On Not Dying In Germany

Marguerite 

“I am determined not to die here. You can laugh if you want to. Go ahead. I guess, I deserve it. I’ve been a pushover. Been so meek all of my life. Obedient. Never wanted to rock the boat. So it’s gonna, it’s gonna hit em over the head like a ton of bricks. And I won’t be there to clean it all up. To lick their wounds. I won’t even hear their cries or hear them suckin in they teeth. I’m not even gonna tell them. I’m just gonna do it! I’m gonna leave. You know they’ll try to stop me, and I just might let em. No fool like an old fool and you know what  that means. Don’t even give em a chance. Don’t do anything to give them the upper hand. I… I always did that. Even with you. Oh you can sit over there pouting and looking all, well… forlorn if you like. ‘The horn. The horn who’s sound is forlorn.’ Remember that in Clint’s music class? Yeah… but you ran me too sometimes. Yes you did. You did. Heck, you should be able to admit it now because all that was a longtime ago. Reggie, it was a lifetime ago. 

I bought a ticket so I can go and stay at Ni Nita’s. We ain’t gon do nothin but make a mess, but it’ll be fun! She doesn’t care anymore. Everybody that cared is dead. All of them. I… I went to almost all of their funerals. Mama. Big Daddy, Cleodora, Thornton, Uncle Dale. All of them dead and gone and only Big Daddy on the altar with Granny Gran Gran, Aunt Anita, and Great Great. Great Great always liked you. Everybody liked you. You knew that though. I’m gonna miss Miss Pia. Me and Miss Pia. She pushes me too. She don’t know neither. We always meet at her apartment. Everything’s there. Always there. Her kids, they know. She said they have to know. She said after her husband died, so did her secrets. All the chains and everything else she carried, she just let em drop on the floor. She said she don’t have to do it no more. What’s the point in letting the dead rule us with laws they don’t even remember writing? I know I could tell the boys. Eventually. Heck, I’m leaving! I can do what I want. If Pia would sleep over just twice a month it would be enough, it would be for sure that Rodney would catch us. He just, now you know I told that boy to call before he just show up. The emergency key is for emergencies only! He don’t listen. None of them do! Even before you died they act like I was the dumbest thing they ever saw, except maybe Smitty. Smitty gone be the only to miss me. Ima miss him too. Ima miss em all. Even if they hate me. They wish it was me instead of you. I don’t… I don’t know if I blame them. I certainly don’t feel sorry for myself. They respected you. They needed you. Except maybe… Smitty. You were just too hard on him. And hard for the wrong reasons Reggie. You know it, and I know it.

It wasn’t gonna leave him Reggie. You knew that too. Where the f… well I ain’t gonna finish that sentence, but there was just too much of it. Where was it supposed to go? Where Reginald? That… that was the only time I was mad at you and I mean really mad at you! That, and you just not wrapping that shit up. We knew that people were dying. Shit! I said shit! You know I hate cussin. He didn’t have to be like us… because he had us. Not like us. Not like yo mama. To this day it’s funny to me how the mamas who always know, they be the ones to get so, so… like they want to beat it out of you. Beat you till you Black and Blue. More violent than some of the men sometimes, although comparison don’t make sense cos the violence of your sex is something else. It’s not our violence but they play on each other sometimes. They feed each other. I worry about him even though he take medication for it. Suppose it run out one day, or he can’t afford it, or they decide to get rid of it, of them one day. All of them. And then you can’t get no more? Then what he gon do? You got it, and he got it… and I think he ran toward it cos he was runnin for something, for anything that felt like affection, no matter what it cost. Don’t worry. I blame me too. As much as I blame you Reginald. And yes even there, even where you at, you know you got to shoulder some of the blame. What woulda happened if we had had the courage? If we… if we were brave? That’s a stupid question. A foolish thing to muse upon. It was a different time. Today it’s a different world. Tomorrow I… 

Sometimes I think about her. I think about her a lot. I see her at Granny Gran Gran’s screen door with her straw hat, I think it belonged to her daddy, and that white dress she wore that hugged her in all the right places. She always wore her hair back then in two long braids, eyes big as saucers. She never smiled. Not much. I can’t remember her smiling. But I remember the first time we, we did what we did. She musta just had watermelon tea. I could smell it. I could taste it. She’s still alive. I saw her in a picture. If I wrote to her now, I wouldn’t know what to say. She got grandchildren too. At least her grandchildren look like her. At least she got that. 

Why they all only date them? Why? I don’t know if it’s cos we raised them here? Would they have found them, sought them out back home? I knew, I guess I knew that one of them was gonna marry white. Well Smitty not married and probably ain’t never gon marry, but he bring over a different buckruh, I swear, every time. Every time Reginald. We didn’t raise them to hate themselves. Clint wanted a family photo for that loft he bought where he can’t house the three different kids he got from the three different Saskias he fooled around with. What is it about King men and condoms? Why don’t y’all use em? Well I showed up for the portrait. It was a big ole mess. Clint’s eldests fight like cats and dogs and look more like twins, than they got different mamas. The baby girl look like she white. She got just a lil somethin in her color that make you question, and it’s in having to ask yourself, that you know...but buckruhs ain’t got a clue. Clint say he have problems pickin her up from this and that. What did he think was gonna happen? Honestly!

Rodney and his wife got the three kids. Now I will say this, those boys run him. They run him and Julia. She don’t care for me. I’m a pushover for my boys, but I’m not droppin my jacket on a puddle for her to walk on or over. No sir-ee-Bob! She called herself gettin mad cos she, get this, when we were on a vacation together, why I let them convince me to go anywhere with them, why, I do not know. And why I thought I was gonna relax… but anyway, she wanted me to give up the room that I booked cause her parents didn’t book a room for themselves. She said that I could sleep on a roll away with the boys! ‘And wouldn’t that be fun’? I don’t see them as much as her parents see them, you know, a little jab in the ribs. But I dodged it. I told her if the kids was better behaved I could look after them more than I do. I wanted to tell her to shove it, but I gave her a Miss Sophia ‘Hell Naw’. She too used to Rodney running around like Chicken George, bendin over backwards for her. I do feel sorry for him sometimes. I know it’s his choice, but when she say jump he land on Mount Everest. But when I told her naw… well you shoulda seen her face. Knowing you, death ain’t gon stop you from shows like this. I can still see you lookin out the window, watchin other people livin their lives. Knowin all they business. You was there. I know you was. Starin through the window. Just like you used to. 

When I was being pushed here and there around the boys and the grandkids, and everybody else, I kept thinking about the picture we was about to take. How many years would it hang in Clint’s loft or at Rodney’s and Broomhilda’s? They kids gonna marry white too. The boys and the girls. Especially Rodney’s, I can tell. Sometimes he talk about Black  women like he think I’m not even in the room. Truth is, and it hurts, it’s sad to say it out loud, but the truth is he know I’m there. He don’t care. He got so much ugly to say about Black women. I think he mad cause the only Black woman he loved, and I think she was real fond of him too, well he did what y’all Kings be doin… The day she found out, I watched from the window. And no I wasn’t bein like you! I heard em screamin all the way up here. She hit him right up side the head and was never to be seen again. At least, we didn’t see her again. After that he dated the same little white girl a hundred times over: plain, nothin special about her. I know he like blondes but most of these girls, even the color blonde they had was stale. The kinda girls no white man wanted, the kind who were princesses to Black men, and later queens. 

I saw them. Our offspring. They gon be white. All roads lead to that. No trace of us. Well then I started thinking what happens to this family portrait? One, two generations from now where it gon be? And where are we in them and the way they see the world? Do we have offspring who hide us in some dank, mouldy basement? Is the me in the photograph to become something, something to be forgotten? Or… do we have the people who are just a little bit too proud, cos that could also be a thing. They might carry themselves like they don’t even have a drop of Black blood, but there I’ll be on the fireplace with the boys. They’ll mention us to say they got it too! They understand, and how dare you say that to me! My mother’s father’s mother was Black and I have the picture to prove it. And I’ll be that proof. The image of me all the way in the back wearing the colors I like, even the ones you told me I was too dark for, on that day we took a picture to show that we are family. Yes, I wore pastels. Even though you told me bold colors were best for me, except on the lips. They’ll be giving me the picture later on but Ima leave it behind, here where it belongs. That’s not how I want to remember us. That’s not how I want to think of myself being remembered, or forgotten. How can you hate yourself so much that you hope that in two generations you’ll be completely washed out? I guess I can’t say anything about it because I have, I too have done terrible things to erase a part of myself that I was tricked into thinking disgusted me. They do as I did, with Smitty being the bravest one out of all of us. With some white boy of the week always following our goober around, at least Smitty does Smitty. He sure does like em dumb, but he’s always gone after what he likes. There’s something honest about that, even if it’s not always admirable. 

Well, they’ll be here in a minute. I better wash up quickly. You comin or are you just gon sit there looking blank and put upon? You sure are quiet today. I know you don’t approve Reggie. But you don’t have a say in the matter. You already left them. You left me too. Gone before your time. We were always gonna keep up the charade. Dominos on Friday nights. Vacations in warm countries where could lie around on the beach. Leaving separately on the way to other people’s houses. Sometimes meeting over fried eggs, hashbrowns and bacon, if we could still eat all that, and I don’t anymore, but that was the plan. Gone too soon Mr. King. Gone too soon. But the kids! They grown. It’s okay for me to leave too. We came here, they learned the language and they became like them. As much as they complained about not knowing who they were, not fittin in, I watched them change. I felt them, they were different. And then after you died they didn’t want to speak to me in English. God, I hate this language. Living here made me also hate English, even if nothing could make me hate the language of Toni Morrison. I know what it is now having lived here and swallowed another tongue. English isn’t mine either. Home isn’t home. It’s just a place that makes sense to die in. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. I’ll make my way back. It’s home or bust! There it is! I made you smile old friend. Old husband who made me a young widow, and old friend who made a covenant with me. We covered each other’s tracks. We did. Sort of. People kept talking, but after the second year, and the seventh, what could they say? We would have stuck it out to the end, the end we planned on. You took me far away from them and from her and the disappointment, the disapproval. That thing, those things that I… I’m learning to let go of, like Miss Pia said. We tried to squash it. We did what we were supposed to do, but you wanted it all. We both did. The difference is I knew from the age of three that I couldn’t have it all. I knew it all along, but especially when there was not one, but then two, and then three little pairs of feet running around and I thought I was going to lose my mind. To lose my goddam mind, but maybe not god forsaken mind. You thought that nothing could touch you. I knew that so many things had already touched me, things that could color and shape a moment, a life. We were becoming friends again and it took you. Death did us part. And I feel so many things at once. I feel sad. I miss you. I love you, and even parts of the lie that was our life. The lie that meant that when our lips moved, we were actually lying just a little bit less. I hated raising our kids by myself. . I was glad that you had Louis right up to the end, and that he helped things stay put, stay hidden. You made it all look so easy back then. Even on the day you died. You were like ‘That’s it’, and of course no one found out. The doctor made sure of that. He thought I didn’t know, and why would I have known? It’s not like I was that way too and we were both in hiding, hiding in our marriage. You make this look easy too. Being here now. You show up when you want to. We leave a space for you. Whenever we can we leave a place. Your favorite plate, it’s gonna break right down the middle but not today. When I die I won’t be anyone’s altar. Oh well. This is the last time we’ll eat together. I’m leaving a week from today. I won’t be surprised if I die next week. I just might. Poor Ni Nita. She’ll figure it out. All I know for sure is that I’m not dying here. Not here. Is that the door? Oh they here now… and you… well that figures! You’ll always left at the wrong time Reginald but I’m used to it. I’m used to it. Let me go answer this door. Can’t they be late for once?”

Written by Isaiah Lopaz, Anthology / Appendix 2021