Jacqueline Woodson - Another Brooklyn

In my father’s long, bitter last days of liver cancer, we had taken turns at his bedside, my brother coming into the hospital room so I could leave, then me waking him so he could go home for a quick shower and prayer before work.

Now my brother looked as though he was seven again, not thirty-one, his thick brow dipping down, his skin too clear and smooth for a man.

I wanted to comfort him. It’s good that he. . but the words wouldn’t come.

Allah is good, my brother said. All praise to Allah for calling him home.

All praise to Allah, I said.

My brother drove me to the subway, kissed my forehead, and hugged me hard. When had he become a man? For so long, he had been my little brother, sweet and solemn, his eyes open wide to the world. Now, behind small wire-rimmed glasses, he looked like a figure out of history. Malcolm maybe. Or Stokely.

I’ll be by day after tomorrow to help you out, cool?

I’m good!

What — you got a man over there you don’t want me to meet?

I laughed.

Still doing the Devil, I bet.

I slapped at him and got out of the car. Love you.

Love you, too, August.

On the subway heading back to the old apartment, I looked up, startled to see Sylvia sitting across the aisle reading the New York Times . She had aged beautifully in the twenty years since I’d last seen her. Her reddish brown hair was cut short now, curly and streaked with gray. Her skin, still eerily bronze against those light eyes, was now etched through with fine wrinkles. Maybe she felt me watching her because she glanced up suddenly, recognized me, and smiled. For several slow seconds, the years fell away and she was Sylvia again, nearly fifteen in her St. Thomas Aquinas school uniform — green and blue plaid skirt, white blouse, and plaid cross bow tie, her belly just beginning to round. As my body seized up with silence again, I remembered Sister Sonja, her hijabbed head bent over her notebook, her fingers going still the first time I cried in her office.

Sylvia.

Oh my God! August! she said. When did you get back to Brooklyn?

The child would be a young woman now. I remember hearing she had Sylvia’s reddish hair, and that as a newborn, her eyes had been gray.

Somehow I knew the train was pulling into Atlantic Avenue. But the station and everything around me felt far away. Somehow, I rose from my seat. Voice gone again. Body turning to ash.

Maybe Sylvia thought I was coming toward her, ready to hug away the years and forget. Maybe she had already forgotten, the way years allow us to.

You look good, girl, she said.

The train doors opened. It wasn’t yet my stop.

But I got off anyway.

Years erase us. Sylvia sinking back into the dust of the world before I knew her, her baby gone, then her belly, then breasts, and finally only the deep gap in my life where she had once been.

Angela fading next, across the years, just a faint voice on the answering machine when I was home on college break. I only just heard about Gigi. So awful. Were you there? Promises to reconnect when both of us were next in New York. Promises she’d find me again. So much air around the lies distance allowed us to tell as she sank back into the world she had become a part of, a world of dancers and actors — redrawn into royalty without a past.

Gigi.

Each week, Sister Sonja said, Start at the beginning, her dark fingers bending around a small black notebook, pen poised. Many moments passed before I opened my mouth to speak. Each week, I began with the words I was waiting for my mother. .

The office was small, ivy cascading down from a tiny pot on an otherwise stark windowsill. Maybe it was the ivy that kept me coming back. Every week, I spent forty minutes, my eyes moving from the ivy to Sister Sonja’s hijab to her fingers closed around the notebook and pen. Maybe I spoke only because each week I was allowed to look into the brown, angled face of a woman and believe again that my mother was coming soon.

I know when I get there, my brother and I used to sing. The first thing I’ll see is the sun shining golden. Shining right down on me. .

How did I get there, to that moment of being asked to start at the beginning? Who had I become?

She’s coming, I’d say. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow .

What about your friends? Sister Sonja asked. Where are they now?

We’re waiting for Gigi, I’d say. Everyone’s waiting for Gigi.

Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, August. We were four girls together, amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone.

This is memory.

In eastern Indonesia, families keep their dead in special rooms in their homes. Their dead not truly dead until the family has saved enough money to pay for the funeral. Until then, the dead remain with them, dressed and cared for each morning, taken on trips with the family, hugged daily, loved deeply.

The year my mother started hearing voices from her dead brother Clyde, my father moved my own brother and me from our SweetGrove land in Tennessee to Brooklyn. It was the summer of 1973 and I was eight years old, my younger brother four, his thumb newly moving to his mouth in the hot city, his eyes wide and frightened.

The small apartment was on the top floor of a three-story building. My brother and I had never been this high up, and we spent hours staring past the painted-shut windows down to the street below. The people passing beneath us were all beautiful in some way — beautifully thin, beautifully obese, beautifully Afroed, or cornrowed, or bald. Beautifully dressed in bright African dashikis and bellbottomed jeans, miniskirts and halters.

The green of Tennessee faded quickly into the foreign world of Brooklyn, heat rising from cement. I thought of my mother often, lifting my hand to stroke my own cheek, imagining her beside me, explaining this newness, the fast pace of it, the impenetrable gray of it. When my brother cried, I shushed him, telling him not to worry. She’s coming soon, I said, trying to echo her. She’s coming tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

It was during this summer that I first saw Sylvia, Gigi, and Angela. The three of them walked down our block, dressed in halter tops and shorts, arms linked together, heads thrown back, laughing. I watched until they disappeared, wondering who they were, how they. . became .

My mother had not believed in friendships among women. She said women weren’t to be trusted. Keep your arm out, she said. And keep women a whole other hand away from the farthest tips of your fingernails . She told me to keep my nails long.

But as I watched Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi walk past our window, I was struck with something deeply unfamiliar — a longing to be a part of who they were, to link my own arm with theirs and remain that way. Forever.

Another week passed and they appeared again, this time stopping below our window, untwining and doubling a long line of telephone cable, Gigi and Angela turning as Sylvia stood just outside the double ropes, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet before jumping in. I watched them, my mouth slightly open, intrigued by the effortless flow of them, how each one moved so that the other could continue moving.