Chapter Text
1. the lessons of a father
Pop got ideas in his head every so often. That was how Mama framed it. He got hooked on another of his notions, there was no tethering the man. And you just couldn't help but be pulled into orbit.
Some ideas lasted longer than others. First came the union meetings: donuts and coffee. Construction workers talked with him about socialist reform and grassroots programs budding in the city. You really should come. I'll think about it, Bobby said, and joked that the best he could offer the cause was washing dishes.
Next was the Black Panther who taught self-defense classes from the confines of a closed nail salon every Sunday. Basics of judo and tae-kwon do. Most important thing is to keep your senses awake. Pig come after you and yours, you've got to be able to drop him.
Bobby lamented his lack of strength compared to his agility; he wanted to build his core. Supposed it wouldn't also hurt the boy to beef up his bean-pole arms.
The instructor made them run laps around the room, carrying one gallon-jug of water in each hand. Sloshing and swishing.
Water flooded the linoleum when the cap ricocheted from the jug in Pop's left hand. The instructor just raised a brow and tipped his head toward the mops. Shit, Bobby panted, hands on knees, don't you pay a deposit or something?
This is stupid, his father complained the moment they sat for lunch, I do the same damn thing at work and that never made me no Jimmy Snuka. Doused in sweat, he grabbed his jacket. Come on, Elijah, we're going.
Mama looked subtle askance at the company he kept, the hoteps and the radicals: folks who also hatched ideas in their heads from time to time. I don't disagree, she said, but you've got to be careful. What if he goes to school and repeats what he hears?
What do you mean? Pop said. They're about the only folk who make sense around here.
His most salient mental snapshot positions her in the doorway with crossed arms, her expression neither forbidding nor accepting; thin, silent expectation as Pop packed him in between bags.
He caught his father's anthracite eyes in the rearview mirror. Is Mama mad at us 'cause we're gone so much?
She just wants us home by dinner.
Until then, another adventure awaited.
Half an hour's drive away, a small apartment crammed between tenements. Eli had been skipping in echo of the faint chalk marks on the curb when the door opened. Out stepped an African woman clad in yellow and orange floral iro; her gele, wrapped tightly about her head, flowered outward, the folds resembling those of a chrysanthemum.
Between her shawl whose hem rippled over the tops of her heels with every step and the cowrie shells rustling at her throat and wrists, he thought her a queen. He understood in his gut why his father sank belly-down on the limestone, forehead touching the welcome mat.
Boy, Pop said, don't be rude. Get up here. Do what I'm doing.
As he'd later learn, they were not to rise until Aunt Della touched their heads in greeting. There, the seat of being, one's destiny and character.
Her name was Adélagunjá, a name American tongues truncated to Della. She earned a living teaching piano lessons before retirement led her to teach Èdè Yorùbá to vagrant and hungry souls like his father.
"You sounded different on the telephone." Music in her voice, a hum that melted on the soft ground of his skin and permeated. "Before you enter, promise me you will not raise your voice at the boy. He is my son as much as he is yours."
Della expected respect but refrained from demanding it, which ironically made them likelier to follow her rules. Nothing disappointed them more than disappointing her, knowing she would never risk her good character to lose her temper.
She didn't believe in malice, seeing only mistakes borne of amnesia. It was her duty, she said, to remind them of their better natures. When to speak, how to speak, how to give greetings and to receive them. See, like scales on the piano. A soul must learn itself, piece by piece.
Their first lesson: prostration. Before she placed a single honeyed word of Yoruba in either of their baby-bird mouths, she insisted they learn the language of greeting first. Against her gender, she demonstrated ìdóbálẹ̀ on the cold tile of her kitchen floor.
Like this, she said, and in a perfumed swish of fabrics, flattened herself until her gele pooled about the floor. Her arms bent at the elbow in rigid angles. This is the proper greeting for boys and men, how they show respect. You do this for every elder you encounter.
Each and every? Seemed a tall order, what with how many adults he bumped into on a daily basis. Between school, home, and Pop's outings, that must be at least ten instances. Not to mention the grocery store, and the diner where Pop bussed tables, and the hospital where Mama supervised...
His arms ached just thinking about it, almost enough to miss the water jugs. Least they got a free lunch after. But if Della said that was how they did things, so it was.
I was close, Bobby said, fishing in his breast pocket for the rumpled napkin on which he had scrawled her dictation.
Pop, Eli said. Wandering over, he placed a palm on the back of her head. Della rose with a laugh, sliding to her knees.
Thank you, ọmọ mi. We're playing each other's parts today. Tomorrow we'll remember ourselves.
Mama glanced from a bubbling pot of spaghetti sauce. What are you boys up to? Don't go messing up my floor.
"Gotta touch our heads, Mama."
"Yeah, baby," Pop added. "Sign of respect."
Respect my ass, she muttered as she picked across the magazine-strewn living room floor. "Your father's friends are going to get us put on a list one of these days." She tapped him on the nape with the back of her salad tongs. "Bippity-boppity boo, little man. Now come help set the table."
Pop proved unusually chatty at dinner, his appetite matched by an equally voracious hunger for words, Yoruba punctuating forkfuls of angel hair. Although seldom a reticent man, his energy surprised his mother into asking what had gotten into him.
They talked while Eli cleared the dishes and went to flip through books in the living room, rooted to their spots; spoke deeper and for longer than he had expected, their words continuing to drift through his consciousness while his eyelids drooped. Having been ordered to wash up and go to bed, he nonetheless watched in a balmy blue darkness from his window as Bobby followed Catherine out the door.
His mother always wandered outside for a nightly smoke. He'd watch her lighter spark a small orange ember, her thin hands cupped to protect its fledgling life. Pop hated the smell of smoke, but tonight that no longer seemed to matter. They ribbed each other like excited teenagers beneath the shared sconce of a streetlight, small tufts of greenery pushing through the sidewalk at their feet. Pop said something wild, Mama smiled; Mama smiled, Pop laughed.
The cigarette fell, reduced to a smolder ground underfoot. Mama looked up, gazing into his father's face with such naked tenderness that the light guttered.
In that brief shadow, he embraced her. Her fingers bunched his denim jacket, seeking anchor. It wouldn't occur to Eli until later how young his parents had been, how warm life still burned in their veins.
He dove into bed when the screen door opened a little while later.
I want you to consider English first. Without anger for how violence stuffed her in your mouths. Without fear for breaking Èdè Yorùbá as though she is made of glass compared to her weathered sister.
Do not approach her with sorrow, but with compassion. She has been abused and abandoned by those who most claim to love her. They demand she wear her finest gown wherever she goes, but they cannot recognize her elderly body, let alone stomach the wisdom in her wear and wrinkle.
Their ancestors called their kings "ring-givers." The minstrels of their courts held their ashe, their life force, in artful suspension to let the pulse of a verse linger. What they omitted was as important as what they deemed worthy of breath.
No longer. These days, you must say everything you fear losing to silence in a single geysered eruption. How might we conduct a civilized discourse, then, if we treat our words as though they are accidents of nature?
Your mouths are English-shaped, Della said, and they hate how you speak it because your ancestors disrupt your caesura with a joyous shout.
See the fear underpinning English, a self-loathing creature scarred by war. Grammar is not an epiphany one arrives at through intelligence, a talent earned by way of skillful effort, but a control exerted over vagary. You cannot misunderstand me, cannot defeat me, if I wield a knife where a tongue ought lie.
Change approached with suspicion, if not hostility. A rigid chant forgetful of its own rhythm. Always emphasis on the first syllable: the first "Hwaet!" cried out in a mead hall echoed through the centuries, distilled into the lonely and ever-present "I." The subject draws undue attention toward itself, as one assumes the listener is eager to abandon the speaker.
This speech is like combat, said Della. While it has its uses, it takes collaboration to achieve understanding.
In Èdè Yorùbá, we must be patient enough to assume patience of others. Consider the hills and valleys of a word: how our mouth and lips and tongue and ashe travel the terrain. Low, medium, high tone - "do, re, mi," in trinity - this is our speech.
This may hurt you, she said. We must break your English mouths a little in order to fit them into a new mold. Your throats will ache, and you will feel foolish for a time. Let it pass.
Eli joined his father's daily routine of pronoun practice. Mimicked it brushing their teeth in front of the mirror. While Pop pedaled to work on his mint-green Schwinn. Whispered on the couch, under blankets, as Mama slept off a graveyard shift upstairs.
Èmi. Ìwọ. Ẹ̀yin. Òun. Àwọn. Àwa. Ẹ̀yin. Àwọn.
While it took him a week or so to begin to grasp the lack of gender in òun - he/she/it - Pop suffered special trouble differentiating second-person pronouns. When to use you familiar, and you respectful, and y'all. I know it up here, he said, bracing his forehead in ink-smeared fingertips, but it's just not sticking in here, patting his breast pocket.
Eli sought to rectify the problem by ambushing him with pop quizzes. You know me: which one do you use when you talk to me? What about your boss? Everybody over for a party? Okay, just us two, me and Mama. Soon it became reflex for Bobby to playfully cuff him on the ear with, "I get to graduate now, Professor Vance? Damn."
By the end of the month, they had hobbled from pronouns to fragmented conversations. Stilt-walking sentences:
Ẹ káàárọ̀, Baba.
Ẹ káàárọ̀, Elijah.
Did you wake well?
I did. Did you wake well?
Yes, thank you.
What do you like?
I like this house.
Who do you see?
I see Mama.
What's over there?
Dog over there.
Pop complained. "We sound like toddlers."
But he kept paper pieces stuck to the bathroom mirror, tucked in the corners of his James Baldwin novels. Èdè Yorùbá spilling over the ice box, a scattering of feathers on the coffee table.
Of course, without the ashe to marry knowledge with tongue, it was just breath unbreathed. He and his father would sit in his two-seater going nowhere, though his hands lay still on the wheel, eyes locked in the rearview mirror. Sharing the breath of their blood, they built sounds together. Ah. Bi. Di.
Unique to Èdè Yorùbá's alphabet, the letter GB was not a cognate of a full English B. It pushed a breeze through the throat and past the teeth. A release of life-energy facilitated through èjí, the gap in one's teeth. Della called it a sign of beauty and wealth.
Following the phonics lesson, his father had put his head in his hands and cried on the steering wheel. They always telling us we princes, he sobbed. We carry the blood of scholars and kings. Thought that was a crock of bullshit 'cause some of us had to have been the busboy. You know? No way all of us was casting cowries or carrying the horse-tail whip when we walked on mother soil.
Taking a shaky breath, he straightened, ran a tongue over the space in his front teeth. My pops said I had a crooked mouth through which my fool thoughts whistled out. Grew up thinking it'd be better if somebody knocked them out so they'd get straightened right. Man, those fights I got into. Blood I spat. And here she be saying, all along, they wanted to look like me.
One Sunday, Della wasn't home. She had taped to the door a note written in Èdè Yorùbá, alongside a blank envelope with ten dollars inside.
Hands shoved in his jacket pockets, Pop shifted from foot to foot. "What's it say?"
Eli squinted. Reading as fast as he could. Sometimes his father forgot, in his own words, that he was barely old enough to piss on his own. "I'unno. Fruit and stuff."
Bobby laughed, spinning around with a vigorous clap. "Auntie D made us a grocery list. Come on, punk: race you to the car."
"What about ìdóbálẹ̀?"
"She ain't gonna know."
Couldn't argue with that logic. He came in second, though he had attempted to shave a few seconds off his father's lead by diving onto the vinyl seat.
"Too slow," Bobby gloated between pants, laughter still buzzing on his lips as he knocked back the stick shift. "Who coaching you at school? A snail?"
His chest puffed with righteous indignation; he gripped the back of his father's seat until his fingertips whitened. "You run like a turtle!"
"All right, now, sit down and hush up. Folks might think we're bush people."
"Ará oko."
"More proper than the Queen of England," Bobby said. "Only thing we don't do is sip tea with our pinkies out." He snapped his head around. "Hey, put that sawbuck back in the slip. Take me hours to earn that much."
To Eli, who kept an old plastic lemonade pitcher full of Indian head pennies under his bed, the ten-dollar bill represented a titillating wealth. As such, he treated it with the reverence it deserved, taking pains to tuck it inside the crisp white envelope.
"Pop," he said, "why do people gotta work?"
"To eat."
"I know that."
"Yeah, smartie? What's your opinion on the economy?"
"Mr. Logan says—"
"Uh-uh," Bobby said. "I ain't asked what Mr. Logan thinks. I asked what you think."
Forced into silence, he fumed.
Bobby slung an arm out the window. "This all," he said, "it's a scam. They say you work hard enough, you'll move mountains, but it's a lie. You could work your whole life through and not get a drop of your worth." Forefinger and thumb pressed to his pursed lips in impression of a drag on a Kool. "You know what else? We used to have a Wall Street 'til the feds burned it down."
"Aw, Pop—" His collapse into the seat earned him a pointed glower.
"You think this is just hotep junk, huh?" his father challenged. "Eli, I ain't dragging you around town for fun. I'm doing it to show you the stuff they don't teach you in school. Wasn't too long ago I saw pigs grabbing my friends and tossing them into vans. We have to be proud of ourselves, put ourselves first. No one else is gonna."
One thing he most admired and loathed about his father: the times he spoke with the solitary candor of one who demanded restitution.
Unable to respond, Eli gazed into the rearview mirror with the unflinching intensity only a child could afford, picking at one corner of the envelope.
Slowly, Bobby relented. "What'd Della write?"
He rubbed one eye with the heel of his palm. "Bananas."
Pop took them to the Caribbean market. An open-air affair where color exploded into vivid bloom.
Having lacked the forethought to bring a bag, they kept their purchases - one of each fruit; one apple, one lime, one mango - in their pockets. They even bought an orisha candle. Pop figured it was okay as long as Mama didn't know, and besides, they should honor Auntie D with a gift.
The sweetness of fried plantains dancing on their tongues while they sat on the back of a parked truck, throwing cherries, pretending they were firecrackers that so happened to attract chickens. Never had his throat brimmed so full of laughter.
And it was then he realized his father, like him, was just a boy. He needed love and he needed fun and he needed a place to belong; he wore his heart on that scuffed denim sleeve of his wherever he went. The same arms wrapping around him, warm and safe, as they drowsed.
'til you and your mama came along, Bobby whispered, I lived like I had nothing to lose. Smiled. You prove me wrong every day.