The bus came, and I handed the nickels to Sonny and Ida so they could drop them in the box themselves. We sat on the bench in back, where we had the better view of the city as we lumbered down Amsterdam Avenue.
Ida wouldn’t leave well enough alone. “Is it unnatural that you’re good at the clarinet, Sonny, huh, now is it? Is it unnatural what Art Tatum does on the piano?” I loved her for defending me, but I wished she would stop.
“Daddy says it’s different. Aunt Phyllis has something extra. Some juju.”
“You sound like a fool, Sonny,” Ida said.
“You’re the fool! Daddy says it’s dangerous to have that juju, ’cause other folks want it and they’ll kill for it. They’ll take her hands. I bet that’s what happened to Uncle Roger.”
I was so surprised that I could only stare. Ida started to cry.
“Is someone gonna take your hands, Aunt Pea?”
I pulled her onto my lap. “No, honey, no. Sonny’s just wrong, that’s all.”
Sonny sulked and stared out the window. I’d had no idea he knew the first thing about Roger, though I should have guessed. Family secrets have a way of getting out. And stealing hands—rumors like that had circulated my whole life, but mostly nothing came of it. There weren’t a lot of us and most didn’t broadcast what we were. Even if it was possible to steal our power by taking our hands, it wasn’t easy.
But a decade ago a man named Trent Sullivan had tried, and bringing him to justice had nearly destroyed me.
Tom Senior and Sonny were right about one thing: it was no blessing when the hands paid their visit. My father had long gone by the time my dream came down; Mommy had to deal with me and Roger on her own. Dad had the wandering itch, as Mommy liked to say, and unlike her, he was light enough to pass when the urge struck him. It struck him one too many times, until she divorced him and told his disapproving Sugar Hill family she wouldn’t wait around for him, or anyone, anymore. How they smacked their lips when our dreams came down! They spread it up and down that our saints’ hands were Mommy’s punishment for getting above her station. When Sonny turned ten, Gloria started sleeping badly, waiting for him to wake up with a dream for the numbers, an ache in his hands and an overnight talent for something that before had been merely ordinary. After his twelfth birthday she’d started to relax. But now she had Ida to watch, and wonder, and protect, if it came to that, from Tom Senior’s attempts to pray the devil out of her.
I kept Sonny and Ida close to me at the park. Gloria was just a shade too dark to come here without the police following close behind and making nasty comments. Sonny and Ida were dark enough, but they were children, and I had a better chance of getting them in and out before they realized why their mother never came to the park with them. Though Sonny probably did already. He was too smart to enjoy the ignorance of childhood, which I grieved while I loved him for it. I dreaded the day he would see me for what I was.
We walked slowly through the bird pavilion and then the bear den. I’d thought we might enjoy ourselves, that Sonny would forget that sticky issue of my talent and Ida would gawk at the sea lions and the grizzly bears, but maybe there was never any chance.
A pair of white boys, no older than sixteen, watched us from beside the bear den. They clearly thought a lot of themselves in their high-waisted oxford pants and low-slung bowler hats. The sandy blond one even kept his hand near a bulge in his left pocket, his fingers twitching like a nervous dog on a leash. Sonny noticed them, but when he looked at me with worry creasing the skin between his brows, I smiled faintly and shook my head. He relaxed—I could still give him that. Ida noted none of this exchange. The grizzlies squatting in existential boredom by their cerulean concrete lake had captured all of her wide-eyed attention. I looked back at the white boys, whose twin gazes still followed us like blue jays through exhaust. The sandy-haired one flexed his hand. His companion spat, generously.
“What’s the world coming to,” Blondie said, in a voice that had broken last week and still bled from the wound, “when we can get a family of black devils strolling Central Park just like they was decent?”
Ida’s shoulders stiffened. Sonny’s hands clenched. “Stay with your sister,” I told him.
Blondie and his brother here probably imagined themselves big hustlers. I doubted they’d have even made soldiers for Dutch Schultz, let alone Russian Vic. That had to be a BB gun in his pocket. Still, almost anything could kill, so long as you aimed it right. I loosened the two-inch knife strapped to my left wrist, let it peek out below the cuff of my summer blazer. Then, before any fuzz could see and ask questions—as bad for my people as dime-store gangsters, New York’s whitest—I bent down, picked up a likely rock, and threw it at the bulge in his pocket. A pop like a firecracker went off against his hip—a BB gun, lucky for him, but at that distance would still hurt like the devil. The dark-haired one stared at me, slack-jawed, while the other cursed and hopped on one leg. I wondered, with a vague sort of pricking in my fingertips, if using my hands to hurt was much better, morally speaking, than using them to kill. Should we have just walked away?
“Ida, Sonny,” I said loudly, “let’s get ice cream. I don’t see nothing much of
