Margaret Sexton: A Kind of Freedom

“You should see her now, Terry. She thinks her shit don’t stink, walking around in her Brooks Brothers suits.”

He nodded, shrugged. “Yeah, I’m not surprised, I guess. You could see something like that was coming her way.” There was a pile of clothes in a basket beside the bed, and he reached down and started folding them, laying them down on the part of the bottom sheet he had smoothed. “Think about it, she was always second to you growing up. Imagine what that’s like, being the older sister but people looked past her for you. You have always been a bright light, Jackie Marie.”

She would have fallen into the compliment, she needed it today more than ever, but the sirens interrupted him, louder than she’d ever heard them, like the police car had pulled right up to her door. Jackie thought she saw Terry’s eyes water. She felt a need to comfort him, let him know she didn’t blame him for the way things had turned out.

“You would think I would feel safer knowing they’re here all night.” She forced herself to chuckle, rolled her eyes.

He set the shirt he was folding down and leaned in and squeezed her. She didn’t fight him off, but she didn’t relax into him either. He seemed to sense her discomfort and eased off but not before adding, “I’m going to get you out of here.”

She smirked. “I thought you said no promises.”

“That’s not a promise, that’s a fact.” He paused, then started again. “When I was gone all that time, it wasn’t ’cause I didn’t love you. I know you know that, but I feel like I gotta say it. My love for you, for T.C., was the only thing that brought me back, the only thing. Remember that.”

Summer 2010

T.C. didn’t remember meeting his father. But the old man’s name was Terry, Terry Cleveland Lewis, and although T.C. wasn’t quite a Junior —his mother believed in saint names and snuck Gabriel in where Cleveland should have been — people had called him T.C. since he was born. So even now as he stood six feet seven inches, so tall he had to duck to get in and out of his jail cell, the other inmates yelled, Watch your head, T.C. The COs of course called him Lewis. Sometimes he thought that had been the origin of the problem, the fact that he wasn’t a real Junior. It wasn’t that cleaving to his father’s legacy might have made a better man of him — from what he’d heard, his old man hadn’t worked in years, and even then it was at a half-dead restaurant in the Quarter. But it was just another example of his not-quiteness, deficiencies he first noticed when he was asked to repeat kindergarten and that had culminated in his stay at the Orleans Parish Prison.

He was getting out today though, and maybe that meant something. It wasn’t his first time in, but it was hard to count the weekend stint for stealing a bicycle from Bourbon Street. He didn’t even mention that incident to his boys; it wasn’t enough to earn him any street cred. Not that he sold drugs to impress anyone. No, he started smoking his second semester in college after his injury, and he found he could actually afford to buy in bulk by supplying his neighbors and friends. Plus, he wasn’t going to lie, there was something soothing about the boys on his block ringing his bell all hours of the day. It hadn’t been that way in grade school when it might have counted for something. He’d been a heavyset kid before basketball, and he wet the bed until he was twelve. He always passed on sleepovers — T.C. was not stupid — but he could never forgot that for so many years longer than was natural, he couldn’t control such a basic function.

“You getting out today, huh, Lewis?” The CO was white and short, even for non-Lewis standards, so short he needed to crane his neck to ask T.C. a question.

“He’ll be right back in though,” the other CO shot in. Black like T.C. but full of undrained malice toward him. It happened like that sometimes.

The white one laughed.

T.C. joined in, best to stay on their good side. But what the CO had said wasn’t true, not this time.

“Nah,” T.C. said. “I got a little man on the way.”

“So he’ll be coming to visit you then?” This from the black one. “Him and his momma.”

T.C. shook his head, but he didn’t protest. If you had to convince people who you were, it was too late , isn’t that what his grandmama always said? Anyway, he was in a good mood. The girl he’d been seeing before he got locked up had let him call her every night and wrote him letters from time to time. Her name was Natalia, but he called her Bon Bon. She was a hot little thing, and she was waiting for him at her mama’s house Uptown. They hadn’t done much before he left, low-level dibbling and dabbling that reminded him of his high school days, but she was all he’d been thinking about, and tonight that anticipation would bloom into something he could feel.

“Whatever you say, boss.” He smiled at the CO who handed him his clothes. T.C. had forgotten he was wearing sweats and a T-shirt when he was brought in four months earlier. He was on his way to the grocery store when he got pulled over. The funny thing was, his mama had told him not to go, reminded him of that later during visitation.

“People think I’m crazy,” she said, “but I’m never wrong. Your friend Daryl would be alive today if he had listened to me. Miss Patricia ain’t been the same since, and she won’t be; Miss Patricia might as well a died along with her boy.” She paused then before going on. “It’s a goddamn shame how the city blew up them levees. Just like Betsy. If they got a choice, they gon’ always side with white.”

T.C. ignored her when she went on like that, though it was true, his mama had predicted Katrina would take lives. Everybody knew it was coming, but half his friends banked on it being like the storms the year before that rerouted or lost force before they hit the city. T.C.’s mama had a dream the morning before the storm hit, though, called him from work, begging him to pack a suitcase. He obliged her only because she started crying. They were halfway to Alabama when the levees broke. Daryl, his brother from another mother, the friend he’d walked to school with every day for fifteen years, had decided to ride it out. They got word three weeks later that his body was found in his attic under a moldering sofa.

On the other hand, T.C.’s mama spilled out useless details, conspiracy theories, information from her childhood nobody wanted to hear, outright inventions, stream-of-consciousness commentary, and caustic affronts that sometimes held truth, sometimes didn’t. Like the time she told Miss Patricia that she’d been ignoring her since she got her new house, but there was no new house. Then once when she was delivering a monologue to the TV screen, T.C. heard her say her mama had died when she was three years old. But her mama was still here, had let T.C. stay with her after he lost the scholarship in fact, and if it hadn’t been for his MawMaw, he’d be doing much worse than selling weed by the eighth.

When he was done dressing, he walked with the COs to sign his release forms. Then they handed him the money left in his commissary, and he was free to go.

T.C. had called Tiger the day before, and sure enough here he was waiting in the parking lot leaning in front of his silver Honda Civic, fancy since T.C. last saw it, with new blacked-out twenty-two-inch rims. The two had met a few years back playing intramural basketball at Joe Brown Park. Tiger always ran with the wrong crowd, even went to juvie when they were in middle school, and T.C.’s mama banned him from kids like that his whole childhood. But things were different now: Tiger had been friends with Daryl too, and after the storm that was worth more than a good reputation.