An American Marriage / Брак по-американски (by Tayari Jones, 2018) - аудиокнига на английском

An American Marriage TAYARI JONES ONE Bridge Music Roy There are two kinds of people in the world, those who leave home, and those who don’t. I’m a proud member of the first category. My wife, Celestial, used to say that I’m a country boy at the core, but I never cared for that designation. For one, I’m not from the country per se. Eloe, Louisiana, is a small town. When you hear “country,” you think raising crops, baling hay, and milking cows. Never in my life have I picked a single cotton boll, although my daddy did. I have never touched a horse, goat, or pig, nor have I any desire to. Celestial used to laugh, clarifying that she’s not saying I’m a farmer, just country. She is from Atlanta, and there was a case to be made that she is country, too. But let her tell it, she’s a “southern woman,” not to be confused with a “southern belle.” For some reason, “Georgia peach” is all right with her, and it’s all right with me, so there you have it. Celestial thinks of herself as this cosmopolitan person, and she’s not wrong. However, she sleeps each night in the very house she grew up in. I, on the other hand, departed on the first thing smoking, exactly seventy-one hours after high school graduation. I would have left sooner, but the Trailways didn’t stop through Eloe every day. By the time the mailman brought my mama the cardboard tube containing my diploma, I was all moved into my dorm room at Morehouse College attending a special program for first-generation scholarship types. We were invited to show up two and a half months before the legacies, to get the lay of the land and bone up on the basics. Imagine twenty-three young black men watching Spike Lee’s School Daze and Sidney Poitier’s To Sir with Love on loop, and you either will or will not get the picture. Indoctrination isn’t always a bad thing. All my life I have been helped by leg-up programs—Head Start when I was five and Upward Bound all the way through. If I ever have kids, they will be able to pedal through life without training wheels, but I like to give credit where it is due. Atlanta is where I learned the rules and learned them quick. No one ever called me stupid. But home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land. I’m not talking bad about Eloe. Obviously there are worse native lands; a big-picture mind can see that. For one, Eloe may be in Louisiana, not a state brimming with opportunity, but it is located in America, and if you’re going to be black and struggling, the United States is probably the best place to do it. However, we were not poor. Let me make that extra-strength clear. My daddy worked too hard at Buck’s Sporting Goods by day plus handymanning in the evenings, and my mother spent too many hours fixing trays at the meat-and-three for me to act like we had neither pot nor window. Let the record show that we had both. Me, Olive, and Big Roy were a family of three, and we lived in a sturdy brick house on a safe block. I had my own room, and when Big Roy built an extension, I had my own bathroom. When I outgrew my shoes, I never waited for new ones. While I have received financial aid, my parents did their part to send me to college. Still, the truth is that there was nothing extra. If my childhood were a sandwich, there would be no meat hanging off the bread. We had what we needed and nothing more. “And nothing less,” my mama would have said, and then wrapped me in one of her lemon-drop hugs. When I arrived in Atlanta, I was under the impression that I had my whole life ahead of me—endless reams of blank paper. And you know what they say: a Morehouse Man always has a pen. Ten years later, my life was at its sweet spot. When anybody said, “Where are you from?” I said, “The A!”—so intimate with the city that I knew her by her nickname. When asked about my family, I talked about Celestial. We were properly married for a year and a half, and we were happy for that time, at least I was. Maybe we didn’t do happy like other people, but we’re not your garden-variety bourgeois Atlanta Negroes where the husband goes to bed with his laptop under his pillow and the wife dreams about her blue-box jewelry. I was young, hungry, and on the come-up. Celestial was an artist, intense and gorgeous. We were like Love Jones, but grown. What can I say? I always had a weakness for shooting-star women. When you’re with them, you know that you’re deep into something, none of that hi-and-bye stuff. Before Celestial, I dated this other girl, also born and raised in the A. This girl, as proper as you can picture, she pulled a gun on me at an Urban League gala! I’ll never forget that silver .22 with a pink mother-of-pearl handle. She flashed it inside her purse under the table where we were enjoying steak and au gratin potatoes. She said she knew I was cheating on her with some chick from the Black Bar Association. How can I explain this? I was scared, and then I wasn’t. Only an Atlanta girl could be so classy while doing something so hood. It was love-logic, granted, but I wasn’t sure if I should propose or call the police. We broke up before daybreak, and it wasn’t my decision. After Pistol Girl, I lost my touch with the ladies for a minute. I read the news as same as anyone, and I heard about some supposed black man shortage, but it seemed that the good news had yet to make an impact on my social life. Every woman I took a shine to had someone else waiting in the cut. A little competition is healthy for all parties involved, but Pistol Girl’s departure got up my skin like chiggers and sent me to Eloe for a few days to talk things over with Big Roy. My father has this alpha-omega way about him, like he was here before you showed up and he would be sitting in his same recliner chair long after you left. “You don’t want no woman that brandished a firearm, son.” I tried to explain that what made it remarkable was the contrast between the streetness of the pistol and the glitter of the evening. Besides: “She was playing, Daddy.” Big Roy nodded and sucked the foam from his glass of beer. “If that’s how she plays, what’s going to happen when she gets mad?” From the kitchen, as though speaking through a translator, my mother called, “Ask him who she is with now. She might be crazy, but she’s not crazy. Nobody would dismiss Little Roy without somebody on the back bench.” Big Roy asked, “Your mother wants to know who she is with now.” Like we weren’t all speaking English. “Some attorney dude. Not like Perry Mason. Contracts. A paperwork sort of person.” “Aren’t you a paperwork person?” Big Roy asked. “Totally different. Being a rep, that’s temporary. Besides, paperwork isn’t my destiny. It’s just what I happen to be doing now.” “I see,” Big Roy said. My mother was still peanut-gallerying from the kitchen. “Tell him that he is always letting these light-skinned girls hurt his feelings. Tell him he needs to remember some of the girls right here in Allen Parish. Tell him to lift somebody up with him.” Big Roy said, “Your mother says—” before I cut him off. “I heard her and didn’t nobody say that girl was light-skinned.” But of course she was, and my mama has a thing about that. Now Olive came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a striped dish towel. “Don’t get mad. I’m not trying to get in your business.” Nobody can really satisfy their mama when it comes to the ladies. All my buddies tell me that their mothers are steady warning them, “If she can’t use your comb, don’t bring her home.” Ebony and Jet both swear up and down that all the black men with two nickels to rub together are opting for the swirl. As for me, I’m strictly down with the brown, and my mama has the nerve to fret about which particular shade of sister I was choosing. But you would think that she would have liked Celestial. The two of them favored so much that they could have been the ones related. They both had that clean pretty, like Thelma from Good Times, my first TV crush. But no, as far as my mama was concerned, Celestial looked right, but she was from a different world—Jasmine in Bernadette’s clothing. Big Roy, on the other hand, was so taken by Celestial that he would have married her if I didn’t. None of this scored any points with Olive. “There is only one thing that will win me any ground with your mother,” Celestial once said. “And what might that be?” “A baby,” she said with a sigh. “Whenever I see her, she looks me up and down like I might be holding her grandbabies hostage in my body.” “You exaggerate.” But the truth was, I knew where my mother was coming from. After a year, I was ready to get this show on the road, creating a new generation with an updated set of rules and regulations. Not that there was anything wrong with the way either one us was brought up, but still, the world is changing, so the way you bring up kids had to change, too. Part of my plan was to never one time mention picking cotton. My parents always talked about either real cotton or the idea of it. White people say, “It beats digging a ditch”; black people say, “It beats picking cotton.” I’m not going to remind my kids that somebody died in order for me to do everyday things. I don’t want Roy III sitting up in the movie theater trying to watch Star Wars or what have you and be thinking about the fact that sitting down eating some popcorn is a right that cost somebody his life. None of that. Or maybe not much of that. We’ll have to get the recipe right. Now Celestial promises that she will never say that they have to be twice as good to get half as much. “Even if it’s true,” she said, “what kind of thing is that to say to a five-year-old?” She was the perfect balance in a woman, not a button-down corporate type, but she wore her pedigree like the gloss on a patent-leather shoe. In addition, she popped like an artist, without veering into crazy. In other words, there was no pink pistol in her purse, but there was no shortage of passion either. Celestial liked to go her own way and you could tell that from looking at her. She was tall, five nine, flat-footed, taller than her own father. I know that height is the luck of the draw, but it felt like she chose all that altitude. Her hair, big and wild, put her a smidge over my head. Even before you knew she was a genius with needle and thread, you could tell you were dealing with a unique individual. Although some people—and by “some people,” I mean my mama—couldn’t see it, all that’s what was going to make her an excellent mother. I have half a mind to ask her if we could name our child—son or daughter—Future. If it had been up to me, we would be all aboard the baby train on our honeymoon. Picture us laid up in a glass-bottom cabana over the ocean. I didn’t even know they had shit like that, but I pretended to be all about it when Celestial showed me the brochure, telling her it was on my bucket list. There we were, relaxing up over the ocean, enjoying each other. The wedding was more than a day behind us because Bali was twenty-three first-class hours away. For the wedding, Celestial had been done up like a doll-baby version of herself. All that crazy hair was wrangled into a ballerina bun and the makeup made her seem to blush. When I saw her floating down the aisle toward me, her and her daddy both were giggling like this whole thing was only a dress rehearsal. There I was, serious as four heart attacks and a stroke, but then she looked up at me and puckered her pink-paint lips in a little kiss and I got the joke. She was letting me know that all of this—the little girls holding up the train of her gown, my morning jacket, even the ring in my pocket—was just a show. What was real was the dance of light in her eyes and the quick current of our blood. And then I smiled, too. In Bali, that slick hair was long gone and she was rocking a 1970s Jet magazine fro and wearing nothing but body glitter. “Let’s make a baby.” She laughed. “That’s how you want to ask me?” “I’m serious.” “Not yet, Daddy,” she said. “Soon, though.” On our paper anniversary, I wrote on a sheet of paper. “Soon like now?” She turned it over and wrote back, “Soon like yesterday. I went to the doctor and he said all systems are go.” But it was another piece of paper that hemmed us up—my very own business card. We were back home after our anniversary dinner at the Beautiful Restaurant, a half diner, half cafeteria on Cascade Road. Not fancy, but it was where I popped the question. She’d said, “Yes, but put that ring away before we get jacked!” On our wedding anniversary, we returned, for a feast of short ribs, mac and cheese, and corn pudding. Then we headed home for dessert, two slices of wedding cake that had been sitting in the freezer for 365, waiting to see if we would stick through the year. Not content to leave well enough alone, I opened my wallet to show the photo of her that I kept there. As I pulled the picture from its sleeve, my business card floated free, landing softly beside the slabs of amaretto cake. On the back, in purple ink, was a woman’s first name and phone number, which was bad enough. But Celestial noticed three more digits, which she assumed to be a hotel room number. “I can explain this.” The truth was straightforward: I liked the ladies. I enjoyed a little flirtation, what they call frisson. Sometimes I collected phone numbers like I was still in college, but 99.997 percent of the time it ended there. I just liked to know that I still had it. Harmless, right? “Get to explaining,” she said. “She slipped it into my pocket.” “How did she slip you your own business card?” Celestial was mad, and it turned me on a little, like the click on the stove before the flame took. “She asked me for my card. I thought it was innocent.” Celestial stood up and collected the saucers, weighed down with cake and dropped them in the trash, wedding china be damned. She returned to the table, picked up her flute of pink champagne and slammed the bubbly like a shot of tequila. Then she snatched my glass out of my hand, drank my share, and then tossed the long-stemmed glasses into the garbage, too. As they broke, they rang like bells. “You are so full of shit,” she said. “But where am I now?” I said. “Right here with you. In our home. I lay my head on your pillow every night.” “On our fucking anniversary,” she said. Now her mad was melting into sad. She sat on her breakfast chair. “Why get married if you want to cheat?” I didn’t point out that you had to be married in order to cheat at all. Instead, I told her the truth. “I never even called that girl.” I sat beside her. “I love you.” I said it like a magic charm. “Happy anniversary.” She let me kiss her, which was a positive sign. I could taste the pink champagne on her lips. We were out of our clothes when she bit me hard on the ear. “You are such a liar.” Then she stretched across to my nightstand and produced a shiny foil pack. “Wrap it up, mister.” I know that there are those out there who would say that our marriage was in trouble. People have a lot of things to say when they don’t know what goes on behind closed doors, up under the covers, and between night and morning. But as a witness to, and even a member of, our relationship, I’m convinced that it was the opposite. It meant something that I could make her mad with just a scrap of paper and she could make me crazy with just a rubber. Yes, we were a married couple, but we were still young and smitten. One year in and the fire was still burning blue hot. The thing is this: it’s a challenge being 2.0. On paper, we’re A Different World: Where Are They Now? Whitley and Dwayne all grown up. But Celestial and me are something Hollywood never imagined. She was gifted and I was her manager and muse. It’s not like I lay around in my birthday suit so she could draw me. No, I simply lived my life and she watched. When we were engaged, she won a competition for a glass sculpture she created. From a distance, it looked to be a shooter marble, but when you got up close and looked from the right angle, you could make out the lines of my profile swirled inside. Somebody offered her five thousand dollars for it, but she wouldn’t part with it. This isn’t what happens when a marriage is in danger. She did for me and I did for her in return. Back in the day, when you worked so your wife didn’t have to, they called that “sitting your woman down.” It was a goal of Big Roy’s to sit Olive down, but it never quite worked out. In his honor, and maybe for my own, I worked all day so Celestial could stay home making dolls, her primary art medium. I’m into the museum-quality marbles and the delicate line drawings, but the dolls were something that an ordinary person could get behind. My vision was a line of cloth dolls that we were going to sell wholesale. You could display them on a shelf or hug the stuffing out of them. There would still be the high-end custom jobs and art pieces. Those could fetch five figures, easy. But the everyday dolls were going to make her mark, I told her. And you see, I turned out to be right. I know that all of this is water under the bridge, and not a sweet little creek either. But to be fair, I have to tell this whole story. We were married only a year and some change, but it was a good year. Even she would have to admit that. A meteor crashed our life on Labor Day weekend when we went to Eloe to visit my parents. We traveled by car because I liked a road trip. Planes, I associated with my job. Back then, I was a rep for a textbook company, specializing in math books, even though my way with numbers ended with my 12 times tables. I was successful at my gig because I knew how to sell things. The week before, I closed a nice adoption at my alma mater, and I was in the running for one at Georgia State. It didn’t make me a mogul, but I was looking forward to a bonus hefty enough to start talking about buying a new house. Nothing was wrong with our current abode, a solid ranch house on a quiet street. It’s just that it was a wedding gift from her parents, her childhood home, deeded over to their only daughter, and only to her. It was like white people do, a leg up, American style. But I kind of wanted to hang my hat on a peg with my own name on it. This was on my mind but not on my spirit as we drove up I-10 on our way to Eloe. We settled down after our anniversary skirmish and we were back in rhythm with each other. Old-school hip-hop thumped from the stereo of our Honda Accord, a family kind of car with two empty seats in the back. Six hours in, I clicked on the blinker at exit 163. As we merged onto a two-lane highway, I felt a change in Celestial. Her shoulders rode a little higher, and she nibbled on the ends of her hair. “What’s wrong,” I asked, turning down the volume of the greatest hip-hop album in history. “Just nervous.” “About what?” “You ever have a feeling like maybe you left the stove on?” I returned the volume on the stereo to somewhere between thumping and bumping. “Call your boy, Andre, then.” Celestial fumbled with the seatbelt like it was rubbing her neck the wrong way. “I always get like this around your parents, self-conscious, you know.” “My folks?” Olive and Big Roy are the most down-to-earth people in the history of ever. Celestial’s folks, on the other hand, were not what you would call approachable. Her father was a little dude, three apples tall, with this immense Frederick Douglass fro, complete with side part—and to top it off, he is some sort of genius inventor. Her mother worked in education, not as a teacher or a principal but as an assistant superintendent to the whole school system. And did I mention that her dad hit pay dirt about ten or twelve years ago, inventing a compound that prevents orange juice from separating so fast? He sold that sucker to Minute Maid and ever since, they have been splashing around naked in a bathtub full of money. Her mama and daddy—now that’s a hard room. Next to them, Olive and Big Roy are cake. “You know my folks love you,” I said. “They love you.” “And I love you, so they love you. It’s basic math.” Celestial looked out the window as the skinny pine trees whipped by. “I don’t feel good about this, Roy. Let’s go home.” My wife has a flair for the dramatic. Still, there was a little hitch in her words that I can only describe as fear. “What is it?” “I don’t know,” she said. “But let’s go back.” “What would I tell my mother? You know she has dinner cooking at full tilt by now.” “Blame it on me,” Celestial said. “Tell her everything’s my fault.” Looking back on it, it’s like watching a horror flick and wondering why the characters are so determined to ignore the danger signs. When a spectral voice says, get out, you should do it. But in real life, you don’t know that you’re in a scary movie. You think your wife is being overly emotional. You quietly hope that it’s because she’s pregnant, because a baby is what you need to lock this thing in and throw away the key. When we arrived at my parents’ home, Olive was waiting on the front porch. My mother had a fondness for wigs, and this time she was wearing curls the color of peach preserves. I pulled into the yard close up to the bumper of my daddy’s Chrysler, threw the car in park, flung open the door, and bounded up the stairs two at a time to meet my mama halfway with an embrace. She was no bigger than a minute, so I bent my back to sweep her feet up off the porch and she laughed musical like a xylophone. “Little Roy,” she said. “You’re home.” Once I set her down, I looked over my shoulder and didn’t see anything but dead air, so I trotted back down the stairs, again two at a time. I opened the car door and Celestial extended her arm. I swear, I could hear my mother roll her eyes as I helped my wife out of the Honda. “It’s a triangle,” Big Roy explained as the two of us enjoyed a corner of cognac in the den while Olive was busy in the kitchen and Celestial freshened up. “I was lucky,” he said. “When I met your mama, we were both a couple of free agents. My parents were both dead and gone, and hers were way in Oklahoma, pretending like she was never born.” “They’ll get it together,” I told Big Roy. “Celestial takes a minute to get used to people.” “Your mama isn’t exactly Doris Day,” he said in agreement, and we raised our glasses to the difficult women we were crazy about. “It’ll get better when we have a kid,” I said. “True. A grandbaby can soothe a savage beast.” “Who you calling a beast?” My mother materialized from the kitchen and sat on Big Roy’s lap like a teenager. From the other doorway Celestial entered, fresh, lovely, and smelling of tangerines. With me nestled in the recliner and my parents love-birding on the couch, there was no place for her to sit, so I tapped my knee. Gamely, she perched on my lap and we seemed to be on an awkward double date circa 1952. My mother righted herself. “Celestial, I hear you’re famous.” “Ma’am?” she said, and jerked a little to get up off my lap, but I held her fast. “The magazine,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell us you were making waves in the world?” Celestial looked shy. “It’s just the alumnae bulletin.” “It’s a magazine,” my mother said, picking up the shiny copy from under the coffee table and flipping it to a dog-eared page featuring Celestial holding a cloth doll that represented Josephine Baker. “Artists to Watch,” announced a bold font. “I sent it,” I admitted. “What can I say? I’m proud.” “Is it true that people pay five thousand dollars for your dolls?” Olive pursed her lips and cut her eyes. “Not usually,” Celestial said, but I spoke over her. “That’s right,” I said. “You know I’m her manager. Would I let somebody shortchange my wife?” “Five thousand dollars for a baby doll?” Olive fanned herself with the magazine, lifting her peach-preserve hair. “I guess that’s why God invented white folks.” Big Roy chuckled, and Celestial struggled like a backside beetle to get free from my lap. “The picture doesn’t do it justice,” she said, sounding like a little girl. “The headdress is hand-beaded and—” “Five thousand dollars will buy a lot of beads,” my mother noted. Celestial looked at me, and in an attempt to make peace, I said, “Mama, don’t hate the player, hate the game.” If you have a woman, you recognize when you have said the wrong thing. Somehow she rearranges the ions in the air and you can’t breathe as well. “It’s not a game; it’s art.” Celestial’s eyes landed on the framed African-inspired prints on the walls of the living room. “I mean real art.” Big Roy, a skilled diplomat, said, “Maybe if we could see one in person.” “There’s one in the car,” I said. “I’ll go get it.” The doll, swaddled in a soft blanket, looked like an actual infant. This was one of Celestial’s quirks. For a woman who was, shall we say, apprehensive about motherhood, she was rather protective of these cloth creations. I tried to tell her that she was going to have to adopt a different attitude for when we opened up our storefront. The poup?es, as the dolls were called, would sell for a fraction of the price of the art pieces, like the one I was holding. They would have to be sewn with a quickness and, once it caught on, mass production all the way. None of this cashmere blanket stuff. But I let her slide with this one, which was a commission for the mayor of Atlanta to be given as a gift to his chief of staff, who was expecting a baby around Thanksgiving. When I parted the blanket so my mother could see the doll’s face, she pulled in a loud breath. I gave Celestial a little wink, and she was kind enough to reset the ions in the air so I could breathe again. “It’s you,” Olive said, taking the doll from me, taking care to support its head. “I used his picture,” Celestial piped up. “Roy is my inspiration.” “That’s why she married me,” I joked. “Not the only reason,” she said. You know it was a charmed moment if my mother didn’t have a single word to say. Her eyes were on the bundle in her arms as my father joined her and stared over her shoulder. “I used Austrian crystals for the hair,” Celestial went on, getting excited. “Turn it to hit the light.” My mother did and the doll’s head shimmered as light from our everyday bulbs bounced off the little cap of black beads. “It’s like a halo,” my mother said. “This is how it is when you really have a baby. You ’ve your own angel.” Now my mother moved to the couch and laid the doll on a cushion. It was a trippy experience because the doll really did favor me, or at least my baby pictures. It was like staring into an enchanted mirror. In Olive, I could see the sixteen-year-old she had been, a mother way too soon but as tender as springtime. “I could buy this from you?” “No, Mama,” I said, pride barreling up from my chest. “That’s a special commission. Ten K. Quick and dirty, brokered by yours truly!” “Of course,” she said, folding the blanket over the doll like a shroud. “What do I need a doll for? Old lady like me?” “You can have it,” Celestial said. I gave her the look that she calls my Gary Coleman expression. The contract specified delivery by the end of the month. The deadline was more than firm; it was black-ink-notarized in triplicate. There was no CPT proviso. Without even looking at me, Celestial said, “I can make another one.” Olive said, “No, I don’t want to set you back. It’s just that he’s so much like Little Roy.” I reached to take the doll from her, but my mother wasn’t exactly releasing it and Celestial wasn’t exactly making it easy. She’s a sucker for anybody who appreciates her work. This was something else we were going to have to work on if we were going to make a real business out of this. “Keep it,” Celestial said, like she hadn’t been working on this doll for three months. “I can make another one for the mayor.” Now it was Olive’s turn to stir the ions. “Oh, the mayor. Well, excuse me!” She handed me the doll. “Put it back in your car before I get it dirty. I don’t want you sending me a bill for ten thousand dollars.” “I didn’t mean it like that.” Celestial looked at me in apology. “Mama,” I said. “Olive,” Big Roy said. “Mrs. Hamilton,” Celestial said. “It’s dinnertime,” my mother said. “I hope y’all still eat candy yams and mustard greens.” We ate dinner, not in silence, but nobody talked about anything. Olive was so angry that she messed up the iced tea. I took a deep sip, expecting the soft finish of cane sugar, and choked on the hot taste of kosher salt. Shortly after that, my high school diploma fell off the wall, and a crack starred across the glass. Signs? Maybe. But I wasn’t thinking about missives from above. I was too distracted by being accidentally caught between two women I treasured beyond question. It’s not that I don’t know how to handle myself when I’m in a situation. Every man knows what it is to spread himself around. But with my mother and Celestial, I was actually split down the middle. Olive brought me into this world and trained me up to be the man I recognized as myself. But Celestial was the portal to the rest of my life, the shiny door to the next level. Dessert was sock-it-to-me cake, my favorite, but the tussle with that ten-thousand-dollar doll stole my appetite. Nevertheless, I pushed my way through two cinnamon-swirled helpings because everybody knows the way to make a bad matter worse with a southern woman is to refuse her food. So I ate like a refugee and so did Celestial, even though we both had pledged to stay away from processed sugar. Once we cleared the table, Big Roy said, “Ready to bring your bags in?” “No, Big Man,” I said, my voice light. “I got us a room in the Piney Woods.” “You would rather stay in that dump than your own home?” Olive said. “I want to take Celestial back to the first beginning.” “You don’t have to stay there to do that.” But the truth was that I did. It was a story that needed telling away from my parents’ revisionist tendencies. After a year of marriage, she deserved to know who she was married to. “Was this your idea?” my mother asked Celestial. “No, ma’am. I’m happy to stay here.” “This is all me,” I said, although Celestial was glad we were staying in the hotel. She said she never felt right about us sleeping together under either of our parents’ roofs even though we were lawfully wedded, et cetera. Last time we were here she put on a Little House on the Prairie nightgown, although usually she slept au naturel. “But I made up the room,” Olive said, reaching suddenly for Celestial. The women looked at each other in a way that a man never looks at another man. For a beat, they were alone together in the house. “Roy.” Celestial turned to me, strangely frightened. “What do you think?” “We’ll be back in the morning, Mama,” I said, kissing her. “Biscuits and honey.” How long did it take for us to leave my mother’s home? Maybe it’s the looking-back talking, but everyone except me seemed to have stones in their pockets. As we made our way through the door at last, my father handed Celestial the shrouded doll. He carried it awkwardly, like he couldn’t decide if it was an object or a living thing. “Give him some air,” my mother said, pulling back the blanket, and the sinking orange sun lit up the halo. “You can have it,” Celestial said. “For real.” “That one is for the mayor,” Olive said. “You can make me another one.” “Or better yet, the real thing,” Big Roy said, tracing an invisible pregnant belly with his big hands. His laughter broke whatever sticky spell bound us to the house, and we were able to leave. Celestial thawed as soon as we climbed into the car. Whatever bad mojo or heebie-jeebies were bothering her vanished once we were back on the highway. She undid the French braids over her ears, nesting her head between her knees, busy unraveling and fluffing. When she sat up, she was herself again, riot of hair and wicked smile. “Oh my Lord, that was awkward,” she said. “Word,” I agreed. “I don’t know what that was all about.” “Babies,” she said. “I believe that the desire for grandchildren makes even sane parents go left.” “Not your parents,” I said, thinking of her folks, cool as icebox pie. “Oh yes, mine, too,” she said. “They keep it in check in front of you. All of them need to go to therapy.” “But we’re trying for kids,” I said. “What difference does it make if they want kids, too? Isn’t it good to have something in common?” On our way to the hotel, I pulled over on the side of the road right before we crossed a suspension bridge that was out of scale with what maps called the Aldridge River but was basically a hearty stream. “What do you have on your feet?” “Wedges,” she said, frowning. “Can you walk in them?” She seemed embarrassed by her shoes, an architectural construction of polka-dot ribbon and cork. “How was I supposed to impress your mother in flats?” “No worries, it’s close,” I said shuffling down a soft embankment as she baby-stepped behind me. “Hold my neck,” I said, picking her up like a bride and carrying her the rest of the way. She pressed her face into my neck and sighed. I would never tell her, but I liked being stronger than she was, the way I could literally sweep her off her feet. She wouldn’t tell me either, but I know that she appreciated it, too. Reaching the bank of the stream, I set her down on the soft earth. “You getting heavy, girl. You sure you not pregnant?” “Ha ha, very funny,” she said, looking up. “This is a lot of bridge for a little slip of water.” I sat on the ground and pressed my back against one of the metal pillars like it was the big hickory tree in our front yard. I scissored my legs and patted the space between them. She sat there and I crossed my arms across her chest and rested my chin where her neck met her shoulder. The stream beside us was clear; the water gushed over smooth rocks, and twilight outlined the little waves with silver. My wife smelled like lavender and coconut cake. I said, “Before they built the dam and the water went low, me and my daddy came out here on Saturdays with our lines and bait. In a way that’s what fatherhood is аbout: bologna sandwiches and grape soda.” She giggled, not knowing how serious I was. Above us, a car passed over the metal mesh, and the sound of the wind passing through the holes played a musical note, like when you blow softly over the mouth of a bottle. “When a lot of cars pass over, it’s almost a song.” There we sat, waiting on cars, listening for the bridge music. Our marriage was good. This isn’t just memory talking. “Georgia,” I said, using her pet name. “My family is more complicated than you think. My mother . . .” But I couldn’t manage the rest of the sentence. “It’s okay,” she promised. “I’m not upset. She loves you, that’s all.” She swiveled and we kissed like teenagers, making out under the bridge. It was a wonderful feeling to be grown and yet young. To be married but not settled. To be tied down yet free. My mother exaggerated. The Piney Woods was about on the level of a Motel 6, a star and a half by objective measure, but you have to throw in another star just for being the only hotel in town. A lifetime ago, I had taken a girl here after prom, hoping to get that virginity thing out of the way. I bagged a lot of groceries at Piggly Wiggly to pay for the room, the bottle of Asti Spumante, and a few other accoutrements of romance. I even swung by the Laundromat for a stack of quarters to operate the Magic Fingers. The night ended up being a comedy of errors. The bed massager ate six quarters before it finally kicked on, rumbling as loud as a lawn mower. Furthermore, my date wore a plantation-era hoop dress that flipped up and hit me in the nose when I was trying to get better acquainted. After we checked in and settled into our room, I told this story to Celestial, hoping she would laugh. Instead, she said, “Come here, sweetie,” and let me rest my head on her bosom, which is kind of exactly what the prom date did. “I feel like we’re camping,” I said. “More like study abroad.” Locking my eyes with hers in the mirror, I spoke. “I was almost born right in this hotel. Olive once worked here, cleaning.” Back then, Piney Woods Inn was named the Rebel’s Roost, clean, but the confederate flag hung in every room. Scrubbing a bathtub when labor pains kicked in, my mama was determined that I would not start my life under the stars and bars. She clamped her knees shut until the motel owner, a decent man despite the decor, drove her the thirty miles to Alexandria. It was 1969, April 5, a year to the day, and I slept my first night’s sleep in an integrated nursery. My mama was proud of that. “Where was Big Roy?” Celestial asked, as I knew she would. The question was the whole reason we were here at all, so why did I have such a difficult time answering her? I led her to this question, but once it was asked, I went as noiseless as a rock. “Was he working?” Celestial had been sitting in bed sewing more beads onto the mayor’s doll, but my silence got her attention. She bit the thread, tied it off, and twisted to look at me. “What’s the matter?” I was still moving my lips with no sound. This wasn’t the right place to start this story. My story may begin the day I was born, but the story goes back further. “Roy, what is it? What’s wrong?” “Big Roy is not my real father.” This was the one short sentence that I promised my mother I would never say aloud. “What?” “Biologically speaking.” “But your name?” “He made a junior out of me when I was a baby.” I got up from the bed and mixed us a couple of drinks—canned juice and vodka. As I stirred the cups with my finger, I couldn’t bring myself to meet her eyes, not even in the mirror. She said, “How long have you known this?” “They told me before I went to kindergarten. Eloe is a small town, and they didn’t want me to hear it on the school yard.” “Is that why you’re telling me? So I don’t hear it in the street?” “No,” I said. “I’m telling you because I want you to know all my secrets.” I returned to the bed and handed her the thin plastic cup. “Cheers.” Not joining me in my pitiful toast, she set the cup on the scarred nightstand and carefully reswaddled the mayor’s doll. “Roy, why do you do things like this? We’ve been married more than a year, and it never occurred to you to share this with me before now?” I was waiting for the rest, the terse words and tears; maybe I was even looking forward to it. But Celestial only cast her eyes upward and shook her head. She breathed air in, she breathed air out. “Roy, you’re doing this on purpose.” “This? What this?” “You tell me that we’re making a family, that I’m the closest person to you, and then you drop a bomb like this.” “It’s not a bomb. What difference does it make?” I flipped it as a rhetorical question, but I craved a real true answer. I needed her to say that it didn’t make a difference, that I was myself, not my gnarled family tree. “It’s not this one thing. It’s the phone numbers in your wallet, the way you don’t always wear your ring. Then this. As soon as we get over one thing, there’s something else. If I didn’t know better, I would think that you were trying to sabotage our marriage, the baby, everything.” She said it like it was all my fault, as though it were possible to tango alone. When I was mad, I didn’t raise my voice. Instead, I lowered it to a register that you heard with your bones, not your ears. “Are you sure you want to do this? Is this the out you’ve been waiting for? That’s the real question. I tell you that I don’t know my daddy and you’re having second thoughts about our whole relationship? Look, I didn’t tell you because it didn’t have anything to do with us.” “There’s something wrong with you,” she said. Her face in the streaked mirror was wide awake and angry. “See,” I said. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you. So now what? You feel like you don’t know me because you don’t know my exact genetic profile? What kind of bourgie shit is that?” “The issue is that you didn’t tell me. I don’t care that you don’t know who your daddy is.” “I didn’t say that I didn’t know who he is. What are you trying to say about my mother? That she didn’t know who she was pregnant for? Really, Celestial? You want to go there?” “Don’t flip the script on semantics,” Celestial said. “You’re the one who kept a secret the size of Alaska.” “What is there to tell you? My real daddy is Othaniel Jenkins. That’s all I got. So now you know everything I know. That’s a secret as big as Alaska? More like Connecticut. Rhode Island, maybe.” “Don’t twist this around,” she said. “Look,” I said. “Have some sympathy. Olive wasn’t even seventeen yet. He took advantage of her. He was a grown man.” “I’m talking about me and you. We are married. Married. I don’t care what the hell his name is. Do I look like I care what your mother . . .” I turned to look at her without the mediation of the mirror, and what I saw worried me. Her eyes were half-shut and she pressed her lips, preparing to speak, and I instinctively knew I didn’t want to hear whatever she was about to say. “November 17,” I said before she could complete her thought. Other couples use safe words to call a time-out from rough sex, but we used it as a time-out from rough words. If either of us says “November 17,” the anniversary of our first date, then all conversation must cease for fifteen minutes. I pulled the trigger because I knew that if she said one more word about my mama, one of us would say something that we couldn’t come back from. Celestial threw up her hands. “Fine. Fifteen minutes.” I stood up and picked up the plastic ice bucket. “I’ll go fill this up.” Fifteen minutes is a nice chunk of time to kill. As soon as I was out the door, Celestial was going to call Andre. They met in a playpen when they were too young to even sit up, so they are thick like brother and sister. I know Dre from college, and it was through him that I met Celestial in the first place. While she fumed to Dre, I walked up to the second floor and set the bucket on the machine and pulled the lever. Ice cubes tumbled out in fits and starts. As I waited, I encountered a woman about Olive’s age, heavyset, with a kind, dimpled face. Her arm was trussed up in a cloth sling. “Rotator cuff,” she said, explaining that driving was a challenge, but a grandbaby waited on her in Houston, a grandbaby she planned to lift with one good arm. Being the gentleman my mama raised me to be, I carried her ice back to her room, number 206. Because of her injury, she had trouble operating the window, so I lifted the frame and propped it open with the Bible. I had another seven minutes to go, so I went into the bathroom and played plumber, fixing the toilet that was running like Niagara. Leaving, I warned her that the doorknob was loose, that she should double-check to make sure it was locked when I left. She thanked me; I called her ma’am. It was 8:48 p.m. I know this because I checked my watch to see if it was late enough for me to return to my wife. I tapped on the door at 8:53. Celestial had made us two fresh Cape Codders. Reaching into the bucket with her naked hand, she added three cubes for each us. She shook the drinks to spread the chill and then she extended her beautiful arm in my direction. And this was the last happy evening I would experience for a very long time. Celestial Memory is a queer creature, an eccentric curator. I still look back on that night, although not as often as I once did. How long can you live with your face twisted over your shoulder? No matter what people may say, this was not a failure to remember. I’m not sure it is a failure at all. When I say that I visit the Piney Woods Inn in my waking dreams, I’m not being defensive. It’s merely the truth. Like Aretha said, A woman’s only human. . . . She’s flesh and blood, just like her man. No more, no less. My regret is how hard we argued that night, over his parents, of all things. We had fought harder even before we married, when we were playing at love, but those were tussles about our relationship. At the Piney Woods, we tangled about history, and there is no fair fight to be waged about the past. Knowing something I didn’t, Roy called out “November 17,” stopping time. When he left with the ice bucket, I was glad for him to go. I called Andre, and after three rings he picked up and talked me down, sane and civil as always. “Ease up on Roy,” he said. “If you lose it every time he tries to come clean, you’re encouraging him to lie.” “But,” I said, not ready to let go. “He didn’t even—” “You know I’m right,” he said without being smug. “But what you don’t know is that I’m entertaining a young lady this evening.” “Pardon moi,” I said, happy for him. “Gigolos get lonely, too,” he said. I was still grinning when I hung up the phone. And I was still smiling when Roy appeared at the door with the ice bucket extended in his arms like a bouquet of roses, and by then my anger had cooled like a forgotten cup of coffee. “Georgia, I’m sorry,” he said, taking the drink from my hand. “This has been burning a hole in my pocket. Think how I feel. You have this perfect family. Your father is a millionaire.” “He didn’t always have money,” I said, something that I seemed to say at least once a week. Before my father sold his orange juice solution to Minute Maid, we were like any other family in Cascade Heights, what the rest of America thinks of as middle-middle class and what black America calls upper-middle class. No maid. No private school. No trust fund. Just two parents, each with two degrees and, between them, two decent jobs. “Well, as long as I’ve known you, you have been a rich man’s daughter.” “A million dollars doesn’t make you rich-rich,” I said. “Real rich people don’t have to earn their money.” “Rich-rich, nouveau rich, nigger rich—any kind of rich looks rich from where I’m sitting. There is no way I was going to roll up on your father in his mansion and tell him that I’ve never met my daddy.” He took a step toward me and I moved toward him. “It’s not a mansion,” I said, making my voice soft. “And I told you, my daddy is literally the son of a sharecropper. An Alabama sharecropper at that.” These conversations always caught me off guard, although after a year I should have been accustomed to this fraught song and dance. My mother cautioned me before I got married that Roy and I were from two separate realities. She said that I would constantly have to reassure him that we were, in fact, “equally yoked.” Amused by her language, I shared this with Roy, along with a joke about pulling a plow, but he didn’t even crack a smile. “Celestial, your daddy ain’t sharing no crops now. And what about your mom? I wasn’t going to have her seeing Olive as a teenage mother, left by the side of the road. No way was I going to set my mama up like that.” I closed the space between us, resting my hands on his head, feeling the curve of his scalp. “Look,” I said with my lips near his ears. “We’re not blackface Leave It to Beaver. You know my mother is Daddy’s second wife.” “Is that supposed to be some kind of shocker?” “That’s because you don’t know the whole story.” I took a breath and pushed the words out fast before I could think too much more about them. “My parents got together before Daddy was divorced.” “You saying they were separated . . . or?” “I’m saying that my mother was his mistress. For a long time. I think like three years or so. My mother was a June bride at the courthouse because her pastor wouldn’t perform the ceremony.” I have seen the photos. Gloria wears an off-white suit and a veiled pillbox hat. My father looks young and excited. There is no indication of anything but effortless devotion in their smiles. There is no evidence of me, but I’m in the frame, too, hiding behind her yellow chrysanthemum bouquet. “Damn,” he said with a low whistle. “I didn’t think Mr. D had it in him. I didn’t think Gloria—” “Don’t talk about my mama,” I said. “You don’t talk about mine, and I won’t talk about yours.” “I’m not holding anything against Gloria, like I know you wouldn’t hold anything against Olive, right?” “There’s something to hold against my daddy. Gloria says that he didn’t tell her he was married until they had been dating a whole month.” She explained this to me when I was eighteen, when I was leaving Howard University after a messy love affair. Helping me seal cardboard cartons, my mother had said, “Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasionally this is in service of the good. Did you know that your father had certain obligations when we met?” I think of this as the first time my mother had ever spoken to me as one woman to another. Wordlessly, we swore each other to secrecy, and until now, I had never betrayed her confidence. “A month, that’s not a lot of time. She could have walked away,” Roy said. “That is, if she wanted to.” “She didn’t want to,” I said. “According to Gloria, by then she was irreversibly in love.” As I told this to Roy, I imitated my mother in the tone she used in public, elocution-class crisp, not the shaky register in which she had shared this detail. “What?” Roy said. “Irreversibly? The warranty was up after thirty days and she couldn’t send him back?” “Gloria said that looking back on it, she’s glad he didn’t tell her because she never would have gone out with a married man and Daddy turned out to be the One.” “I can get that, in a way.” Roy raised my hand to his lips. “Sometimes when you like where you end up, you don’t care how you got there.” “No,” I said. “The journey matters. Let my mama tell it. My daddy lied to her for her own good. I never want to feel grateful about being deceived.” “Fair enough,” he said. “But think about it 2.0. If your daddy didn’t hide his situation, you wouldn’t be here. And if you weren’t here, where would I be?” “I still don’t like it. I want us to be on the up-and-up. I don’t want our kid to inherit all of our secrets.” Roy pumped his fist in the air. “Did you hear yourself?” “What?” “You said ‘our kid.’ ” “Roy, stop being silly. Listen to what I’m trying to say.” “Don’t try and take it back. You said ‘our kid.’ ” “Roy,” I said. “I’m for real. No more secrets, okay? If you got anything else, spill it.” “I got nothing.” And with that, we reconciled, as we had so many times before. There is a song about that, too: Break up to make up, that’s all we do. Did I imagine that this was our pattern for all time? That we would grow old together, accusing and forgiving? Back then, I didn’t know what forever looked like. Maybe I don’t even know now. But that night in the Piney Woods, I believed that our marriage was a fine-spun tapestry, fragile but fixable. We tore it often and mended it, always with a silken thread, lovely but sure to give way. We climbed into the small bed, a little buzzed from our jerry-rigged cocktails. Agreeing that the bedspread was suspect, we kicked it to the floor and lay facing each other. Lying there, tracing his brow bone with my fingers, I thought of my parents and even Roy’s. Their marriages were cut from less refined but more durable cloth, something like cotton-sack burlap, bound with gray twine. How superior Roy and I felt that night in this rented room of our own, enjoying the braid of our affection. I am ashamed at the memory and the hot blood heats my face, even if I’m only dreaming. Then, I didn’t know that our bodies can know things before they happen, so when my eyes suddenly filled with tears, I thought this was the unpredictable effect of emotion. It washed over me sometimes when I was browsing fabric stores or preparing a meal—I would think about Roy, his bowlegged walk or the time he wrestled a robber to the ground, costing him a precious front tooth. When memory tapped me, I let go a few tears, no matter where I was, blaming it on allergies or an eyelash gone rogue. So when my emotion filled my eyes and closed my throat on that night in Eloe, I thought it was passion rather than premonition. When we planned the trip, I’d thought we’d be staying at his mother’s, so I didn’t pack lingerie. Instead, I wore a white slip, which would have to do for our game of undressing. Roy smiled and said he loved me. His voice caught, like whatever had taken hold of me had grabbed him, too. As silly as we were, young as we were, we thought it was merely desire. This thing we enjoyed in abundance. So there we were, not sleeping yet spent, occupying some in-between restful affection state, full of possibility. I sat up in bed next to him, inhaling the odors of the day—river mud, the musk of hotel soap, and then the scent of him, the marker of his personal chemistry, and then my own. It’s a fragrance that burrowed into the fibers of our sheets. I eased close to him and kissed his shut lids. I was thinking that I was lucky. I didn’t mean that I was lucky in the way that single women made me feel when they reminded me how fortunate I was to find a marrying man these days, and not lucky in the way of magazine features lamenting how few “good” black men there were remaining, providing a bullet-point litany of the ineligible—dead, gay, in jail, married to white women. Yes, I was fortunate by all those measures, but in my marriage to Roy, I felt blessed in the old-fashioned sense, in the way that anyone would be in finding someone whose smell you enjoyed. Did we love so forcefully that night because we knew or because we didn’t? Was there an alarm from the future, a furious bell without its clapper? Did this hopeless bell manage to generate a breeze, causing me to reach to the floor to find my slip and use it to cover myself? Did some subtle warning cause Roy to turn and pin me to his side with his heavy arm? In his sleep, he mumbled something but did not wake. Did I want a child? Did I lie in bed that night imagining an eager clump of cells dividing and then dividing again until I was somebody’s mother and Roy was somebody’s daddy, and Big Roy, Olive, and my parents were somebody’s grandparents? I did wonder what was going on inside my body, but I won’t say what I hoped for. Is motherhood really optional when you’re a perfectly normal woman married to a perfectly normal man? When I was in college, I took on a volunteer position at a literacy organization and tutored teen mothers. It was hard work and tended to be disheartening, as the young women seldom earned their diplomas. My supervisor said to me over espresso and croissants, “Have a baby and save the race!” He was smiling, but he wasn’t kidding. “If girls like this are having all the kids, and girls like you stay childless and fancy-free, what’s going to happen to us as a people?” Without thinking, I promised to do my part. This is not to say that I didn’t want to be a mother. It’s not to say that I did. This is only to say that I was certain that the check would come due. So while Roy slept with confidence, I closed my eyes with trepidation. I was still awake when the door burst open. I know they kicked it in, but the written report says that a front-desk clerk handed over the key and the door was opened in a civilized manner. But who knows what is true? I remember my husband asleep in our room while a woman six years older than his mother says she slept lightly in room 206, worried because the door didn’t seem quite secure. She told herself she was being paranoid but couldn’t convince her eyes to stay closed. Before midnight, a man twisted the knob, knowing that he could. It was dark, but she believed she recognized Roy, the man she met at the ice machine. The man who told her he had been fighting with his wife. She said that this was not her first time finding herself at the mercy of a man, but it would be the last. Roy, she said, may be smart, and he may have learned by watching TV how to cover his tracks, but he couldn’t erase her memory. But she couldn’t erase mine either. Roy was with me all night. She doesn’t know who hurt her, but I know who I married. I married Roy Othaniel Hamilton, whom I met for the first time when I was in college. Our connection wasn’t immediate. He considered himself a playboy in those days, and even at age nineteen, I was not one to play with. I’d come to Spelman as a transfer student after the one-year disaster at Howard University in DC. So much for me leaving home. My mother, an alumna herself, insisted that this was where I would cultivate new, bone-deep friendships, but I stuck close with Andre, who was literally the boy next door. We had been close since we were three months old, bathing together in the kitchen sink. Andre was the one who introduced me to Roy, although it wasn’t quite on purpose. They had been next-door neighbors in Thurman Hall, on the far side of campus. I often stayed nights in Andre’s room, strictly platonic, although no one believed us. He slept atop the covers, while I huddled under the blankets. None of it makes sense now, but this is how Dre and I always were. Before Roy and I were properly introduced, a sex-breathy voice on the other side of the wall pronounced his whole name. Roy. Othaniel. Hamilton. Andre said, “You think he asked her to say that?” I snorted. “Othaniel?” “Doesn’t strike me as a spontaneous utterance.” We giggled as the twin bed thumped against the wall. “I think she’s faking it.” “If she is,” Andre said, “then they all are.” I didn’t meet Roy in person for another month. Again, I was in Andre’s room. Roy came by at 10 a.m., trying to hustle up some change to do his laundry. He came in without the courtesy of a knock. “Oh, excuse me, ma’am,” Roy said in a way that sounded like a surprised question. “My sister,” Andre said. “Play sister?” Roy wanted to know, sizing up the dynamic. “If you want to know who I am, ask me.” I must have looked a sight, wearing Andre’s maroon-and-white T-shirt and my hair tucked beneath a satin bonnet, but I had to speak up for myself. “Okay, who are you?” “Celestial Davenport.” “I’m Roy Hamilton.” “Roy Othaniel Hamilton, from what I hear through the wall.” After that, he and I stared at each other, waiting for a cue to show us what type of story this was going to be. Finally, he looked away and asked Andre for a case quarter. I flipped over on my stomach, bent my knees, and crossed my legs at the ankle. “You something else,” Roy said. When Roy was gone, Andre said, “You know that Gomer Pyle thing is an act.” “Clearly,” I said. Something about him was dangerous, and after my experience at Howard, I wanted no part of danger. I suppose it wasn’t our time because I didn’t speak with or even think about Roy Othaniel Hamilton again for another four years, when college felt like a photo album memory from another era. When we reconnected, it wasn’t that he was so different. It’s just that what felt like peril then now morphed into something that I labeled “realness,” something for which I developed a bottomless appetite. But what is real? Was it our uneventful first impression? Or the day in New York, of all places, where we found each other once again? Or did things “get real” when we married, or was it the day that the prosecutor in a little nowhere town declared Roy to be a flight risk? The state declared that though he may have roots in Louisiana, his home was in Atlanta, so he was held without bond or bail. At this pronouncement, Roy spat out a caustic laugh. “So now roots are irrelevant?” Our lawyer, friend of my family but paid handsomely just the same, promised me that I wasn’t going to lose my man. Uncle Banks made motions, filed papers, and objected. But still, Roy slept behind bars one hundred nights before he was brought to trial. For one month, I remained in Louisiana, living with my in-laws, sleeping in the room that could have saved us this trouble. I waited and I sewed. I called Andre. I called my parents. When I sent the mayor his doll, I couldn’t bring myself to seal the flaps on the sturdy cardboard box. Big Roy did it for me and the memory of ripping tape troubled my sleep that night and many nights to come. “If this doesn’t go the way we want it to,” Roy said the day before his trial, “I don’t want you to wait for me. Keep making your dolls and doing what you need to do.” “This is going to work out,” I promised. “You didn’t do it.” “I’m looking at so much time. I can’t ask you to throw your life away for me.” His words and his eyes were speaking two different languages, like someone saying no while nodding his head yes. “No one is going to throw anything away,” I said. I had faith in those days. I believed in things. Andre showed up for us. He had been a witness at our wedding and a character witness at trial. Dre let me cut his hair, handing me the scissors to saw through the dreads he had been growing for the last four years. At our wedding, they had been rebellious little nubs, but when I cut them off they were finally responding to gravity, pointing toward his collar. When I was done, he walked his fingers through the choppy curls that remained. The next day we took our seats in the courtroom, costumed to seem as innocent as possible. My parents were there, and Roy’s, too. Olive was dressed for church, and Big Roy sat beside her looking poor-but-honest. Like Andre, my own father groomed himself, and he, for once, appeared to be “equally yoked” to my elegant mother. Watching Roy, I could see he was an obvious match for us. It wasn’t just the cut of his coat or the break of his hem against the fine leather of his shoes; it was his face, shaven clean, and his eyes, innocent and afraid, unaccustomed to being at the mercy of the state. The time in the county jail shrank him; the boyish chub of his cheek was gone, revealing a squared-off jaw that I didn’t know he had. Strangely enough, the leanness made him look more powerful than wasted. The only thing that gave him away as a man on trial, rather than a man on his way to work, was his poor fingers. He’d chewed his nails down to the soft meat and started in on his cuticles. Sweet Roy. The only thing that my good man ever hurt was his own hands. What I know is this: they didn’t believe me. Twelve people and not one of them took me at my word. There in front of the room, I explained Roy couldn’t have raped the woman in room 206 because we had been together. I told them about the Magic Fingers that wouldn’t work, about the movie that played on the snowy television. The prosecutor asked me what we had been fighting about. Rattled, I looked to Roy and to both our mothers. Banks objected, so I didn’t have to answer, but the pause made it appear that I was concealing something rotten at the pit of our very young marriage. Even before I stepped down from the witness stand, I knew that I had failed him. Maybe I wasn’t appealing enough. Not dramatic enough. Too not-from-around-here. Who knows? Uncle Banks, coaching me, said, “Now is not the time to be articulate. Now is the time to give it up. No filter, all heart. No matter what you’re asked, what you want the jury to see is why you married him.” I tried, but I didn’t know how to be anything other than “well spoken” in front of strangers. I wish I could have brought a selection of my art, the Man Moving series, all images of Roy—the marble, the dolls, and a few watercolors. I would say, “This is who he is to me. Isn’t he beautiful? Isn’t he gentle?” But all I had were words, which are as light and flimsy as air. As I took my seat beside Andre, not even the black lady juror would look at me. It turns out that I watch too much television. I was expecting a scientist to come and testify about DNA. I was looking for a pair of good-looking detectives to burst into the courtroom at the last minute, whispering something urgent to the prosecutor. Everyone would see that this was a big mistake, a major misunderstanding. We would all be shaken but appeased. I fully believed that I would leave the courtroom with my husband beside me. Secure in our home, we would tell people how no black man is really safe in America. Twelve years is what they gave him. We would be forty-three years old when he was released. I couldn’t even imagine myself at such an age. Roy understood that twelve years was an eternity because he sobbed right there at the defendants’ table. His knees gave way, and he fell into his chair. The judge paused and demanded that Roy bear this news on his feet. He stood again and cried, not like a baby, but in the way that only a grown man can cry, from the bottom of his feet up through his torso and finally through his mouth. When a man wails like that you know it’s all the tears that he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointment to teenage heartbreak, all the way to whatever injured his spirit just last year. As Roy howled, my fingers kept worrying a rough patch of skin beneath my chin, a souvenir of scar tissue. When they did what I remember as kicking in the door, what everyone else remembers as opening it with a plastic key, after the door was opened, however it was opened, we were both pulled from the bed. They dragged Roy into the parking lot, and I followed, lunging for him, wearing nothing but the white slip. Somebody pushed me to the ground and my chin hit the pavement. My slip rode up showing my everything to everyone as my tooth sank into the soft of my bottom lip. Roy was on the asphalt beside me, barely beyond my grasp, speaking words that didn’t reach my ears. I don’t know how long we lay there, parallel like burial plots. Husband. Wife. What God has brought together, let no man tear asunder. Dear Roy, I’m writing this letter sitting at the kitchen table. I’m alone in a way that’s more than the fact that I am the only living person within these walls. Up until now, I thought I knew what was and wasn’t possible. Maybe that’s what innocence is, having no way to predict the pain of the future. When something happens that eclipses the imaginable, it changes a person. It’s like the difference between a raw egg and a scrambled egg. It’s the same thing, but it’s not the same at all. That’s the best way that I can put it. I look in the mirror and I know it’s me, but I can’t quite recognize myself. Sometimes it’s exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I’ve lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn’t kill me then and will not kill me now. But this is what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again. Before I met you, I was not lonely, but now I’m so lonely I talk to the walls and sing to the ceiling. They said that you can’t receive mail for at least a month. Still, I’ll write to you every night. Yours, Celestial Roy O. Hamilton Jr. PRA 4856932 Parson Correctional Center 3751 Lauderdale Woodyard Rd. Jemison, LA 70648 Dear Celestial, aka Georgia, I don’t think I have written a letter to anyone since I was in high school and assigned a French pen pal. (That whole thing lasted about ten minutes.) I know for sure that this is the first time I ever wrote a love letter and that’s what this is going to be. Celestial, I love you. I miss you. I want to come home to you. Look at me, telling you the things you already know. I’m trying to write something on this paper that will make you remember me—the real me, not the man you saw standing in a broke-down country courtroom, broke down myself. I was too ashamed to turn toward you, but now I wish I had, because right now I would do anything for one more look. This love letter thing is uphill for me. I have never even seen one unless you count the third grade: Do you like me yes no. (Don’t answer that, ha!) A love letter is supposed to be like music or like Shakespeare, but I don’t know anything about Shakespeare. But for real, I want to tell you what you mean to me, but it’s like trying to count the seconds of a day on your fingers and toes. Why didn’t I write you love letters all the while, so I could be in practice? Then I would know what to do. That’s how I feel every day here, like I don’t know what to do or how to do it. I have always let you know how much I care, right? You never had to wonder. I’m not a man for words. My daddy showed me that you do for a woman. Remember that time when you damn near had a nervous breakdown because it looked like the hickory-nut tree in the front yard was thinking about dying? Where I’m from, we don’t believe in spending money on pets, let alone trees. But I couldn’t bear to see you fret, so I hired a tree doctor. See, in my mind, that was a love letter. The first thing I did as your husband was to “sit you down,” like the old folks say. You were wasting your time and your talents doing temp work. You wanted to sew, so I made it happen. No strings. That was my love letter to say, “I got this. Make your art. Rest yourself. Whatever you need to do.” But now all I have is this paper and this raggedy ink pen. It’s a ballpoint, but they take away the casing so you just have the nib and this plastic tube of ink. I’m looking at it, thinking, This is all I have to be a husband with? But here I am trying. Love, Roy Dear Georgia, Hello from Mars! That’s not really a joke. The dorms here are all named for planets. (This is the truth. I couldn’t make this up.) Your letters were delivered to me yesterday. Each and every one, and I was very happy to receive them. Overjoyed. I am not sure even where to start. I haven’t even been here three months, and already I have had three cell partners. The one I have now says he’s here for good, and he says it like he has some type of inside track. His name is Walter. He’s been incarcerated for most of his adult life, so he knows what’s what around here. I write letters for him but not gratis. It’s not that I’m not compassionate, but you get no respect when you do things for free. (This I learned in the workforce, and it’s ten times as true in here.) Walter doesn’t have money, so I let him give me cigarettes. (Don’t make that face. I know you, girl. I don’t smoke them. I trade them for other things—like ramen noodles. I kid you not.) The letters I write for Walter are to women he meets through personal ads. You would be surprised how many ladies want to pen-pal with convicts. (Don’t get jealous, ha ha.) Sometimes I get irritated, staying up so late answering all his questions. He says he used to live in Eloe, so he wants me to bring him up to date. When I said that I haven’t lived in Eloe since before I went to college, he says he has never set foot on a college campus and he wants me to tell him all about that, too. He was even curious about how I got the name Roy. It’s not like my name is Patrice Lumumba, something that needs explaining, but Walter is what Olive would call “a character.” We call him the “Ghetto Yoda” because he’s always getting philosophical. I accidentally said “Country Yoda” and he got mad. I swear it was an honest mistake, and it’s one I won’t make again. But it’s all good. He looks out for me, saying that “us bowlegged brothers got to stick together.” (You should see his legs. Worse than mine.) So that’s all I got in terms of atmosphere. Or all that I want you to know about. Don’t ask me questions about the details. Just suffice it to say that it’s bad in here. Even if you killed somebody, you don’t deserve to spend more than a couple of years in this place. Please tell your uncle to get on it. There is so much here that makes you stop and say, “Hmm . . .” Like there are about fifteen hundred men in this facility (mostly brothers), and that’s the same number of students at “Dear Morehouse.” I don’t want to be some kind of crazy conspiracy nut, but it’s hard not to think about things in that way. For one, prison is full of people who call themselves “dropping science,” and second, things here are so bent that you think somebody must be bending it on purpose. My mother wrote to me, too, and you know her theory—“the devil stays busy.” My dad thinks it’s the Klan. Well, not the Klan specifically with hoods and crosses but more like Ameri–KKKa. I don’t know what I think. Besides thinking that I miss you. I finally got to make my visitors’ list and right at the top is you, Celestial GLORIANA Davenport. (They want your full government name.) I’ll put Dre on, too—does he have a middle name? It’s probably something religious like Elijah. You know he’s my boy, but when you come the first time, come by yourself. Meanwhile, keep the letters flowing, baby. How did I forget that you have such a pretty handwriting? If you decide not to be a famous artist, you could go be a schoolteacher with that penmanship. You must bear down on the pen because the paper buckles. At night, when the lights are out—not that they are ever really out—they make it dark enough that you can’t read but too light to really sleep—but when they cut the lights off, I run my fingers over your letters and try to read them like Braille. (Romantic, right?) And thank you for putting money on my books. You have to buy everything you think you might want in here. Underwear, socks. Whatever you need to try and make your life a little better. This isn’t a hint, but it would be nice to have a clock radio, and of course the main thing that would make my life a little better would be seeing you. Love, Roy PS: When I first started calling you Georgia, it was because I could tell you were homesick. Now I call you that because I’m the one missing home and home is you. Dear Roy, By the time you get this letter, I will have already been to visit because I’m mailing it on the way out of town. Andre has filled the tank and the car is stocked with snacks. I have practically memorized the visitors’ guide. There are clothing regulations and they are extremely specific. My favorite detail is that “gauchos and culottes are strictly prohibited.” I bet you don’t even know what those are. I recall them being very fashionable when I was in the fourth grade, and thankfully, they have never come back in style. To summarize the dress code: show no skin. Don’t wear an underwire bra unless you want to fail the metal detector test and get sent home. I imagine it’s like going to the airport . . . on your way to a convent. But I’m ready. It goes without saying that I know this country and I know history. I even remember a man who came to speak at Spelman who had been wrongfully imprisoned for decades. Did you see him? He spoke along with the white woman who pointed the finger at him in the first place. They both got saved or something. Even though they stood right there in front of me, they felt like a lesson from the past, a phantom from Mississippi. What did it have to do with us, college students piled in the chapel for convocation credit? Now I wish I could remember what they said. I’m bringing this up because I knew that things like this happen to people, but by people, I didn’t mean us. Do you ever think about the one who accused you? I wish I could have a sit-down with her. Somebody attacked her in that room. I don’t think she’s making that up, you could tell that just from her voice. But that somebody wasn’t you. Now she’s gone back to Chicago or whatever, wishing she never stopped in Eloe, Louisiana, and she isn’t the only one. But you don’t need me to tell you this. You know where you are and you know what you didn’t do. Uncle Banks is preparing the first appeal. He reminds me that it could be worse. Many people have run-ins with the law and they don’t live to tell the tale. There’s no appealing a cop’s bullet. So at least there’s that, but it’s not much. Do you know that I’m praying for you? Can you feel it at night when I get down on my knees beside my bed like I did when I was a little girl? I close my eyes and I can picture you the way you were when we were last together, all the way down to the freckle over your eyebrow. I have a notebook where I wrote down every word that we said to each other before we fell asleep that night. I wrote it down so when you get home, we can pick up where we left off. True confession: I am extremely nervous. I know it’s not the same, but it reminds me of when we were first going out, when we were trying to be a long-distance couple and you sent me a ticket. After all the buildup with our phone conversations and email, I wasn’t sure what to expect when we finally saw each other again. Obviously it all worked out, but I feel the same way writing this letter. So I want to say in advance that even if things are awkward between us when we finally lay eyes on each other, please know that it’s because it’s all very new and I’m so agitated. Nothing has changed. I love you as much as I did the day I married you. And I will always. Yours, Celestial Dear Georgia, Thank you for coming to visit me. I know it wasn’t easy to get here. When I saw you sitting there in the visitor’s room, all classy and out of place, I have never been happier to see anyone. I could have cried like a little girl. I won’t lie. It was strange to have to see each other for the first time in front of so many people. And the truth is that I was quiet because you said that you didn’t want to talk about what was really on my mind. I didn’t push it because I didn’t want to ruin our time together. And it wasn’t ruined. I was very glad to see you. Walter teased me all the next day about being lit up like a Christmas tree. But I’m sorry, Celestial. I have to tell you what has been troubling my soul. I know that I said that I didn’t want any son of mine having to say his daddy was in jail. You know I don’t know much about my biological father except his name and that he is probably a criminal. But since Big Roy raised me as his own, I didn’t have to wear shame around my neck like a giant clock. Sometimes, though, in the back of my mind I could hear that clock ticking. I was also thinking about this kid I knew named Myron whose father was in Angola. Myron was teeny-tiny and his clothes were all donated by the church. One time I saw him in one of my cast-off jackets. They nicknamed him “Chickie” because his daddy was a jailbird. To this day, he answers to “Chickie” like it’s his real name. But our kid would have had Mr. D and Gloria, Andre, and my family, too. That’s a village and half right there to take care of him until I win my freedom. He would have been something else for me to look forward to. I can see why you didn’t want to talk about it. What’s done is done. But I can’t stop thinking about him. Of course, I don’t know that the baby was a boy, but my gut is telling me he was my junior. This is painful to ask, but if we had more faith, would things have worked out differently? What if it was a test? What if we kept the baby? I could have made it home in time to see him crown into the world, innocent and bald-headed. This whole ordeal would just be a story we would tell him when he was older, to teach him how to be careful as a black man in these United States. When we decided to have the abortion, it was like we were accepting that things weren’t going to work out in the courtroom. And when we gave up, God gave up on us, too. Not that He ever gives up, but you know what I mean. You don’t have to answer this. But tell me, who knows about it? It doesn’t matter, but I’m curious. I put your parents on my visitors’ list and I wonder if they know what we did. Georgia, I know I can’t make you talk about what you don’t want to talk about, but you should know what it was that was blocking my throat so I couldn’t hardly talk. Still, it was beautiful to see you. I love you more than I can say here. Your husband, Roy Dear Roy, Yes, baby, yes, I think about it, but not constantly. You can’t sit with something like that every single day. But when I do, it is with sadness more than regret. I understand that you’re in pain, but please do not ever send me another letter like the one you sent last week. Have you forgotten the county jail? It smelled like pee and bleach and all these desperate women and kids surrounding us. Your complexion was so gray that you looked like you had been powdered over with ashes. Your hands were rough like alligator skin, and you couldn’t get any cream to stop the cracking and bleeding. Have you forgotten all of that? Uncle Banks had to find you a new suit because you dropped so much weight waiting for your “speedy trial.” You were your own ghost. When I told you I was pregnant, it wasn’t good news, not in the way it should have been. I hoped the idea would stir you, bring you back to this life. You did come back but only to moan into your tight fists. Remember your own words: You can’t have it. Not like this. This is what you said to me, your grip on my wrist so tight my fingers tingled. You can’t tell me that you didn’t mean what you said. You didn’t mention a boy named Chickie or your “real” dad, but I saw the forest, if not the trees. This is something that I was sure about at the time, and I’m still mostly sure about now: I don’t want to be a mother of a child born against his father’s wishes, and you made your wishes clear. Roy, you know I hated to do it. However much it hurts you, remember that I am the one it happened to. I am the one who was pregnant. I’m the one who isn’t pregnant anymore. Whatever you feel, think about what I must feel. Just like you can say I don’t know what it is like to be in prison, you don’t know what it’s like to go to a clinic and sign your name in the book. I’m dealing with it in the way that I do, through my work. I’ve been sewing like a crazy person, late at night. The dolls remind me of a doll I had when I was little, when you could go to Cleveland, Georgia, and adopt a “baby.” They were a little beyond our means, but Gloria and I went out there to at least have a look. When we saw all the dolls on display, I said, “Is this summer camp for dolls?” And she said, no, it was like an orphanage. I was so sheltered, I didn’t even know what an orphan was, and when she explained, I sobbed and asked to take all the dolls home. I don’t think of my dolls as orphans; they’re babies that happen to live in my sewing room. I’ve made forty-two so far. I’m thinking I’ll try and sell them at craft fairs, at cost, about fifty dollars each. These are for children, not collectors. And truth be told, I want to get them out of the house. I can’t have them staring at me all day, but I can’t stop making them either. You asked me who knows. Are you asking me who knows what I did or who knows that you asked me to? Do you think I took out a billboard? If you’re a grown woman and you have more than ten dollars in the bank, nobody understands why you can’t have a baby. But how could I think about being a mother with my husband in prison? I know you’re innocent, there is not one doubt in my mind, but I also know that you’re not here. This isn’t a game, a drill, or a movie. I don’t know that it hit me until I was two weeks late and getting ready to pee on a stick. I didn’t tell anyone but Andre. All he said was, “You can’t go by yourself.” He drove me and he covered my head with his jacket as we made our way past the chanting demonstrators and their disgusting signs. When it was done, he was waiting for me. Afterward, in the car, he said something that I want to share with you. He said, “Don’t cry. This isn’t your last chance.” Roy, he’s right. You and I will have babies in the future. We will be parents. Like they say, “A girl for you, a boy for me,” or was it the other way around? But when you get out, we can have ten babies if that’s what you want. I promise you that. I love you. I miss you. Yours, Celestial Dear Georgia, I know I said that I would let this go. But I have one more thing to say. We took our family and pulled it out by the roots. Reading your letter, you make it sound like I forced you, like you came into the county jail excited to be having my child. You said, “I’m pregnant,” like it was cancer. What was I supposed to say? And besides, let’s say that I did push you in one particular direction, don’t act like you were being an obedient little woman. I’ll never forget our wedding when, in front of everyone, you got into a stare-down with the minister who asked you to say the word obey. If he didn’t back down, we would still be standing at the altar, on the outskirts of matrimony. That day at the County, we had a discussion. You and me. Two grown people. It was not about me telling you what to do. As soon as I mentioned the idea of not keeping the baby, I saw the relief on your face. I loosened my grip and you snatched the ball and ran with it. Everything you remember is true. I said what I said, but you didn’t try and argue the other side. You didn’t say that we could make it. You didn’t say that this was a child we created. You didn’t say that maybe I could be free by the time he was born. You tucked your head and said, “I can do what has to be done.” Yes, I get it. Your body, your choice. All of that they taught you at Spelman College. Fine. But we should have known there would be some consequences. I’ll take responsibility for my role in it, but it wasn’t me by myself. Love, Roy Dear Roy, Some background: In college, my roommate told me that men want a woman to be a “virgin with experience,” and therefore you should never talk about your past relationships with a man because he wants to pretend like they never happened. So I know that you’re not going to want to hear this, but I feel like you’re forcing me to share this sad story. Roy, you know that I spent a year at Howard University before Spelman, but you don’t know why I left. At Howard, I took Art of the African Diaspora, and my teacher, Raul Gomez, was the diaspora himself. A black man from Honduras, he spoke Spanish when he was excited and he was always excited about art. He said that the reason he didn’t finish his dissertation was because he couldn’t bear to write about Elizabeth Catlett in English. He was forty, married, and handsome. I was eighteen, flattered, and dumb as a box of rocks. When I figured out that I was pregnant, we were unofficially engaged. I had no ring, but I had his word, but—there is always a “but” isn’t it? But he needed to get divorced and he didn’t think that after twelve years of marriage, his wife should have to bear the shame of a “love child.” (And here I was, encouraged that he used the word love.) I believe that you know where this story is going. It’s clear to me, too, looking back on it. I was recovering when he came to my dorm room to tell me that we were done. He was all dressed up in a dark blue suit and a tie the color of ashes. I was wearing sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt. He showed up outfitted like the Harlem Renaissance and I didn’t even have shoes on my feet. He said, “You’re a beautiful girl. You turned my head and made me forget right from wrong.” And then he left. He was gone, and I was gone, too. It was like I slipped on a patch of ice on a dark road inside my own mind. I stopped going to his class and then I stopped going to all classes. After a couple of weeks, one of my dad’s friends from the chemistry department alerted my parents. Black colleges are serious about that in loco parentis thing. My folks were up to DC faster than you can say “civil lawsuit.” (Yes, Uncle Banks was the attorney. The suit was frivolous, but the goal was for Raul to lose his job.) The experience broke me down, Roy. I came back to Atlanta and just sat there for a month. Andre would come over and I didn’t even want to talk to him. My parents were seriously thinking about sending me somewhere. It was Sylvia who snapped me out of it. (Every girl needs a wise and reassuring aunt.) I was telling her the same kinds of things that you’re telling me now—how I thought I jinxed my own life. That if I had been brave enough to keep the baby, I would have been rewarded with what I really hoped for, which was to be Mrs. Gomez. That life was a test that I kept failing. Sylvia said, “I am not about to judge you. That’s between you and Jesus. Sugar, tell me the honest truth—do you wish you had a baby right now?” I really couldn’t say. The main thing was that I didn’t want to feel the way I was feeling. Then Sylvia said, “When you took the test, were you hoping for a plus or a minus?” And I said, “Minus.” So she said, “Look. What is over with is over with. What are you going to do? Get in a time machine? Go back to last fall and unfuck him?” And then she pulled out a dozen socks, embroidery thread, and cotton batting. This part of the story you know, everyone does. She showed me how to make the sock dolls that would be donated to Grady Hospital to comfort the crack babies. We went over there sometimes and held the poor little ones who were so strung out that they rattled in my arms. It wasn’t charity. I sewed those first dolls to work the guilt out of my system. I never thought of poup?es, commissions, contests, or exhibitions. I felt like every time I made something to comfort a motherless infant, I was repaying the universe for what I did. After a while, the dolls and DC weren’t connected anymore. I had a weight pressing on my soul and I dolled my way out from under it. But I didn’t forget, promising myself I would never find myself in that predicament again. For a while, I was scared to try, thinking that maybe I ruined myself, not in a medical way but in a spiritual one. Roy, I know that we had a choice, but really, we didn’t have a choice. I mourned as though I had miscarried. My body apparently was fertile soil, but my life was not. You may feel that you’re carrying a burden, but I shoulder a load as well. So now you know. We are bearing two different crosses. And can we please please please stop talking about it. If you care for me at all, you will never bring this up again. Yours, Celestial Dear Georgia, Two years down and ten to go. (This is my idea of a joke.) Finally, Banks will go forward with the appeal. I hate thinking about how much money your parents are shelling out for this. They are getting a “friends