She gave him a hard look, and he gave it right back. For the first few years of his life, it had just been him and Willie. Try as hard as he might, Sonny could never conjure up a picture of his father, and he still hadn’t forgiven his mother for that.
“You’s a hardheaded fool,” Willie said, pushing past him now. “You need to stop spendin’ time in jail and start spendin’ it with your kids. That’s what you need to do.”
She muttered the last part so that Sonny could barely hear her, but he would have known what she said even if she hadn’t said it. He was mad at her because he didn’t have a father, and she was mad at him because he’d become as absent as his own.
—
Sonny was on the housing team at the NAACP. Once a week, he and the other men and women on the team went around to all the different neighborhoods in Harlem to ask people how they were faring.
“We got so many roaches and rats, we got to keep the toothbrushes in the fridge,” one mother said.
It was the last Friday of the month, and Sonny was still nursing Thursday night’s headache. “Mm-hmm,” he said to the woman, sweeping a hand over his brow, as though he could mop up a bit of the pain that pulsed there. While she talked, Sonny pretended to take notes in his notepad, but it was the same thing he’d heard at the last place, and the one before that. In fact, Sonny could have not gone to a single apartment and he still would have known what the tenants would say. He and Willie and his sister, Josephine, had lived in conditions like these and much worse.
He could remember with clarity a time when his mother’s second husband, Eli, left and took the month’s rent with him. Sonny had held baby Josephine in his arms while they all went from block to block, begging anyone who would listen to take them in. They’d ended up in an apartment that had forty people living in it, including a sick old woman who’d lost control of her bowels. Every night the woman would sit in a corner, shaking and crying and filling her shoes with her own shit. Then the rats would come to eat it.
Once, when his mother was desperate, she’d taken them to stay in one of the Manhattan apartments that she cleaned while that family was on vacation. The apartment had six bedrooms for only two people. Sonny didn’t know what to do with himself with all that space. He spent the whole day in the smallest room, too scared to touch anything, knowing that his mother would have to dust off his fingerprints if he was to leave them.
“Can you help, mister?” a boy said.
Sonny dropped his notepad down and looked at him. He was small, but something about the look in his eyes told Sonny that he was older than he looked, maybe fourteen or fifteen. The boy came up to the woman and put a hand on her shoulder. He stared at Sonny longer, and so Sonny had time to study his eyes. They were the biggest eyes Sonny had ever seen on a man or a woman, with eyelashes like the long, glamorous legs of a terrifying spider.
“You can’t, can you?” the boy said. He blinked twice quickly, and, watching his spider-leg lashes entangle, Sonny was suddenly filled with fear. “You can’t do a single thing, can you?” the boy continued.
Sonny didn’t know what to say. He just knew he had to get out of there.
The boy’s voice rang in Sonny’s head for the rest of that week, month, year. He’d asked to be moved off the housing team, lest he see him again.
“You can’t do a single thing, can you?”
Sonny was arrested at another march. And then another. And then another. After the third arrest, when Sonny was already handcuffed, one of the police officers punched him in the face. As his eye started to swell shut, Sonny puckered his lips as if to spit, but the officer just looked him in his one good eye, shook his head, and said, “Do that and you’ll die today.”
His mother saw his face and started to weep. “I didn’t leave Alabama for this!” she said. Sonny was supposed to go to her house for Sunday dinner, but he skipped it. He skipped work that week too.
“You can’t do a single thing, can you?”
Reverend George Lee of Mississippi was fatally shot while trying to register to vote.
Rosa Jordan was shot while riding a newly desegregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was pregnant.
“You can’t do a single thing, can you?”
Sonny kept skipping out on work. Instead, he sat on a bench next to the man who swept the barbershops on Seventh. Sonny didn’t know the man’s name. He just liked to sit and talk to him. Maybe it was the fact that the man held a broom like his mother did. He could talk to him in a way he’d never been able to talk to her. “What do you do when you feel helpless?” Sonny asked.
The man took a long drag off his Newport. “This helps,” he said, waving the cigarette in the air. He pulled out a small glassine bag from his pocket and placed it in Sonny’s hand. “When that don’t help, this do,” he said.
Sonny fingered the dope for a while. He didn’t speak, and soon the barber sweep took up his broom and left. Sonny sat on that bench for nearly an hour, just running that small bag from finger to finger, thinking about it. He thought about it as he walked the ten blocks home. He thought about it as he fried an egg for dinner. If nothing he did changed anything, then maybe he was the one who would have to make a change. By midafternoon the next day, Sonny had stopped thinking about it.
He called up the NAACP and quit his job before flushing the bag down the toilet.
—
“What are you gonna do for money?” Josephine asked Sonny. He couldn’t keep his apartment now that he didn’t have an income, so he was staying at his mother’s house until he could figure things out.
Willie stood over the sink, washing dishes and humming her gospel tunes. She hummed loudest when she wanted to appear as though she wasn’t listening in.
“I’ll figure something out. I always do, don’t I?” His voice was a dare, and Josephine didn’t accept, leaning back into her seat and becoming, suddenly, silent. His mother hummed a little louder and started to dry the dishes in her hands.
“Let me help you with that, Mama,” Sonny said, hopping up.
Immediately, she started in on him so that he knew that she had been listening. “Lucille came by here yesterday asking for you,” Willie said. Sonny grunted. “Seem like maybe you should give the girl a call.”
“She know how to find me when she want to.”
“What about Angela or Rhonda? They know how to find you too? Seem like they only know how to get to my house on days you ain’t here.”
Sonny grunted again. “You don’t got to give ’em nothing, Mama,” he said.
His mother snorted. She stopped humming and started singing instead. Sonny knew he had to get out of the apartment, and fast. If his women were after him and his mama was singing gospel, he had better find himself a place to be.
—
He went to see his friend Mohammed about a job. “You should join the Nation of Islam, man,” Mohammed said. “Forget the NAACP. They ain’t doing shit.”
Sonny accepted a glass of water from Mohammed’s eldest daughter. He shrugged at his friend. They’d had this conversation before. Sonny couldn’t join the Nation of Islam as long as his mother was a devout Christian woman. He would never hear the end of it. Besides, his days of sitting in the back of his mother’s church had not left him immune to ideas about the wrath of God. It was not the kind of thing you wanted to attract. “Islam ain’t getting shit done neither,” he said.
His friend Mohammed used to be named Johnny. They’d met shooting hoops in courts all around Harlem when they were boys, and they’d kept up their friendship, even as their basketball days ended and their midsections grew.
When they’d met, Sonny had still gone by “Carson,” but on the court he liked the quickness, the ease of “Sonny,” and so he’d adopted that name as his own. His mother hated it. He knew it was because his father used to call him that, but Sonny didn’t know a thing about his father and there was no sentimental pull to the name for him other than the sound of the other kids saying “Yeah, Son! Yeah, Sonny!” when he sunk one.
“It’s dry out there, Sonny,” Mohammed said.
“You gotta know somethin’. Anything, man.”