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AT THE corner of Ebony and Mecca, Cadillac found the Biscuit Shop. He knew they had supernaturally good biscuits. He didn’t know they had a DJ and people danced as they ate their biscuits. When he walked in, Prince was talking about a lady cabdriver and there was a full-blown party goin on even though, or maybe because, it was Friday afternoon. Someone screamed that the roof was on fire, and a couple jumped up on top of a table to dance. An ancient-looking woman came trembling from behind the counter, her pace so much slower than the high-slung rhythm of the party that she seemed like a superimposed freeze-frame. She was golden brown and paper-thin with silvery hair and Coke-bottle glasses, leaning for dear life on an ornately carved cane, a thick wool shawl clinging to her shoulders. She looked as sweet as any cookie-bakin grandmother who ever lived. Then she opened her mouth. “Git the fuck down from there!” she croaked. “Y’all think y’all at home?”
“Sorry, Granmama,” they said, their heads bowed. They jumped down. But the party went on.
As Cadillac waited in line he looked at the photos that covered the walls. There was Granmama with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, the men young, sweaty, and clearly brimming with thoughts. There was Granmama beside Martin Luther King, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, Zora Neale Hurston, Josephine Baker, Madame CJ Walker. And sepia photos and daguerreotypes of Granmama beside people who had been dead for a good long while: Frederick Douglass, Phyllis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman. For these pictures to be real, he thought, Granmama would have to be more than two hundred years old. They had to be Photoshopped. A two-hundred-year-old woman was impossible.
When Cadillac sat down with his sack of six biscuits, they were still piping hot and the butter’s seductive scent was dancing into his nose. As soon as he took a bite the biscuit began melting in his mouth, first flaking into pieces, then a little river of butter washing over his tongue, butter sweeter than he’d ever tasted. He remembered that it was just the sort of biscuit his aunt Omen had given him at her house on Downhome Drive when he was a boy. The taste of it shook an image loose from the ocean floor of his memory. It came floating up toward his consciousness, the memory of what it was to have been young and in the air, riding on breezes, cutting through clouds, flying. There was no need to put his arms out because gliding was as natural as walking. The weight of life was lifted and the air felt slower and he felt free. He gazed down at Soul City from a bird’s view and saw Honeypot Hill and Niggatown and Soul City’s central monument, its Eiffel Tower, the one-hundred-foot-tall black steel Black fist Afro Pick, with fifty-foot-tall teeth shooting up from the ground and flowing together to form a muscular, militant Black power fist, so big that aliens cruising by in outer space couldn’t miss it. Then everything stopped. How could he remember flying if he’d never flown in his life? How could he remember the Afro Pick if he’d never seen it? And who was this Aunt Omen person? What was in this biscuit? It was a long time before Cadillac understood that each of Granmama’s biscuits had a memory baked into it, but a memory from whoever had baked that biscuit. He’d gotten lucky and eaten that one in a thousand baked by the one girl who worked in the shop and knew how to fly.
When Cadillac stood to leave, the DJ scratched and suddenly Prince’s needle-sharp falsetto leaped from the speakers, wanting your extra time and your . . . kiss. The Biscuit Shop screamed as one and launched into dancing so intense that the room was just this side of a riot. He looked at the DJ in her dowdy Biscuit Shop uniform, dull gray like a cheap maid’s outfit. But she had long, cascading diva curls, a face like Dorothy Dandridge, and was flowing from vinyl to vinyl with a cigarette in her hand. Her name tag said MAHOGANY. When he passed she didn’t smile. He walked to his hotel replaying the memory of flight over and again, clinging to the images, afraid if he forgot for a moment he’d never know flight again.