Hold Love Strong Read online

  But when she felt weak, when she felt hopeless and useless and begged my grandma to make the pain stop, to let her quit, my grandma said, “No!” My mother couldn’t stop, not even if great God Almighty Himself said she could quit. And so, because my grandma was not the type of woman anyone could disregard, my mother pushed with her life. She clenched the air in her fists. She gritted her teeth. She closed her eyes so tightly she saw everything she’d ever wished to see, every mountain and ocean, every sandy beach, tropical waterfall; elephants and lions and giraffes in Africa; she saw Jesus, she shook President Reagan’s hand; she saw the Statue of Liberty; herself with a car, a fur coat; a collie like Lassie; she saw herself as a movie star. Her toes curled. Her calves cramped. Her heart became a volcano bursting blood. She saw her dreams. She felt their temperature. She smelled them.

  My grandma saw my head. She took it in her hands and pulled gently, but then, holding one hand up as if halting a train, she shouted: “STOP!”

  Every muscle in my mother’s body went limp. My umbilical cord was wrapped twice around my neck. My mother’s pushing combined with my twisting and turning was killing me. I was being lynched and I was hanging myself. My face was the color of an electric blue bruise. One more push or pull, one more twist, and I was dead. My mother begged to understand what was happening.

  “Momma,” she said, propping herself on her elbows. “Momma, please.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Rhonda. “Ma, what is it?”

  My grandma breathed deep. “Shh, both of you, let me think.”

  Outside of the bathroom, Eric stopped hollering, Donnel stopped asking questions, and my Uncle Roosevelt stopped hushing and singing lullabies. All of Ever Park, all of Queens went silent. Then, in through the door burst Cherrie.

  “They coming!” she shouted. “A ambulance is on the way!”

  My Aunt Rhonda looked over her shoulder at Cherrie, her eyes demanding silence.

  Cherrie stopped in the middle of the living room. “What’s going on?” Cherrie said, her voice a fraction of its preceding size.

  In the bathroom, my grandma looked up at the ceiling. “God,” she whispered. “Jesus. Somebody, please help me save this child.”

  My grandma took one deep breath, closed her eyes, and made the same prayer silently. Then she opened her eyes, gently held my head and slowly drew my shoulders free. She paused to think. What next? What could she possibly do? The umbilical cord was taut. She cupped her hand beneath me, breathed, then cautiously guiding me in an un-hurried somersault, she turned me upside down, freed my legs, and unwound the umbilical cord from my neck. My grandma saved me from that which fed and kept me for the first nine months of my life. She cleared my nostrils and mouth with her pinky. Then she wiped the blood from me with the palm of her hand.

  “Roosevelt!” she called out. “Get me a knife! A sharp one. One of the ones with the wooden handles.”

  But it wasn’t my uncle who brought my grandma the knife. It was Donnel. Like a miniature Mercury, he burst into the bathroom and held the knife out to her. Then he stood on his tiptoes and looked at the new life my grandma cradled to her chest.

  “This your baby cousin,” she said. She pushed me into his arms. “Now, hold love strong.”

  Donnel held me against his chest like a ball of loose yarn and my grandma cut my umbilical cord and left me the ugliest outie the world has ever seen. She washed me in the sink and handed me to my mother. And as my mother held me on the floor in the bathroom, as she wept and dealt with the awe of my making, Rhonda asked what my name should be because my mother had not yet been able to settle on one.

  “Abraham,” my grandma announced.

  “Like the president?” Rhonda asked.

  “No,” said my grandma. “Like the old man in the Bible that God said was gonna be the father of a great people as numerous as the stars.”

  II

  I’m one of hundreds; one of thousands; one of millions now and millions more to come; a project nigga, a beautiful project nigga through and through. I lived in Ever Park every day of my life; in a building of stacks, of bricks stacked upon bricks, people stacked upon people, the smell of adobo stacked upon the scent of frying chopped meat stacked upon a hungry baby screaming for food. I lived on a ladder, on one of the rungs between third and first world. I didn’t care about people starving in Africa or Mexicans stuffed like sardines in the back of a truck just to get a chance at the American Dream. I didn’t care about wars in other countries, apartheid in South Africa, feeding the world’s poor, housing the world’s homeless, or bringing freedom to every communist country. I hardly cared about slavery. I’m not saying I didn’t know or think about those things. I’m not saying I was unsympathetic, impervious, uneducated. I was affected. I understood. But I also knew how people lived where I lived so I didn’t need to go looking for struggle, pain, or a country of people who needed to be free, because that country, those Somalians, those Rwandans, those Iraqis were my people, my family in Ever, where men came home from prison desperate for the gentle touch of a woman, for a breast to rest their heads on, a neck to nuzzle into, for the sanctuary of a lover’s voice whispering about the brightness of their future, how now there was nothing to stop them, nothing standing in their way then two weeks later these men found themselves missing the prison’s hospitality, the three square meals a day, the library, and the fact that their misdeeds made them members of a world rather than unemployable pariahs. Where were they to go, brothers wanted to know. Back to Africa? Haiti? Jamaica? Puerto Rico? Trinidad? The Dominican Republic? And do what? Die dirt poor or in the midst of a civil war? Wasn’t this America; wasn’t this the greatest land of all great lands of opportunity? In Ever, we were three things: broken, desperate to leave, or soldiers in a war so impossible to win that everything we did, even blinking our eyes, even licking our lips, might be suicide.

  Then crack hit. Then AIDS came right behind it. And who wasn’t plucked and sucked dead either got high, wasted away one bloody sore at a time, or fought with all of their might just to exist, just to walk down the street, just to make love without being afraid of saliva and semen, just to share a can of soda, a straw, a spoonful of ice cream with a best friend, just to sleep with some semblance of restfulness and peace. How did AIDS spread? Where did crack come from? What, who, if anything and anyone, was safe? In Ever, brothers and sisters were fish and dying was the H, the 2, and the O of our lives. So what did we do? We did what anyone would do. We breathed in dying and lived in dying as if dying and the baggage that came with dying were normal, like everywhere in the world mama stole from grandma and sold her pussy in the stairwell to get high.

  III

  I was a statue, the type of infant whose stoic, tearless nature and irrevocable insomnia led my family to believe I was afflicted. I could be knocked down, dropped, shaken like a bottle of soda, even forgotten for hours at a time, yet still I would not burst, cry out, whimper; still I would not look upon the world with anything less than a wide, exacting stare. Over the course of the first two years of my life, all kinds of ailments, retardations, and deficiencies were prefaced with maybe and assigned to me. Maybe I was deaf. Maybe I was mute. Maybe too much water surrounded my brain. I didn’t get enough air. I was blind, lacking the sense of touch. I was autistic, dyslexic, unable to make the connection between need and action, emotion and thought, heart and mind. When put down, when brought to the floor, when seated on the bus, when planted on a lap, I grew roots; I stayed. When put to bed, I lay on my back, my brown eyes round, unblinking, doll-like. When lifted and carried, I leaned back, made myself a weight greater than I actually was, pushed away from my embracer as if determined to attain a particular distance, freedom, a space that gave me enough room to look around, lay my eyes upon the people and environment enveloping, studying, tickling, prodding, and fussing over me.

  When she was not doting over her newest truest true love, when she was not chasing after or being chased, flirting or playing coy, my Aunt Rhonda teased me
, poked my belly, picked me up to sit me down again so she could study my stillness and have a laugh. When he was not playing basketball with friends, practicing his shooting form in the bathroom mirror, or dribbling a ball in the apartment, the hallway, on the roof, or up and down the stairs, my Uncle Roosevelt utilized me like an inanimate object. I was the stone he used to prop open a door, the broom he used to sweep the kitchen floor, a table he tried to balance things on, a shotgun he tucked under his arm, cocked and aimed. The doctors at the clinic had no time for me. I looked healthy, they said. My stool was normal. I didn’t have a fever. Take him home, they said. My mother fretted over my lethargy, my aloofness, the distance I seemed predetermined to attain. She feared she did something to damage me during her pregnancy and her fear was so great she was positive she must have. Perhaps it was the cigarettes she’d smoked, the pulls from a joint. Perhaps it was her youth, that because she’d only menstruated a handful of times prior to my conception and without any semblance of regularity, I was damaged. Maybe she’d run around too much, chased, teased, laughed, and sobbed. Maybe she talked on the phone too loud. Maybe she watched too much TV. Maybe the various manifestations of her physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual immaturity pervaded me, infected me with the particulars of my nature.

  My grandmother told her not to worry. She shrugged off all fears and doubts. She said I was Job; Jonah in the belly of the whale; Noah in his ark; Moses in the desert. It was my great patience that would help me overcome everything the world, this life, gave me.

  Of course, my mother didn’t believe her. She couldn’t. She didn’t have the capability. She was a teenager. How she felt, not facts or biblical stories, burned inside of her, mingled with her desire to dance and flirt and the fantasy that there was a brother who was her prince, who would soon arrive, ride into Ever on his horse, his magic carpet, in a car, a boat, a plane, and whisk her away, take us to a land where she was queen.

  Yet, because she was the only parent of a black boy from the projects she also knew herself as the sole remaining partner of a creation that would not only outgrow her but also live in a land that, if it did not despise me, certainly made it difficult for my soul to achieve a human level of peace. Like any mother, she knew she could only protect me for so long, that her role as the center, the cause, and the solution of what occurred in my life was a fleeting post. The summation of these facts caused her to doubt herself, perhaps even hate herself. That she was already a mother at thirteen, and what motherhood meant for the remainder of her life, was often, if not always, too tremendous a weight for her to bear. So, although she did no greater wrong than what both my Aunt Rhonda and my grandma had done before her, having a child while still children themselves, my mother was fraught with self-abasement, and eventually, mortal defeat. In her diary, she cursed herself. She cried at night. She was ornery. She acted out, threw tantrums and doled out silent treatment as if extreme action would both reverse her life and provide her control over it. Some days she couldn’t bring herself to pick me up, to hold me, to feed me or change my diaper. Sometimes she watched me sleep and considered ways to make me not hers. She could leave me outside, put me on the stoop of a church, leave me on the bus or train with a note. Maybe the pawnshop would take me. Maybe some rich white woman in Long Island needed a small, brown novelty. Maybe she could take me to an ocean, a river, lay me down, sail me away.

  While my mother struggled with how tremendously my arrival into the world had changed her life, Donnel, encouraged by my grandmother, propelled by both curiosity and an already intact sense of paternal responsibility that belied his age, slowly assumed more and more responsibility over me. He loved to hold me, to feed me, to proclaim that I, Abraham, was his baby cousin. He, when my mother couldn’t, owned my well-being. At the park, in the waiting room of the sulfurous city health clinic with the failing fluorescent lights, in the Laundromat, on the bus, through summer’s hottest days, through autumn, winter, and spring, and when we went shopping along the avenue, Donnel carried me, moored me upon his narrow hip. According to my grandmother, never had a brother so young walked with such pride; never had a boy emanated a holy power of unconquerable manhood.

  Donnel taught me how to speak. He taught me how to hold a bottle. He reveled in making me giggle and smile. And like a puppeteer, he taught me how to walk. He stood in front of me, held me by my hands and helped me balance, then walked backward as I walked forward. I moved where his hands, his eyes, his smile led me. I lifted and dragged my feet according to his desire. By the time he was five, Donnel, with limited supervision and later no supervision at all, determined if and when I soiled myself, then changed me, gently laid me on a kitchen chair or the couch or, when need be, utilizing the dexterity and balance only available to fearless children and great athletes, he changed my diapers in his arms, pressed me against his body, nestled me in the crux between his rib, arm, and abdomen.

  The bond Donnel and I had, the bond he was unconsciously but purposefully building was, in its essence, the fundamental mooring and foundation of my family. We were not grandmother, daughters, sisters, or sons. We were not uncle, aunts, and cousins. We were brothers. Our love was unwavering, unflappable, greater than anything presented by the Bible, the Torah, and the Qur’an combined. That is, where we’d go, what would occur, what we lost and gained together, what we suffered and championed through, what we sometimes wished to recall and force ourselves to forget, our lives, the occasions and circumstances, were more than everything, more than forever, more than even the truth.

  BAR 2

  Ornithology

  I

  His nose boxed in, swollen and buckled like a jammed thumb, Lyndon Goines was a former amateur boxer who lied about being a Golden Gloves champion, a hardworking maintenance worker at the Queens Botanical Garden, and Ever Park’s resident conversationalist, canvasser, activist, and organizer. Smelling like wet earth, he collected signatures on petitions then mailed them to city assemblymen, the mayor, congressional representatives, senators, the Supreme Court, and the president. He attended community and city council meetings clad in weathered three-piece suits. He’d step to the microphone, stomp his foot, and demand equality and justice. He wanted the potholes filled, the public streets paved flat and smooth like the streets in wealthy neighborhoods. He wanted the public library on Columbus Avenue, the only library within walking distance from Ever, to have the same amount of books as the smaller libraries in the exclusive white neighborhoods. He insisted that rather than putting new nets on the basketball rims in the park or funding basketball leagues and clinics, the city should allocate money to supply our public schools with the proper resources and implements, textbooks published post civil rights movement, microscopes for biology class, rulers, compasses, and protractors for math. He wanted each school to have adequate paper and pens. He wanted working water fountains with drinkable water and toilets that flushed. He wanted solar-powered scientific calculators and college prep classes for young brothers and sisters in high school. He wanted the music programs reinstated. He wanted art classes again. And how about horticulture? Get the kids to know what it means to couple with the earth. And the elevators in Ever Park? He wanted them fixed once and for all. He said if the city, the state, the country had enough money to blast men into outer space and wipe the green Statue of Liberty clean, then they could certainly equally provide for its brown citizenry.

  Lyndon Goines wanted and his wanting was only equaled by one thing: his love for my grandma. He’d been in love with her since he first saw my grandma walking down the street, hips, he said, swaying like two apples clinging to a branch in the breeze. Never once did he doubt his love for her. But never once did he shout about it either. He was the type of humble southern man who had come north to do two things: fight in Madison Square Garden and find his queen. All he arrived with was this desire, a suitcase of belongings, his boxing gloves, and a wallet-sized photograph of his mother, who, when Mr. Goines took the picture out to show, he swore was
named Beautiful Gorgeous Weeks before she married his father, Everett. She was the first grandchild of a freed slave, and so was his father. Lyndon Goines was the middle son of five boys, and just about as gentle as he was indefatigable. Once a week, he brought my grandmother various forms of plant life. He brought her tiny cactuses, bonsai trees, and flowers: tulips, poppies, ranunculas, orchids, lilies. From his gifts, I learned the names of flora born and blooming miles from Ever. Once he brought an African violet, a Venus flytrap, and an orchid that smelled like chocolate. But nothing, not one of his gifts, survived forever. Even the hardiest cactus he delivered eventually withered and bent at the stem. Still, the dying of a plant or my grandma’s indifference never once caused Mr. Goines’s love to wane. His heart was planted, rooted and green like an evergreen tree. Whenever he saw anybody in my family, he asked about my grandma. Then he suggested we put in a good word for him. We should tell my grandma to give him one chance, unhook the chain latch, let him and his punching-bag face in, just once, so he could sit in the kitchen, talk to her, watch my grandma’s hips sway as she made her way between the stove, the sink, and the refrigerator. He swore he was a good man, a fine man. He’d even help with the dishes. But if she didn’t believe it, if she wasn’t ready, he said he had all of his life, forever to wait. He’d never been knocked out in a fight, never once stayed on the canvas. Sure, he’d lost. But he always lost by decision, in the middle of the ring, the referee holding his opponent’s fist up.