Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing

Soon the person next to him was Diante. His friend poked him in the shoulder repeatedly, all the jabs in quick succession, so that he had finished before Marcus could tell him to stop.

“What, nigga?” Marcus said, turning to look at him.

It was like Diante didn’t even realize someone else was there. His body was angled away, and he suddenly turned it back toward Marcus.

“She’s here.”

“Who?”

“The fuck you mean, who? The girl, man. She’s here.”

Marcus turned his gaze toward where Diante was pointing. There were two women standing side by side. The first was tall and skinny, light-skinned like Marcus himself was, but with dreadlocks that drifted down past her ass. She was playing with her locs, twirling them around her finger or taking the whole lot of them and piling them onto the very top of her head.

The woman next to her was the one who caught Marcus’s eye. She was dark — blue-black, they would have called her on playgrounds in Harlem — and she was thick with sturdy, large breasts and a wild Afro that made her look as though at some point very recently she had been kissed by lightning.

“C’mon, man,” Diante said, already walking toward the women. Marcus walked a little bit behind him. He could see Diante trying to play it cool. The calculated slouch, the careful lean. When they got to the women, Marcus waited to see which one was the one.

“You!” the woman with the dreadlocks said, slapping Diante’s shoulder.

“I thought I recognized you, but I couldn’t remember where I woulda known you from,” Diante said. Marcus rolled his eyes.

“We met at the museum, a couple of months ago,” the woman said, smiling.

“Right, right, of course,” Diante said. He was on his best behavior now, standing straight and smiling. “I’m Diante, and this is my friend Marcus.”

The woman flattened her skirt and picked up another loc, started to twirl it around her finger. Preening, it seemed. The woman next to her hadn’t said a word yet, and her eyes were mostly trained on the ground, as though if she didn’t look at them, she could pretend they weren’t there.

“I’m Ki,” the dreadlocked woman said. “And this is my friend. Marjorie.”

At the mention of her name, Marjorie lifted her head, the curtain of wild hair parting to reveal a lovely face and a beautiful necklace.

“Nice to meet you, Marjorie,” Marcus said, extending his hand.

*

When Marcus was just a little boy, his mother, Amani, had taken him for the day. Stolen him, really, for Ma Willie and Sonny and the rest of the family had no idea that Amani, who had asked just to say hi, would lure him away from the apartment with the promise of an ice cream cone.

His mother couldn’t afford the cone. Marcus could remember her walking with him from one parlor to another shop to another and another in the hope that the prices would be better at a place just a little bit farther down. Once they reached Sonny’s old neighborhood, Marcus knew two things with certainty: first, that he was somewhere he was not supposed to be, and second, that there would be no ice cream.

His mother had dragged him up and down 116th Street, showing him off to her dope fiend friends, the broke jazz crew.

“Dis your baby?” one fat, toothless woman said, squatting so that Marcus was looking straight down the barrel of her empty mouth.

“Yep, dis Marcus.”

The woman touched him, then waddled on. Amani kept navigating him through a part of Harlem that he knew only through stories, through the salvation prayers the church congregants put up each Sunday. The sun got lower and lower in the sky. Amani started crying, and yelling at him to walk faster though he was going as fast as his little legs could carry him. It was nearly dusk before Ma Willie and Sonny found him. His father had snatched his hand and tugged him away so fast, he thought his arm would escape its socket. And he’d watched as his grandmother struck Amani hard across the face, saying loud enough for anyone to hear, “Touch this child again and see what happens.”

Marcus thought about that day often. He was still amazed by it. Not by the fear he’d felt throughout the day, when the woman who was no more than a stranger to him had dragged him farther and farther from home, but by the fullness of love and protection he’d felt later, when his family had finally found him. Not the being lost, but the being found. It was the same feeling he got whenever he saw Marjorie. Like she had, somehow, found him.

Months had passed, and Diante and Ki’s relationship fizzled, leaving only Marcus and Marjorie’s friendship as evidence of its ever having been. Diante teased Marcus about Marjorie constantly, saying, “When you gon’ tell that girl you into her?” But Marcus couldn’t explain to Diante that it wasn’t about that, because he didn’t really understand himself what it was about.

“So this is the Asante Region,” Marjorie said, pointing to a map of Ghana on her wall. “This is technically where my family’s from, but my grandmother moved down to the Central Region, right here, to be closer to the beach.”

“I hate the beach,” Marcus said.

At first Marjorie smiled at him, like she was going to start laughing, but then she stopped, and her eyes turned serious. “Are you scared of it?” she asked. She let her finger drift slowly from the edge of the map down to the wall. She rested her hand against the black stone necklace she wore every day.

“Yeah, I guess I am,” Marcus said. He had never told anyone before.

“My grandmother said she could hear the people who were stuck on the ocean floor talking to her. Our ancestors. She was kind of crazy.”

“That don’t sound crazy to me. Shit, everybody in my grandma’s church caught a spirit at one point or another. Just because somebody sees or hears or feels something other folks can’t, doesn’t mean they’re crazy. My grandma used to say, ‘A blind man don’t call us crazy for seeing.’ ”

Now Marjorie gave him a real smile. “You want to know what I’m scared of?” she asked, and he nodded. He had learned not to be surprised by how forthcoming she was. How she never gave in to small talk, just dove right into deep waters. “Fire,” she said.

He had heard the story of her father’s scar in the first week of meeting Marjorie. Her answer didn’t surprise him.

“My grandmother used to say we were born of a great fire. I wish I knew what she meant by that.”

“You ever get back to Ghana?”

“Oh, I’ve been busy with grad school and teaching and all of that.” She paused and looked into the air, counting. “I haven’t been back since my grandmother died, actually,” she said softly. “She gave me this. A family heirloom, I guess.” Marjorie pointed to the necklace.

Marcus nodded. So that was why Marjorie never took it off.

It was getting late, and Marcus had work to do, but he couldn’t move from this particular spot in Marjorie’s living room. There was a large bay window that let in so much light that his shoulder felt brushed with warmth. He wanted to stay for as long as he could.

“She would have hated to know that it’s been so long. Almost fourteen years. When my parents were alive, they used to try to make me go, but it was too painful, losing her. And then I lost my parents, and I guess I just didn’t see the point anymore. My Twi’s so rusty, I don’t know if I could even get around anyway.”

She forced a laugh, but looked away as soon as it escaped her lips. She hid her face from him for what seemed like a long stretch of time. The sun finally reached a place where the window couldn’t catch its light. Marcus could feel the heat lifting off of his shoulder, and he wanted it back.