Jacqueline Woodson - Another Brooklyn

We had heard for years that the shop owners on Broadway were white and lived in fancy houses in places like Brentwood, Rego Park, Laurelton. We knew that financing meant watching neighbors throw broken couches and torn mattresses into the alley between houses long before they were paid off. So as we watched the looters move through the neighborhood selling TVs and radios and shoes and dry cleaning they’d taken from window-smashed stores, my brother and I felt a longing to be a part of the free stuff spilling out along Broadway. Still, my father warned us not to leave the front gate. And meant it.

That was the summer every park and every school building gave out Free Lunch — brown paper bags holding plastic-wrapped bologna sandwiches and sugar-sweetened orange juice in foil-sealed cups. We watched hungry kids line up in the heat, waiting for food, hoping a neighbor was volunteering who would sneak them an extra bag. In the hot refrigerator-less days with my father broke from the work lost at Abraham & Straus, my brother and I stood on a line that wrapped around the park and leaned against the chain-link fence as we slowly moved forward. I looked for Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi — afraid I’d see them, hungry and hot like us. Reaching for the brown bags with ashamed and ashy hands.

The last of the white people began fading. We didn’t know the German woman’s name. She was snow-haired, small and thick, with adult sons who used to come with their children on Sundays. The children, three boys, would not play with us. In the summer, they sat on their grandmother’s stoop in their collared shirts and blond crew cuts watching the brown boys in the street spin wooden tops wrapped with graying string. Their fathers had the same cuts, the same pastel-colored collared shirts. In the late afternoon, when the fathers appeared at the top of the stoop, the boys rose and they all made their way to identical station wagons parked one behind the other at the sidewalk. As the cars pulled away, the boys stared at us. Sometimes, the littlest one waved.

The brown boys who had moved to the sidewalk to let the cars pass ran back to the middle of the street and resumed their game. But with the pastel boys gone now, it was hard not to see the brown boys differently in their cutoffs and dirty white T-shirts, ashy kneed, chipped wooden tops violently spinning.

We didn’t know the Italian family or the Irish sisters who dressed alike and left their building each morning, pulling identical shopping carts, returning each evening with A&P bags. We didn’t know the man who yelled at the boys in the street in a language none of them understood or the curly redheaded family with the mother who always looked as though she’d just had a good cry.

But we knew their moving vans. We knew their cars. We knew the people who came to help, checked their cars many times, then glared at the boys in the street. We knew the sticks for stickball games weren’t weapons. We knew the spikes at the bottom of wooden spinning tops weren’t meant to hurt anything but other spinning tops. We knew the songs the boys sang Ungawa, Black Power. Destroy! White boy! were just songs, not meant to chase white people out of our neighborhood.

Still, they fled.

They left driving their cars. They left in the backseats of the cars of sons and daughters. They put FOR SALE signs on their homes but left before the buildings sold. They rented to single mothers and junkies, Puerto Ricans and Blacks, anyone with the deposit, the first month’s rent, and the promise of a job somewhere. They put mattresses and broken-legged tables and boxes of old books out on the street.

Their cars and vans and trucks parted the brown boys, signaled right at the corner, and left our neighborhood forever.

My brother had discovered math, the wonder of numbers, the infinite doubtless possibility. He sat on his bed most days solving problems no eight-year-old should understand. Squared, he said, is absolute. No one in the world can argue algebra or geometry. No one can say pi is wrong.

Come with me, I begged.

But my brother looked up from his numbers and said, She’s gone, August. It’s absolute.

Late in the autumn, the woman returned for Jennie’s children. She carried the little one out in her arms, the older one, skipping ahead, not looking back, the baby screaming.

What the hell is going on? My father asked.

They’re taking Jennie’s children.

I had oiled and braided the older one’s hair. Three cornrows front to back tied with a blue Goody ribbon. I had fed them cereal and pastrami sandwiches, grits and eggs. I had put Vaseline on their arms and legs, used a wet washcloth to wipe milk from around their mouths and sleep from the corners of their eyes. I had read to them and sang to them, dampened toilet tissue to wipe crust from their noses. When the girl smiled, her teeth were stunningly white.

The girl, ribbon gone now, skipped around the corner and disappeared. Long after they were out of sight, my brother swore he could hear the baby crying.

I imagined the women my father brought home taking a place until my mother returned. Each Shhh, my kids are sleeping. Each Oh lord, look at your precious babies! brought her closer. I lay in bed and listened as the clink of ice in glasses and the hushed laughter gave way to sighs and moans. I imagined waking up with a new woman, her hair in curlers, holding her robe closed with one hand, asking if I wanted pancakes or cereal, scouring the cabinets for the last of the Aunt Jemima Syrup, sprinkling a bit of cinnamon and sugar when there was none. I imagined strong, sure hands pulling my hair into tight cornrows, telling my brother to take his thumb out of his mouth, kissing my father on the lips as he headed off to work.

I imagined four of us at the kitchen table, the thick stink of boiling chitterlings gone, replaced by hot sauce and white rice and the woman who came to stay until my mother returned asking if I wanted a little or a lot.

Years later, I would tell this to Sister Sonja, wanting her to know that I had dreamed our family whole again. That I believed wholeness was on its way.

In a jar on the counter of Poncho’s store there were pickled pig’s feet that he’d scoop out into brown paper. When you said, I want to choose my own, Poncho said, No choosing! I choose! his old-man eyes moving over your body. And if you were hungry enough, you let him.

I imagined the four of us — brother, father, new woman, me — sucking the last of the pickled meat from the pig’s-foot bone, wrapping cartilage and bone back into the brown paper, washing it down with Dr Pepper.

Pork rinds were packaged and sold for fifteen cents. With hot sauce sprinkled into the plastic bag, you almost had a meal. My brother ate his without the sauce, sometimes adding more salt.

On good days, our father took us around the corner and let us buy ham-and-cheese heroes, the boiled ham cut into thin slices and layered over Italian bread already spread thick with mayo. Some days my brother preferred the square cuts of spiced ham with its tiny speckles of white fat.

That was before.

The woman who came didn’t tiptoe through our room in the night, didn’t ask for just a taste when my father offered his whiskey, didn’t sit with us eating pig’s feet and spiced ham. She came by way of the Nation of Islam, her head wrapped, her dark dress draping down below her ankles. She said, My name is Sister Loretta, her body a temple, covered and far away from my father’s, her thin face free of the swine-filled makeup with which unenlightened women painted their faces. She said I know how amazing and lovely I am . When she looked down at us and smiled, her dark face broke into something open and hungry and beautiful.