Marjorie PDF

Marjorie “ESS-CUSE ME, SISTAH. I take you see Castle. Cape Coast Castle. Five cedis. You come from America? I take you see slave ship. Juss five cedis.” The boy was probably around ten years old, only a few years younger than Marjorie herself was. He had been following her since she and her grandmo...

Marjorie “ESS-CUSE ME, SISTAH. I take you see Castle. Cape Coast Castle. Five cedis. You come from America? I take you see slave ship. Juss five cedis.” The boy was probably around ten years old, only a few years younger than Marjorie herself was. He had been following her since she and her grandmother’s housekeeper got off the tro-tro. The locals did this, waiting for tourists to disembark so that they could con them into paying for things Ghanaians knew were free. Marjorie tried to ignore him, but she was hot and tired, still feeling the sweat of the other people who had been pressed against her back and chest and sides on the nearly eight-hour tro-tro ride from Accra. “I take you see Cape Coast Castle, sis. Juss five cedis,” he repeated. He wore no shirt, and she could feel the heat radiating off of his skin, coming toward her. After all the traveling, she couldn’t stand another strange body so near hers, and so she soon found herself shouting in Twi, “I’m from Ghana, stupid. Can’t you see?” The boy didn’t stop his English. “But you come from America?” Angry, she kept walking. Her backpack straps were heavy against her shoulders, and she knew they would leave marks. Marjorie was in Ghana visiting her grandmother, as she did every summer. Some time ago, the woman had moved to Cape Coast to be near the water. In Edweso, where she had lived before, everyone called her Crazy Woman, but in Cape Coast they knew her only as Old Lady. So old, they said, she could recite the entire history of Ghana from memory alone. “Is that my child coming to me?” the woman asked. She was leaning on a cane made of curved wood, and her back mimicked that curve, rounding down so that the woman looked like she was in constant supplication. “Akwaaba. Akwaaba. Akwaaba,” she said. “My Old Lady. I’ve missed you,” Marjorie said. She hugged her grandmother too forcefully and the woman yelped. “Eh, have you come to break me?” “Sorry, sorry.” Old Lady called her house boy to take Marjorie’s bag, and slowly, gingerly, Marjorie pulled the straps from her aching shoulders. Her grandmother saw her wince and asked, “Are you hurt?” “It’s nothing.” The response was a reflex. Whenever her father or grandmother asked her about pain, Marjorie would say she had never known it. As a young child, someone had told her that the scars her father wore on his face and her grandmother on her hands and feet were born of great pain. And because Marjorie had no scars that resembled those, she could never bring herself to complain of pain. Once, when she was just a little girl, she had watched a ringworm on her knee grow and grow and grow. She’d hidden it from her parents for nearly two weeks, until the worm overtook the curve where thigh met calf, making it difficult for her to bend. When she’d finally shown her parents, her mother had vomited, and her father had snatched her in his arms and rushed her to the emergency room. The orderly who came to call them back had been startled, not by the worm, but by her father’s scar. She’d asked if he was the one who needed help. Looking at her grandmother’s hands now, it was almost impossible to distinguish scarred from wrinkled skin. The whole landscape of the woman’s body had transformed into a ruin; the young woman had been toppled, leaving this. They took a cab back to Old Lady’s house. Marjorie’s grandmother lived in a big, open bungalow on the beach, like the kind the few white people who lived in town had. When Marjorie was in third grade, her father and mother had left Alabama and returned to Ghana in order to help Old Lady build it. They stayed for many months, leaving Marjorie in the care of a friend of theirs. When summer came and Marjorie was finally able to go visit them, she fell in love with the beautiful house with no doors. It was five times the size of her family’s tiny apartment in Huntsville, and its front yard was the beach, not a sad slab of dying grass like the yard she had always known. She spent that whole summer wondering how her parents could leave a place like this. “Have you been good, my own child?” Old Lady asked, handing Marjorie some of the chocolate she kept in the kitchen. Marjorie had a sweet tooth reserved for chocolate. Her mother often joked that Marjorie must have been birthed from a cocoa nut, split open and wide. Marjorie nodded, accepting the treat. “Are we going to the water today?” she asked, her mouth full, the chocolate melting. “Speak Twi,” her grandmother answered sharply, knocking Marjorie on the back of her head. “Sorry,” Marjorie mumbled. At home in Huntsville, her parents spoke to her in Twi and she answered them in English. They had done this since the day Marjorie had brought a note home from her kindergarten teacher. The note read: Marjorie does not volunteer to answer questions. She rarely speaks. Does she know English? If she doesn’t, you should consider English as a Second Language classes. Or perhaps Marjorie would benefit from special care? We have great Special Ed classes here. Her parents were livid. Her father read the note aloud four times, shouting, “What does this foolish woman know?” after each repetition, but from then on they had quizzed Marjorie on her English every night. When she tried to answer their questions in Twi, they would say, “Speak English,” until now it was the first language that popped into her head. She had to remind herself that her grandmother required the opposite. “Yes, we will go to the water now. Put away your things.” Going to the beach with Old Lady was one of Marjorie’s favorite things in the world to do. Her grandmother was not like other grandmothers. At night, Old Lady spoke in her sleep. Sometimes she fought; sometimes she paced the room. Marjorie had heard the stories about the burns her grandmother carried on her hands and feet, about the one on her father’s face. She knew why the Edweso people had called her Crazy Woman, but to her, her grandmother had never been crazy. Old Lady dreamed dreams and saw visions. They walked to the beach. Old Lady moved so slowly, it was like she wasn’t moving at all. Neither of them wore shoes, and when they got to the edge of the sand, they waited for the water to come up and lick the spaces between their toes, clean the sand that was hidden there. Marjorie watched as her grandmother closed her eyes, and she waited patiently for the old woman to speak. It was what they had come for, what they always came for. “Are you wearing the stone?” her grandmother asked. Instinctively, Marjorie raised her hand to the necklace. Her father had given it to her only a year before, saying that she was finally old enough to care for it. It had belonged to Old Lady and to Abena before her, and to James, and Quey, and Effia the Beauty before that. It had begun with Maame, the woman who had set a great fire. Her father had told her that the necklace was a part of their family history and she was to never take it off, never give it away. Now it reflected the ocean water before them, gold waves shimmering in the black stone. “Yes, Old Lady,” she said. Her grandmother took her hand and once more they fell silent. “You are in this water,” she finally said. Marjorie nodded her head soberly. The day she was born, thirteen years ago, all the way across the Atlantic, her parents had mailed her umbilical cord to Old Lady so that the woman could put it into the ocean. It was Old Lady’s only request, that if her son and daughter-in-law, both old themselves by the time they decided to get married and move to America, ever had a child they would send something of that child back to Ghana. “Our family began here, in Cape Coast,” Old Lady said. She pointed to the Cape Coast Castle. “In my dreams I kept seeing this castle, but I did not know why. One day, I came to these waters and I could feel the spirits of our ancestors calling to me. Some were free, and they spoke to me from the sand, but some others were trapped deep, deep, deep in the water so that I had to wade out to hear their voices. I waded out so far, the water almost took me down to meet those spirits that were trapped so deep in the sea that they would never be free. When they were living they had not known where they came from, and so dead, they did not know how to get to dry land. I put you in here so that if your spirit ever wandered, you would know where home was.” Marjorie nodded as her grandmother took her hand and walked her farther and farther out into the water. It was their summer ritual, her grandmother reminding her how to come home. — Marjorie returned to Alabama three shades darker and five pounds heavier. Her period had come while she was with her grandmother, and the old woman had clapped her hands and sang songs to celebrate Marjorie’s womanhood. She didn’t want to leave Cape Coast, but school was starting and her parents wouldn’t let her stay any longer. She was entering high school, and while she had always hated Alabama, the newer, bigger school had instantly reminded her of why. Her family lived on the southeast side of Huntsville. They were the only black family on the block, the only black people for miles and miles and miles. At her new high school, there were more black children than Marjorie was used to seeing in Alabama, but it took only a few conversations with them for Marjorie to realize that they were not the same kind of black that she was. That indeed she was the wrong kind. “Why you talk like that?” Tisha, the leader of the pack, had asked her the first day of high school when she joined them for lunch. “Like what?” Marjorie asked, and Tisha had repeated it, her accent turning almost British in order to capture her impression of Marjorie. “Like what?” The next day Marjorie sat by herself, reading Lord of the Flies for English class. She held the book in one hand and a fork in the other. She was so engrossed in the book that she didn’t realize that the chicken she had pierced with her fork hadn’t made it into her mouth until she tasted air. She finally looked up to see Tisha and the other black girls staring at her. “Why you reading that book?” Tisha asked. Marjorie stammered. “I—I have to read it for class.” “I have to read it for class,” Tisha mimicked. “You sound like a white girl. White girl. White girl. White girl.” They kept chanting, and it was all Marjorie could do to keep from crying. In Ghana, whenever a white person appeared, there was always a child there to point him out. A small group of children, dark and shiny in the equatorial sun, would extend their little fingers toward the person whose skin was different from theirs and shout, “Obroni! Obroni!” They would giggle, delighted by the difference. When Marjorie had first seen children do this, she’d watched as the white man whose skin color had been told to him grew shocked, offended. “Why do they keep saying that!” he’d asked the friend who was showing him around. Marjorie’s father pulled her aside that night and asked her if she knew the answer to the white man’s question, and she had shrugged. Her father had told her that the word had come to mean something entirely different from what it used to mean. That the young of Ghana, itself an infant country, had been born to a place emptied of its colonizers. Because they didn’t see white men every day the way people of his mother’s generation and older had, the word could take on new meaning for them. They lived in a Ghana where they were the majority, where theirs was the only skin color for miles around. To them, to call someone “obroni” was an innocent act, an interpretation of race as skin color. Now, keeping her head down and fighting back tears as Tisha and her friends called her “white girl,” Marjorie was made aware, yet again, that here “white” could be the way a person talked; “black,” the music a person listened to. In Ghana you could only be what you were, what your skin announced to the world. “Don’t mind them,” Marjorie’s mother, Esther, said that night as she stroked Marjorie’s hair. “Don’t mind them, my smart girl. My beautiful girl.” The next day Marjorie ate lunch in the English teachers’ lounge. Her teacher, Mrs. Pinkston, was a fat, walnut-skinned woman with a laugh that sounded like the slow build of an approaching train. She carried a large pink handbag that she would pull books out of unendingly, like a magician’s hat. In her head Marjorie called the books rabbits. “What do they know?” Mrs. Pinkston said, passing Marjorie a cookie. “They don’t know a thing.” Mrs. Pinkston was Marjorie’s favorite teacher, one of two black teachers in a school that served almost two thousand students. She was the only person Marjorie knew who had a copy of her father’s book, The Ruin of a Nation Begins in the Homes of Its People. The book was her father’s lifework. He was sixty-three when he finished it, approaching seventy when he and her mother finally had her. He’d taken the title from an old Asante proverb and used it to discuss slavery and colonialism. Marjorie, who had read every book on her family’s bookshelves, had once spent an entire afternoon trying to read her father’s book. She’d only made it to page two. When she told her father this, he’d said that it was something she wouldn’t understand until she was much older. He said that people need time in order to be able to see things clearly. “What do you think about the book?” Mrs. Pinkston said, pointing to the copy of Lord of the Flies that dangled from Marjorie’s hands. “I like it,” Marjorie said. “But do you love it? Do you feel it inside you?” Marjorie shook her head. She didn’t know what it meant to feel a book inside of her, but she didn’t want to tell her English teacher that, lest it disappoint her. Mrs. Pinkston laughed her moving-train laugh, leaving Marjorie to her reading. — And so Marjorie spent three years this way, searching for books that she loved, that she could feel inside of her. By senior year, she had read almost everything on the south wall of the school’s library, at least a thousand books, and she was working her way through the north wall. “That’s a good one.” She had just brought down Middlemarch from the shelf and was taking in the smell of the book when the boy spoke to her. “You like Eliot?” Marjorie asked. She had seen him around recently, but she couldn’t quite remember where. With blond hair and blue eyes, he looked like a little boy she’d seen in a Cheerios commercial once, now grown up. He put his index finger to his lips. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said, and she smiled despite herself. “My name’s Marjorie.” “Graham.” They shook hands and Graham told her about Pigeon Feathers, the book he was reading. He told her that his family had just moved there from Germany, that his father was in the military, that his mother had died long ago. Marjorie must have spoken too, but she couldn’t remember what she had said, only that she had smiled so much her cheeks ached. Before they knew it, the bell rang and lunch hour was over and they went on to their next class. From then on, they saw each other every day. They read together in the library while everyone else ate lunch. They sat only inches apart at a big, long table that could have seated thirty or more, the many empty seats giving them no excuse to explain their proximity. They stopped talking as much as they had that first day. Reading together was enough. Sometimes Graham would leave a note with his own writing for Marjorie to find. They were mostly little poems or fragmented stories. She was too shy to show him the things that she had written. At night, when she went home, she would wait for her parents to go to bed before turning on her lamp to read Graham’s notes in the soft light. “Daddy, when did you know you liked Mama?” she asked at breakfast the next day. Her father had suffered from a heart attack two years before and now ate a bowl of oatmeal every day. He was so old that Marjorie’s teachers always assumed he was her grandfather. He wiped his lips with his napkin and cleared his throat. “Who told you I like your mother?” he asked. Marjorie rolled her eyes as her father started to laugh. “Did your mother tell you that? Eh, Abronoma, you are too young to like anyone. Concentrate on your studies.” He was out the door, headed to teach his history course at the community college, before Marjorie could protest. She had always hated it when her father called her Dove. It was her special name, the nickname born with her because of her Asante name, but it had always made Marjorie feel small somehow, young and fragile. She was not small. She was not young, either. She was old, so old her breasts had grown to the size of her mother’s, so large she sometimes had to carry them in her hands when walking naked through her bedroom to keep them from slapping against her chest. “Who do you like?” Marjorie’s mother asked, coming into the room with fresh laundry in her hands. Though her parents had lived in America for nearly fifteen years, Esther still would not use a washing machine. She washed all the family’s undergarments by hand in the kitchen sink. “No one,” Marjorie said. “Has someone come to ask you to prom?” Esther asked, grinning widely. Marjorie sighed. Five years ago she had watched a 20/20 special on proms across America with her mother, and her mother had been delighted by it. She said that she had never seen anything like the girls in their long dresses and the boys in their suits. The thought that her daughter could be one of those special girls was a hope that flickered like light in Esther’s eye, just as it stung like dust in Marjorie’s. Marjorie was one of thirty black people at her school. None of them had been asked to prom the year before. “No, Mama, God!” “I am not God, and I have never been,” her mother said, pulling a lacy black bra from the depths of the sink water. “If a boy likes you, you have to make it known that you like him too. Otherwise, he will never do anything. I lived in your father’s house for many, many years before he asked me to marry him. I was a foolish girl, hoping he would see that I wanted the same thing he did, without ever making it known. Were it not for Old Lady’s intervention, who knows if he would have ever done anything. That woman has strong powers of will.” That night, Marjorie tucked Graham’s poem under her pillow, hoping she had inherited her grandmother’s willpower, that the words he’d written would float up into her ear as she slept, blossom into a dream. — Mrs. Pinkston was putting on a black cultural event for the school, and she asked Marjorie if she would read a poem. The event, called The Waters We Wade In, was unlike anything the school had ever done before, and it was to take place at the beginning of May, well after Black History Month had passed. “All you have to do is tell your story,” Mrs. Pinkston said. “Talk about what being African American means to you.” “But I’m not African American,” Marjorie said. Though she couldn’t exactly read the look on Mrs. Pinkston’s face, Marjorie knew instantly that she had said the wrong thing. She wanted to explain it to Mrs. Pinkston, but she didn’t know how. She wanted to tell Mrs. Pinkston that at home, they had a different word for African Americans. Akata. That akata people were different from Ghanaians, too long gone from the mother continent to continue calling it the mother continent. She wanted to tell Mrs. Pinkston that she could feel herself being pulled away too, almost akata, too long gone from Ghana to be Ghanaian. But the look on Mrs. Pinkston’s face stopped her from explaining herself at all. “Listen, Marjorie, I’m going to tell you something that maybe nobody’s told you yet. Here, in this country, it doesn’t matter where you came from first to the white people running things. You’re here now, and here black is black is black.” She got up from her seat and poured them each a cup of coffee. Marjorie didn’t really even like coffee. It was too bitter; the taste clung to the back of her throat, like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to enter her body or be breathed out of her mouth. Mrs. Pinkston drank the coffee, but Marjorie just looked at hers. Briefly, for only a second, she thought she could see her face reflected in it. That night Marjorie went to see a movie with Graham. When he came to pick her up, she asked him if he would park his car one street over. She wasn’t ready to tell her parents yet. “Good idea,” Graham said, and Marjorie wondered if his father knew where he was. When the movie ended, Graham drove her into a clearing in the woods. It was one of those places that other kids supposedly went to make out, but Marjorie had been through it a couple of times, and it was always empty. It was empty this night. Graham had a bottle of whiskey in his backseat, and though she detested the taste of alcohol, Marjorie sipped from it slowly. While she drank, Graham pulled out a cigarette. After he lit it, he kept playing with the lighter, making the fire appear, then disappear again. “Would you stop that, please?” Marjorie asked once he started waving the lighter around. “What?” Graham asked. “The lighter. Would you put it away, please?” Graham gave her a strange look, but he didn’t say anything, and so she didn’t have to explain. Ever since she had heard the story of how her father and grandmother got their scars, she had been terrified of fire. When she was just a little girl, the firewoman of her grandmother’s dreams had haunted Marjorie’s own waking hours. She had only heard about her from her grandmother’s stories on those days when they walked to the water so that her grandmother could tell her what she knew of their ancestors, and yet Marjorie thought she could see the firewoman in the blue and orange glow of the stove, in hot coals, in lighters. She feared that the nightmares would come for her too, that she too would be chosen by the ancestors to hear their family’s stories, but the nightmares never came, and so, with time, her fear of fire had waned. But every so often she could still feel her heart catch when she saw fire, as though the firewoman’s shadow still lurked. “What’d you think of the movie?” Graham asked, putting the lighter away. Marjorie shrugged. It was the only response she could manage because she hadn’t been thinking at all about the movie. Instead, she’d thought about the location of Graham’s hands in relationship to the popcorn or the armrest they shared. She’d thought about his laugh when he’d found something funny, about whether or not the tilt of his head toward the left, toward her, was an invitation for her to tilt her own head toward him or to rest it on his shoulders. In the weeks they had spent getting to know each other, Marjorie had become more and more enamored with the blue of his eyes. She wrote poems about them. The blue like ocean water, like clear sky, like sapphire—she couldn’t capture it. At the movies, she had thought about how the only real friends she had were characters in novels, not real at all. And then Graham had appeared and swallowed up a bit of her loneliness with his blue whale eyes. The next day she wouldn’t for the life of her be able to remember what the movie was called. “Yeah, I felt the same way,” Graham said. He took a long drag from the whiskey bottle. Marjorie wondered if she was in love. How could she know? How did anyone know? In middle school she had been into Victorian literature, the sweeping romance of it. Every character in those books was hopelessly in love. All the men were wooing, all the women being wooed. It was easier to see what love looked like then, the embarrassingly grand, unabashed emotion of it. Now, did it look like sitting in a Camry, sipping whiskey? “You still haven’t let me read any of your writing,” Graham said. He stifled a burp, passing the bottle back to Marjorie. “I have to write a poem for Mrs. Pinkston’s assembly next month. Maybe you can read that one.” “That’s a few weeks after prom, right?” Her mouth went dry at the mention of the dance. She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t, and so she just nodded. “I’d love to read it. I mean, if you want me to.” The bottle was back in his hands, and though it was dark, Marjorie could make out the deeply wrinkled lines of his knuckles, turning red from clutching. — That week the Bradford pear trees started to bloom. At school everyone said they smelled like semen, like sex, like a woman’s vagina. Marjorie hated the smell of them, a reflection of her virginity, her inability to liken the smell to anything other than rotting fish. Every year, by summer, she would grow accustomed to the smell, and by the time the blossoms fell, the smell would be nothing more than a distant memory. But then spring would come and the smell would resurface, loudly announcing itself. Marjorie was working on her poem for The Waters We Wade In when her father got a call from Ghana. Old Lady was frail. Her caretaker couldn’t tell if the dreams were the same or different. Old Lady didn’t leave the bed as often as she used to—she, the woman who had once been afraid of sleep. Marjorie wanted her family to go to Ghana immediately. She stopped writing the poem, snatched the phone away from her confused father—an act that on another day would have earned her a knock on the head—and demanded that the caretaker put Old Lady on the phone, even if it meant waking her. “Are you sick?” she asked her grandmother. “Sick? I will soon be dancing with you by the water this summer. How can I be sick?” “You won’t die?” “What have I told you about death?” Old Lady said sharply into the phone, her voice sounding stronger than it had at the beginning of their conversation. Marjorie tugged at the cord. Old Lady said that only bodies died. Spirits wandered. They found Asamando, or they didn’t. They stayed with their descendants to guide them through life, to comfort them, sometimes to scare them into waking from their fog of unloving, unliving. Marjorie reached for the stone at her neck. Her ancestor’s gift. “Promise me you won’t leave until I can see you again,” Marjorie said. Behind her, Yaw placed a hand on her shoulder. “I promise I will never leave you,” Old Lady said. Marjorie handed the phone back to her father, who gave her a strange look. She went back to her room. On her desk, the piece of paper that was supposed to hold a poem simply said, “Water. Water. Water. Water.” — Marjorie and Graham went on another date, this time to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. Graham had never been before, but Marjorie and her parents went once a year. Her mother liked to look at all the pictures of astronauts that lined the halls and her father loved to walk through the museum, examining every rocket as though he were trying to learn how to build one himself. In some ways, Marjorie thought, her parents had already traveled through space, landing in a country as foreign to them as the moon. Graham didn’t heed the Do Not Touch signs. He left ghostly fingerprints on fiberglass cases, prints that disappeared almost as soon as he left them. “America wouldn’t have a space program if it weren’t for the Germans,” Graham said. “Do you miss Germany?” Marjorie asked. Graham hardly ever talked about the place where he had done most of his growing up. He didn’t wear the country on his sleeve the same way she wore Ghana on hers. “Sometimes, but military brats get used to moving around.” He shrugged and pressed his fingers against a case that held a space suit. Marjorie pictured his hand pushing through the glass, lifting his body into the case, fitting him into the suit, then losing gravity until his body started to float up, up. “Marjorie?” “What?” “I said, would you ever move back to Ghana?” She thought for a moment, of her grandmother and the sea, the Castle. She thought of the frantic commotion of cars and bodies on the streets of Cape Coast, the wide-hipped women selling fish out of large silver bowls, and the young girls whose breasts had not yet come in walking down the road’s median, pressing their faces into the windows of the taxis, saying “Ice water,” and “Please, I beg.” “I don’t think so.” Graham nodded and started to move forward, on to the next case. Marjorie took his hand just as he was lifting it to press it against the fiberglass. She stopped him, and said, “I mostly just feel like I don’t belong there. As soon as I step off the airplane, people can tell that I’m like them but different too. They can smell it on me.” “Smell what?” Marjorie looked up, trying to capture the right word. “Loneliness, maybe. Or aloneness. The way I don’t fit here or there. My grandmother’s the only person who really sees me.” She looked down. Her hand was shaking, so she let go of Graham’s, but he took it back. And when she looked up again, he was leaning down, pressing his lips to hers. — For weeks, Marjorie waited for word about her grandmother. Her parents had hired a new caretaker to watch her every day, which only seemed to infuriate her. She was getting worse. Marjorie didn’t know how she knew, but she knew. At school, Marjorie was quiet. She didn’t raise her hand in any of her classes, and two of her teachers stopped her to ask if everything was all right. She brushed them off. Instead of eating lunch in the English lounge or reading in the library, she sat in the cafeteria, at the corner of a long rectangular table, daring anyone who passed by to do their worst. Instead, Graham came over and sat across from her. “You okay?” he asked. “I haven’t really seen you since…” His voice trailed off, but Marjorie wanted him to say it. Since we kissed. Since we kissed. That day, Graham was wearing the school’s colors—an obnoxious orange, calmed, only slightly, by a soothing gray. “I’m fine,” she said. “You worried about your poem?” he asked. Her poem was a collection of fonts on a piece of paper, an experiment in box lettering, cursive, all caps. “No, I’m not worried about that.” Graham nodded carefully, and held her gaze. She had come to the cafeteria because she wanted to be alone while surrounded by people. It was a feeling she sometimes liked, like stepping off the plane in Accra and being met by a sea of faces that looked like her own. For those first few minutes, she would capture that anonymity, but then the moment would drop. Someone would approach her, ask her if he could carry her bag, if he could drive her somewhere, if she would feed his baby. While she stared back at Graham, a brunette girl Marjorie recognized from the hallways approached them. “Graham?” she asked. “I don’t normally see you here at lunch. I would remember seeing you.” Graham nodded, but didn’t say anything. The girl had yet to notice Marjorie, but Graham’s lack of attention pulled her glance away from him, toward the person who had won it. She looked at Marjorie for only a second, but it was long enough for Marjorie to notice the wrinkle of disgust that had begun to form on her face. “Graham,” she whispered, as though lowering her voice would keep Marjorie from hearing. “You shouldn’t sit here.” “What?” “You shouldn’t sit here. People will start to think…” Again, a quick glance. “Well, you know.” “No, I don’t know.” “Just come sit with us,” she said. At this point, she was scanning the room, her body language turning anxious. “I’m fine where I am.” “Go,” Marjorie said, and Graham turned toward her. It was as if he had forgotten whom he had been arguing for in the first place. As if he’d been fighting simply for the seat, and not the girl who sat across from it. “Go, it’s fine.” And once she had said it, she stopped breathing. She wanted him to say no, to fight harder, longer, to take her hand across the table and run his reddened thumbs between her fingers. But he didn’t. He got up, looking almost relieved. By the time Marjorie noticed the brunette girl slipping her hand into his to pull him along, they were already halfway across the room. She had thought Graham was like her, a reader, a loner, but watching him walk away with the girl, she knew he was different. She saw how easy it was for him to slip in unnoticed, as though he had always belonged there. * Prom was themed The Great Gatsby. In the decorating days that preceded it, the school’s floors were littered with sparkles and glitter. The night of prom, Marjorie was sandwiched between her parents on their couch, watching a movie on the television. She could hear her parents whispering about her when she got up to make popcorn. “Something’s not right,” Yaw said. He had never been good at whispering. At regular volume his voice was a boom from the belly, deep and loud. “She’s just a teenager. Teenagers are like this,” Esther said. Marjorie had heard the other LPNs at the nursing home where Esther worked talk like this, as if teenagers were wild beasts in a dangerous jungle. Best to leave them alone. When she came back, Marjorie tried to look brighter, but she couldn’t tell if she was succeeding. The phone rang, and she rushed to pick it up. She had asked her grandmother to call her once a month as an assurance, even though she knew it was cumbersome for the old woman to have to do so. But, when she answered the phone, she was greeted by Graham’s voice. “Marjorie?” he asked. She was breathing into the phone, but she had yet to speak. What was there to say? “I wish I could take you. It’s just that…” His voice trailed off, but it didn’t matter. She’d heard it before. He was going to go with the brunette. He had wanted to take Marjorie, but his father didn’t think it would be proper. The school didn’t think it was appropriate. As a last defense, Marjorie had heard him tell the principal that she was “not like other black girls.” And, somehow, that had been worse. She had already given him up. “Can I still hear your poem?” he asked. “I’m reading it next week. Everyone will hear it.” “You know what I mean.” In the living room, her father had started snoring. It was the way he always watched movies. She pictured him leaning down onto her mother’s shoulders, the woman’s arms wrapped around him. Maybe her mother was sleeping too, her own head leaning toward Yaw’s, her long box braids a curtain, hiding their faces. Theirs was a comfortable love. A love that didn’t require fighting or hiding. When Marjorie had asked her father again when he had known he liked Esther, he said he had always known. He said it was born in him, that he breathed it in with the first breeze of Edweso, that it moved in him like the harmattan. There was nothing like love for Marjorie in Alabama. “I have to go,” she said to Graham on the phone. “My parents need me.” She clicked the phone onto its receiver and went back into the living room. Her mother was awake, staring ahead at the television, though she wasn’t watching it. “Who was that, my own?” she asked. “No one,” Marjorie said. — The auditorium sat two thousand. From backstage, Marjorie could hear the other students filing in, the insistent chatter of their boredom. She was pacing the room, too scared to look out past the curtain. Beside her, Tisha and her friends were practicing a dance to music that played faintly from the boom box. “You ready?” Mrs. Pinkston asked, startling Marjorie. Her hands were already shaking, and she was surprised she didn’t drop the poem she was holding. “No,” she said. “Yes, you are,” Mrs. Pinkston said. “Don’t worry. You’ll be great.” She kept moving, off to check on all the other performers. When the program started, Marjorie’s stomach began to hurt. She had never spoken in front of so many people before, and she was ready to attribute the pain to that, but then it settled more deeply. A wave of nausea accompanied it, but soon both passed. This feeling came from time to time. Her grandmother called it a premonition, the body registering something that the world had yet to acknowledge. Marjorie sometimes felt it before receiving a bad test score. Once, she got it before a car accident. Another time, she got it only moments before she realized she had lost a ring her father had given her. He argued that these things would have happened whether she had felt the feeling or not, and perhaps that was true. All Marjorie knew was that the feeling told her to brace herself. And so, bracing herself, she stepped onto the stage once Mrs. Pinkston introduced her. She knew the lights would be bright, but she had not factored in their heat, like a million brilliant suns shining down on her. She began to sweat, passed a palm across her forehead. She set her paper down on the podium. She had practiced a million times, under her breath in class, in front of the mirror in her bathroom, in the car while her parents drove. The sound of silence, cut by the occasional cough or shuffling of feet, taunted Marjorie. She leaned into the mic. She cleared her throat, and then she read: Split the Castle open, find me, find you. We, two, felt sand, wind, air. One felt whip. Whipped, once shipped. We, two, black. Me, you. One grew from cocoa’s soil, birthed from nut, skin uncut, still bleeding. We, two, wade. The waters seem different but are same. Our same. Sister skin. Who knew? Not me. Not you. She looked up. A door had creaked open, letting more light in. There was enough light for her to see her father standing in the doorframe, but not enough for her to see the tears running down his face. — The only promise Old Lady, Akua, the Crazy Woman of Edweso, broke was the last one she made. She died in the middle of a sleep she used to fear. She wanted to be buried on a mountain overlooking the sea. Marjorie took the rest of the school year off, her grades so good it didn’t make much of a difference. She walked with her mother behind the men who were tasked with carrying her grandmother’s body up. Her father had insisted on carrying too, though he was so old, his presence was more of a burden than a help. When they got to the grave site, the people began weeping. Everyone had been crying for days and days on end, but Marjorie had yet to. The men began digging out the red clay. Two mounds stood on either side of the big rectangular hole, growing deeper. A woodworker had crafted Old Lady’s coffin in a wood the same color as the ground, and when the coffin was lowered, no one could tell where it ended and the earth began. They began to return the clay to the hole. They packed it in tight, patting it with the back of the shovel once they had finished. The sound echoed off of the mountain, into the valley. Once they put a marker on the grave, Marjorie realized that she had forgotten to drop in her poem, built from the dream stories Old Lady used to tell when she walked Marjorie to the water. She knew her grandmother would have loved to hear it. She pulled the poem from her pocket, and her trembling hands made the words wave even though there was little wind. Marjorie threw herself onto the funeral mound, crying finally, “Me Mam-yee, me Maame. Me Mam-yee, me Maame.” Her mother came to lift her up off the ground. Later, Esther told her that it looked like she was going to fly off the cliff, down the mountain, and into the sea.