From the Valley

by Margaret Saunders 

Your Father

In the center of your parent’s bedroom dresser, next to collected ceramic knickknacks and jewelry boxes of saved movie tickets, there was a picture of your father as a shadow.

It was all an effect—an underexposed, black and white yearbook photo set against a dark stage curtain. Your father, with his black skin and his black suit, faded seamlessly into the background of darkness. Your mother had always appreciated the artistry of the photo but by the time you were a teenager, she decided she would rather have the memory in sharper focus. Extensive restoration revealed your father as he was at age 16: lanky and long, with a face he hadn’t yet grown into and clumsily balled up hands that resembled yams. He was a high school sophomore about to compete in his first national debate. He had the type of smile that stretched off his face; he had the type of idealism that in ten years time he would never admit to having ever possessed.

This was what you knew from the photo, and from your father’s salutatorian speech, you knew that he used to have the same tilting southern accents that his sisters had. And from these sisters, you knew that he was once a Black Panther, that he marched on Washington, that the walls of his Harvard dorm were covered in Malcolm X posters that compelled his roommate—he of the Greenwich, Connecticut legacy-stock—to request a room change.

And from your mother you knew that he and his cousins once staged a sit-in at an ice cream shoppe in their hometown of Glendale, Ohio. But from him, you didn’t know much. If you wanted to learn about history, he said, fine, watch Roots. Go to a museum. Here’s a biography of Marcus Garvey. If you wanted to know about him, well, you knew him then. He was middle-aged, solid, handsome. He had the indecipherable accent of a primetime anchorman. He had a short salt and pepper beard and a shaved head and everyday he wore a suit and a baseball hat to the Harlem Parole Reentry Court, where he worked as a judge. He was usually funny. He was very loving. And, most markedly, he was always only a few paces ahead of some familiar sorrow.

Early on, this rule was clear: It was not that your father would not talk about the past. Rather, he would skip over the things that never made a difference anyway.

Emmett

From the very first moment you became aware of him, he would visit you in your sleep. A boy, maybe, with no face, who cried with no mouth, who stood but was limp. Your mother said, She’s too young.

Your father said, I had to learn it young too.

He was a boy far from home, the color of a Tar Baby, fourteen and fourteen and fourteen, and never older. He was beaten with a pistol, shot through the right eye and tied to a fan because the men who killed him did not want his body to float to the top of the Tallahassee. You were eight when you saw him preserved in post-mortem photograph, swollen beyond recognition, face engorged with dusty river water. He was a boy a lot like other boys you know, just a regular boy, maybe with a quick smile and bright eyes and shoulders just beginning to broaden. But your Aunts called him a lesson and your male cousins learned him from a young age.

The Boy

This was what you thought love meant. You were sixteen and stupid and eager. His name was Luis, and he was an exchange student from Argentina, black hair and beauty marks with moss eyes, a soothing combination. After an overly long tussle with puberty that left you pimply and hairy and frizzy for four years, you were finally emerging from your cocoon, maybe not yet beautiful. But something on the cusp of it. You both played the trumpet in band class and would always sit next to each other, until one day, your teacher moved you saying, I can’t have you two distracting each other like this. It hadn’t even occurred to either of you that you were engaging in anything tangible. He asked you to go for ice cream one day after school and you two sat in Central Park until you got kicked out at night. Unaccustomed to lying to your parents, you explained that you were home late because you’d been at the park with a boy. Your mother smiled. All your father said was, Mmf.

Sean Bell

He was from your neighborhood, twenty-three, engaged, a father. You know how the story goes.

You were twelve in 2006, and that was the year that you bought your first bra and watched your hips fan out like the Delta. That was the year that the block got hot in the summertime, that there was a heatwave like no other in Jamaica, Queens. Someone busted up the fire hydrant in front of your apartment building and you all got soaked real good. The bus never came on time and the candy bars melted in their wrapping. 2006. That was the year on everyone’s tongue, fanning themselves in church, loitering on subway platforms, drinking Arizonas in front of the bodega. With bowed heads, they’d say, It’s 2006 and the cops still can’t tell the difference between a gun and a wallet.

You know how the story goes. The court ruled that fifty bullet holes in an unarmed black body are accidents.

And the Preacher Said

“The justice system is a burst artery in the heart of New York City, in the heart of our country.” From your TV set at night, from your bedroom window, in your own head, you watched the black boys of America bleeding out into the streets.

The Big Night

It happened very fast. Everyone’s gossiping urged it along, because, after all, they had seen you both, exchanging looks in orchestra from your new distant seating positions, or maybe they spotted him carrying your books in the hallway, or maybe heard you teaching him English slang, dirty talk, curses in between giggles. You heard through the grapevine that people were saying you’d lost your virginity to him up on the catwalk of the big auditorium where you performed jazz shows for the school. It was, in reality, much more innocent than that. You two hadn’t even kissed yet. At the same time, you felt all the passions that the gossips had surmised you did. When Luis asked you to hang out on the weekend, making it the first time you two didn’t just meet up after school, you called half your friends, sweated through your turtleneck, and made the family cat scratch at you when you tried to hug him. It was a Saturday night and you wore your new pale ballet flats that ended up smudged with city smut by the end of the evening, though, at that point, you didn’t notice. You made the hour and half trip to the Upper East and waited for Luis in front of the apartment where he stayed with his wealthy aunt and uncle, who had moved to the States five years prior. It was a sweet night, puffed up clouds and the sky all deliciously pink and you, with unexplainable chattering teeth even though it was a warm winter, a frostless one, even though you were almost a woman and didn’t know why boys should scare you so much anymore. There was dinner, overpriced Italian, little shells in a light and tasteless pesto, which Luis used his uncle’s money to pay for. There was ice cream and coffee, and you two played at being adults in your pea coats and stiff scarves. Afterwards, you walked to the East River and the chill from the water was a good excuse to wrap yourselves into each other. Did you look up or did he tilt your head? Was the kiss fumbling and awkward the way they said first kisses were or romantic, the way fairy tales had informed you a kiss should always be? Later on, you didn’t remember the kiss itself anyway.

What you did remember that night, what you always remembered was that you were mixed. Luis said that in his country they might call you milk and coffee. When people met you, when they learn your background, they would nod and say, Oh, you must take after your mother.

These interactions left a bad aftertaste, the bitterness of them like old strange fruit. Because at the end of the day, it was just another way for people to say, But you aren’t really black or But you aren’t like other black girls or But you don’t look it, so you can’t be it.

People said these things like they were compliments. Like you were supposed to thank them.

A moment after your very first kiss, Luis ran a hand through your hair, long and untextured, and twisted his finger around the bottom of a lock, looking at it in wonderment. Good thing, he said, already smiling at the clever comment he was about to make, that you don’t have Nigger Naps.

The Cultural Exchange

Four years after Luis, you were twenty and out to dinner in Buenos Aires, where you were studying abroad. Accompanying you was a boy named Agustin, a dead-ringer for Luis, his long lost amber-eyed twin perhaps. Agustin was your intercambio, an Argentinian student that the university had set you up with so that you could practice languages with each other. Your hangouts with Agustin went like this: 15 minutes of Spanish speak ing, 45 minutes of English. Agustin controlled the dialogue and he liked to tell you long, roaming stories in his melodic English. The dinnertime story for the night detailed his time studying abroad in Idaho, of all places. He talked about his spring break, a trip to California with his friends.

We wanted to get drugs, he explained, so we drove down the street looking for a Nigger.

When he saw your face, he nodded his head back and forth reconsidering, and tapped his fingers gently on your upturned palm. You know what I mean, he said, there is a difference between a Black person and a Nigger.

No, I don’t know what you mean, you told him pointedly.

He looked at you with his prematurely wrinkled forehead and his little pink mouth hanging opened slightly. He appeared confused. Because, after all, wasn’t this something an American taught him? Wasn’t this something that all Americans knew?

And the Preacher Said

“The Real America, brothers and sisters, is land of peaks and valleys. And our people have been to the very pits of those valleys and some of us have struggled to reach those mountainous peaks. But know, in the end, that we all have born the scars for it.”

The Scars

A 45-minute F train ride back to Queens and 30 more minutes on the bus. You only wanted to see your father, to tell him that now you understood what the world was like, what it would always be like, but he wasn’t home. He was in Harlem. They were having a gala for Black judges, your mother explained, and then smiling, asked, How was your date? You grumbled some inaudible response. Your mother maybe remarked about how fickle young love was. You looked at her, a small rosebud mouth and soft skin, almost paper pale after a sunless winter. She couldn’t understand the way your father could. You held your tongue and waited. Long after she went to bed, you were up with the TV on for background noise. You were waiting for your father; somehow the idea of going to bed without seeing him seemed unbearable. You flipped the channel to some entertainment news show so that your mind could mush. Donald Trump was saying that Obama was born in Kenya. You muted the TV and watched silent images, snapshots of an angry Trump while big bold quotes popped up: “Where is his birth certificate?” Where is your toupee’s birth certificate, you wanted to ask Trump. Just then, you heard the door. You and the dog both ran for it with the same urgency, but you stopped short when you saw your father. It was not so much the look in his face, his eyes faraway somewhere else and his mouth folded in resignation, but rather the fact that he didn’t even seem to notice you.

Daddy, you called out to him and he came halfway out of the trance. It’s so late, Sweet Cake, was all he said. Go on to bed.

* * *

The next day, he slept impossibly late, past 1, past 2, past 3, but your mother would not wake him. Over lunch meat sandwiches, she whisperingly told you what happened: He and his friend Dan were leaving the Gala, getting into Dan’s Mercedes, when two police officers stopped them to ask,

Where are you boys going and what do you? Boys, you repeated.

Your mother advised you not to bring it up to him. 

The Mike Brown Grand Jury Decision

Where were you that day?

Your father was at home watching a football game because he said at least that outcome would be unpredictable.

That same week, in Brooklyn, the police shot an unarmed Black man in the staircase of the Pink Houses and no one cared.

That same week, the police shot a Black 12 year old with a BB gun and educated college friends of yours will defend this.

People went to sociology classes and talked about white privilege and studied people like you and your neighbors in textbooks and threw around terms like culture of poverty and you wanted to get up and rip off your skin and say, Here. Do you want to see it? Do you really want to know?

You could parcel out your flesh and bones and tissue in the name of social science. You could watch them offer up their austere, academic analyses without seeing the human heart of the matter.

You saw yourself become a query. Your father, a statistic. Your life, a thesis paper abstract: I want to explore the reasons why the men I love, the men whose toes I danced on top of, the men who put wet clothes on my head when I was sick, the men who played stick ball with me and sang me to sleep, pose an absolute and undeniable threat to America.

Maybe George Zimmerman sold a piece of artwork he made that week, an American flag with bullet holes where stars should be.

Maybe Darryl Mounger woke up with the words “Rodney King was in control of the situation,” plastered across his forehead in brutal red ink.

Maybe after Darren Wilson resigned from the police force, he took his donation money and moved to a tropical locale and fucked local Black women just to prove, hey, no hard feelings.

Maybe for all your righteous anger and online social activism, you were a phony. It was a good friend’s birthday so you went out even though you didn’t feel up for it, because it seemed, for whatever reason, silly, to say, I want to stay in because I’m really upset about what happened.

So protesters marched eastward down Houston and you went westward towards some shiny club in Meatpacking, where glossy haired girls in heels and backless dresses sang out, Nigga I ain’t worried about nothin’ in a chorus of off-key falsetto. In another time, it might have broken your heart, but instead you leaned coolly against the club’s exposed brick wall, sipping a vodka soda, ghostly in the harsh white strobe lights. 

At the Peak

A day after your failed date with Luis and your father’s Stop and Frisk, the two of you sat silently in front of the TV. You both considered your Hungry Man frozen dinners and the possibility of light-hearted conversation with each other despite everything that was unspoken. There was a Sci-fi movie on, something about mutant spiders, but only two people were still alive, the unemotional male lead and his useless babe sidekick, so you knew the movie was almost over. Maybe they blew up the spiders in a mine, or drowned them with some sort of man-made tidal wave. Who cared? Your father changed the channel.

Now CNN was on and Obama was speaking about something or other, three years into his first presidency and gray from his suit to his skin. Your father looked at the President and smiled, but not in a happy way.

Did I ever tell you, he asked, about the sit in we did when I was about your age? You said no, and pretended you didn’t already know the story from your Aunts.

It was me, Leland, and Tyler. We went down to Andy’s Ice Cream Shoppe, across the tracks. You know the place. It’s still there. I bet you’ve gone with Claudia and Malik and them, he said. Anyway, they only seated white customers at the counter. Blacks had to take their food to go. So one day the three of us just sat there. They ignored us for a while and then after a few hours, they sent this old Tom motherfucker they had to wipe the tables come by and ask why we wanted to go and start up trouble.

Your father paused for a while, so you prompted him to go on, asking, What did you say?

I said that we weren’t trying to start anything. That we just wanted to sit down and eat like human beings, your father began, but then, stopped again, looking weary from the effort of telling the story. You realized that your aunts never told you how it ended.

And what happened, you asked your father.

Nothing, he said. We sat there all day and they didn’t serve us. At night, they closed up and we went home.

You both continued to watch the rest of the President’s speech in silence, not really listening but not interrupting either until the end, when your father laughed out loud in a dry way, and said, almost to himself,

No matter what you become in this world, you’ll always be a Nigger to them.

God Bless the United States of America, Obama said, and your father changed the channel.