just go on home with Nona.’
‘Shut up about Nona.’
‘You know I’m right.’ And as soon as he said those few words, Omar felt Cooper crack.
He lowered the gun. ‘Get lost,’ he muttered. Omar breathed deeply. Looked around him but saw nothing but a misty golden haze, anonymous, identical faces. He reached for his glass of cognac.
‘Beat it, I said,’ Cooper whispered.
Omar forgot about the glass and left the Circle Ballroom.
Alone in his car. There was pressure on his temples, like a belt tightening around his head. The silence was a whispering, silvery rustle. The pumping of his heart. The heat of his blood. He closed his eyes. Black. No thoughts. Only a vague sensation of emptiness. A void so silent and dark that he was almost weightless. He couldn’t be sure if this was all real. He pushed open the door and got out. Went around to the trunk, opened it, and took out his .38. Got back in the car. His gun on his lap, hidden under the thin silk of his shirt. No music. He waited. He waited and kept his eyes fixed on the brightly lit door to the Circle Ballroom. Time ceased to exist. Just the wait. A drab, empty wait.
Nona came out first. The clatter of her high heels on the sidewalk. Like rushing water in a river. She let her purse dangle playfully from her hand. She wasn’t wearing a sweater or jacket over her bare arms. Omar imagined he could see her goose bumps, tiny black bulges on her skin. Then Cooper came out. Didn’t he realize how gaudy and ugly that glossy suit of his was? Omar rolled down the window. Pulled out his gun without losing sight of Cooper. Nona was already at their car. She called out something, he couldn’t hear what. Omar saw Cooper’s movements. Squinted, stretched out his arm, and aimed. The shimmering of the white imitation silk. The coolness of steel in his hand. The play of the trigger under his finger. Don’t move. Stop. Don’t move. He sucked in the sharp night air and—bam! He recoiled. The dull metal crack hummed in his ears. Cooper lay on the sidewalk in the merciless, bleak neon light that spilled out of the bar. He heard shouting. He had nothing to do with it. It wasn’t him. Nobody saw him. Nona hurried on her high heels over to her wounded boyfriend. Omar was afraid she would stumble. He rolled up the window, put the gun in the glove compartment, started the engine, and drove down Euclid Ave.
-
‘A.M.’ (1990)
He was a love Supreme
a love Supreme
He was a love Supreme
-
‘Epic’ (2001)
That possible criminal element
awakens you
to the terror
and loneliness
of running into the silent pain
of someone else
looking to you
for answers.
-
FLINT, MICHIGAN, SEPTEMBER 2001
Sandra Saint-Claire
‘Sometimes Jerome works in my basement. And he’s down there, talking and saying his poetry. I hear how his voice changes, low to high, fast, slow. Or just mumbling. I’ve got a ping-pong table down there, and that’s where he used to write. Trying stuff out. I like it when he does that. I like lot of his poetry.
I remember him making ice cream for us from snow in the wintertime. He’d pack the snow down hard and pour fruit syrup over it. Other times he’d bring us crackers and pop in the middle of the night. He was nine. As children we didn’t get along. He was so bossy. When we were teenagers, whenever a guy came to the house for my sisters or me, he’d first have to deal with my brother Jerome. He would interrogate them like he was our father. We lived on West Chestnut. But at a certain point my mother couldn’t take living with my father anymore and so we moved in with her mother.
So then we lived in a mixed neighborhood for the first time, with Italians and blacks. And anyway, back then white people didn’t come into our neighborhoods. Our businesses were black-owned. There weren’t even any white kids at school. And believe it or not, it was much better that way. There was more cohesiveness, no confusion. Everybody seemed to get along. My father used to talk about white people. “Don’t trust them,” he’d say. He grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and down there you didn’t look white people in the eye when you talked to them. My father had some racist ideas, but his ideas gave me self-confidence. I’m very outspoken. Whatever I have to say, I say it. As a matter of fact, some of the kids I went to school with thought I would become a politician rather than a nurse.
I can’t remember what started the riots in Akron. I didn’t get involved. There was a curfew. We had to stay inside. There were tanks parked on our street. Jerome, he went over to them, gave the military police some lip. My mother called for him to come inside. “Leave those guys alone. They’re just doing their job.”
You know what did bother me, though? When Martin Luther King got assassinated.
Jerome says this is a blessed house. I think he likes being around me and my kids. The neighborhood is really decayed, but the people are okay. I always tell him he should buy a house here. Invest. At his age. That green house across the street was sold for five thousand dollars. But I don’t know what he’ll do. I won’t be here forever. I’ve outgrown Flint. I’m thinking about getting back together with my ex-husband, my son Rachet’s father. When you get older it’s no good being alone. Jerome says he might stay here in the house if I go. He’s changed a lot. He takes things more seriously. Even though it does get on my nerves when he spends days in his room just sleeping and watching TV. I think he could do more for himself. But he says he needs it. Sometimes he’ll be sitting out here on the porch and suddenly he’ll just start saying stuff. I’m pretty sure he just comes up with it on the spot. It’s not like he sits down and thinks real hard. It just comes. My daughter gave him a typewriter and he types out his poems later on that.’
◆
You hear that? That deep, dark quiet behind the sounds? That’s the difference with New York, Detroit. None of that constant background noise, that drone. Every sound here is individual. The rustling of the leaves on the trees. Killer Joe’s dogs barking when his friend feeds them. That guy goes around twice a day, just for the dogs. Killer Joe’s too old to take care of them. He’s in his seventies, but always well-dressed. I’ll bet he was a handsome guy when he was young.
I was sitting out here last night. It was already dark. I dozed off a little. All of a sudden I hear a man singing at the top of his lungs. I look up. An attractive, strong voice, as a matter of fact. I see lights on in the house across the street, the yellow one there. The front door’s open and all I see is the silhouette of somebody dancing and jumping. The flickering light is from the television. He’s singing along with some rather old song. Must have been drinking. A little later he comes outside. Sees me sitting here, walks over. Tom’s his name. Launches into a long story, that he used to live here. Moved back from Arkansas. A musician. He plays in a blues band, he says. And he works in construction now and again to make ends meet. He’s planning to fix up that house all by himself.
There’s so much talent here.
Before eleven, twelve o’clock in the morning
