“We submit and we wait,” he said.
Later, on Christmas night, stomach full of neck-bone meat and turkey legs and chitlins, I headed out into the backyard, but this time I took a shovel. I dug until I found it. The comb. The teeth shining black in the moonlight. Its wooden handle was covered with dirt. I stood over it, panting slightly from the work. Then I spat on it. Again and again and again.
CHAPTER 22
Miriam
2001
She was snaking a needle into a vein when her patient, an elderly white woman wearing pearls and her hair in a high bun, exclaimed, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
The woman had one of those old Memphis accents. She reminded Miriam of Scarlett O’Hara, the older and much-lived version, but Scarlett nonetheless. Miriam sat back, inspected her work, which looked fine, and frowned. She was known for being gentle with all her patients. Two years more, and she would be a nurse.
“Just bear with me, ma’am, almost there,” Miriam said.
She’d found the vein on the first try, no digging around, but she was prepping this woman for surgery, and she reasoned that that was enough to make anyone feel on edge. Miriam released the rubber band around the woman’s arm.
“Chile,” the woman said. “This world on fire, and you fussing about an old woman’s veins.”
Miriam followed the woman’s gaze to the television in the corner and saw buildings as tall as titans on fire. She fumbled for the remote and turned the volume up. Apparently, planes had flown into them. She saw folk covered in soot and ash and debris, coughing up blood. Miriam put hand to mouth when she realized that in the debris, like confetti falling from some heavenly party, were bodies. She and her patient watched human beings jump from the buildings. Reports were coming in that there’d been another crash in Pennsylvania.
Was this woman right? Was the earth on fire? But what made Miriam break—what made Miriam drop her entire tray of needles and gauze and sterilizer—was the announcement that there had been yet another plane crash.
The Pentagon had been hit.
It had been six years since she last saw Jax. After Miriam left, fled in the night with their children, Jax had advanced in the Marines. He had made lieutenant colonel. Miriam knew he had been transferred from Camp Lejeune to the Pentagon because of the forwarding address on the divorce papers.
“You all right, chile?” the patient asked, concerned.
Miriam bent to pick up the upturned tray. She did not know how to answer. She honestly did not know if the North house could bear any more loss.
Four years had passed since Derek’s arrest. He had been charged with first-degree murder on two counts. Miriam had sat in the Shelby County Courthouse, her hands tightly intertwined with those of her sister, every day of the trial. They both had worn black.
The courtroom smelled like the hickory benches that lined the small room on two sides. Derek was there in his blue prison jumpsuit, sitting at a long table on the left side of the room, flanked by his public defender.
Three Black boys had entered the courtroom shortly before the call to order and had sat directly across from the North family pew and stared at Derek. They wore sagging jeans and royal-blue T-shirts. Apparently, Kings Gate Mafia had sent troops to monitor the battle playing out in the courtroom. They were there every day of the trial. So were the Douglass Park Bishops, known for their bloodred bandanas tied around still-growing biceps. The guard had stopped many a brawl in the aisles, separating Black child from Black child clawing at each other.
Derek never confirmed his involvement with the Douglass Park Bishops, but he did not have to. The judge, the Honorable Dorothy White, was from the streets of Memphis, knew that a seventeen-year-old boy does not own an AK-47; that weapon had been gifted. She, and the jury, also knew that a boy from North Memphis had no valid, reasonable reason to even be in Orange Mound, much less with an automatic weapon used in warfare, all to kill two people he had never met. The jury took all of thirty minutes to issue a guilty verdict; didn’t even need to break for lunch.
Miriam remembered only letting go of her sister’s hand when she took the stand at Derek’s sentencing. The prosecution was pushing for the death penalty; Derek’s best shot was life without parole. August wore a black cape dress that flared out at her arms so that she looked like some medieval sorceress. A black funeral hat with a lace veil covered most of her shell-shocked face. Her kitten heels clicked on the marble floor as she swung open the saddle doors separating public from judge and took the stand.
“Raise your right hand,” the security guard had bellowed.
August obeyed.
“Do you solemnly swear that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, under penalty of perjury, so help you God?” he asked.
“Yes,” August said.
“Ma’am, we need you to state your full name for the record,” Derek’s defense attorney began. He was a stout, bearded, middle-aged man, and he wore a well-tailored suit, a red carnation at the lapel.
“August Della North.”
“And state your relation to the defendant.”
“He’s my son.”
“Ma’am, what is your occupation?”
“I’m a hair stylist. I have a little shop I run out the back of my home.”
Derek’s attorney paced, nodded his head, and stroked his beard. He spoke slow, pronouncing each syllable so that the courtroom understood the gravity of the situation. “Ma’am, why don’t you begin by telling us a little about your son?”
Miriam remembered seeing her sister take a deep breath, exhale. She had never seen August so utterly spent. She looked like she had been to the underworld and back and could speak the language of the dead and the lost.
At first, it didn’t seem as if August would be able to speak. She sat on the witness stand and Miriam saw her shoulders rise and fall in deep, concentrated breaths. The silence got to the crowd. There were snickers from the Kings Gate Mafia pew.
It seemed as if August took no note. She lifted her veil so that her eyes were exposed. Even from her seat, Miriam could see them: They were two dark holes. Looked like they contained the suffering of the entire world.
August began: “That boy’s father was Lucifer. I mean that. Kind of man make you believe in evil in this world. Know it in your bones. Feeling you get when you stare at an abyss and know in your heart that there, below, dragons roam.”
The courtroom fell silent. There were no more snickers.
“We met on Beale Street,” she said, her voice steadier now. “He was walking down Beale, cigarette in hand, and offered me one. I had never tried one before, and it tasted so good, like a freedom I didn’t know I needed. He had on this black leather jacket. Sideburns. He was the color of fall—golden brown. Stole my heart. Took it, beating, right out of me. Felt like I didn’t even have a say in the matter.
“He never hit me. Didn’t have to. I knew what a demon was, what it wanted, what angered it. Miss Dawn—she an old family friend—she once told me, ‘Djinnis are real.’ But I didn’t believe her until Derek was born.
“Derek was born in the middle of a thunderstorm in March. The power out. Six hours into labor, an elm had fallen on a power line. People drowned that night. Derek came out silent as a lamb through all of it. His father held him first. Can you imagine? Wouldn’t even let me be the first to hold my boy. He said, ‘He’ll be a Spartan.’ God, that man lived up to his promise. Brutally. Ruthlessly. Once, I found D—we call him D at home—in a closet, shivering. He had held a bucket of water in his hands. For hours. You hear me? Hours. He was ten years old. I was at home, but I had ten washes and sets that day—” She broke off, reached for a tissue from a box on the witness stand.