The touch combined with actual eye contact was too much. I felt overwhelmed, and tears welled up in my eyes. I knew it was all bullshit—that I had gotten here on bullshit—that my life was an infinitesimal piece of bullshit in a world full of bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. But all I could say was “Really? You think I can?”
She smiled and nodded. “C’mon baby,” she said. Then she said it again when I didn’t move. “C’mon, baby.”
She was standing there, believing in me and looking at me and touching me and calling me “baby” like I was her child. And I was standing there trying not to cry, because I couldn’t sing and I wasn’t anybody’s child, not really.
And only then, only when I was moments away from crumpling onto the ground in a ball of inability, did Me-But-Not-Me finally decide to step forward again.
She was the one that sang, “There was a boy . . .”
“Yes,” Mama Jane said, like it was the most profound thing she had ever heard.
“A very strange, enchanted boy.”
Mama Jane was nodding now. And as I kept on singing, I felt like I was explaining something to her. Telling her the story of my life. It started off with one of my first memories, which was my grandmama, putting on this record and singing along with it as she went about the house. I sang, and in my heart, I told Mama Jane about how later, after my grandmama had died and Cora had taken up residence in her room, I had come to think of the boy from this song as my brother. Someone who spent most of his days alone and valued love because he didn’t have it.
Somehow I had forgotten about my grandmama. I had only been five when she passed, but when Me-But-Not-Me was singing, I remembered her.
When Nicky joined me on the piano after the first few lines, I watched Grandmama clean the house, and I heard her tinny voice joining in with Nat’s. I felt her hand wrap around mine as we walked down Glass’s Main Street. I missed her as I sang about the boy wandering very far over land and sea.
Mama Jane stepped back to look at me. And, to tell you the truth, so did I. I had to get a good look at me so I could see that Me-But-Not-Me was actually Me Then. She was Little Davidia, the girl that I had been before Cora knocked her out of me.
And man, could she sing.
I mean, she was killing this song. She was taking it home to its rightful maker and showing it off in heaven. She was letting people know that she had risen from the dead and that she was back.
Little Davidia finished the song on a long note—not because she was showing off, but because she did not want it to end.
The piano part finished. Nicky put his hands in his lap. Mama Jane was openly crying now. But I couldn’t let it end, not till every last breath was gone from my body, and even then, I fell to my knees, holding it just a little longer.
I was wheezing by the time it was over. I could feel Little Davidia running her hands over me, comforting me like she used to comfort our grandmama when she had coughing fits.
The room was silent. I was wheezing. Mama Jane was weeping and Nicky was staring at me in a very loud way.
Which is why I was surprised by how quiet his voice was when he actually spoke. “How old are you?”
This time I didn’t beat around the bush. “I’m fifteen,” I said. Straight up.
“1969. Remember this year when ABC comes up in here. We going to get you some ID, but sometimes they ask you a follow-up.”
He got up and walked over to me and took me by the chin. “Show me your teeth.”
I had read that overseers used to do this when buying slaves, but I showed him my teeth anyway.
“They’re straight and it don’t look like you got any cavities. Good. But you better start flossing or you’re going to have trouble with them gums down the line. How old are you?”
“Twenty-two,” I answered automatically. I didn’t even have to think about it.
He smiled down at me, showing off his own pearly whites.
“You a fast learner. Good.” He let go of my chin and turned back to Mama Jane. “Davidia. That’s ugly.”
I flinched. I thought for a second he was saying I was ugly, just like the people back in Glass said all the time.