Choose Me (18 page)

“No, I can’t,” I told her. “Just call me back at ten, okay?”

When ten o’clock rolled around and Ms. Miller hadn’t called, I called her, but the phone was busy. I worked at the computer
a bit, checked my e-mails, then searched the Internet for a local screen-writing contest someone at work told me about. I
was beginning to take my creative writing more seriously, determined to finish my screenplay by year’s end. After I located
the website and downloaded the information, I called Ms. Miller again. The phone was still busy so I went to bed.

Just as I had fallen asleep, the phone awoke me.

“Adam—Mr. Black, it’s Nikki. Nikki Miller.” Her voice sounded shaky.

“What’s wrong?” I squinted in the dark at the digital clock radio: 12:05.

“Justin hasn’t come home. He hasn’t called. His cell phone is still off—”

“Hold on, hold on,” I said, still half asleep. I struggled out of bed and snapped on the light.

“I don’t know what to do. Should I call the police?”

“I’ll be right there.”

On the drive over, I tried not to think of the worst-case scenario. Ordinarily, I didn’t notice Justin and Ricky’s neighborhood,
but at twelve-forty-five in the morning it amazed me how alive it was—the young brothers on the corners, the constant flow
of traffic, drug deals in plain sight as cop cars drove by blatantly oblivious. It was still a nice neighborhood, predominantly
full of hardworking and retired Black folks, and I could only imagine what the poorer neighborhoods were like. I drove slowly,
glancing periodically at the young men for a glimpse of Justin’s familiar hair, his slightly bow-legged walk, even though
I knew he wasn’t the hanging-out kind. Times like this made me glad I wasn’t a father.

When I got to the Millers’ house, I halfway expected another trap—dinner and a bottle of wine, topped off with a lonely single
mother in a hot dress. Instead I found Ms. Miller distraught, a scarf tied around her head, wearing what looked like her son’s
clothes: baggy jeans and a T-shirt.

“He hasn’t called. He always calls, even if it’s to lie about where he is.”

“Did you two have a fight or something?”

“We’re always fighting these days. Yesterday, he told me he was going away to college and never coming to visit me.”

“He was just angry, he didn’t mean it.”

“He said he hated me.”

It was an ugly thing to hate a parent. It was like hating yourself, like hating God. I knew because this was the disease that
lived in me and had been eating at my insides. It was like the cancer that had tried to thrive in my body. However, the hate
had been more successful. What I felt for my dead father was immune to forgiveness like radiation and chemotherapy was to
terminal cancer.

“Kids say those things just to hurt their parents, but they don’t mean what they say.” I tried to assure her, though I knew
it was indeed possible for kids to hate their parents.

I listened as she talked about how hard it had been to be a single mother after her husband died, how careful she had to be
about dating, how hard it was for a woman with needs. I should’ve taken the hint and bolted, but I wanted to make sure Justin
made it home safely.

“Men pretend like they’re interested in me, you know. They think I’m desperate because I have two kids and I want to find
a daddy for them and that I’ll do anything, put up with anything, just to have a man in my life. But I’m waiting for someone
special,” she went on.

Yeah, so am I,
I thought.
But I am not the one.
I could feel her eyes eating away at me, piece by piece, and I scratched the back of my neck out of habit. Even though I
was sitting across from her, I was on edge and got up and walked to the window just in time to see Justin exiting a gray car.

“He’s here,” I announced, a little too happily.

She rushed to the door. “I’m going to kill him!”

I put out my arm and held her back. “That’s what he wants. To get a rise out of you. Don’t let him. Let me talk to him.”

At my father’s funeral, almost twenty years ago, I remembered standing at his coffin, fighting back the urge with all my might
to keep from pounding on his chest. I wanted to bring him back to life so I could choke it right back out of him. How dare
he cheat on my beautiful, God-fearing mother who always saw the good in everyone. I thought, it would have been easier to
understand if she had been a bad wife and mother—no, not even then. On the rare occasions when we dared to talk back or be
disobedient, Mama would quote Ephesians 6:2,
Honor thy mother and thy father … that thy may enjoy long life on earth.

When I looked over at the section where the family members were assembled, I saw the other woman, a Caucasian woman, and her
two children, sitting directly behind my mother and sister. The combination of my father’s long-ago mixed genes and the White
woman’s had produced almost White children. The girl was about my age—I later learned eight months younger—with long, wavy
dishwater blonde hair and pale skin. The boy was even more pallid, almost albino, with lighter, straighter hair. He was closer
to Jade’s age, by five months. It wasn’t until years later, when my cancer was diagnosed, after the doctors told me how rare
it was in African Americans, that I thought about my father’s great-grandfather, the German immigrant who was rarely mentioned
when talk turned to the ancestors. “The German,” as he was referred to by the family, was the one who had passed down his
light eyes and light skin on to my father, and possibly, his cancerous genes, which in turn, were transmitted to me.

The day of the funeral, I recalled everyone whispering around us, or so it seemed. If pointing were an acceptable thing to
do at a funeral, the fingers would have been all over us. As it was, the eyes and chins were doing a good job of indicating
the scandal unfolding at the front of the parlor. I heard my mother call me, her voice swollen with grief and exhaustion.
She said,
“Adam-Love, come meet your brother and sister.”
Jade, at eleven years old, had not grasped the depth of their relationship to us and was talking to them like they were long-lost
cousins. I whirled around and looked at my mother with such vehemence that she recoiled as if I had hit her. Then I turned
and walked out of the church without delivering the eulogy. In my head was the poem I had written and memorized for my father,
about his life as a father, a navy man and my hero. But I laid the words to rest and never resurrected them again. I didn’t
go to the burial, and at seventeen I swore that I would never visit his grave. Ever.

FIVE YEARS
. I had waited for a man like him for five years. And just when I had decided to give up, there he was, standing
in front of me, regal like a Black prince with locks the color of dark sand, eyes the color of night, reciting spiritual poetry
like biblical verses. It was Adam. He had to be the one.

At least that’s what my heart was telling me as I watched him take the podium with an air of confidence associated with success.
The tunic he wore blended with his golden skin tone and clung impeccably to each muscle and hard line on his torso. A long
duster and loose slacks, both in black, completed his ensemble, shrouding his lower contours in mystery so that the rest of
him had to be quickly reconstructed in the Etch A Sketch of my imagination. It was an outfit an eccentric man would wear,
like an artist. He wore it like a king.

Now at the microphone, he adjusted his thin-rimmed, amber-colored glasses, which I could tell were for show because he had
no broken refraction along his cheekbones where the bottoms of the lenses rested.

“Uhh,” Simone grunted with approval. “He don’t look like no Christian.”

“Don’t judge,” I whispered to silence her.

She nudged me hard. “You like ‘heem,’” she teased in a fake Jamaican accent.

She was right, Adam did seem out of his element, like he belonged at Words, the coffeehouse in Printer’s Row where weekly
secular poetry slams were held. And she was right, I did like him. His locks were tied back, cascading down his back like
a horse’s tail. A few locks spilled from his forehead and strategically covered his eyes as if he were trying to avoid eye
contact.

It was Second Thursday, Spiritual Poetry Night at TCCC, when members and visitors shared their inspirational verses. Once,
a young man read a poem laced with sexual innuendoes disguised as a spiritual sonnet. Subsequently, a sign-up sheet with prior
approval of any poetry being presented was instituted after Sunday service, so that no unsaved souls could wander in off the
streets to sample their “worldly” poetry on the sanctified. It was censorship but the church was not a democracy. I concluded
that it
was
Adam I saw in church the previous Sunday, and I wondered if he had attended just to sign up for poetry night or if he had
stayed to hear the Word.

At the table next to where I sat with Maya and Simone, there were four young women who always hung in a pack and whom I had
seen only sporadically in church. I had dubbed them “the Sister-Girlfriends.” They were the kind of people who came to church
for special functions, musical performances, when there was food, or for the weddings or baptisms of people they knew. I noticed
that when men took the mike, the Sister-Girlfriends would make comments behind elaborately manicured hands, or snicker into
each other’s ears like high school girls even though they looked to be in their mid-twenties.

I watched as Adam closed his eyes briefly, for effect, or so it seemed; he could have been nervous. Then he spoke, and I realized
he
was
nervous, for his voice belied his demeanor. It was raspy, like someone recovering from laryngitis, shaky, with just the slightest
hint of bravado as he intermittently bit his bottom lip.

“This first piece is entitled ‘My Precious Father, Eighty-Three,’” he began.

Despite his earlier self-assurance, I could tell he was a first-timer, a virgin. He made no eye contact, keeping his eyes
averted to the back of the darkened church on some distant focal point, much like a pregnant woman in labor would do. He held
a battered paperback in his hands, which he kept rolling around and around in a tube shape, but he didn’t read from it; I
assumed it was a prop to keep his hands occupied. I tried to make him feel at ease by flashing a small smile at him from the
sea of expectant, judgmental faces. But it was evident that we in the audience didn’t exist to him. He was in his own spiritual
realm and lost in the anointing of his words. He spoke slowly, deliberately, drawing out each word dramatically but at the
same time with a beatnik flair, pausing at every other syllable so that listeners could envision the poem in stanza formation,
line by line. As he went on, his voice became more solemn as if he were reciting a prayer.

The poem, cunningly mixed with phrases from various psalms and proverbs, was in the form of an epic; it told of a boy who
sought his father’s approval from the time he was little until the father’s death. In the end, the narrator forgave his father
for never being around and accepted that the only true father in his life was God. The poem hit home for me and I thought
about my own father. As he repeated the phrase,
“My precious Father, I love you, for being the only Father of this nation’s fatherless children,”
his voice faded away, and I wondered if the poem was autobiographical.

The applause was sporadic until I began clapping with appreciation to get everyone to give him his props; soon others joined
in. It wasn’t until Simone nudged me hard that I realized I was the only one left clapping.

It got his attention. He finally looked down from his focal point and gazed into the audience for the first time. Even though
he seemed to be glancing in my direction, it seemed he was staring right through me. I gave him an encouraging smile, but
he had already returned his sight to his point of origin and was beginning his next poem.

“This next one is called ‘Choose Me, Ninety-Nine.’”

“Yeah,” one of the Sister-Girlfriends muttered.

Another one said boldly and loudly, “I’ll choose you alright.” This was followed by stifled giggles.

“Shhh,” I hushed them, shooting a disapproving look in their direction.

Even after I had turned away from them, I could feel their collective eyes shooting daggers at the back of my head. There
were murmurs sweeping the church, and I could see Pastor Allen look apprehensively at the emcee, Sister Erma, perhaps wondering
if Adam was about to slip in a risqué poem that hadn’t been approved.

Adam read the second one with more passion, less pauses, much louder, sending even the teenagers into a frenzy and onto their
feet. With the extra beats, the poem went over the three-minute limit. There were the usual “Amens” from the older set and
affirmative “Uhs” and squeals from the women. The Sister-Girlfriends continued whispering comments and giggling, but none
of it seemed to faze Adam. When he was done, the audience gave him a standing ovation, the applause drowning out the Sister-Girlfriends,
who finally realized perhaps, that the “me” Adam was referring to was God, and not himself. As hard as I tried to remember
the poem in its entirety, the only words that stayed on my mind were,
“Choose Me.”

“I’m Adam. Thank you,” he said, his mouth so close to the mike that his voice exploded over the acoustics. As he stepped off
the stage, one woman, then another, reached out to shake his hand, complimenting him. Adam strutted past them and almost rushed
down the aisle, keeping his head down. I turned to see where he was sitting, but he headed straight for the door. Before I
knew it, my feet leaped from under me.

“Where are you going?” Simone and Maya both whispered aghast.

I waved them off and slowed down as I got to the end of the aisle, pretending I was just going out for air. It was another
freakish Chicago summer night when the temperature dropped suddenly and drastically, catching everyone unprepared. In the
foggy chilly night, I looked up and down the street, but Adam had mysteriously disappeared into the night.