• CHAPTER 27 •
Conviction
[1]
The day of the invasion, Selah didn’t see the horseman break through the volley of bullets and ride up just feet away from God’s Place, for the birds she had entered to watch over Ours all amassed over the town in a vortex of fear. Selah jumped from bird sight to bird sight, telling Aba what horseman she saw and by whose house on what streets.
The Ouhmey swiftly killed all intruders and suffered few injuries. Birds settled in trees after bullets ceased tearing through the town, the streets clogged by living and dead horses and the corpses of men who had no business barging into Ours demanding their children. Audacity such as this required death, which is why Selah needed little convincing to climb into that tree and direct Aba’s percussion to where the bullets needed to go. But when that one horseman rode up close, she missed him, and it took the sound of the bullet leaving his up-close gun to shock her out of the bird she had inhabited a half mile south and return to her own body, her own sight, and watch the horseman—bleeding from the eyes and nose, rotting on the inside—die slowly in Naima’s wave of sickness.
Naima’s intense focus broke at the sound of the bullet as well, and when she came to, she saw the sick, stubborn man with his gun still in hand. Outraged, Naima widened her eyes and he died in a rush of illness.
Selah listened. That bullet had entered a place important, Selah knew. ‘It’s in his breathing,’ she thought, and put her hands to Aba’s chest to keep him alive with her own life force. In the back of her mind, she saw Saint lording over her, that snake staff digging into the floor and her stern gaze digging into Selah. She shook her head to shake out the vision of Saint, but Saint’s image soon took over her vision of Aba.
The image of Saint rhythmically pounded its staff into the floor of Selah’s mind. Naima rubbed Selah’s back, but Selah didn’t feel it. Getting away from Saint and the demand that she raise the dead had erased the world.
The only time Saint had ever encouraged Selah had burned shame and fear into her memory. “We will try again some other time,” Saint had told her, “when you get stronger.” When Selah protested that it hurt too bad to pour that much into somebody to bring them back to life, that Saint’s hope that she could do it hurt the worst, Saint said, “Pain gets easier. It has no other choice.” She kissed Selah on the forehead, and what should’ve been a good feeling nauseated Selah instead.
While keeping Aba alive against his body’s wishes, Selah dove into the dark beneath the vision of Saint, into the depths of what felt to her like oil that loosened into cool water, then opened into air. Weightless in the void. To get away from Saint’s demands, she fell into the unknown and found that she knew it, at least a little, for this is where she went when under the pressure of healing those she couldn’t heal. This is where she went when the older woman took over her body. But after Frances had touched Selah that one time, the older woman couldn’t come back and no longer waited in the dark recesses of Selah’s need.
Not too long after Frances’s touch chased that woman away did Selah realize the older woman was herself but from a long time into the future. How her older self got inside her younger self she didn’t know, so in secret she took to pretending she was asleep while contemplating how to reach her older self on her own. If that woman from an approaching time could come to Selah, maybe Selah could go to her. In this moment of Aba’s dying, she needed the woman Frances had chased away, back into the after. So she dove.
She heard Joy’s voice from the outside saying “please” so sweetly that she began to feel guilty for having held on to Aba’s life in the first place. She was about to give up on finding her older self and just go on and let Aba pass away into his own peace. ‘He deserve rest,’ she thought. But the tap of Saint’s ominous staff returned to her mind like the loud ticking of a mean clock, seconds shaved off as quick as Aba’s breath sliced and seared by a bullet. If Aba died, Selah knew she would be forced to bring him back, to make the painful attempt while disregarding her own life. No. No. No. Never again. Selah released both Aba and herself from the tethers of the world, floating . . .
[2]
. . . in the great nothing, deeper than she had ever traversed, the surrounding darkness bursts open into a garden of light. Pulsing orbs of various colors speckle the canvas that had once been no different from an empty night sky. Inside the orbs, Selah sees people who look like her and Naima. Kinfolks living inside their bubbles of time. They wear bizarre clothes, enter colossal buildings carved from metal and carriages that move without horses. They carry weapons, wearing all black or suits or green and brown uniforms. Around her, their voices bleed out from their orbs, creating a cacophony from which she can’t escape. Conversations pummel into her. Screams beckon for her. Laughter removes the pain she felt while putting hands on Aba. In one orb, she sees a woman who looks like her, rocking a baby in her arms. In an adjacent orb, another woman with her face, a bit older, sits in a crowd of people who watch young blacks in caps and gowns walk across a platform, grab a document, shake white folks’ hands, then take a seat.
A dark orb depicts a ship sinking into the depths of a large body of water, the ship torn asunder by a storm. Beside it, an orb shows a town full of people celebrating a couple, a woman nearby pounding yam with a large pestle in a giant wooden bowl.
One orange orb attracts her so much that she touches it. A bright orange light overtakes her sight and when she comes to, she finds herself standing in line behind a stream of Negroes, backs straight, facing forward and focusing on the task at hand that waits beyond where she can see. She can’t control her body, as though she had entered an animal, but she knows she is inside a person this time, one who smells like sweet perfume.
She catches a glimpse of the person she has entered in a window that reads “Gloria’s Hair Emporium est 1925.” Seeing the year, she understands that she has gone into the future but not how or why, and seeing that the woman looks so much like her makes the unfamiliar world more familiar.
She learns the woman she’s inside of is named Naima, which makes her smile. “Get moving, chile. Folks is waiting. You hear me, Naima?” Hearing this, Naima turns away from herself in the mirroring shop window after giving her reflection a curious look, surprising Selah into believing this woman sees Selah resting inside of her.
When Selah sees Naima’s mother, she can barely contain herself inside the young woman’s head. She cackles at the resemblance, rubs her hands together greedily like a fly. It becomes clearer to her that this is her lineage as though the mind in which she sits has been hers all along.
The line of Negroes, all dressed in suits or skirts that hit the knee or just under, pushes forward, a slow river of people filed neatly, newspapers tucked under arms and brimmed hats blocking out the eager sun. It’s hot outside and one man in line says, “This the hottest election of all my life. And this long line don’t make it no better.” Selah doesn’t know what is happening, even after Naima enters a bank that is shut down for the day, selects several names on a ballot (one a Franklin Delano Roosevelt), and disappears the ballot into a box.
A young man calls out to Naima’s mother, calls her Dr. Holiday, explains that the “liniment worked mighty fine, Dr. Holiday. My grandfather sends his regards.” Children outside jump as a rope spins above and beneath them. Selah wants to join them. Naima passes them with her mother on the way down the street.
In a blink, Selah is back among the orbs, and without thinking touches another. In this future, she is inside an older woman in a candlelit room, white drawings of arrows curving and pointing in many directions all around her. The person she is inside of shakes small bones in her hand and throws them to the floor. A turned-over shoe shows its bottom to the woman and white arrows dart toward the toes’ direction beneath the sole. A black rooster sneaks past the door and the woman begins to speak, “Thank you for visiting me, young ancestor,” and Selah is thrown from the woman’s body and back into the orb garden.
Each orb shows to her descendants from the future. ‘These my kin,’ she thinks, and reaches for a light blue orb that shows the face of a woman who looks only a little like her, and as she flashes into this world, she finds herself in a bed, charts and metal devices all around, a man telling the person she is inside of to push while a handsome man with big puffy hair stands at the foot of the bed watching on with extravagant worry.
Minutes later, the doctor’s rolled-up sleeves reveal dark brown skin with curly hair covered in a wet sheen of sweat. There’s crying, and the doctor passes the baby to “Mrs. Johnson. It’s a boy. Congratulations,” and the handsome man with the big puffy hair says, “Evie, a son. Baby, you gave me a son!”
Music plays in the background, “Betcha by golly woooow” crooning from a small box someone brought into the delivery room. Selah wants to see more of the mysterious music box, but Evie keeps turning her head to look at the baby that Selah thinks looks a fool and a mess.
“Thank you for letting me have music in here. I know it’s not protocol,” Evie says, then the box begins to speak “That was ‘Betcha by Golly Wow,’ brand-new from the Stylistics, Dionne Warwick’s favorite male group.” Selah wonders how the man’s voice got inside the black box and what Stylistics meant and who Dena Warnick is.
She is thrown into the orb garden before she can learn more, and when she catches a glimmer of herself in another orb that appears to be filled with only water, she notices she has grown into a young woman.
She visits several more orbs, staying longer in each one, hours, days, weeks, months, years. She learns that her own age changes depending on whose orb she visits. She goes in as a thirty-six-year-old visiting a seventeen-year-old descendant and returns to the orb garden as a seventeen-year-old. That she remembers everything from the lives she eavesdrops on excites her, the puzzle of the future coming into stark clarity as she moves from Negro, to black, to African American, then to Black.
She learns what a radio is, a car, oil sheen, and Vernor’s Ginger Ale. She sees people of all races holding hands and singing against a war that wilted the flowers woven into their hair. Luster’s Pink Oil Moisturizer and disco. Aretha Franklin and Soul Train. Watching the Soul Train line in one life and dancing in the line in another. She watched the women she inhabited fall in love with men who loved them fiercely, imperfectly, but never with fist or slap, though sometimes in the embrace of addiction that lit up their veins and delivered them to early graves. The bent spoon, the blunt syringe, the white rock of disaster a rocket ship, baby, to the moon and stars that burn the smoker to the bone.
In 1990, she learns what HIV and AIDS are, sees for herself what the invisible insurgencies do to a brother who dies in her descendant’s arms in his own bed, twenty-five of his friends dead over the course of two years. Cancer and diabetes ravages one descendant in 1993, while in 1995 she learns how to bring somebody back from an overdose and how to lose them after bringing them back. The burnt spoons clink hypnotic in her brain. Blunt syringes unsew a vein. For the first time she sees poverty in Black towns and neighborhoods that knew of no such thing. But she also learns that the fighting spirit in the Ouhmey transfers into the time beyond, and that the desire to live confounds the forces that try to undo.
After living six years in the 1990s in a single descendant and the first ten years of the 2000s in another, she wants to leave the bodies in less time, but she stays longer each visit, living through years in mere moments, her own age in utter confusion, lost in the time jumps, both woman and girl, having gained hundreds of years of experience from the various women whose compiled lives welcomed her unknowingly and taught her phrases like “Keep on keeping on” while their children rolled into early graves.
Then she opens her eyes after touching the orb she thought was empty, the one that looks like a ball of water, and wakes up inside the body of a teenage boy. She has never been inside a boy before and immediately wants to go back to the orb garden. The room is dark. A small clock near the bed reads 11:47 in glowing red numerals. Selah knows she will be with Him for a long time and prepares herself for the worst.
What happens is much different from before. She can smell what He smells, taste what He tastes, and feel what He feels emotionally and sometimes physically: the fried whiting placed over a bowl of grits, His piss stinging dark yellow into the toilet, the sneakers with the worn-out insole soring His feet as He rushes through games of football. When He brushes His hair, waves take over His scalp and the feel of the hard bristles against His head are hard bristles against hers, delivering a satisfying chill down her back. When He sees a girl He likes and hardens, her stomach roils, and the sensation overwhelms. She isn’t merely inhabiting His body. Selah has merged with Him and the luster of His life illuminates and challenges her own.
The boy somehow moves throughout the day without hearing His birth name. He is lovingly called Boy, Nigga, G, the homie, son, Deazy, which is the closest thing to His name she hears. When He brushes His teeth, He does not look at Himself in the mirror, focusing on parts of Himself that keep His face in disconnected fragments. It takes her days to see what this descendant looks like.
When He showers, she feels a nervousness when He washes His behind, a reticence to soap near His asshole, but He does it and she can’t understand why this act of cleaning Himself brings the boy so much shame. He takes His time getting into the shower and rushes to get out. His own body seems to repulse Him. His big hands. The hair on his thighs. The dark of his elbows. He doesn’t want to know them at all, and it disrupts her desire to see and know Him.
One morning, He goes downstairs before the rest of the family wakes, to look at the photos over a mantel in the living room. Selah’s heart races, which is the boy’s heart racing, as she sees through His eyes the same woman who voted decades ago, the photo in black and white and her mother beside her. The handsome man with the afro appears in another photo kissing the pregnant woman Selah had been in on the forehead. The woman holds the hand of a young boy, no older than five. The photo that He focuses on is one of an older woman holding a baby in her lap. He tears up and Selah’s own eyes grow wet from their shared sorrow.
At the dining room table, His mother says, “Fix your face. I’m not gone tell you again. You too big for that soft shit,” and the feeling inside of Selah is a new pain that doesn’t sting but throws open every hidden window in the body. His body is soft, but strong, and Selah’s confusion sits in the hurt because He sits in the hurt. She wants Him to look at His mother, to read her face and body language for clarity, but He keeps His head in His plate of food. She cannot stop looking at His beautiful hands.
His mother washes dishes and kisses Him on the forehead when she leaves the room. He looks up finally, letting Selah see her face. His mother looks nothing like Selah’s people, and she frowns at the surprise of her freckled cheeks.
Later that day, when His father comes home from work after a security night shift, He is playing Mortal Kombat 11 on the Xbox in the basement. His father grabs the second controller and plays along, smelling like Irish Spring soap. Selah sees that it’s His father who is the earlier descendant and the sadness in his eyes angers her. He and His father play the game for almost two hours, Selah wondering how they don’t speak but between them exists a bond that moves from them into her, one that makes Him smile on the inside as He decapitates His father’s character with a bladed hat. His father rubs Him on the head, then climbs up the stairs and into bed. She does not know what His father’s voice sounds like.
At night, He reads a short story in a Playboy He had stolen from His father. When He finishes, He stares at the nipples of one of the models, rubbing His balls, then slides the journal between His mattress and the bed frame, His imagination too stunted to get Him hard. Selah can’t sense what He thinks but watches the streetlights paint the inside of the bedroom a dirty yellow as He looks at the one tree on the block until He dozes off.
He has a few friends. His mother likes none of them. His father doesn’t care. They smell like cooking grease, onions at the armpits of their shirts, and cheap Avon cream. His mother knows they are clean of body, but their clothes are never clean, and she tells Him this with disdain, hateful of the boys’ mothers, never mentioning the fathers. Selah wonders why. When He goes to his room, He mumbles under His breath, “Blessings don’t come even.” Selah agrees.
His friends are poor and underfed, and this makes Him love them harder, especially His friend Torrance. His mother shakes her head and sends Torrance home immediately after he’s eaten at her house. “Wash your clothes, Torrance. If you need to do that hur, let me know. Use dish soap if you need to,” she says. “You hur me, lil nigga?” she asks, and Torrance says, “Yes, ma’am, I hur you.” “Aight, get going.” “Thank you for the food.” “You know I got you,” she says, then disappears upstairs.
Soon after, He walks Torrance to the door and Torrance says, “My mama ain’t gone let me wash my shit over hur. She’d cuss me the fuck out if I came home with clothes smelling better than urbody else’s. She a goofy gal.” They dap up and plan to meet the next day to play football. Selah thinks Torrance’s voice sounds like fire.
He sits on the porch. A young woman named Candice walks up to Him and sits on the porch, her body heat adding to the hot summer. “What’s the sitch, Deazy?” she asks, rubs His knee. He doesn’t want her. He doesn’t have language to say no to her because He doesn’t want to be called funny. “You funny boy?” He’s been asked a few times since Selah arrived. He shuts them up on the field, using His body to devastate the boys who try to talk shit about Him as He steamrolls into them. They call Him funny, and He lands His full weight onto them. He catches the football and folks don’t even try to stop Him. Selah thinks this power is what makes them call Him funny, because she laughs when they can’t stop Him. But today, she learns funny doesn’t mean laughter. He shakes His head at Candice’s advance. She says, “I knew you was funny,” but Selah notices no one has laughed. She notices that she feels anger and her head fills up with blood.
“Sit yo stupid ass down,” He says.
“Who you calling stupid? You tweakin,” Candice says, but it’s half-hearted.
“You. Who the fuck else hur?”
Candice pushes His head hard with the tips of her fingers. He grabs Her arm and forces her to the porch. Selah is breathing hard. She doesn’t know why they are fighting. Why they hardly smile at each other. They tussle for a little bit more until He says, “Come on,” and goes into the house.
Selah learns that she can stop feeling what He feels with his body if she closes her eyes and huddles into a ball inside her own mind. She does this whenever He touches Himself in ways that bring pleasure. The first time it happened, Selah didn’t know boys did that and when the white, sticky fluid shot out from His dick she screamed and closed her eyes. Every feeling went away then, as though she had fallen asleep inside Him.
When she opens her eyes and unfolds her body, Candice is putting on her clothes. “You going to the party tomorrow?” she asks.
“I might. Ain’t thought about it,” He says. Selah has never felt this feeling He feels now and for the first time she tries to impart her will to Him. When Candice finally leaves, she kisses Him on the lips and proceeds down the street. The feeling fills Him up. He goes to the bathroom and looks into His eyes for the first time. The mirror is speckled with toothpaste and missing a piece of glass on the bottom right-hand corner, the black backing with old glue darkening the space where glass should’ve been.
He opens the medicine cabinet and takes out a bottle of Tylenol, pours half the bottle into His hands. He looks into His own eyes and steals Selah’s heart. “O Deazy, you got Naima’s eyes,” she says, and the overwhelming, unnamable feeling in Him relaxes, as if He hears her for the first time. He doesn’t hear her. She knows this. He has calmed down. He puts the pills back into the bottle. This is the fourth time He has done this, but the first time Selah felt as though He might go through with it. Selah knows what this would do to Him if He does it, had seen in 1974 the aftermath of a handful of pills on a lover. Her descendant was able to save her lover, but would this descendant always be able to stop Himself?
Then, that night, while He is asleep, she finds that she can see His memories in a similar way she can see the orbs of the future. His memories float about like fireflies, and she wonders how memory is connected to time since they both look the same when up close: orbs of light, the future orbs big as a head and frozen in place; memory orbs were insect-small and fleeting. She reaches for one and it moves away from her fingers. They mostly escape her, but she eventually finds one she can grab. Touching it does not send her into the memory; rather it puts the memory inside her. It is a memory of his grandmother holding Him in her lap. He is five years old. She is telling Him stories. Another memory is of an uncle teaching Him how to fish. And another of His father giving Him a piggyback ride. Memory after memory of love, intentional and effortless, care that she had seen from previous futures of her descendants. It challenges what she thought was His sad life. She searches through many of His memories but can’t pinpoint the source of what He has become. She wonders if He even knows why He is so sad, or if He is under the hold of a conjure.
By the tenth day of her settling inside of Him, she learned to love the taste of hot chips and grape Vess. She recognizes that Torrance makes Him laugh the loudest of His friends and cheers Him up when he notices the lamp in His eyes has gone out. The two remind her of Luther-Philip and Justice, and this thought makes Selah miss her old life, until she hears a clock tick or a mouth pop or when He habitually knocks on the desk in His room, making beats—all of which brings back images of Saint and her staff.
Selah is shocked to hear His mother cracking up at a television show that she invites Him to sit next to her and watch. He does. On the television, a man dressed up as a woman rolls her eyes and pushes her long-nailed fingers into the other women’s faces. He and His mother laugh. Selah worries she is missing something because she doesn’t find this funny, but is happy that He is happy, feels His happiness fill her up. She wants more of this for Him. Tired, He leans on His mother, holding most of His imposing weight. She doesn’t push Him off. She holds Him and they laugh for three episodes straight until time for dinner.
Something has changed. His father comes through the door from a morning shift, smells the meat loaf, and shouts, “Oh, we EATING eating tonight.” This is the first time Selah has heard his voice. It is booming and edgeless, how she imagines smoke would sound if it had a voice. He is not a large man, but his voice takes over the space with its warm quality. And this, too, makes Him happy.
They eat together, tell stories, shit talk, gossip about ole dude at the corner store who was shot in the foot by Azrael for feeling on his sister booty. Shot in the foot and dared to say something. “ ‘Make it worth my time, then, nigga, or shut the fuck up,’ ” His father quotes Azrael, and He shakes His head while His mother says, “He be doing too much.”
In the basement, His mother decides she wants to learn how to play Mortal Kombat. She plays against His father and wins, pulling off a fatality. “Last time I play with you,” His father says. Outside, a storm takes out the electricity. They light a few candles. His father tells a story about His’s great-grandfather and how he used to salt the thresholds of his house.
“This was back when granddad lived in Gary, Indiana, and his sister stayed with him. She had stepped out, right, and my granddad, the night before, salted the thresholds of the house. I’m talking sea salt at every doorstep, in the windowsills and shit.
“So, this woman comes by to see my grandaunt for lunch. Granddad knew of her but wasn’t friends with her, but he knew his sister got along with her well, so it was cool. He greeted her and she was like, ‘Is Beetle in?’ They used to call my grandaunt Beetle. And he tells her, ‘Naw she stepped out but you can wait inside. Hot out there. Come on in.’ So tell me why she look like she about to step in but then stop like it’s a glass wall in front of her. Kid you not! She gone say, ‘Naw, I’ll wait out here.’ He invite her in again, says, ‘Beetle be back real soon. She just went down the road,’ and the woman getting nervous, crinkling her dress in her hands. ‘Naw, just tell her I came through,’ and the chick walks off.” His father laughs, “She don’t ever visit again. My grandaunt got to go to her raggedy friend’s house from then on cause the woman wouldn’t step foot into my granddad house.” The air is spiced with fear and anticipation. His mother laughs nervously while He sits stuck in the images He’s created in His mind: a thin woman wearing a large, brimmed hat and a cream-colored dress with matching shoes and stockings, her eyes all blacked out and wide with spite when she turns her back to His great-grandfather, who smiles knowingly at what he’s done and who he’s done it to.
Selah listens to the story and recognizes Saint’s ways in the great-grandfather; not the invitation, but the salt, its effectiveness against evil and unlikable Negroes, whatever that difference might’ve been. At least with this story, she knows that conjure has made it this far into the future, well respected and intimate. For the first time she feels protected inside of Him.
But something in the air clenches shut the following day. The summer sun drops onto everybody and angers them with its relentless heat. Selah feels His anger as He fixates on what happened moments ago. Torrance showed up for football in the park and halfway through the game he picked a fight with one of the other boys and all twelve of them ended up rumbling in the hard grass. Selah thinks back to how it was so easy to rile up Torrance by calling him a “musty nigga,” when they all were musty as hell out there. But the temporary and changeable stink on some of the boys was assumed a permanent stink on Torrance, and because he knew they believed he was filthy and that his filth was an unchangeable reality, Torrance swung on dude, and He had to get involved to defend His homie from folks He thought was all homies.
Selah wants Him to stop fighting. Her heart breaks with each punch. Her fists throb with His. Someone screams, “Gun!” and they all scatter, not knowing who had the gun or if there even was one.
The two boys stop at a corner store. Torrance steals a honey bun while He distracts the cashier by buying an orange Fanta and some double-A batteries. Outside, He sees Torrance’s honey bun and asks where His at. Torrance breaks far more than half of the honey bun off and hands the little bit left to Him, who shakes His head and walks off.
Selah feels His anger rise up in her as the boys walk home in the middle of the street, Torrance flipping out again, swearing on his mama grave he was “bout to beat that nigga ass. On my mama, he fucked with the wrong one. Come see me! Bitch ass niggas, P the fuck up,” Torrance shouting at nobody nearby cause the boys back at the park are four blocks away. And He says nothing, moves faster, wanting to get away from Torrance, who is hopping up and down, his shirt pulled up over one shoulder as he punches his hand harder than he punched the dudes at the park, cappin like he hard, which only pisses Him off more. They live on a quiet set of blocks in a dangerous city. When the two realities meet, He gets nervous, wants to disappear.
“Dead it, T,” He says. “F’you was gone do something, you woulda done it back thur.”
“Drove as fuck,” Torrance said.
“Say less. Say less.” They are close to His house. He sees His father sitting on the bottom stair of the porch, drinking a glass of water. Quiet night. Torrance seems to notice the quiet and silences his rage. But His father has already heard.
“What was all the noise about?” His father asks. “I heard y’all all the way down the street.”
Annoyed, He points to Torrance and shakes His head.
“Get on in the house, then. Food ready. Torrance, call your mama when you get inside and let her know where you are. I know you ain’t told her.”
After dinner, the two boys sit in the basement. Torrance was quiet throughout dinner. Afterward, he took a shower while His mother washed the boys’ clothes. Torrance is wearing an old shirt and some shorts of His. Everything is too big, the shorts’ drawstring tied as tight as it can go.
“Aight, so why you get so mad over dude calling you musty when we all was musty as fuck?”
“We ain’t all shit. He said it to me cause he think that about me regardless,” Torrance said. “And I’m sick of niggas thinking I’m dirty. I shower just like errbody else.”
“It be your clothes, man.”
“I know. Shit.”
“Wash them hur.”
“Naw my mom would be shamed.”
“You already eat hur. She shamed about that?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well, let her sometimes be shamed about you washing clothes hur. Y’all can split being shamed.”
Torrance laughs and thanks Him. Selah wonders how often Torrance allows himself to have this soft look on his face like he does now. She likes it on him and likes how He brings this out of somebody who she thought only knew anger.
The mood shifts a bit after He asks about the gun, if Torrance had seen it himself and Torrance says no. Neither of the boys saw the gun but both ran, just like everyone else.
“It wasn’t even that serious,” He says. Torrance nods. “Folks ain’t shot around hur since last summer after . . .” but He doesn’t finish. Selah wants to know what happened last summer that has made it chilly inside Him. She holds herself, the cold coming on strong and the look on Torrance’s face like he is being drained of blood. “I didn’t mean to—”
“I didn’t take it no way. It is what it is. My brother in Heaven,” Torrance says.
“Facts. Rasheed was good people,” He says. They sit in silence until it’s time for Torrance to go. The chill inside Him gets worse.
That night, He wakes to a light glowing outside his closed eyelids. It’s red and deep. Selah notices it, too, and screams when He opens His eyes. A man draped in red light is standing over His bed. The man has a gunshot wound in his head, off-center toward the left. The chill returns to Him and Selah wonders if this is Torrance’s brother, Rasheed. The man reaches toward Him and His body seizes, turns onto its stomach, and is pressed down by the air itself. The man in red touches Him on the back of His body in several places before He is spun back onto his back. The man looks sad, shakes his head, and says, “Don’t leave Him alone.” He points now to Him, between the eyes, looking through Him and speaking to Selah, then is gone in a blink. He cries out with a sob-struck voice, “Rasheed,” but the man is gone. “I’m never leaving Torrance alone. You ain’t got to worry about that. Why you keep coming to me? Go to your brother. Why you keep coming to me!”
The chills make sense to Selah now, as this isn’t the first time Rasheed has come to pay Him a visit, which only solidifies for her that this is indeed her descendant, a seer of the dead, someone whom the dead feel obligated to communicate with for whatever reason. This instruction of “Don’t leave Him alone” feels like it was for her, not Him. She doesn’t know what to do with His body turning over on its own, the ghost touching Him, and what feels like an augury. Her descendant doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night. She sits with her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around her legs, afraid but not knowing of what.
It’s the following afternoon when Candice visits again. Selah doesn’t understand why she can’t see that He doesn’t want her company. ‘No other boys for you?’ she thinks. When Candice calls Him a punk for not taking the hint, Selah feels a new blaze light up in Him, but the front door opens and His mother steps onto the porch before He can react. Neither He nor Candice knew she was home. Her car is gone and so is His father’s. Candice stands up when she sees His mother.
“Baby, who you calling a punk?” His mother asks.
“I was just messing around. Wasn’t no thing, Mrs. Gaudry,” Candice says.
His mother laughs. “Why you call my son a punk? Cause he won’t sleep with you.”
Selah wants to see Candice’s eyes, but He will not look up from the steps. “Don’t nobody want your son,” Candice yells. “You tripping.”
“I know what I heard. Been sitting in the window since you got hur. You ain’t gotta to lie to me, Candice. Ain’t trying to shame you. Just saying I see you and you can talk to me if you need somebody to listen to you.”
“You don’t know me!”
“But I know your daddy,” His mother says. “I know him and his ways very well, Candice.”
The air stiffens. He looks up and out into the street. Selah wants Him to turn around so that His mother’s face is in view. She wants to know what shape her mouth has taken after saying those words.
Candice steps down from the bottom porch and steps backward toward the sidewalk. He glances up and catches her broken countenance. Selah has never seen that much hurt in one expression, not even when Naima felt betrayed and smashed three of her fingers. It was like looking at a sky grow overcast and forgetting there was ever a sun there to begin with. “Fuck both y’all,” Candice says. He stands up, but when His mother speaks He gets real still.
“Relax, baby. She can cuss me,” His mother says to Him, then to Candice, “I been thur, love. Witnessed a lot of shit in my life. Nothing can come out your mouth that’ll wound me. Gone sit down, son. See, I’m proud of this one right hur. This my heart. He my whole heart. I protect what I love, Candice. If you not gone protect Him with me, then you can’t come around hur,” His mother says. “God bless you and I hope you take my invitation seriously.”
Candice storms down the walkway, but when she gets to the sidewalk she stops and bends over, clutching her chest. She cries a leaning-into-it kind of cry.
His mother descends the porch steps to where Candice is and stands before her. She speaks assertively and quietly into the girl’s ear so that He and Selah can’t hear. “I love you. You understand me?” she says audibly, and Candice nods. They part ways, Candice walking down the street and His mother going back inside the house. He stares out toward the street. Selah wishes she had the language for the fullness she feels, whether it was a good full or a bad full.
At the corner store, people talking about the fight from the other day. Say one of the boys had a gun and was looking for some of the other boys who was there. No one uses names because no one really knows who all was there. Not really. He buys His orange Fanta and steps out, avoiding eye contact. More police cars around than ever. Folks had gotten used to not seeing them after Rasheed got shot and they said it was an accident. Was supposed to be a taser. Was supposed to be a regular traffic stop. Why didn’t he just get out the car? Why didn’t he cooperate? And the neighborhood, small and predominantly Black, put up blockades at every street for two weeks to keep the cops out. After that, they stopped patrolling the area. Neighbors got more invested in doing their part, nightly patrolling the streets in groups to make sure the young folks could safely get home. Chastising the dope boys with Bibles, Qurans, and photos of all the young folks they had killed: “Y’all remember Khalil? Was killed right here by some folks living right here. He was six years old. You listening to me? We need to figure something else out, cause this not us,” and sat there in groups reading the holy texts out loud, which chastened the folks looking to buy a 20-piece for a quick high. Some of the dope boys threatened the neighbors but they didn’t move from their foldable chairs. “You’d shoot your grandmother?” one of the women asked her grandson, who hadn’t recognized her before pulling his pistol out against her. “I know you would. That’s why I’m sitting here. So you can do it with your eyes open.”
Eventually, they removed the barricades and kept up the neighborhood watch. It wasn’t until the fight in the park that any mention of a gun had happened that summer. Hearing all this, He leaves the store with His soda and tries to get home as fast as possible, and Selah feels His heart drum Him along the way.
It doesn’t take long, though. A police car rushes beside Him, turning the corner adjacent to the one He walked down. Then a bloop from the police siren, an infraction made that somehow only the police knows has been made and now He must bend to a knowledge not His own. Selah hates the sound of the siren, had experienced it in nearly every future she visited, and only twice in those timelines did the officer treat her descendant with dignity. The other times: a baton to the skull, pepper spray in the face, a dog sicced on them, a knee on the neck, a hand fondling and groping, fingers prodding and entering, some racial slur, several guns pulled for a missed stop sign, face slammed onto the car hood because “you shouldn’t have sassed me,” tear gas on a peaceful protest, rubber bullet to the eye, size intimidation as the officer leans into the car and refers to himself as “a godly specimen” and meaning he could use his body in perfectly ghastly ways, a plunger shoved up the ass of a cousin while her descendant was forced to watch. And with each case, a settlement, a resignation only to be reinstated elsewhere, character assassination of the victim, eternal bullying from the police force as they urinate on one descendant’s property and shit outside the house of a neighbor, like vengeful children, a luciferous gang, like a military against the lone nation of another’s body. Selah had seen enough to know that He should stop walking, should kneel, play dead, and even then He wouldn’t ever be safe, even if He complied, He could still be harmed in some way; call it an accident, call it “what did He do to deserve it?” call it He should’ve stopped sooner and faster and laid flatter on the ground, call it Rasheed’s legacy, call it a few “bad apples,” God-fucking-damn it, the inconvenience of somehow getting the bad one every fucking time, the inconvenience of losing your life, the lack of luxury to test each apple for the gun-toting worm.
Selah needed Him to stop moving, she shouted it in His head but He didn’t stop.
Now, hearing the bloop of the police siren again, Selah’s heart drops inside of Him whose heart drops, though He keeps going. The officer bloops his siren again and the boy moves to the sidewalk. But the officer, instead of driving on, follows Him as he walks on the sidewalk and tells Him to stop walking. “You hear the siren,” the officer says and still He doesn’t stop, even though this cop is Black and should be okay, right, but naw because He thinks the Black ones have something to prove and distrusts them more so He keeps going, remembering a year ago when Frosty, the only white boy on the block, complied and they shot him in the leg. A month after that, a five-year-old girl was shot dead by a SWAT team while she slept on the couch. The suspect in question lived with his girlfriend in the apartment two doors down the hall. Every moment is wrapped in a grave, so why not keep moving, get home, get to His mother and father, get to His porch where He, in life or death, can be fully known?
When the officer jumps out the car, Selah’s dropped heart climbs up her throat. She notices His hands hurt. He has squeezed them into fists. He sees His house across the street.
“Get on the ground!”
But He can’t stop. The narrative is inconsistent. He believes He will be killed regardless of what He does, and He wants to be killed where He is loved.
He crosses the street. His hands are in the air, but He doesn’t lay in the street. He stumbles and the Fanta flies from His shallow shorts pocket. When it hits the ground, it makes a popping sound, and Selah feels a pull on her body as the orbs summon her back to the garden, and before a single bullet leaves the mouth of a gun, she is back in the orb garden with a hand on her shoulder. She turns, panicked, and sees an older woman wearing an old nurse’s uniform. The woman watches her sternly and squeezes her shoulder hard, wanting it to hurt to snap the girl back to reality, the girl who now looks as she did back in Ours.
“You do not belong there, young Selah,” and Selah knows immediately who this woman is; it is herself, older, from her future, wrinkled about the face, hair in immaculate curls, her eyes wild and spectral in their sockets. “You cannot be in that boy as he dies.”
“He is mine. He is my bloodline,” Selah says.
“He is not yours directly.”
“His people my people.”
“Selah.” Future Selah kneels to meet her younger self eye to eye, but Selah is hysterical, fighting to get out of the woman’s grip. The woman digs in with her nails. She doesn’t let her go.
“You’re hurting me.”
“What you think bullets feel like?”
“I can save Him. I can keep Him alive till help comes.”
“You will die in Him and kill me, Selah. And I will live the future you made for me.”
“Don’t you care about his life?”
“None of these people whose futures you stepped in are from you, Selah. This Naima’s line. You don’t have a line. You don’t have children, Selah. Even if you did, you’d kill them all off by dying in this boy who ain’t yours. I am yours. You needed help. You came looking for me and I helped you mend those folks, fix those bones, cut the blood loose. I helped you do that, Selah. You helped you do that. Don’t get rid of yourself in the future.”
Selah stops fussing and stills herself. “Naima’s line . . .” She lowers her head. Future Selah pulls young Selah’s face up to meet her own.
“This is His fate. If He dies with you in Him, Selah, you will not be able to come back. I cannot get back to you again. Look.” Future Selah shows her arm to Selah. It is aged into near mummification. “I can’t be in the future beyond my time. In His timeline, I would already have been dead by almost one hundred years. In your timeline, if Frances hadn’t sent me back, you would’ve died the death I died but in your own time. We can only coexist here, Selah. But I know how to get you back to your time. Let’s get you home.”
Selah nods. She nods and nods. “This is Naima’s child, not mine.” She smiles. Future Selah releases the girl’s shoulder and stands. She reaches for her anterior self, but Selah stands on her own. “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand what I was doing. I do now.” And with that she reaches back into the orb and is sucked into the future. “My home is with Him. I will turn His now into a future.”
Future Selah screams into the orb, decays on the other side. Not even a speck of dust is left.
Back in the future, the Fanta bottle rolls, and spills. The sound of orange carbonation fizzing in the street is that of meat sizzling on a grill. A voice calls out to Him and Selah doesn’t know that it’s His mother because she has never heard her emote in this way, a strange weather spilling from her throat that can’t settle into its thunder, into its downpour that is His name in sudden soprano falling, falling, falling.
Selah feels every bit of pain He feels as she holds herself to shake it off. But it won’t fall off. The pain clings like someone in love. She reminds herself that love is the reason why she returned and places her hand on the ground of His mind and pushes life into Him.
She smells the saltiness of ocean water but doesn’t know that’s what she smells. It’s delightful and briefly makes her homesick. The light from her hands brightens, then disappears right along with the smell of the sea. As quickly as the light diminishes, the pain is gone. He opens His eyes, and the room of His mind lights up with daylight, the street black and hard against His face and covered with Jordans and flip-flops with socked feet in them, an elder’s Payless slip-ons sliding into view, all of them appearing sideways in His floored glance so that they look like they are standing on a wall.
Selah isn’t sure what has happened, doesn’t know why He is suddenly able to roll onto His stomach and push Himself to kneeling. Then He stands, the world going right side up again, His wounds closed. The bullets lying warm on the ground. The pain gone. The pain gone. The pain gone. The pain gone. The pain gone. The pain gone. For every bullet that had entered Him, the pain is gone. Cast-iron skillet burning in the oven. A pot of rice boils over on the stove. Televisions go unwatched. The dope boys unhide their hands.
Selah sits inside Him and touches herself. She feels her face, clenches her teeth, and laughs from the gut. When He sees His mother’s baffled look as she considers His body from behind police tape, as she breaks through the tape and pushes away the officers who try to keep her from the raised-from-the-dead—when He sees her rush to Him and feels her touch His lips as though to pull from His mouth the secret of His return, He unclenches His fists. Then His mother asks, “Baby? Baby how? Is this you?”
He nods when Selah nods, smiles when she does, cries as she cries. A car pulls up. His father runs from it, leaving the car door open, and for the first time, Selah hears His name. Born from the mouth of his father. “Dontrell-Elizah!” A memory floats by Selah. She grabs it and learns that Dontrell is His father’s name and Elizah his mother’s name. The two in union created him, and now Selah has joined. She presses her hands against the windows of His eyes, basking in His name that is now a part of her.