Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing

“Willie, you sang awfully pretty tonight,” a man said after the meeting ended. Willie was standing with her little sister, Hazel, outside of the church, watching the people walk home while H closed up. Willie didn’t recognize the man. He was new, an ex-con who’d worked the railroads before coming to work as a free man in the mines. “I’d like you to meet my son, Robert,” the man said. “He’s shy, but boy does he love to hear you sing.”

Robert stepped out from behind his father.

“You go on and play for a bit,” the man said, pushing Robert forward a little before walking on home.

His father was the color of coffee, but Robert was the color of cream. Willie was used to seeing white and black together in Pratt City, but she’d never seen both things in one family, both in one person.

“You got a nice voice,” Robert said. He looked at the ground as he spoke, and kicked up a bit of dust. “I been coming to hear you sing.”

“Thanks,” Willie said. Finally, Robert looked at her and smiled, relieved, it seemed, to have spoken. Willie was startled by his eyes.

“Why your eyes look like that?” Willie asked while Hazel hid behind her leg, eyeing Robert from behind the bend of Willie’s knee.

“Like what?” Robert asked.

Willie searched for the word, but realized there wasn’t one word to describe it. His eyes looked like a lot of things. Like the clear puddles that stood over the mud that she and Hazel liked to jump in, or like the shimmering body of a golden ant she had once seen carrying a blade of grass across a hill. His eyes were changing before hers, and she didn’t know how to tell him this, so instead she just shrugged.

“You a white man?” Hazel asked, and Willie pushed her.

“No. Mama say we got a lot of white in our blood, though. Sometimes it take a while to show up.”

“That ain’t right,” Hazel said, shaking her head.

“Yo daddy’s old as dirt. That ain’t right neither,” Robert said, and before Willie knew what she was doing, she pushed him. He stumbled, fell down onto his butt, and looked up at Willie with surprise in his brown, green, gold eyes, but she didn’t care. Her daddy was one of the best miners Birmingham had ever seen. He was the light of Willie’s life, and she was his. He told her all the time how he waited and waited and waited to have her, and when she’d come, he’d been so happy his big coal heart had melted.

Robert stood back up and dusted himself off.

“Ooh,” Hazel said, turning toward Willie, never missing an opportunity to shame her. “I’m telling Mama on you!”

“No,” Robert said. “That’s all right.” He looked at Willie. “That’s all right.”

The push had broken some kind of barrier between them, and from that day on, Robert and Willie were as close as any two people could be. By the time they hit sixteen they were dating, and by eighteen they were married, and by twenty they had a child. The people of Pratt City spoke about them in one breath, their names one name: RobertnWillie.

The month after Carson was born, Willie’s father died, and the month after that her mother followed. Miners weren’t meant to live long. Willie had friends whose fathers had died when those friends were still swimming in their mothers’ bellies, but knowing this didn’t lessen the hurt.

She was inconsolable those first few days. She didn’t want to look at Carson, didn’t want to hold him. Robert would take her up in his arms at night, kissing her never-ending tears while the baby slept. “I love you, Willie,” he’d whisper, and somehow that love hurt too, made her cry even harder, because she didn’t want to believe that anything good could still be in the world when her parents had left it.

Willie sang lead in the funeral procession, the weeping and wailing of all the mourners carrying sound down into the very mines themselves. She had never known sadness like that before, nor had she known the fullness of hundreds of people gathering to send her parents off. When she started the song, her voice quivered. It shook something in her.

“I shall wear a crown,” Willie sang, her voice booming, bouncing from the bottom of the pit and coming back up to meet them all as they walked around the mines. Soon they passed the old potter’s field where hundreds of nameless, faceless men and boys were buried, and Willie was glad that, at least, her father had died free. At least that.

“I shall wear a crown,” Willie sang again, holding Carson in her arms. His mewling cry was her accompaniment, his heartbeat her metronome. As she sang, she saw the notes float out of her mouth like little butterflies, carrying some of her sadness away, and she knew, finally, that she would survive it.

—

Soon Pratt City started to feel like a speck of dust in Willie’s eye. She couldn’t be free of it. She could tell that Robert was itching to leave too. He had always been a little delicate for coal mining. At least that’s what the bosses thought every time he got a mind to go ask them for a job, which was about once a year since his thirteenth birthday. Instead, he worked as a clerk in the Pratt City store.

Then, after Carson was born, the store suddenly didn’t seem like enough for Robert. He could spend whole weeks complaining about it.

“There ain’t no honor in it,” Robert said to Willie one night. She was seated stomach to stomach with little Carson while he tried to snatch the light that was reflecting off her earrings. “There’s honor in mining,” Robert said.

Willie had always thought that her husband would die in the mines if ever he got a chance to go down. Her father had stopped working in the mines years and years before he died. He was twice the size of Robert, ten times as strong. Yet, still, he almost never stopped coughing, and sometimes when he coughed a string of black mucus would escape his mouth, his face would contort, and his eyes bulge out, so that it looked to Willie as though some invisible man were behind him, hands wrapped around the large trunk of his thick neck, choking him. Though she loved Robert more than she had ever thought it possible to love, when she looked at him she did not see a man who could handle hands around his neck. She never told him this.

Robert began to pace the room. The clock on the wall was five minutes behind, and the click of the second hand sounded to Willie like a man clapping off beat at a church revival. Awful, but sure.

“We should move. Go north, somewhere I can learn a new trade. Ain’t nothing in Pratt City for us now that your folks are gone.”

“New York,” Willie said, just as soon as she had thought it. “Harlem.” The word hit her like a memory. Though she had never been there, she could sense its presence in her life. A premonition. A forward memory.

“New York, huh?” Robert said with a smile. He took Carson into his arms and the boy cried out, startled, missing the light.

“You could find some kinda work. I could sing.”

“You gon’ sing, huh?” He dangled his finger in front of Carson’s eyes, and they followed him. This way, then that. “Whatchu think about that, Sonny? Mama singing?” Robert brought the dangling finger down to Carson’s soft belly and tickled. The baby screamed with laughter.

“I think he likes that idea, Mama,” Robert said, laughing too.

—

Everyone knew someone who was headed north, and everyone knew someone who was already there. Willie and Robert knew Joe Turner back when he was just Lil Joe, Joecy’s smart boy in Pratt City. Now he worked as a schoolteacher in Harlem. He took them into his place on West 134th Street.

For as long as she lived, Willie would never forget the feeling of being in Harlem for the first time. Pratt City was a mining town and everything about it was focused on what lay beneath the ground. Harlem was about the sky. The buildings were taller than any Willie had ever seen before, and there were more of them, tense, shoulder to shoulder. The first inhale of Harlem air was clean, no coal dust traveling in through the nose to hit the back of the throat, to taste. Just breathing felt exciting.