Another Brooklyn Read Free

street below, shooting bottle caps across chalk-drawn numbers, their hands and knees a dusty white at the end of the day. Sometimes the boys looked up at our window. More than once, a beautiful one winked at me. For many years, I didn’t know his name.
    Early one morning, as my brother and I took our place by the window, cereal bowls in our laps, a young boy pulled a wrench from his pocket, used it to remove the cap from the fire hydrant below us, then turned the top of the hydrant until white water pounded into the street. We watched the water for hours. Children we didn’t know but suddenly hated with a jealousy thick enough to taste ran through it, their undershirts and cutoffs sticking to their brown bodies. I saw Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi again that day, pulling each other into the water, their voices floating up to our window.
    Is she laughing at us? my brother asked. That red-haired girl. She just looked up at our window and laughed.
    Shush, I said. She isn’t even anybody.
    I was beginning to hate them. I was beginning to love them.
    Sometimes, Angela stood apart from the others, biting fiercely at her nails, her short Afro dripping. The high yellow of her skin was as familiar as Tennessee to me. At the small church our mother took us to sometimes, four sisters who looked like Angela sat up front, their hair straightened, braided, and white-ribboned, their backs straight. As their father preached, I watched them, wondering what it was like to walk the edge of holy. For God so loved the world, their father would say, he gave his only begotten son . But what about his daughters, I wondered. What did God do with his daughters?

    My father had grown up in Brooklyn but joined the military at eighteen and was stationed at a base near Clarksville, Tennessee. Then Vietnam. Then my mother and SweetGrove. He was missing a finger on each hand, the pinky on his left, and on his right hand, the thumb. When we asked him how it happened, he wouldn’t answer, so my brother and I spent hours imagining ways to lose two fingers in a war—knives, bombs, tigers, sugar-diabetes, the list went on and on. His parents had grown old and died only a block from where we now lived. That summer, when we begged him to let us go outside during the day, he shook his head. The world’s not as safe as you all like to believe it is, he said. Look at Biafra, he said. Look at Vietnam.
    I thought of Gigi, Sylvia, and Angela walking arm in arm through the streets below our window.How safe and strong they looked. How impenetrable.
    One Sunday morning, on the way to the small church my father had found for us, a man wearing a black suit stopped him. I’ve been sent by the prophet Elijah, in the name of Allah, he said, with a message for you, my beautiful black brother.
    The man looked at me, his eyes moving slowly over my bare legs. You’re a black queen, he said. Your body is a temple. It should be covered. I held tighter to my father’s hand. In the short summer dress, my legs seemed too long and too bare. An unlocked temple. A temple exposed.
    The man handed my father a newspaper and said, As-Salaam Alaikum . Then he was gone.
    In church behind the preacher, there was a picture of our Lord Jesus Christ, white and holy, hisrobe pulled open to show his exposed and bleeding heart.
    The Psalm tells us, the preacher said, I call on the Lord in my distress and he answers me.
    Gold light poured in through a small stained glass window. My father lifted his gaze, saw what I saw—the way the light danced across the folding chairs, the rows of laps, the buckling hardwood floor. Then the sun shifted, melting the light back into shadow. What was the message for you, my beautiful black brother, in all that church light? What was it for any of us?
    Behind me, an old woman moaned an Amen.

    The streetlights had come on and from our place at the window, my brother and I could see children running back and forth along the sidewalk. We