August turned and faced Miriam. “You open it,” she said, stepping aside.
“I don’t want to go in there.”
August put a hand on a hip and, this time, blew her smoke where it went, directly into Miriam’s face.
Miriam swatted away the smoke.
“Then I guess we stand here looking at each other all night into morn.”
“Fine!” Miriam exclaimed, her frustration mounting. “Hardheaded as I don’t know what.”
Miriam twisted the handle and threw her right shoulder against the door, and it swung open.
Unlike the rest of the house, Derek’s room was brightly lit. At first, the light dilated Miriam’s pupils, blinded her a bit. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust, longer for them to process what she was seeing.
For the second time that night, Miriam nearly had a heart attack. She could have fallen to her knees, dropped down onto the hardwood floor and prostrated herself in front of all the beauty.
She had never really looked at Joan’s drawings, her sketches. All these years of telling Joan to put her sketch pad away, asking her bluntly if she had finished her calculus homework, Miriam had never really seen anything Joan had done. At least, not since she was a child. And now Miriam was certain her daughter had grown up into such a fine thing.
For all around that room was Joan’s art. Ten pieces, as tall as the ceiling, lined the room. And they were all of folk she knew: Miss Jade. Mika. Other women from the shop. It would’ve been almost sacrilege, near blasphemous, not to have recognized Miss Dawn’s hands. Joan had used ink on white canvas, and like in some ancient Japanese print, Miss Dawn’s dark hands held a branch thick with blackberries.
And August. Miriam saw her sister awash in vivid colors that belonged only in heaven. The cream of August’s kimono looked like the buttermilk she soaked her chicken in. Joan had even got the plume of August’s cigarette smoke just so; it looked like lace. The pale green of the Kool box was the color of a hummingbird in her sister’s hand.
Miriam turned her head to the right and froze. She saw herself. In soft pastel watercolors. In it, she lay asleep atop a thick medical book. She must have fallen asleep right at the kitchen table after a long shift. And Joanie—bless the child—must have draped that quilt over her. Must have painted away.
August moved to stand in front of her own portrait, and it was shocking to Miriam how lifelike the painting was, how Joan had captured August so perfectly.
“You asked that girl once to name you a famous artist who was a woman, who was Black.” August’s cigarette was out, but her face was set in stone. She hadn’t minded the fact that the cigarette singed her fingers. “Joan Della North. That’s who. If she has to be the first, then so be it. Because she gon’ go to that fancy school overseas, Meer. You hear me? I don’t mean no disrespect. I love you”—she lifted her arms in the air, so elegantly, like a Bolshoi ballerina reaching for something—“like the stars. And I know I shouldn’t be telling no mother how to raise her kids. But I am a mother, too. And Joan. My. They mine, too.”
August’s voice never wavered from this stoic, determined tone. But she stumbled here, just a bit, when she said, “Joan been touched by…” She couldn’t finish. Miriam knew her sister well enough to know she would not, could not mention God.
“She gon’ go to that school, Meer. If she get in, she gon’ go, and she will paint this world. Our Joanie will paint it all.”
Miriam forgot her shower. She stayed in that room, kneeling, until the sun came up. Then, she made the girls grits. Kissing them more than usual but unable even to say “good morning.” Not for lack of trying. She was still so tired. And there was laundry to do, the light bill to pay.
CHAPTER 32
Joan