anymore. She'd won the prize, the robe of heaven.
He whispered to her, 'I'm sorry, baby. Come back.'
But she didn't seem to see him. She was talking to an audience, telling them in her lecturing voice how black people were in America before the
'The first baby born in the New World was a Moor. They had no word for black or white skin then. The baby was baptized William. There were free blacks in the North, right here in New York, long before there were slaves.'
The robe Merrill wore was wide in the sleeves and sweeping at the hem. Like an angel, she argued Liberty's past.
'Rick, you could be one of those indentured servants, a trader from the Middle East, a descendant of Cleopatra or an Ethiopian king. You could be a founding father of America. A free man all the way back to the beginning of time.'
'Never was so, baby,' Liberty told her in his dream. 'Uh-uh, my grandmother on my mama's side was the daughter of a slave, black as night.' Nothing free about his past. His father had died in the Korean War. He'd been a member of the last segregated unit in the armed forces, the one that was officially branded in the army's most recent rewriting of history as the 'Coward's Brigade.'
The man his mother claimed was his father looked dark in his pictures, but Rick had never known him. There was no way to be sure that the dark-skinned dead soldier, who was a musician before he was drafted, was in fact his real father. Rick himself had no musical abilities. For all he knew his real father had simply taken off when he was born, or even before. Could even be his father was a white man. It wouldn't be the first in his family. No matter who he was, Rick had always felt abandoned by him, fatherless in the most profound and unsettling way because he could not get solid information about the man who'd sired him. And what he'd been told didn't add up. His grandmother's skin was dark, his mother's was almost white. His own skin was closer to his mother's than her mother's. And somehow it had been easier for his grandmother to accept her daughter's light skin than his. Even when he was a small child, his gramma had studied Rick's fine, nearly Caucasian features with anger and didn't like to touch him. When his mother had given birth to his younger sister, his grandmother rejoiced because she was dark. And although there were always men around in the fringes of their lives, neither his grandmother or mother ever married.
'Honey, let's have beautiful golden children and go to the Caribbean to dance in the sun.' Merrill's robe faded to black and she disappeared.
Pain sliced through Liberty's brain. He opened his eyes. The dream was gone and he needed a bathroom. He smelled coffee. His sweater and pants were rumpled and sweaty. He slipped on his shoes, grabbed his computer, and reached for the doorknob. The spindle came out in his hand, knocking the knob off on the other side.
'Yo, what's up?' The woman in the living room turned at the sound and examined him coldly.
Liberty stared at her. Marvin had told him a friend of his hung out here but hadn't said it was a woman. She hadn't been there last night when he'd come in.
'What's the matter wit you? Ain't never seen a sista befo?' The woman's hostility almost sent him back into the bedroom.
He held out the knob and spindle. 'Your door handle is loose,' he said.
'Yessir, I took the screws out. I ain't keeping no strange nigger in
Liberty turned toward the aroma. The kitchen was a corner without a door that contained a refrigerator, tiny stove, and sink. The woman was sitting at a table in front of it with a cup in her hand. She followed his gaze to a sagging sofa and two more wicker chairs and the milk cartons filled with books that served as coffee tables and bookcases.
'Around here, you better have nothin'. worth stealin',' she said coldly. 'So I don't.'
Rick needed to urinate and wash his face.
She jerked her chin toward a closed door. 'Bathroom's in there.'
'Thanks.' Rick crossed the room and opened the door. The sink was brown with rust. The toilet was old and the tank had deep cracks. It smelled. Rick closed his eyes as he urinated. He gathered his friend Marvin had some message in mind when he'd left him here late last night. Marvin always had a message. The mirror was shadowy with age and had a crack in it. The mirror had a message for him, too. His hair had not one or two gray strands. It had become grizzled, as if he'd been fried in the night and all that was left was ash. His beard gave his face a gray covering, too. He stared at himself, shocked. He thought of the electric chair, but then remembered they didn't kill that way in New York State anymore.
The woman put another cup of coffee on the table and moved back toward the wall, putting the table between them.
'Yo, nigger,' she said. 'Don't know why you in my place, but I owe Marvin. You register that? I'd do whatever, don't matter what he say. I'd do it, you understand? He wants to hide out some nigger killed a white woman in my place—' She spread the shapely fingers of one hand in the cool sign and shrugged. 'Maybe that nigger had a good reason.'
Rick opened his mouth at the word
'These the house rules. No drugs here. No weapons of any kind. No drugs, no weapons. That's it. I can smell it before you can open it. I can smell it in the hall. One sniff an' I'll call the cops. 'Nother thing, dude, you try to rape me or hit me or come on to me in any way—verbal or otherwise—you try to touch me any place on my person I'll kill you. Got that?'
Rick scratched the side of his gray face to keep from smiling for the first time since Merrill died. Here was a militant sister of some kind, wearing a cloth twisted around her head in a turban, heavy boots, several layers and colors of sweaters, vest and skirt down to her ankles. African trading beads and heavy metal necklaces on her chest. Lecturing him about drugs and sexual harassment.
'I don't look like it anymore. But my name's Rick Liberty,' he said. He didn't offer to shake her hand.
She shook her head vehemently. 'I don't give a shit who you look like or who you be. Don't care if you famous, or rich as Croesus. You touch me and you a dead man.'
Rick closed his teeth over his lips. The situation was ridiculous. Black humor in the extreme. Marvin had some sense of humor. He kept his mouth closed, didn't want to insult her by laughing.
'Oh, you think it's funny? Marvin knows I has friends in the community. I has lots of friends. I told him, this nigger touch me, and he's a dead man. Won't have no more problems with his image.'
'Are you a nigger—?' Rick said softly, pulling out a chair and sitting. 'Ms. . . . ?'
She eyed him suspiciously. 'It's Belle. You dissing me, man?'
Rick shook his head. 'No, Belle. Nobody in his right mind would dare to dis you.'
'What's your point then?'
'Thank you for your hospitality last night. It wasn't my plan to intrude on your privacy.'
'Black folk gots no privacy,' she said flatly.
Now there was a position he wasn't going to touch. 'Well, thanks anyway. I have to go.'
'Drink your coffee.'
Rick considered the coffee.
'Ain't nothin' about us good enough for you?'
He wasn't going to touch that either. Rick picked up the cup, swallowed the coffee. Who was—the community? He thought of his own community, of Merrill. Numb, he put the empty cup down. 'I have to go.'
'How you gonna do that?'
'Taxi.'
'Ain't no taxis here.'
'Fine, I'll call a car.'
'With that blockade out there?'
'What blockade?'
'They stop the cars, ask them what they doing here, run a warrant check on the passengers.'
Rick frowned, trying to take that in. 'The police have a blockade in the street and stop the cars?'
She nodded. 'Uh-huh.'
