Kenya rolled her eyes. “You mean it says he loves me?”
“Well, it does,” Sheila said.
“Mom, how long is this going to go on? I mean, what would happen if he got caught?”
Sheila looked around Kenya’s room, furnished with the small child’s desk they’d borrowed from Grandmama and the tall shelf of books of which Kenya was proud. There was a dresser, a couple of orange crates full of board games brought from the city, and that was basically it. Kenya hadn’t decorated the ugly yellow walls, feeling too angry at the Black History Month calendar pictures and UNICEF posters of the world’s brown children that her mother had hung in her old room back in the city, but not knowing where to go next.
Instead of answering, Sheila said, “You would think you would go crazy in here with nothing on the walls.”
“Mom!”
“I don’t know what would happen, okay? There’s a warrant out for his arrest for … what happened.”
Kenya looked down, but the world kept spinning and her mother kept talking. “I told them I wouldn’t testify against him, but he claims the prosecutor is out to get him.”
“Is he?”
“I don’t know. But the other thing is…” And here she managed to roll her eyes, even as they filled with water. “There’s stuff I didn’t know about.”
“What?”
Sheila sighed. “Well, I guess your father and Cindalou were going around vandalizing police stations? So your father’s on probation and he already spent a night in jail.”
Kenya remembered when she’d awoken to the sound of her parents arguing about where her father had spent the night. He claimed he’d fallen asleep in the library. Maybe he’d been in jail. Or, she thought, feeling queasy, making a baby with Cindalou.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked.
“I really don’t know,” Sheila said, her face wet with unacknowledged tears. Then, as if she absolutely couldn’t stand up anymore, she sat down on Kenya’s bed.
It was not the tears but the sitting that did it. Kenya found that when she went to ask her mother more questions, her mouth would not move.
How could you not know all of this? Is Baba a crazy person?
“Okay,” said Kenya. “Okay.”
Shortly after that conversation, Kenya realized she’d squandered what might have been her last chance to ask about what had happened to their family. The subjects of Johnbrown, Cindalou, and even the Seven Days had been sealed up underground, like the man in the Edgar Allan Poe story she had read at school.
One subject that didn’t need to be closed, as it had never been opened, was how Kenya, sleeping, came to hold a loaded gun, and why she chose to aim it at her mother. The one thing Kenya felt sure of was that she had not had to unearth the gun from its hiding place in the basement. One of her parents had taken it out. She never found out which one it was. She could easily imagine Sheila going for it in a moment of indignant rage, or Johnbrown moving it to keep it from Sheila’s hands. Or maybe it was the desperate Johnbrown trying finally to win a fight.
When Kenya asked herself, of all things, why, even sleeping, she would shoot her mother, no answer suggested itself. Whenever she found herself pondering this question, she felt that a cord had snapped and she was flying away from her body.
* * *
That December, Sheila and Kenya did not have to make a special secret trip to Bryn Mawr to see Grandmama. Instead they were invited to Christmas dinner at her house. “Nothing fancy,” she had promised.
Knowing Grandmama, like attending Barrett, was a constant education for Kenya about the well-to-do. For instance, while she dreamed, in spite of Grandmama’s warning, that the house would be decked out with scarlet ribbons and softly glowing white candles, there was only a squat businesslike tree hung with a few pink balls and an ugly clay ornament that Kenya had made at Barrett. At the top sat a black angel with a white chip in its cheek.
“When your father was young,” Grandmama said as they sat at the dining room table, “we would all go with the man who worked for us to chop down a tree. I thought it was splendid fun. But oh, John would moan and groan about the weather.”
“He never did like the cold,” Sheila said with a distant look.
“Kenya, we’ll have to take you to the Christmas farm one day to pick out a real tree,” said Grandmama. “You seem like you might be made of some pretty sturdy fiber.”
More education: sometimes for Christmas the upper classes served slices of turkey and pale stuffing out of Acme supermarket cartons, and gifted ill-fitting sweaters that smelled distinctly like basement. All of this made Kenya feel she had not been cheated by Kwanzaa after all. But then again, Kwanzaa dinner back on Irving Street was an altogether different beast from the one she now shared with her mother on Umoja at the Ardmore Arms. Kenya had never enjoyed listening to her father talk about the stifling confines of the slave hold while supposedly enjoying a holiday. But now she longed to hear anyone talk with interest about anything at all as she pushed around her mother’s brandied chicken, which had been more edible in the pre–Weight Watchers days.
Though it seemed like it would have been Johnbrown’s idea, Sheila had been the one to push for Kwanzaa. Johnbrown thought Karenga was a huckster who would one day become rich from something called “licensing.” He often brought up the fact that Kwanzaa was an American creation, rather than an African tradition. “It’s a Hanukkah rip,” he had once said, “and that’s barely a real holiday to start with.”
“So why do we do it?” Kenya had asked.
“It’s not always about complaining and tearing everything down,” Sheila said firmly. “People need celebrations.”
The word
celebration
would not have come to anyone’s mind observing Kenya and her mother during the seven nights of their first holiday in the suburbs. At one time Kenya had viewed the length of Kwanzaa as an advantage over Christmas, which was one lousy day that peaked well before noon. But now, Kenya dreaded each night of Kwanzaa in the Ardmore Arms, where she would face her mother at the kitchen table, making promises like being extra kind to the girls in Daughters of Isis, the black students’ group, and working harder on her math homework. On the second night they hosted Grandmama, who kept saying how interesting it all was and insisted on trying to pronounce the pertinent Swahili words.
“You know, Kiswahili is not a real language,” she announced, clearing her throat, after a botched attempt to say
Kujichagulia
. “It’s a mishmash of other languages.”
“Well, it’s a trading language,” Sheila said without commitment. Kenya noticed that her mother rarely disagreed with Grandmama.
That night, after Grandmama left, Sheila mysteriously produced a can of beer, which she sipped as she cornrowed Kenya’s hair. They watched
It’s a Wonderful Life
without really watching, and Kenya remembered her father’s running commentary about “fantasy capitalism.” She recalled that the Seven Days once bitterly debated Christmas and whether it was “categorically antirevolutionary,” as her father put it, which especially angered Earl. As if reading her mind, Sheila said, “They knew.”
“Who knew what?”
“All of them knew about your father and Cindalou.”
Kenya twisted around to look at her mother’s face. “You mean the Days?”
“Yeah, the
Seven Days
,” snorted her mother.
“Did someone tell you that?”
“They didn’t have to. How could they not know? And if I know your father, he was building his case to them.”
“Ow,” Kenya said. Her mother’s braiding became unpredictable when she grew agitated.
“I know that didn’t hurt,” Sheila said.
Kenya didn’t contradict her.
“Oh fuck this. It’s making my teeth hurt,” her mother said, indicating the television with her head. She worked the remote control until she landed on an old episode of
Star Trek.
“Mom,” said Kenya, “wouldn’t someone have told you? Yaya?”
“You would think,” she said in an acid voice. “But I guess they didn’t want to break up their precious group.”
“You were part of it, too.”
“Not like them, Kenya. I mean, yeah, I was part of it. And I believed in it. But not like your father.”
Kenya did not ask her mother to elaborate, but she continued talking anyway. “I’m going to level with you. You know I grew up in the projects. It wasn’t bad when I was little. It was just a decent place you lived with a bunch of other black people who worked hard, but it fell apart when the drugs and guns came in. Folks started going to jail, getting strung out, getting dead. The way I figured it, not getting pregnant, going to college, having a decent job, and taking care of my family was doing something for the community.” Sheila had taken her hands out of Kenya’s hair to make a mock-grandiose gesture when she said
community
. Then she turned Kenya back around roughly and continued to cornrow.
“On the other hand, people like your father, or even Yaya and Robert, they grew up with daddies and all of that. They had a little bit more to prove, especially your father. He liked to tell a lot of stories, but did he ever tell you the one about when he used to run with some Panthers and a bunch of them got picked up by some white cops?”
Kenya shook her head no.
“Keep your head still. Yeah, well, everybody got slammed against some brick wall. They were all about to get hauled downtown and strip-searched, and your father pulled out a little card his mother had snuck into his wallet and gave it to them. So he got to go home without a hair out of place.”
“Okay,” said Kenya.
Sheila laughed. “I mean shit, I was the community. ’Course, I wasn’t a backwoods charity case like some people.”
Cindalou.
“Uhura,” Sheila said, now talking about the black woman in an aerodynamic minidress on the television. “You know she wanted to quit this show and Martin Luther King called her and asked her not to? Because she was a role model? Like Martin Luther King didn’t have anything better to do that day?”
* * *
The summer before Kenya’s second year at Barrett, Grandmama died of lung cancer. Kenya had grown used to her cough and didn’t think it was unusual that Grandmama often excused herself for several minutes of hacking in the bathroom. Kenya had also gotten used to finding the occasional tissue delicately spotted with blood around Grandmama’s house.
“You need to get that cough checked out, Eveline,” her mother would say gently.
“For what?” Grandmama would ask drily. “For them to tell me it’s a cough?”
At Barrett, Kenya’s science class had been subjected to a terrifying weeklong unit on smoking. Phyllis Fagin had run weeping out of class and tried to win an audience at lunch wailing that her dad smoked cigars, which was even worse! It was true that Phyllis was, as the other girls said, a “drama queen,” but maybe Kenya might have cried, too, if she’d thought something like cancer could happen in her family. Family such as it was.
When she died, Grandmama’s few remaining friends were dreaming away their days in nursing homes, which she called “the poppy fields.” Her funeral was a small cemetery affair on a muggy July morning, attended by Sheila, Kenya, a few neighbors, and Grandmama’s oldest sentient friend, a black dentist. Kenya had met the large, slow-moving, and deep-voiced Dr. Walton before. Grandmama had spoken proudly of his accomplishments as the only black dentist on the Main Line, but bitterly of what she characterized as his eagerness to get his hands into the mouths of white people.
The service was presided over by the young minister of the Episcopalian church Grandmama had long since stopped attending. He kept mispronouncing her name, evidently confusing it with the name of the wicked witch in
The Wiz
.
Kenya couldn’t cry. She did not feel the acute sting of sadness so much as a heavy, damp feeling. For days after the funeral, she tried to snap herself out of the strange spell cast by Grandmama’s death. One night, unable to sleep, she charged out of her room and into the living room, where Sheila sat watching a police show that she repeatedly denounced as racist but never missed.
“Kenya?” Sheila said in an alarmed voice.
“I’m awake!”
“Of course.”
“You thought I was sleepwalking,” said Kenya accusingly.
Sheila rolled her eyes. “What are you doing up?”
“I’m sorry,” said Kenya.
“Sorry—?”
“I’m sorry I shot you!”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. Everything is my fault. It’s because of that. But I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean—I don’t remember—”
“Come here,” said Sheila.
Kenya cried then while Sheila stroked her head and told her it wasn’t her fault. Kenya had been sleeping, Sheila said; who knows what happened, everyone was fine, her shoulder had healed quickly, it didn’t matter.
After her tears had dried, Kenya pulled out of her mother’s arms to face her. “I know you say it wasn’t my fault. But do you forgive me?”
Sheila’s face grew strange. Not angry, but as if she was trying not to say something. “I forgive you,” she said.
Kenya nodded.
“I’m okay, Kenya,” Sheila said, turning to stare straight ahead at the television, “but it hurts too much to think about it. Can you understand that?”
“Yes,” Kenya said in a whisper, tears gathering again in her throat.
“No more crying,” her mother said. “There’s been enough crying.”
Kenya thought of the one time she’d heard her mother secretly sobbing. She thought of her father dripping snot and tears over her mother in the hospital. There had not actually been a lot of crying, she thought. But perhaps her mother was right that more would not help.
* * *
A few months after Grandmama’s death, Kenya watched Alma Lewis, the mother of her one black classmate, sweep through Grandmama’s house with Sheila at her heels.
“Estate sale, hun,” Alma Lewis said, touching a yellow porcelain lamp. “Darling, please, county dump,” she said, touching a chipped glass table.
Sheila protectively caressed the coral-pink silk sofa where Kenya sat curled up with her English homework. “You don’t think just take the plastic cover off? Vintage?”