“Please!” Rita say.
“What the do-diddly!” Rhonda say, and take the lady’s arms from around me. A guy come up behind the old lady, take her elbow, tell her, “Let’s have a seat, ma’am.” She starts crying more crazy and tries to walk up to the casket. I look up at the Reverend look like her eyes gonna fall out her head. Rita looks back. “Speak of the devil!”
“Is that her?” Rhonda ask.
“Uh huh.” Rita nod.
A big big lady is coming down the aisle waving her hands screaming, “My BAABEE, My BAAABEEEE!” She so big she can almost touch both sides of the aisle. She got on a big black raincoat. Her hair is sticking straight up like on the cartoons when they put their fingers in the electric socket. Why is she screaming like that? I start crying. Crying and crying. Snot coming out, my teeth is chattering. She remind me of Channel Thirteen, elephants in Africa. A elephant gets killed, all its friends come out and shake the earth with they screaming.
“MY BAAABEEEEEEEE!”
“You know who that lady is?” Rita ask me.
“No.”
“You should tell him, Rita.”
“Enough already!” Rita tell Rhonda.
The lady stops screaming. She’s wringing her hands like she’s washing’em. Then she turn around mumbling. Her hair is smashed flat in the back, and there’s a bald spot. From the back you can see a big tear in her raincoat, look like she ain’t got nothing on under it, ugh! Her bedroom slippers going
schlup-schlup
down the aisle.
I look down at my shoes, my “good” shoes. Special occasions. When I was in the play at school, my mother bought ’em. I wore ’em when she took me to see Aretha Franklin at Lincoln Center.
Remember what you seeing, Abdul. She’s the greatest.
I wore ’em when we went to see Haitian people’s paintings at the Schomburg. At the Schomburg on the first floor there’s a circle made of gold stand for the world with blue lines through it for rivers. I read the poem written on the floor, “I’ve Known Rivers.”
Underneath is Langston Hughes’s ashes.
I look at Mommy, my shoes. I got these on today ’cause she’s dead. Not because I’m going anyplace. Who gonna buy me shoes now? I lean against Rita, I’m tired, I want to go to sleep.
“Sit up!” Rhonda hiss.
“He’s tired, he’s just a little boy.”
PING! go Rhonda upside my head with her forefinger and thumb like a slingshot. “Dis your mother’s funeral. Sit yourself up!”
“Would you let him be!” Rita’s mad.
“No, Rita, you wrong. He don’t need to sleep through this.”
“Sit up, baby.”
More people is coming down the aisle now. Ladies is crying. One lady is crying so hard she can hardly walk, two guys is helping her. “No, no,” she sobbing, “I don’t believe it.” I stop crying to watch her. Ha, ha.
“Lots of these people is from your mother’s job and from where she went to school. Some of them didn’t know she was sick.”
I knew she was sick, but not sick enough to die. What you do in college, Mommy? She laugh.
Work, work real hard.
I’m going there when I grow up?
Of course.
The old lady in the dirty orange dress who was hugging on me is creeping down the aisle now. Weird. Everybody sits back down.
Reverend Bellwether looks at us. “The family may come forward to view the deceased.”
“Deceased?” I whisper.
“Dead,” Rita say.
Reverend Bellwether is still looking at us. “Come on, baby, that’s what we came here for, to say good-bye to Precious. They gonna close the casket after this.” We walk down the aisle to Mommy. I like her dress, white, shiny. Her face looks funny, the way her lips is pressed together make her look like somebody else. Rhonda lean over and kiss Mommy. Then she come behind me. “You want to kiss your mudder good-bye?” Before I can say anything, she pick me up and lean me over the casket. I feel like my lips done bumped up against the water fountain at school, hard, cold. I start crying. Loud. Rita pull me from Rhonda.
“You shouldn’t have done that!”
Rhonda go sit back down without saying nothing.
Reverend Bellwether says, “Good morning.” I wipe my nose on my sleeve. Rita gives me some tissue. I wipe my sleeve with the tissue. She shake her head. “We’re gathered here this morning to say good-bye to someone who has finished with this world,” Reverend Bellwether say.
“Yes we are!” someone shout.
“Umm hm!” someone say.
“‘For now we see through a glass darkly!’ the Bible says.”
“Umm hm, yes it does! Yes it does!”
“In this life we don’t know God! God is revealed to us but still not known. We think we know God, got him labeled, unh huh! done named that file and saved it under Sunday! Sunday morning ten a.m. to one p.m. to be exact. Or, or”—Reverend Bellwether wheels around and points at Jesus hanging on the cross—“God is a statue dripping with blood. Or a book somebody told us was holy. Same somebody put us in chains and brought us here.”
“Uh oh! Tell the truth!”
“Where she going with dis? We ain’t paying her for dis nonsense,” Rhonda grumble. “Dis spozed to be a funeral.”
“Let me tell you, you don’t know God and you ain’t seen God! The glass is dark on this side. The only time you see God, the only time the light shine bright enough to see is when you doing God’s work! We may not know God, but we know what God wants us to do. He has been clear about that. Don’t kill. Don’t steal. Love thy neighbor as thyself.
As thyself. Love thyself?
Yeah, how you gonna love anybody as you love yourself if you don’t love yourself? Jesus was a loving child of God. ‘Forgive them, Daddy,’ he said, ‘for they know not what they do.’ That’s what he said, not an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth. But love! And she—unh huh, who we’re gathered here together to wish her well on her journey from this life—she tried to do that, didn’t she?”
“Yes!”
Journey? Heaven? How is she gonna be in heaven if she’s here? How can she go someplace if she’s dead?
“You know she did! You wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t, wouldn’t be people standing here in the aisle for one little ol’ single mother as they call us nowadays, nothing spectacular about that. No, you wouldn’t be standing in the aisle if she hadn’t been filled with love. I know you loved her and I know she loved you. It’s love, then.
Then
we see, know, and are known. Death takes everything, and into it you can take nothing but the part of you that is like God—spirit! The part that stands face-to-face with your Creator, who don’t care about Gucci, Halston, or Hilfiger! Hair or degrees, color or pedigree—he knows you by the work—not your work,
his
work that you have done. He knows you by the love in your heart. So she’s at rest here, now. Finally. And we can rest too, even in our sorrow, knowing God will know Precious Jones and she knew him.”
“Yes!”
“Yes he will!”
“We’re saying good-bye to someone who loved and who we loved. Faith! Hope! Charity! Charity meaning love. Jesus said, ‘I give you these three, faith, hope, and love. And of these three love is the greatest’! Without it everything else is as tinkling brass, paper tigers, and three-card monte. Don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got love. Hollow, empty, keep your toys, prizes, hold on to ’em, ’cause without love they all you got! No one ever tell me when I’m up there at Harlem Hospital, ‘Reverend Bellwether, could you contact my BMW, could you see if my Jaguar could come see me before I go, could you tell my IBM ThinkPad I love her!’ You’re able to laugh even now in this hard hour at the absurdity of that. You know what they tell me? ‘I broke up my brother’s marriage in ’86, tell him I’m sorry.’ ‘I haven’t seen my mother in three years, tell her everything is OK and what’s past is past. She’ll know what I mean.’ ‘My daddy threw me out when he found out I had the HIV, tell Junebug to go by and tell him I love him and ask him would he come see me.’ ‘I had a son I gave up for adoption when I was sixteen, can you write it down somewhere if he ever come looking I loved him and thought about him every day. I couldn’t do nothing for him on heroin. It was the best thing.’ Now, that’s what they tell
me,
Reverend Bellwether. I don’t know what they tell you. But I ain’t heard ’em mention they Jaguar Apple laptop BlackBerry BlueBerry yet!
“Twenty-seven years is not much time. But it’s all the time God gave our sister, I don’t know why any more than you do. It was all the time she had, and she used it well.” Reverend Bellwether stop talking for a minute and sigh. “Her friends, teachers, clients, and son can all testify that she used her time well. Some of the people here are going to say a few words about our sister who is no longer with us.”
That’s stupid, Mommy’s right here. I’m thinking sometimes all this is just a game we’re playing, ha, ha! Or a story with a surprise ending like at school, they give you a story with no end and you get to write the end, or this is a joke, not that Mommy played a lot of jokes, but she could! She could just jump up laughing and climb out the casket hollering,
Psyched you out! Psyched you out!
Then grab me by the hand and say,
The fun is over. I don’t have time for all this foolishness! What do you think I be doing all day, sitting on my butt? If that bathroom is not clean when we get home—I don’t want to hear no excuses! The bathroom and taking out the trash are your jobs. You hear me, it ain’t no goddamn joke out here. You think it’s a joke? Huh? HUH?
No, I don’t think it’s a joke, I say. We’ll go home and I’ll run go turn on the TV and she’ll come turn off the TV and say,
Do your homework.
I’ll stomp my feet and throw my book bag on the floor when she leaves the room, and she’ll come back in the room and say,
If you know what’s good for you, you’ll pick those books up like you got some goddamned sense and do your homework.
She’ll go in the kitchen mumbling about I don’t know how lucky I am, and I’ll be in the living room mumbling about I wish I could go live with my father or by myself! But I’ll do my homework, then she’ll come and see me doing it, smile, and say the Asian Student Union showing
Return of the Dragon
for free at her school Friday night, we can go and go to McDonald’s afterwards if she don’t hear no nonsense from me till Friday. I’ll smile. And she’ll say,
So could we have drama-free homework until Friday?
“Abdul.” Rita’s shaking my shoulder. “Let the lady pass.” I stand up and a big white lady who had been sitting down the aisle from us squeeze past.
“Hello,” she say when she gets up front. “My name is Sondra Lichenstein. I met Precious almost eleven years ago when I was working for the Board of Ed. I won’t even try to describe the circumstances that we met under, that’s like a book or something, really. But I will tell you I stayed in touch with her, sometimes whether she wanted it or not.” She laughs. “Eventually we became friends. Before she died, in addition to being a student in the SEEK Program at City College, she worked as a peer counselor at Positive Images in Harlem, and was a full-time mom of a beautiful little boy, Abdul, who is a wonderful student; and it was Abdul who made the computer graphic design you see next to the Langston Hughes poem in the middle of the program. I’m going to sit down now and let Blue Rain, one of Precious’s teachers, speak.” She comes to sit back down. Good, I’m glad; it makes me sick to hear people talking about Mommy like she’s dead.
Oh, I know her, lady with dreadlocks. I seen her before, she’s one of my mother’s friends.
“Hi, I’m Blue Rain, I was Precious’s teacher and later became her friend.” Blue Rain looks down at a little card and says, “I didn’t want to forget anything I had to say or go on too long, so I wrote down what I had to say. I remember once Precious telling me, ‘What difference does it make whether the glass is half full or half empty? You just drink as much as you can while you can.’ Abuse truncated her life and led to the AIDS”—AIDS! What she talking about?—“which finally took it. But she showed me, all of us, what a good game you can still play when the deck is stacked against you.”
“Ashé!”
someone yell.
“Tell the truth!” someone else yell.
“She learned to read and write at the age of sixteen.” Who she talking about? “At twenty she received a GED and began the slow walk toward a college degree. Her achievements were remarkable because of what she was able to overcome and perhaps even more remarkable because of what she wasn’t able to overcome. We who knew her watched a child become a woman, a half-full glass spill over, something broken become whole. And in the act of witnessing became more whole ourselves.”
If I had been good and done what she said, she wouldn’t have gotten sicker and sicker.
Do you have to make so much noise!
My job is to clean the bathroom. When I open the medicine chest over the sink—
Don’t bother with that, I’ll do that
—I count thirteen bottles of medicine. In the morning in the afternoon at night. Why, if nothing’s wrong with you? I know you don’t have what they’re saying because you’re good we’re good I’m good we don’t have that, we’re, I’m a boy who’s
going somewhere, gonna be something.
I didn’t mean to be making noise I miss my father I wish he would come and get me and make it alright I want to go horseback riding if I had a father I could go horseback riding all the time. But I don’t and I won’t I wish my mother would get up out of that box and holler (even though it’s November) APRIL FOOLS! APRIL FOOLS! I PSYCHED YOU OUT! I PSYCHED YOU OUT! and we could go home again like before I feel so tired and I don’t like listening to all these stupid people talking. This is the fourth, no fifth one. Tall skinny woman in blue jeans and a jacket and tie.
“We are all here today—oh, my name is Jermaine Hicks—as we were saying, we are all sad to see our friend and sister lose her valiant—I mean that in every sense of the word—val-lee-ant, fight for life. She was a star, a diamond among rhinestones, a warrior. That’s not rhetoric, that’s real. I guess there were bad things you could say about her, there’s bad things you could say about anybody. But to me this moment is about celebrating the life she did have, as well as pouring out our grief for the one she didn’t have and now will never have. Her shit was not easy—Oh, I’m not supposed to talk like that here?” She look over at Rhonda. When I look at Rhonda, Rhonda is staring the girl down so hard her eyes look like traffic lights. “I’m not supposed to mention Medicaid didn’t want to pay for her drugs or that the ’fare was threatening her again to leave school or lose her benefits, that there’s a padlock on her door and that she died broke and depressed, deeply depressed.”