks, though faded, showing his height, his age. And Derek phoned the house. I hated when he called collect to speak to Auntie August. She’d always be upset after. I’d hear her side of the conversation from the hallway phone. Always “It’s gonna be okay, baby” and “Keep that head of yours up, D.” I’d hear the receiver click and her footsteps toward the kitchen shelf, straight for the whiskey. I wasn’t sure if my burying that comb was what landed my cousin in prison, but I thanked God—and Miss Dawn—for the magic of it.

Miss Dawn was looking at me hard, and I didn’t challenge her—no use pretending to her or myself that I didn’t think of Derek, that I didn’t remember burying that comb. “Dig it up,” she said again. “Or you won’t be going anywhere.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know damn well what it means. Did I stutter, child? How come no one in your family listens to Miss Dawn? For the life of me, I can’t understand it. Y’all some hardheaded women, dear Lord.”

But she agreed to increase our monthly sessions to twice weekly.

The next month, I brought Professor Mason two pieces: a canvas of Auntie August painted in broad black ink strokes on a stark white background. She wore her legendary kimono, stood for me smoking her legendary Kools. The other was Miss Dawn. Her hands mostly. They held a bouquet of blackberry bush bramble. Both women were ten feet tall on white canvas.

“You’re ready,” Professor Mason said, admiring my work.

“What happens now?”

“We submit and we wait,” he said.

Later, on Christmas night, stomach full of neck-bone meat and turkey legs and chitlins, I headed out into the backyard, but this time I took a shovel. I dug until I found it. The comb. The teeth shining black in the moonlight. Its wooden handle was covered with dirt. I stood over it, panting slightly from the work. Then I spat on it. Again and again and again.





CHAPTER 22


    Miriam


   2001


She was snaking a needle into a vein when her patient, an elderly white woman wearing pearls and her hair in a high bun, exclaimed, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

The woman had one of those old Memphis accents. She reminded Miriam of Scarlett O’Hara, the older and much-lived version, but Scarlett nonetheless. Miriam sat back, inspected her work, which looked fine, and frowned. She was known for being gentle with all her patients. Two years more, and she would be a nurse.

“Just bear with me, ma’am, almost there,” Miriam said.

She’d found the vein on the first try, no digging around, but she was prepping this woman for surgery, and she reasoned that that was enough to make anyone feel on edge. Miriam released the rubber band around the woman’s arm.

“Chile,” the woman said. “This world on fire, and you fussing about an old woman’s veins.”

Miriam followed the woman’s gaze to the television in the corner and saw buildings as tall as titans on fire. She fumbled for the remote and turned the volume up. Apparently, planes had flown into them. She saw folk covered in soot and ash and debris, coughing up blood. Miriam put hand to mouth when she realized that in the debris, like confetti falling from some heavenly party, were bodies. She and her patient watched human beings jump from the buildings. Reports were coming in that there’d been another crash in Pennsylvania.

Was this woman right? Was the earth on fire? But what made Miriam break—what made Miriam drop her entire tray of needles and gauze and sterilizer—was the announcement that there had been yet another plane crash.

The Pentagon had been hit.

It had been six years since she last saw Jax. After Miriam left, fled in the night with their children, Jax had advanced in the Marines. He had made lieutenant colonel. Miriam knew he had been transferred from Camp Lejeune to the Pentagon because of the forwarding address on the divorce papers.

“You all right, chile?” the patient asked, concerned.

Miriam bent to pick up the upturned tray. She did not know how to answer. She honestly did not know if the North house could bear any more loss.

Four years had passed since Derek’s arrest. He had been charged with first-degree murder on two counts. Miriam had sat in the Shelby County Courthouse, her hands tightly intertwined with those of her sister, every day of the trial. They both had worn black.

The courtroom smelled like the hickory benches that lined the small room on two sides. Derek was there in his blue prison jumpsuit, sitting at a long table on the left side of the room, flanked by his public defender.

Three Black boys had entered the courtroom shortly before the call to order and had sat directly across from the North family pew and stared at Derek. They wore sagging jeans and royal-blue T-shirts. Apparently, Kings Gate Mafia had sent troops to monitor the battle playing out in the courtroom. They were there every day of the trial. So were the Douglass Park Bishops, known for their bloodred bandanas tied around still-growing biceps. The guard had stopped many a brawl in the aisles, separating Black child from Black child clawing at each other.