The Blue Is Where God Lives, page 1
Copyright © 2023 Sharon Sochil Washington
Cover © 2023 ABRAMS
Published in 2023 by The Overlook Press,
an imprint of ABRAMS.
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022947228
ISBN: 978-1-4197-6710-4
eISBN: 978-1-64700-964-9
The characters and events depicted in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. The author and publisher make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this material.
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To Richard Peña, who said, when everyone else said the opposite:
“You should write. You’re a really good writer.”
PRE(R)AMBLE
They say it came from the ships. Living in the cracks of the planks. A memory inhibitor. Something designed to erase yourself. Sleeping on pillows made of ash. Dripping from the dicks of men the color of clouds and seeping into the material consciousness of our sleep. We didn’t really understand the severity of the situation. Language had been rerouted. Killings were rampant. We caught it. Ended up acting just like them.
Those of us lining both sides of the ancient Gambia River became West Africans. West Africans became Geechee. Geechee became Black—a condition that created White people.
Black folks lost themselves when they moved up north. And memories had the pleasure of being rescored in the palm of a new music and new tongues speaking wildly, pulled from the cracks of Creation like a demon with curses to pass out weekly on one of their most favorite holidays—Sunday. We cursed that day, making it so that if we worked on that day, they—the cloud-colored people—would end up no longer able to speak in tongues. An exorcism of almost six million Black folks left the open space of southern American landscapes that overwhelmed with dreams of red, yellow, orange, and blue—a sky so blue it makes you want to curl up and immerse yourself in it, and so wide dumbass motherfuckers thought they could touch it. Fools were always jumping off roofs trying to touch it. When southerners got up north, they found buildings so tall that they hid the sky. People from the south couldn’t get their balance, and they never did get their balance back. Ran some of them plum crazy, as the old folks used to say—plum crazy.
The axe-wielding woman was one of them old Geechee people who moved north and went plum crazy.
She held that axe to her grandson’s head, spewing threats that at first nobody took seriously, even though she had already made good on that fuckin’ promise. In Houston, Blue was kept in suspense for two hours before they told her the truth. It would have been more humane if they had just told her the truth from the beginning.
This axe-wielding woman had unobtainable hopes about her actions. She hoped they would not be misinterpreted as a desperate act but as a radical gesture demanding that life should change and that things should end as they were. But this was no glorious call for revolution; it was the result of a fragmented self—and fragmented selves were so common by then that she barely drew a crowd, even though she had already started hacking into the boy’s mother.
Eventually, when it was over, she was described as having no memory of the past two hours. Meanwhile, Blue was flooded with memories. Memories that belonged to that axe-wielding lunatic. And other memories that popped in and out of Blue’s mind like a jigsaw time line, making no sense at all. You’ll see what I’m talking about. Houston. To Detroit. South migrating north. Then the reverse. New York. To Houston. Then on down to the coast, where Texas and Mexico meet in the desert. The Detroit family. The East Texas Rose family. Moving on a nomadic time line also known as the diaspora, like motherless ants with no antennae. Unplanned re-memberings that work like severed limbs looking for a way to appendage themselves back to me.
Because I changed too. I’m no different. But I did try to hold on to some elements of myself. Despite my efforts, the umbrella and the little white gloves overtook me. And as unfortunate as it was, those two hours did give me some time to start revealing myself, and the living history that has colonized me, initially perceived to be a Lie. But we do work that out later.
As you may have guessed by now, I was there in Detroit, in proximity to Texas. When the blood gurgled from the mouth of Blue’s daughter, Tsitra, as her breath snagged in her throat, as her spirit struggled to slip away. Faint as it was, Tsitra held on to her life. Her body still working to pulsate streams of blood running onto the floor. Her dark skin turned purple from the bruising. Tsitra, lying on her right side, could see us. Lying there caked in her blood, she could see us. The axe-wielding woman holding Tsitra’s son in one hand and the Georgia-made axe in the other. She could see us. The baby not even crying at all. She could see us. Looking up at his grandmother through the biggest, blackest most innocent eyes you’ve ever seen. She could see us. Sitting on the floor next to her. She could see us. Comforting her. She could see us. Stroking her left cheek with the caress of a hand. She could see us. While his grandmother ranted and raved, she could see us.
These two hours required me to rely on re-memberings rather than history because I know I cannot, should not, trust recorded history to help Blue navigate this tragedy. It would be absolutely dim-witted of me to rely on Oscar Wilde or Thomas Jefferson or Emerson for the history that will enlighten Blue on these matters. The memory would have to metamorphose itself into metaphorical and imagistic associations. Otherwise it would enter into this crack as it initially did—perceived to be a Lie.
For entry into this moment of horrifying knowings, it is important for me not to reveal, that is, reinforce, an already established reality that you and I agree upon beforehand. Authentic characteristics mindful of and rebellious toward the expectations and impositions of my relationship with Blue would encourage an understanding of history versus remembering, and remembering versus re-membering. Re-membering as in reconnecting memory as in re-appending limbs of the body, the family, the population of the past.
It was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device for breaking free that which pits Blue against herself. It was the device that I came to attend to. The monumental tragedy of this moment opened a wormhole that breached the insane rationality of colonization and set us on a path to regeneration through numbers. Or, more specifically, through time.
And the effort to both remember and not know became the structure of our relationship.
1
When the call came in, Blue was just about to leave the house. She’d been studying her to-do list in her reminder app when the buzz startled her, and she dropped her phone. A smile tugged at the corners of her lips when she saw her son’s name light up the screen as she bent down to pick it up. Standing back up, she moved through an energy that made her light-headed. The elements around her moved slower against the speed of sunlight cutting across her fourth-floor bedroom. From the corner of her eye, a streak of something slipped past her. She ignored the disorienting swirls, the sense of fragmented time; it was not uncommon for things to move slowly in Houston. The day had begun like any other summer day in South Texas. Sunny. Hot. Still. The humidity made nature just sit for a while, inside of air so thick it slowed down the rotation of the earth around the sun. The plants. The trees. The dirt. The animals. The sky. All of it still, even though in motion. Just sitting for a while, dripping like the sweat off a fat man eating pork.
“Momma. Are you sitting down?”
“No. Why?”
“I think you need to sit down.”
“Why?”
“I need to tell you something. And you need to sit down.”
“Just tell me what it is . . .”
“Are you sitting down?”
Blue never understood why people asked that question. Delivering news that would rip your heart out was just as bad standing as sitting. “You’re scaring me. What is it?”
“I think Tsitra has been killed.”
There it was. He dropped the information into her lap, which could not hold it because she was standing. The information fell to the floor, and the weight of it dragged her down with it. On her way down, she began to hear a sound like an echo left behind by one of them old slaves who would rather kill their children than see them become a slave. Who would just do it! Just kill their own babies. In a fit of mercy. And then cry about it for centuries inside caves named after tragedies.
Thirty-eight minutes later, when her son came over to check on her, she was still on the floor where she had dropped. Sitting on her knees and the backs of her heels in a daze. He helped her to her bed. “We’re not sure she’s dead. The police are outside the house, trying to get to her inside,” he said, in barely a whisper.
The woman holding Tsitra and her two-year-old son hostage wielded an axe she brought with her from Georgia, promising to cut off her grandso
n’s head unless everyone did exactly as she instructed.
“Back up! Back up! Get away from this house! Do not come in here!”
The two-hour wait for an update on the horror evolving thirteen hundred miles away in Detroit unfolded like the petals of a night flower at sunset. One petal opened, then another and another and another, until the spiral of a sunflower revealed itself in the center of an ironic nocturnal night bloom set against the reflective light of the sun. Coerced by what seemed like the strange randomness of the spiral, memory began to undo itself and she slipped into the beginning stages of a stillness that unraveled her nerves. Stillness was something that had always unnerved her. The first time she had been asked to sit still at fifteen, she had deliberately refused. The idea of no movement at all, to be constrained in such a way, was a direct attack on her freedom to be herself, to live her own life. It was as unnatural to her as death itself.
Blue waited by phone for an update from Detroit, as did a growing crowd outside the dilapidated two-story duplex at the end of Automobile Industry Lane, a long road that ran from the Ford factory in neighboring Dearborn to downtown Detroit and snaked through the city like a river to a dead end at the corner of Garrett Morgan Road on the south side of Detroit.
The initial small crowd, which can be attributed to an insensitivity developed out of an overwhelming number of murders in Detroit, gave way to a larger crowd as more police, paramedics, and firefighters arrived, and the neighbors started spreading the word of who was being held hostage. Tsitra was popular across the city of Detroit. With a heart for the mistreated and a ravenous taste for nightlife, Tsitra was known to both the struggling poor of Detroit and to the Motown wannabe moguls—like her boyfriend, whose mother had already begun hacking into Tsitra’s body with one hand while cradling her grandson with the other.
A man in the crowd, charging the house, had to be restrained by three others. “That’s my daughter!” he screamed. “I have to get through! Let go of me!”
Also in the crowd, later reported by the Detroit clan of nieces, nephews, and cousins who talked incessantly about the scene outside the falling-down house, were two peculiar otherworldly women. They were described as ghosts. Barely visible, almost sunspots, only a few people caught glimpses of them. Upon being noticed, the women shifted. One woman wore a long flowing white muslin dress that draped her figure with a flattering high Empire-style waistline. She carried a frilly matching umbrella in her glove-covered hand, slightly above her wide-brimmed, matching lace-wrapped hat. The other woman, dressed just as exquisitely, wore a long beige-and-brown dress with a drop waist, hundreds of small buttons running from her waist to the top of her neckline. Her skirt swept the ground as she walked, and it opened to the front to reveal trousers and snakeskin cowboy boots. Her hat was more utilitarian but matched the outfit perfectly nonetheless.
Inside the house were faint cries of “Please. Please. Somebody help me.”
The Detroit police had sectioned off the scene with a yellow rope instead of the traditional crime scene’s yellow tape. The police chief had innovatively come up with this rope idea because the city was bankrupt and couldn’t afford to buy enough tape to keep up with all the murders and other crimes. The rope could be used repeatedly.
Unable to listen to the guttural moaning that pierced right through the clamoring gossip of the crowd anymore, Tsitra’s father broke away from the three men holding him and past the rope into a mob of police, who inexplicably turned their guns on him. The police sergeant in charge stepped in between the guns of her subordinates, who were both Black and White, and stopped the man with a simple look of compassion. Where the strength of three men and the prospect of a hail of bullets had failed, the reasoning of a single Black woman prevailed. Tsitra’s father, who went by the name of Guitar, fell to his knees, unable to stand any longer, and let out a wail that broke the sergeant’s heart. He was overcome by losing Tsitra, his favorite child—the one he had tried to convince his then wife to abort. He always regretted that. He had fallen in love with his daughter as soon as he saw her.
Memory continued to run across Blue’s mind, like a vertical conveyor belt moving a steady flow of information in an upward movement, like a moving image story running through a vintage movie projector.
She pictured the dilapidated house at center stage and all the crumbling two-story Tudor houses of Detroit that could be purchased for ten thousand dollars or less. Those with enough ambition to buy one were often left stuck in those decrepit conditions; the renovation costs were too high. Two streets over was Guitar’s two-story house, filled with objects he had hoarded and intended to restore.
Tsitra had followed in the footsteps of her father. His people took horror-inducing and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train to their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos with only treacherous choices. Tsitra, a prodigy of sorts, started college at sixteen. But after meeting her boyfriend in a club—she got in with a fake ID—she exchanged her studies at University of Michigan and the ambition of becoming a lawyer for a modeling career and a baby. Tall and pencil thin, Tsitra was like a mannequin when clothes draped her dark skin body. It made her modeling career a real possibility—but too slim in a city full of hustlers.
The police were trying to negotiate with the axe-wielding woman. Echoing the fading cries from inside the house, Guitar pleaded with the police to just shoot the bitch.
“Why are you trying to negotiate with a crazy woman?!” Guitar yelled.
A woman in the crowd shouted, “So you’ll turn your guns on a grieving father, but you just let that crazy bitch hold a young child hostage?”
“Why not just shoot her?” Guitar turned to reasoning with the police, since pleading wasn’t working.
“Sir, please just back up behind the rope,” a White police officer responded.
“What would be the problem with shooting her?”
The police officer just looked at Guitar, his eyes betraying his confusion with Guitar’s question.
“You don’t really care about what’s going on here,” Guitar said with such matter-of-factness. “I know it. They know it,” he said, gesturing toward the crowd. “You know it.” The police had never put much value on Black life in this country, and certainly not in Detroit, Michigan, a decaying city full of Black people. “So why now? Why her? Why save the one African American who should just be shot?”
The police officer fiddled with his cap and looked at one of his colleagues for support as he walked away from Guitar.
As the scene in the house deteriorated further, someone in the crowd, which had grown to be a horde, said to the family, “You better call Zion.”
Zion got the call.
Four years ago, Zion had left his sister Tsitra and followed his mother back to the South, to Houston, where she settled after completing her graduate degree in New York City. He was studying engineering at a prestigious Texas university and was on his way home from class when the Detroit call came. He reluctantly decided to wait for an update from Detroit at his mother’s house. But before leaving her alone in her bedroom, Zion stopped to ask one last question before he squirreled away in a bedroom two floors down. “How in the heck did you end up with my dad?” This question—with complex arteries hidden in the simplicity of its presentation—had been the subject of many reflective therapy sessions for his mother.
Right on cue, in a room washed in the sun, a story moved at the speed of its light through her consciousness. It was the story of her ancestors: Blue’s great-great-grandparents George Washington Rose and Elizabeth Beacon Rose, who had fought alongside General François-Dominique Toussaint-Louverture in the 1791 Haitian Revolution. Unfortunately, the Haitian victory ended with a twist for the Roses. Benoit Joseph André Rigaud, who was also a leading general in Haiti, took George and Elizabeth captive and sold them to a land baron in East Texas, so named Mr. Barron. Blue felt it must be important to connect to what you know in order to ground yourself before all hell breaks loose.
George, a brilliant, well-educated, handsome, and charming military leader, became Mr. Barron’s confidant and led his army to defeat the British in the American colonies, a war that had already claimed all the Barron sons before George arrived. Mrs. Barron had died in childbirth with the last son. With no heirs, old man Barron deeded his property, which included land, soldiers, and enslaved peoples, to George. Barron went into town for what he considered to be his final farewell, as he too was dying from his war injuries. While in town, a young mulatto woman passing for White trapped him into a wedding ceremony. He came back to the plantation with a new heir. The mulatto woman was hateful. But, to be fair, her hate had been shaped by her life. Sold from one owner to the next for years until she ran away—and the first person she ran into thought she was White. The very next day, after her introduction to the Barron plantation, the mulatto, without hesitation, announced to the house staff that all of them would be serendipitously sold immediately upon the death of the lord of the manor. Having vowed never to be sold again, to choose death instead, each person began to envision a noose creeping up and around their necks. The first instant as the itchy strains of rope roll across the head and down the back of the neck. The chills that emerge from underneath the skin of a naked body as apprehensions rise to interlock with the threads. The next second when body temperature elevates to the point of liquid running slyly down the body like cooling mercury on a bronze anvil covered in soft flesh. Then the drop of the braided cord onto the base of the neck where it connects to the shoulders, in that crevice where separation is assured and breakage occurs. Then the budding of strange fruit sprouting from the poplar trees.
