Hold Love Strong Read Free Page A

and mouth with her pinky. Then she wiped the blood from me with the palm of her hand.
    â€œRoosevelt!” 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.
    â€œThis 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.
    â€œAbraham,” my grandma announced.
    â€œLike the president?” Rhonda asked.
    â€œNo,” 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, becausethat 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