Sister Souljah: Life After Death

“What’s twelve times eight?”

“Ninety-six!” I would say rapidly like he required. No matter how fast I would come up with the answer, he’d be like, “Nah, it took you too long!”

I’d laugh and be like, “It didn’t!! That was quick, Poppa!”

“Not quick enough!” He’d challenge me. “If you want to hang out with me, you gotta be so quick with your times tables that I can’t see you thinking.”

“See me thinking?” I’d ask, still laughing.

“Yep, swift with the right answer and with your game face on.”

“Game face?” I followed up.

“That’s what you call a face that doesn’t reveal what you are thinking or feeling on the inside. Only you should know that. Everybody else shouldn’t.”

After that I mastered multiplication super-rapid response with the right answers. I would also stare in the mirror every morning and every night practicing my game face.

In his cell, Santiaga was getting dressed. He stepped into his boxers, every muscle defined. Even his hands were rough and gorgeous and just the right size. When he turned, I could see the bullet-wound scar on his sculptured abs. His haircut was sharp and he was dapper even in Department of Corrections digs. His eyes were brighter than his atmosphere. His stare was solid, masculine. His complexion was not showing that charismatic glow he flashed naturally before hitting the pen, where there’s rarely any sunshine. But I’ll fix that. I’ll be the one to get him out of here even though he is serving life. Poppa’s release is sure to happen. It was the condition I gave Elisha. The one thing that would cause the whole entire reality show, followed up by a major motion picture, followed up by a television series, followed up by a Winter Santiaga video game, to fall through and be nothing at all. Money makes shit happen. I read the many magazine articles on Elisha and how smart he is. How he had gotten accepted into six of America’s top universities. So in my six days of thinking about my list of demands, the answer to what Winter really wants is, Santiaga. I want my father to be released. I want both of us to come up, back to where we belong. To be the royal high that we were before, but even higher . I bet my whole eight-hundred-thousand-dollar bag on that. Three gunshots later, and the most perfect plan exploded.

I rushed towards Santiaga. His facial expression showed me what I had already figured out the second I arrived in his cell . Poppa cannot see me . Long ago there was a smile that would come to his face and even to his eyes naturally whenever he saw me after not having seen me for a few days or hours even. Here I am standing right in front of him and that smile is not there.

“Poppa,” I spoke, but even I could not hear my own spoken words even though I was speaking them. “Poppa, I…” I moved in close to him and ran my fingers through his hair. My fingertips traced his iconic face. My palms rested on his strong shoulders. Then I touched his fingers and then held his hands. He walked away from me. I followed him and saw that he had a short stack of magazines with a tall stack of letters on top. I dashed to the letters and went to pick one up or push the whole pile over even, in order to grab my father’s attention. I wanted to give him a hint that I am here. But my fingers weren’t working properly. I couldn’t lift the letters up, even though I could see clearly that the letter on top was one of the many letters that I had written to him. My father, Santiaga, and I had remained close even while both being separately incarcerated. I tried to knock everything over but couldn’t.

Now Santiaga was leaning against the cell door looking out the narrow slot. I’m familiar with that stance. How many days had I stood still staring through the cage bars, and then later through the metal door slot. Sometimes staring at the floor because at that moment in lockdown, there was nothing else to do. So I eased towards him. As soon as I did he turned his head. His eyes on the lookout but he didn’t move. I could tell by his gaze he felt something. Like a man who had looked over his shoulder as hustlers gotta do all da time. Then he spun a one-eighty. His feet on pivot. His eyes on search. I ran into his arms, wrapped my arms around his neck, then closed in and hugged him extra tightly. I moved my lips to his ears and said, “Goodbye, Poppa. In all of the whole wide world, you were my favorite person, my best friend, my realest teacher, my deepest love.” I pressed a closed-lip kiss on his lips.

“Santiaga, hands,” the familiar authoritative voice of a corrections officer called through the slot.

“Don’t interrupt!” I screamed. Santiaga walked back to the cell door he had been staring out of a minute ago and put his hands through the slot. C.O. cuffed him.

“Why are you cuffing my father? He’s already locked in!” I yelled. Santiaga drew back his now-cuffed hands.

“This is just a precaution,” the C.O. said, downshifting his tone like he should have in the first place. The heavy cell door slid open.

“Wait, don’t come in here,” I said forcefully. “I need a little more time with my father!” Then I stepped between them and turned to face Santiaga.

“Poppa,” I called out. “Somebody got me! But don’t you worry about who did it. Stay still for me. Don’t kill whoever did it. I’m gonna get you the fuck out of here. I’m gonna put you back where you belong. Trust me, your Baby Girl. Poppa, you did everything in life for me. Now I’m gonna be the one to king you!”

“Bad news…” the C.O. said as though I was not even standing there blocking him from speaking directly to my father. So I started screaming to dead the sound of C.O.’s voice. It must have worked because just as the words “Your daughter…” came out of C.O.’s filthy mouth, I dissolved.

3.

Heat, I was nothing but heat now. Like heat coming through the radiator or incinerator or any hot place. Who killed me? That’s all I wanted to know. Revenge, that’s all I wanted to get. Yeah I was mad about losing out on the moneybag that I was about to earn, but I was more furious that I would not be there to see Santiaga get out and come home. Now I want to put down whoever shot me, before Poppa got home and gave the order to eliminate that person and whoever was on that person’s team. No, erase that. Poppa would pull that trigger himself. That’s the kind of man he is.

Of course I love, admire, and respect that deadly element of my father. However, it was hard and costly work to get to the point where he would possibly be released. I didn’t want him finally freed only to return to the box for avenging my murder. So my mission is to murder first. They couldn’t charge me with murder in the first, ’cause I’m already dead in the first place. I started laughing. Like real shoulder-shaking laughter that makes the whole body shake. Somehow the volume of my own laughter was increasing like someone slipped a mic on me or was in the DJ booth fucking with the fader, controlling the sound. Soon the volume doubled. So, I stopped laughing, but the laughter didn’t stop. It tripled. It was the first time I ever got pissed and aggravated at the sound of my own voice. The more vexed I got, the more the laughter increased. It grew so loud it mutated and started sounding like some old guy laughing.

“Shut the fuck up!” I screamed. When I couldn’t out-scream the laughter I stopped caring. I’m good at that ’cause I didn’t care in the first place. Once I thoroughly ignored the laughter, it thoroughly disappeared. I can’t say how long it took to stop because I was realizing that I could no longer count time. That may sound like no big deal but to a locked-up bitch time is everything and the countdown from capture to release is as important and necessary as a pulse or a heartbeat. Without being able to count down time… well now that I think about it, that’s like death. For example, is today the same day as the day I got shot dead? When I saw Santiaga, even though he didn’t see me, was I seeing him right after I’d been murdered? Or was it days after or weeks after or months after?