The evening Derek was arrested, Mya and I had been sitting in the shop. Most of the clients had streamed out, and only Miss Dawn was left, getting her ritual wash and set. It was four years ago now, but I could still remember it clear as day. A loud banging on the shop’s patio entrance had startled all of us. It was not the sound of a woman coming in for her treatment. Auntie August pressed a finger to her lips. She ran into the house, and when she returned seconds later, she was carrying a shotgun.
She’d rushed to the door, pulled back the curtain, and slowly opened the door to let in two police officers.
Mya and I ran to Miss Dawn and hid behind her chair. I did not like police officers. Neither did Mya. I was only twelve then, and all I knew was that they meant my parents’ fights had escalated.
I remembered Auntie August asking, pointedly, if the two white officers had read her shop’s sign outside and whether they had a warrant. How her face fell when they told her that they, indeed, did.
Later that night, we’d sat at our kitchen table shell-shocked and silent. My mom had done what she could—she made us all tea. Mya had fallen asleep with her head resting on Auntie August’s lap. August’s head was on the table, folded in the crook of her arm.
My mom had placed a brown hand atop her sister’s shaking one. She reached across and grabbed mine so that we formed a half séance over the table. “We will get through this,” my mom had said.
I snatched my hand back. “I’ve prayed for this night all my life,” I said.
“Joan,” my mom said, sharp, reproachful.
“He’s gone,” I said. “I’m finally safe. Free. We all are now.”
Auntie August’s cackle reverberated throughout the yellow kitchen. Felt like it shook the rafters themselves. “Free?” Her laugh was steeped in the same bitterness when I had asked her about God. “A Black woman hasn’t ever known the meaning of that word, my love.”
“Joan,” Mr. Harrison said again, startling me back to the present. He was at the front of the classroom, a piece of chalk in his hand. “You’re drawing again, aren’t you?” He sighed but didn’t sound angry. More resigned.
Damnit, I thought. I glanced down at my notebook.
“The New Deal” was written in my standard cursive…and nothing else. A lot of drawings of the room. The maple. Random half drawings.
I sighed, too. I would be in the library looking up whatever the hell “the New Deal” was before our next exam. You’re killing me, Teach. Give me war! I almost moaned aloud. At least in a battle, people are fighting for something, I thought. What was I fighting for, sleeping and eating and growing up in the Cold War being waged between me and Derek, and then between me and the memory of Derek? To get out with my dignity, I supposed. To get Mya through safe. To give Mama, despite our fights, a chance to make her own way, to become a nurse. To make sure Auntie August kept eating when she took to her bed.
My gaze shifted to the window again, but I was no longer studying the maple.
Mama had told us countless stories of Papa Myron. His love for his wife became a legendary thing in our house. Mama and Auntie August would mention his lynching infrequently, but it loomed large in all our minds. I wondered whether he’d ever been scared on the front. If he felt more scared there or when his fellow officers turned on him. A man who loved big enough to build Grandma Hazel the house we all lived in now—had he killed, when it came to it? It was easier to imagine that my daddy had. Harder to picture him ever being scared. Is that why he’d chosen the Marines, because he’d always been like that? Or was it the Marines that turned him angry and violent?
The wind picked up, working the leaf from its branch, and it fell out of sight. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, thinking about how when Derek was still living with us, I sometimes felt a rage so strong I believed I could kill. Maybe I wasn’t so different from Daddy. An unpleasant thought. Maybe he’d even made me this way, I realized, angrily. But my rage came partly from fear. That reassured me until I considered, with a start, that maybe that wasn’t so different from my father, after all. When Derek got me angry, especially when we first moved to Memphis, it would take all of me not to break something—to pick up some antique in the house and throw it against the wall. I had to learn to control this rage. I would walk away, argue with myself. I’d leave the table and eat alone on the porch, cooling off. Why on earth could my father not do the same? What did my daddy have to be afraid of, anyway?
“Joanie!”
I snapped my head to the front of the room, confused. That wasn’t Mr. Harrison’s voice—and nobody in that classroom ever called me “Joanie.”
Mya had appeared. In the classroom’s doorway. Her hair was disheveled. Auntie August made sure our hair was neatly parted and combed every morning, but Mya’s looked undone now. Her eyes were large and—my heart sped up—she was crying.
But Mya could not have been there; that was not possible. Mya should have been in Orchestra, her first-period class at Douglass Middle. The middle school was located just a block down the street from Douglass High. But there she was, breathless, scanning the crowded room for my seat. I could see the middle school Orchestra teacher, Ms. Oakley, behind her. The students sat in curious silence, all eyes on my sister.
I stood up. Mya ran to me. She nearly knocked me over. She buried her face against my shoulder, and I felt hot tears dampen my shirt.
“My, talk to me,” I whispered in her ear. “What’s wrong?”
I didn’t know if she would be able to talk; her shoulders were convulsing in sobs. But everyone in that classroom, everyone on that floor—shit, every soul in North Memphis likely heard Mya as she tilted her head up to look at me and wailed that planes were dropping from the skies and that one had hit Daddy’s work.
CHAPTER 21
Joan
2002
I’d been taking art classes at Rhodes after school this fall, just like I did during my junior year. Rhodes displayed all the art students’ work in a small show each year, and last spring mine was included for the first time. I was the only high school student featured in the showcase. I don’t know for sure, but I had to think that was part of the reason they’d offered me a full ride for the following year. There was no way I’d have been able to go otherwise—it was a dream come true. And that would never have happened without Professor Mason. You got grit, girl, he’d say, standing behind me as I painted. He’d stroke his long white beard and repeat it: You got grit.
One Saturday, he asked me to stay behind.
“Joan?”
Students were filing out of the now-dark studio and into the fading fall light. I was bent over my large portfolio, packing up my pencils.
“Professor Mason?”
He leaned on an intricately carved ebony cane. He threw up a free hand. “Call me Bartram.”
“I’m not doing that; Mama would fillet me.” I smiled.
“Listen, Joan, where are you going after this?”
“Home,” I said.
“You know damn well what I meant.”
“You know where I’m going,” I said warily. I went back to packing up my things.
Rhodes. The argument with my mother, though it had happened the month before, still brewed hot in my thoughts. I could still hear her voice: pleading, defiant. Same as mine.