Hold Love Strong (7 page)

“Jelly,” he said. “You coming?”

“Meet you up there,” my mother called back from the bedroom.

Donnel turned around and walked into the hallway light. Blowing out my candle, putting it down, and holding my breath as best as I could, trying not to breathe in the stale stench of hot piss that bloomed in the elevator and lived in the hall, I followed him. We took the elevator up to the top floor. Donnel muttered about how he would kill Beany if he did anything to my Aunt Rhonda. I told him that I had his back and that I hated Beany too.

“Serious,” Donnel said, leaning against the back of the elevator and glaring at its steel door. “Nigga is crazy if he thinks I'm gonna do nothing the second he hurts her.”

We reached the top floor and the elevator door squelched and groaned open. We climbed the flight of stairs to the roof. Donnel shouldered open the door and I followed him. And then, there it was: a pale blue plastic kid pool sitting between the blackness of the sky and the blackness of the tarred roof.

“I told you,” Donnel said.

We walked to the pool and stopped at its edge. It was filled with water.

“Is it warm?” I whispered as if the night were a baby I was afraid to wake.

Donnel bent down and put his hand in it. “Perfect,” he said.

Behind us the door to the stairs swung open and out walked my mother followed by my grandma.

“So I see how it is,” said my grandma, her voice deep and craggy from sleep. “You all taking a vacation without me.”

“You was sleeping!” I said, excitement making my voice loud.

“So?” said my grandma.

Donnel peeled his sweatshirt off, dropped it, kicked off his sneakers, and stepped into the water.

“Look at you,” said my mother, teasing him as she and my grandma came to the edge of the pool. “Donnel, you so skinny I can see your heart beating.”

“My heart?” said Donnel. Standing in the middle of the pool, the water just below his knees, he curled his fist to his chest, flexed his bicep, and gave the tight little mound a kiss. “What you know about this?”

“I know it ain't shit,” my mother laughed.

“It looks like you got an itty bitty egg under your skin,” I teased.

Donnel splashed water at me. “Nigga,” he said. “What're you talking about? Go ahead and lift your shirt. C'mon. Let's see that nasty ole' outie of yours.”

My outie button was the subject of most of the harassment I received from my cousins and everyone else our age who had either seen me shirtless themselves or had heard about my belly button, the tiny, limp fist that stuck out an inch and made it seem like I had a nipple in the middle of my stomach if my T-shirt was too tight. I was embarrassed by it. Sometimes I pulled on it and pushed it in and held it there, like I was plugging the hole in a dam, hoping it would stay in. Sometimes I pondered how much it would hurt if I cut it off.

“Donnel,” scolded my grandma. “You know I made that belly button with the help of great God Almighty. That right there ain't a defect. It's what…He told me to do.”

My grandma wore a pair of my uncle's basketball shorts and one of his basketball T-shirts.

“And Donnel,” she continued, “don't go pretending you didn't have
no hand in it either. You was right there too. So maybe you was holding Abraham too tight. Or maybe you wasn't holding him tight enough. You know, you didn't have none of those muscles you got now back then.”

Donnel's body was goldened by the reflection of the moon in the pool, the lights of Ever Park and Queens, and those lights way off in the distance, the electric ivory that was Manhattan. “I remember,” he said. “A is lucky to be alive.”

Donnel looked at me and smiled. Then he splashed water at me and clapped and laughed as I squinted and blinked and hastily wiped the water from my face. I kicked my sneakers off and stepped into the pool. Then Donnel and I urged and teased my mother and grandma until they joined us.

“Don't splash,” my grandma scolded, holding the edge of the pool as she stepped over it to join us. “I don't want my hair to get wet.”

We squatted and sat down in the water and our legs touched in the middle of the pool. The kid pool was the first pool I'd ever been in that wasn't packed with people on a hot summer day, brimming with children splashing and peeing and seeing who could hold their breaths longer; with teenagers ogling and wrestling each other; with mothers holding infants. I was conditioned to be one of many, to be of the masses; to be crammed in and to call such conditions relief; to know crowds as home. My mother, grandma, and Donnel whispered and cursed Ever, how strange it was that when the heat was broken the elevator ran smoothly. Donnel talked like an adult, like he was husband and they were his wives. He could do that. He had an ability to speak in the manner and on the terms of those he was with. I half listened and looked up at the sky, watched the lights of airplanes blink through the blackness, wondering who went where.

“You all right?” asked Donnel, flicking water on my face and shifting attention to me.

“Yeah,” I said, meeting his eyes. “Why?”

He shifted his eyes to my mother and laughed a tumble of breath. “A can be so quiet, can't he?”

“He always been that way,” my grandma said.

My mother reached over to me, pressed, then slid her wet hand down my ear, my cheek, and along the line of my jaw. “Mister Man,” she said, calling me by the name she used for me when she wished to tell me how much she loved me but either chose not to or could not say the words.

Donnel spun himself around in the pool, hooked his legs over its plastic wall, and leaned backward into the water. He floated on his back, his arms at his sides, his head in the middle of the pool. The only sound was the waves made by Donnel's movement, the water lapping against our bodies and the walls of the pool.

“Look at the moon,” he said, talking louder than necessary because his ears were submerged in the water.

The moon was nearly full, like someone had punched a hole in the black night and there was white on the other side. My mother laid her arms along the edge of the pool, leaned back, and looked up.

“Sometimes, don't it look so close you can touch it?” she asked.

Donnel turned to his side and splashed water at me. “Lay on your back,” he said. “It's nice. There's nothing to be scared of.”

“Who said I'm scared,” I snapped.

Donnel lifted his legs from the edge, turned, and quickly sat on his knees.

“Here,” he said, laying his hands on the surface of the water. “Lean back. I got you. Lean back and put your feet up.”

“You gonna pull your hands away,” I said.

“I got you,” he said. “Trust me.”

I turned around, bent my knees over the lip of the pool, and looked over my shoulder at Donnel.

“Come on,” he said. “Sometime before I'm dead.”

I leaned and lowered myself until I felt the tips of Donnel's fingers, then the flat of his hands against my back. Slowly, he lowered me.

“Abraham,” my grandma laughed. “Open your eyes!”

“They're open,” I said.

“Then open them wider,” Donnel ordered.

I opened my eyes as wide as I could.

“And breathe,” he said.

I breathed. The surface of the water hovered an inch from the corner of my eyes, two inches from the sides of my nostrils, and half an inch from the corners of my lips. My ears were under water. All sound was muffled. It was wonderful. Peace.

“All right,” Donnel said. “I'm gonna let go.”

I felt his hands leave my body. Then the water rippled against my skin when he returned to lying on his back.

“Imagine doing this in the ocean,” he announced, making sure to speak loud enough for me to hear.

“What if you got tired?” I shouted back.

“Then you climb onto your boat,” he answered.

“Who's got a boat?” laughed my grandma.

“In the ocean,” Donnel said, “you can have whatever you want. A, what you want?”

I thought for a moment. I wanted whatever he wanted, whatever he needed.

“I don't know,” I said. “What you want?”

“Who?” he said.

“You,” scolded my mother. “Unless you see some other skinny nigga in the pool.”

“All I see is the sky,” Donnel said. “There could be thousands of niggas in this water for all I know.”

“So what you want?” I asked again.

“A boat for one thing,” said Donnel. Then after a brief pause he added: “And a trumpet.”

“A trumpet?” my grandma said.

“If I had a trumpet…,” Donnel began.

“If you had a trumpet, what?” my mother interrupted.

Suddenly, police sirens burned the night; broke us from below.

“Jesus,” my mother sighed. “Why they always got to be fuck'n everything up.”

Never had I been so still, so weightless; never had I been in a pool on the roof of Ever. I looked at the moon one last time and then I closed my eyes. I was surrounded, floating in darkness. The wail of the sirens faded, disappeared, and I waited for someone to speak, to say anything, to overcome the silence, to speak before police sirens arrived again.

“So,” my grandma finally said. “What're you gonna do with your trumpet?”

“If I had a trumpet,” Donnel answered, his voice soft and longing. “If I had a trumpet I don't know.”

I
t didn't happen every Sunday, nor did it occur with enough regularity to be considered an occasional occasion, but when my grandma went to church, dragging with her anyone in our apartment who didn't have a legitimate reason why he or she could not join her, it was not because she was a churchgoing type of woman who believed she needed to be in church to be saved by Jesus and heard by God. Rather, on the mornings when my grandma went to church it was because she awoke with an irrepressible longing, a hurt so great no other place but a place where brothers and sisters came together could salve her wound. Sometimes the wound was born from recollection, a dream, a memory she went to bed with at night. Sometimes it was a product of the television, the five, six, and eleven o'clock news and the reports of brothers killing brothers in Los Angeles, brothers killing brothers in Texas, brothers killing brothers in Africa, in Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. And sometimes this hurt was born from one thing, a murder in Ever, a thievery. But no matter how much she hurt,
no matter how sick or tired she was, my grandma never once allowed herself to be defeated. Her will, her determination to live was too great. But I am skipping ahead.

Born in 1952 to a single teenage girl, my grandma was orphaned in Harlem at the age of five when her mother fell in love with heroin. For the next seven years, my grandma was a ward of the state. She lived in children's homes. She lived in foster care, where she was fed only oatmeal, water, and eggs. By the time she was twelve, my grandma had fought off three rape attempts, kicking and biting and tearing at the eyes of each of her attackers. By fourteen, she'd had two miscarriages, given birth to my Aunt Rhonda, and dropped out of school. She was tired, she said, too damn tired to do anything with her head. At fifteen, she fell in love for the first time. Like her, he was young, a hard-knock brother, a dreamer who, five years later, left her with not only my Aunt Rhonda, but his daughter, my three-year old mother, as well. It was 1972. My grandma was twenty. She said she considered the world, considered where she was in it, where she might go, and she could only conclude: nowhere, nothing. Martin Luther King was dead. Malcolm X was dead. Brothers were dying in Vietnam. Black power, black nationalism, black hope was, quite simply, losing. Brothers and sisters needed more than revolution. My grandma was alone, jobless. Her babies needed more than diapers, more than food. Rent went unpaid. The electricity and the gas were shut off. For six months, my grandmother, my Aunt Rhonda, and my mother lived in the cold and dark. They ate one meal a day, lunch in a soup kitchen. For dinner, they prayed a local bakery would throw out stale bread. Yet and still, every night, my grandma told my aunt and mother it was going to be OK. And then, only after she was sure her children were sound asleep, she cried until the morning, when with dry, red eyes, and before my mother and aunt woke, she would consider a way out, an escape. Sometimes, pitying herself, desperate, my grandma thought about killing herself.
There were lives, she reasoned, that were simply impossible to live. She could die and no one would care; no one would notice. Her children might have a better life. But could she repeat the cycle that had created and produced her life? My mother or aunt would wake and call for her. She would take a deep breath and then, always, my grandma decided: no, she couldn't. She wouldn't let herself fail. There was no other option. No action that fostered any variation of genocide would be accepted. So she held her chin higher than heights unreachable. So she sashayed and strutted when she walked. So she laughed bigger laughs than could possibly fit in her body. And then, a week after my grandma turned twenty-one, she met, fell in love with, and married my grandfather, my Uncle Roosevelt's biological father, Sterling James Singleton, a man who fueled and fortified my grandma and taught her that she was not the only one who was determined to overcome, surpass, and leave a legacy that transcended the lengths men went to generate and fortify damnation.

Sterling was a good, solid forty-something-year-old brother with a head of salt and pepper and a sliver of space between his front teeth. He attended church regularly and played cards. Often, he announced he was a simple man, a brother who was just two things: a plumber and in love with my grandma. He bathed her. He kissed and massaged her feet. He planned for their future and the future of their children and their children's children, and quite possibly, if the world was still the world, the generations of children that would forever come. One day, God willing, he said, he would have his own business. Then two. Then three. He adopted my mother and my aunt and they took his last name. Everyone on the block called him Pop and at parties, he took my grandma by the hand and made her slow dance with him, first at the party, then as they walked home, in the middle of the street, with and without music playing, with him humming and whispering her a tune, rain or shine, in the light of the afternoon, at night, in the yellow circle
the streetlight made on the black street. He was gallant, hardworking. Then while walking home alone one night, while my grandmother, my Aunt Rhonda, my mother, and my then two-year-old Uncle Roosevelt slept, he was shot dead by a man who knew Sterling Singleton had a wad of cash in his pocket when he walked home, whistling after gambling and drinking all night.

After his death, my grandma came to the decision that no man would sleep in her bed. So no matter how many times Lyndon Goines asked she swore she would not go on a single date with him. She said she didn't care if he had all the money in the world and a diamond heart because none of it could stop man's insanity. As for Mr. Goines, not only was he crazy, she said, but she didn't have the energy or the time for him and his damn foolishness, running around protesting and shouting and acting like his itty bitty voice was worth minding.
Lyndon,
she would say after he knocked on our door holding flowers or offering to take her to the movies and sometimes to herself after he called and she hung up on him,
I don't need no man; why is that so damn hard to understand?
She was a woman, no longer some scared and confused twenty-year-old child. She said she was beyond love, far past it like stars are farther than the moon. It wasn't absent from her life. When she wanted it, she said, she'd listen to the Whispers or watch a good movie. So it wasn't something that needed to be recovered. She had a family to worry about. She had her children. And her daughters had me and Eric and Donnel. But that wasn't the truth. The truth was that although my grandma loved us and we loved her, the courage to love someone new, someone she had no hand in creating had been razed from her, torn from its roots, burned and hacked from every follicle, every pore. So she was scared to love. Because she didn't think she could handle it. Because what would she do or become if love was stripped from her once more?

The answer was nothing. That is, because love had been ripped from her before, she would remain herself.

It was the end of April, the time of year when the temperature rose and the basketball court teemed with brothers the winter had kept inside for too long. I was nine. I walked down Columbus Avenue dribbling my basketball.

The buildings in the neighborhood, the streets, the telephone poles and their drooping wires, everything around me was barely hanging on. The sidewalk was crumbled. Street signs leaned at an array of angles less than ninety degrees. Some of the doors and windows of abandoned buildings were shuttered with rotting, warped, and splintered plywood. Others were sealed with corrugated steel or blocked off brick by brick. Stray dogs walked with their noses to the ground, only stopping to lift their legs and urinate in the spot where another dog or a man had urinated minutes before.

The previous winter, two things occurred in my life. First, like a biblical plague that had finally matured and now enveloped us, the quantity of crack in Ever infinitely multiplied, becoming not just a part of the landscape but the greatest cause and the defining characteristics of the neighborhood's dilapidation. And second, I had reached an age, a point of maturation where I not only saw crack's effects, how it hollowed and gutted brothers and sisters, both its users and those who loved its users, but I also understood the sight to be an indication of a devastation that was a particular infliction of my life. The books and stories I read in school never mentioned it. And nowhere, not even on cable or public access TV, was there a truthful depiction of my life, how we in Ever existed, however since crack came there wasn't a single being, not a bird, person, or rat in Ever who wasn't desperate to either change our predicament or get out, move to a quiet, safe place, to live and breathe freely. Of course, my family had a chance to get out. And of course that chance was my Uncle Roosevelt, Nice, he who was as proud to be a product of Ever Park as he was to be our family's savior.

I dribbled with my left hand. I dribbled the ball between my legs. I
spun it on my finger. As I walked down Columbus Avenue, I said hello to people my mother and aunt and uncle were cool with. I smiled at my grandma's friends. I said hello to my friends. Everyone smiled back. They said I looked like a miniature version of my uncle then laughed at the shining smile of my face. How excited I was. I was going to the basketball court and I was sure my uncle would be there. I'd watch him slither, dance, prance, and groove to the basket. I would have held my basketball under my arm and sprinted to the court if I was not aware, not invested in being cool, being a basketball player like him.

When I came within eyesight of the basketball court, I saw no one was playing. Not a single brother shot or dribbled a ball. A crowd was gathered on the side of the court. I stopped dribbling and cradled the ball against my hip. Then I walked toward the court until I could hear what people were saying.

Elijah Treadwell, a three-hundred-pound maple-syrup-colored brother, talked with his hands, the perpetually lit Newport pinched between his finger and thumb swirling and darting like a flaming mosquito.

“They got that nigga!” he shouted, yanking his cigarette to the left, pointing it at the sky, then swinging it like a sword across his chest. “They snatched him! For nothing!”

“We was just standing here!” shouted Beany. “Talking! Doing nothing! Then they came and got him!”

“Motherfuckers didn't even have the dignity to say what he did,” interjected Hector Mendez, a skinny Puerto Rican who could have passed for Caucasian if not for the manner in which he rolled his R's and the Puerto Rican pride paraphernalia he always wore—the bracelet, the pins, the many T-shirts, the gold necklace with a Puerto Rican flag inside a gold medallion.

“And when I asked those niggas,” continued Beany, so angry he was choking on his words. “When I said:
What my nigga do?
”

“They told him to shut up, get back, before he got arrested too!” Hector interjected again.

“So I was like,” said Beany. “So I was like,
What? This is my nigga, right here! This is my girl's brother! Shit, arrest me! You know? Take me! Just let my nigga Nice go free! Let my man Nice be.”

“And you know if they arresting Nice then ain't no motherfucker safe!” said Hector. “Believe that! Not a single motherfucker!”

“Me and Nice have been like brothers since we was this big,” Elijah exploded, his hand two feet from the ground, his eyes full of tears. “You can't be running up and cuffing a nigga like Nice for no reason. It's damn near the twenty-first motherfuck'n century. This ain't no South Africa or China or Cuba or some fucked-up place like Mississippi!”

“Shit, when we gonna be like Crown Heights?” shouted Alton Johnson, a light-skinned brother with fingers as thick as my neck and freckles the size of M&M's on his cheeks. “That's what I want to know. When we gonna riot?”

Elijah threw his cigarette on the concrete, crushed it out with his heel, snatched his pager from his hip, and looked at it. “An hour ago,” he said, breathless and suddenly defeated. “Exactly fifty-three minutes. That's how long it's been.”

“And Luscious don't know?” blurted Cherrie, one of the few women in the gathering.

Still my mother's best friend, Cherrie had become a big woman with big juicy arms, three chins, and a neck like melted Rolos. She was twenty-three and in the previous two years, Cherrie's mom had died from breast cancer and her big sister Candy joined the army so Cherrie lived alone. She loved anything and everything that distracted her from this fact and offered her familial belonging, like talk shows and playing Spades and dominoes, and basketball. Cherrie lived for basketball so she was always at the basketball court.

“Hell no, Luscious don't know,” said Elijah. He tore his pack of
Newports from his pocket, jammed a new cigarette in his mouth, and lit it with a lighter. Then he took a deep slow drag, blew it at the sky, and added: “And I ain't gonna be the one to tell her neither.”

“Me neither,” agreed Hector. “I ain't saying shit.”

“Cause you know Luscious ain't having it,” surmised Cherrie. “Lord knows she ain't letting her man go down for nothing.”

“Shit,” said Alton, sadly kicking aside one of the crushed cigarettes on the ground. “What the fuck Luscious gonna do?”

“Start a war, that's what we should do,” Beany decided.

“A war?” said Elijah, considering the option. “Nigga, what kind of war we gonna win? What you gonna do when niggas roll up in Ever in a tank?”

“Niggas dropped the bomb on those Japanese,” added Alton. “So don't think for a minute, don't think for a second that they won't drop one of them on us.”

I was stunned, shocked, battered and beaten and so speechless I was invisible. No one looked my way. No one recognized that it was my uncle, my Nice the police snatched and yanked away. I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to know why. But I did not cry or shout. No, my body boiled from the outside in, from my skin to my heart. I listened to everyone describe what the police did and what we needed to do; how we needed to take control of our own community, govern ourselves; move, get out of Ever; how we were so damn sick and tired; and slowly I understood what happened, and put recent events together, and so I knew that Nice had decided that he couldn't allow what our home had become. We could not lack so greatly. And he was not helpless. He was a star, Ever Park's hero, a young man who kept on rising and rising. And he was just about to decide on which college was for him. But his family could not go in the opposite direction. We could not fall into greater poverty, greater pain and suffering. He had been to church enough times with my grandma to know Moses didn't stand for it. So neither would he. But
the problem was what a basketball could do for us would take years. And it was a maybe. And we needed something now and definite. Appetites were increasing, so food stamps were not enough to feed still-growing Nice, and three growing boys in addition to my mother, my aunt, and my grandma. And then the last time I had been to the doctor, the doctor told my mother I was anemic. It was nothing serious but when Nice found out he asked a hundred questions. Was I going to die? Would I need radiation and chemotherapy? Was it like sickle cell? How would I be treated? He couldn't believe that my ailment could be solved simply by eating more meat, drinking more milk. And of course there was Luscious, and how he wanted to provide her everything. So he had taken a job in the only booming economy in and around Ever. Meaning he asserted his Americanness, became a capitalist, and followed the tenets of supply and demand. He didn't deal drugs. He wasn't a hustler. He was a sherpa, a mule, a ferry. His plans were to only do it temporarily, just until he accepted his college scholarship and left Ever. So when he was not playing basketball, or in school, or spending his time with Luscious, he put crack in his gym bag and carried it from point A to B. No one wanted Nice to do such a thing, not my mother, not my aunt, and, of course, not my grandma. But they also didn't ask him where he was getting money from or demand that he stop if they knew. We needed, and our simple needs took precedence over adhering to a legal code and system that did not provide. And so he got the money to pay our bills. And our refrigerator was full of food. And he had bought me new basketball sneakers, Nikes, the same as his, the same ones players wore in the NBA. How proudly I wore them, how sweet they felt on my feet.