Chapter 93

Emma had given the last bit of the money she and Sam saved from the sale of the Harlem brownstone to an expensive attorney who hadn’t been able to get the charges against Harlan dropped but had managed to wrangle his sentence down from ten years to five.

Harlan was an exemplary prisoner, so after serving three years and four months, he was paroled on good behavior. On a wet, blustery morning in November of 1970, he walked out of the Essex County Penitentiary and into his mother’s open arms. She hugged him so tight it hurt.

“This the last time white folks gonna take you from me,” she murmured into his neck.

In the twenty-year-old Chevrolet Fleetmaster, Emma took the backseat and Harlan sat up front, next to his father. The butter-colored car looked out of place amongst the snazzy Cadillacs and Lincolns traveling the highways.

Harlan pointed at the automobiles that roared past them. “Maybe you should get a new car.”

“For what? Ain’t a thing wrong with the one I have.”

Harlan didn’t know how his father did it, but he’d kept the Fleetmaster running as smooth as the day it rolled off the assembly line.

The family, happy to be together again, chattered joyfully above the radio, their voices running in hot competition with Diana Ross. “Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough . . .”

“We gonna stop to get something to eat?” Harlan asked, rolling down the window to inhale the damp November air. “I’ve spent three years and four months dreaming about sinking my teeth into a juicy cheeseburger.”

Emma clutched her coat collar and backed away from the cold air. “Cheeseburger? Boy, I got a mess of food back at the house.”

“Your mama been cooking for three days,” Sam said.

“That’s a lie,” Emma laughed. “I only been cooking for two days.”

As they sped along, Sam shivered and said, “Harlan, close that damn window. It ain’t summertime.”

“Aw, Sam, if the boy wants some air, let him have it.” Emma coiled her scarf around her head.

“Okay, okay, just one more gulp.” Harlan pushed his entire head out the window. Yes, he thought to himself, freedom not only smells sweet, it tastes sweet too.

“Boy,” Emma cried, slapping him on the shoulder, “get your big head back in this window before it’s knocked clean off your shoulders!”

Sam turned to him. “You look like a dog with your head hanging out the window like that. Like an old mangy retriever!”

They were all laughing when Sam shot through the stop sign right into the path of a speeding fire truck, and was killed instantly.

Emma’s spine, pelvis, and legs were mangled unrecognizable.

Harlan was ejected through the window like an arrow.

* * *

Miraculously, Harlan only suffered a broken arm and skin lacerations, so he was at Emma’s side when, two days after the accident, she let go of this life and slipped into the next.

It took three male nurses to wrench Harlan’s hand from hers.

During their long and short careers, the hospital staff had bore witness to many things, but none of them could ever remember hearing a man scream the way Harlan did after his mother died. The gut-wrenching howl he released over Emma’s quiet body would haunt them for years.