I wanted to paint it all. The church fans, every color of the rainbow. The women of all shades who had come to Auntie August’s shop not for their usual presses, but for the relief of cornrows and Bantu knots and box braids. I wanted to draw Mya and the cats in the green trees.
Now that school was out and there was no math homework for Mama to hound me about, my goal for the summer was to compile a series of sketches of women from the neighborhood I had grown to love. My weekly sessions on Miss Dawn’s porch had added to my skills as an artist. I had pages and pages of her hands moving this way and that. Only if the weather would allow, the heat being near-suffocating, I’d take a whole easel and sit out there for hours with her. Seemed as if we could talk even Wolf’s ears off. Often, Wolf would place her huge head in my lap and sleep like that.
Drawing was my refuge. I could escape into my sketchbook. I didn’t see much of Derek because I chose not to. Yes, he was there in the house living with me. But I behaved as if he were a house cat I didn’t much like and who did not much like me. If he entered a room, I left it. If he spoke to me—rare—I hissed back. There had been more than a few Mexican standoffs in our kitchen. Always soundless. Dinners, the one meal all five of us shared together, were tense and awkward. My stomach twisting so that I’d lose my appetite. Most nights, I’d ask to leave the table and retreat to the front porch, bringing my plate of food with me. It was hell batting off the cats and the flies and the bees and the birds that all seemed to want what was on my plate: mashed potatoes with gravy, turnip greens, candied yams, neck bones smothered in hot sauce. I’d swat them all away and scoop quick mouthfuls as I brought out my sketchbook, rested it on my knees, and began to do what I loved most. If I concentrated on the sketch at hand, Derek would fade into the background of my life.
The car in our driveway honked again, longer this time.
“Nigga, go,” I said.
“Hear, hear,” Mya said, her British inflection slightly muffled through her mouthful of grits. But behind Mya’s humor, her eyes were ice cold. She’d asked me that first night we arrived, and not one time since, what had happened between me and Derek. She didn’t need to know the details to know whose side she was on. Mya could annoy the shit out of me the way only younger sisters can. Her constant jokes. Always checking my forehead. The way she looked over my shoulder while I was doing geometry homework and shouted out the correct answers in her Mary Poppins voice before I got even halfway through understanding the question. But she’d fight Satan for me, tiny fists balled up and unafraid.
“Joan,” Auntie August said with a sigh. She sounded tired. The coffee had spilled down the front of her robe, and she reached for a paper towel.
Derek took one long pull from the pint of buttermilk and then placed it back and closed the refrigerator door.
“Goddamnit, Derek, don’t go,” Auntie August said.
During the school year, boys with pistols bulging from the back of their jean waistbands had showed up at our doorstep each morning promptly at seven-thirty to escort me, Mya, and Derek, their young new recruit, to the Douglass High School. The middle school and elementary were located just a block away. It had become the most dangerous block in North Memphis. The night before we first went to our new school two years ago, Auntie August had sat me and Mya down while Mama was in the shower and told us frankly that in the time since Mama had up and left with our Yankee father, the Douglass Park 92 Bishops had controlled our new neighborhood and the surrounding hoods of North Memphis: Douglass, Chelsea, New Chicago. I had a feeling Auntie wanted to add “no good” to her description of Daddy, but she stopped short. She sucked on a Kool and continued explaining calmly that we should never wear red, never wear blue. Stick to neutrals. Always. An affiliate of the Bloods, the Douglass Park Bishops wore red bandanas hanging off their back pockets or tied around still-growing biceps. They shot people, she said. Children. Asleep in their beds.
Mama would sometimes say Memphis had changed since she was last here. There were just as many abandoned lots, payday loan sharks, and liquor stores as churches now, peppering the city where once had stood pillars and monuments of Blackness—Clayborn Temple, Sun Records, the Lorraine Motel. I’d overheard Auntie August telling Mama that most white folk had fled to the countryside in the early part of the decade, to the cotton fields of Shelby County and its white-only schools. Sometimes I thought the gangs were a blessing in a way. Made Memphis Black. Utterly. Black men and women ran these streets without a white person in sight—a relief. If Memphis were alive, gangs would be both her red and white blood cells—killing and healing and repeating.