When Trying to Return Home

Table of Contents
 
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Contents
 Torsion
 When Trying to Return Home
 The Missing One
 Good Guys
 Fevers
 I Don’t Know Where I’m Bound
 Last Saints
 La Espera
 Liberation Day 
 Acknowledgments
 Publication Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Torsion
 Contents
 
 
 Page List
 
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 To Abba, my family, and Jesse
 
 
 Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
 —JAMES BALDWIN, GIOVANNI’S ROOM
 
 
 Contents
 Torsion
 When Trying to Return Home
 The Missing One
 Good Guys
 Fevers
 I Don’t Know Where I’m Bound
 Last Saints
 La Espera
 Liberation Day 
 Acknowledgments
 
 
 
 
 
 Torsion
 WHEN I WAS A TEEN GIRL, MY HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER came up to my mother. That teacher, all pink-pocked and smiling, told my mama I was going to do something good with my life. Your girl looks straight forward, she said. She’ll see success, for sure. That woman, whoever she was, was wrong as hell.
 If Mama’s plan to snatch her son from White Nurse worked, she and I would be criminals. Baby snatchers. Dark-skinned derelicts. We’d be the dead-eyed Black folks they throw up on KDKA after a story about recalled strollers. If the news story was longer than a clip, the announcers might roll through our supposedly hoodrat attributes. Mama: a be-weaved hair technician who barely made rent at our apartment on the Hill, who had two kids from two different daddies. She was a PTA at Allegheny General for years and a terrific stylist, but those bits didn’t make the story simple. Me: a part-time Eat N’ Park waitress (I was a college student at Point Park, but would they mention that?) who made the Gazette once for saying, “He wasn’t all bad,” about her ex-boyfriend who’d robbed a Texaco. If Mama’s plan didn’t work, the five o’clock news would be fast to break us down as they saw fit. The St. Benedict ladies would frown at the screen and suck their teeth. My professors would shrug and delete my name from their rosters. Parker, the schizophrenic who slept in our apartment and sort of loved Mama, would think about helping us but give up halfway through the thought. The boy I loved would shake his head and say, “There you go, like I’ve always said. She could never say no to her mama.”
 So, you see, my mother and I couldn’t fail.
 At four o’clock in the morning, I backed my mother’s slug-colored minivan out of the Banford Dwellings parking lot. My hands, sweat-wet and sticky, slid down the wheel. I stamped on the brakes, stopped at the mouth of the lot.
 I rested my forehead against the wheel. The sky reddened above the shadows of rust-colored tenements, dollar marts, and fading apartment complexes. A knob of moonlight sunk underneath the arms of the St. Benedict statue, which stood drearily atop our orange-bricked church. Crows cawed in poplar trees I couldn’t see; the 83 cracked gravel as it rolled on to the next bus stop.
 At 4:00 a.m., in mid-November, I was still a good-enough person. My definition of myself: a junior in college, an awkward girl who played varsity softball and took weekend rides on Allegheny riverboats. I was someone who could still do something nice with her life.
 I looked at Mama. My mother stared forward at the street, her naked lips stitched in a stiff line. Her eyes were wrenched wide. Her hair was greased against her scalp; her skin fresh smelling and slathered with baby oil. She wore whitewashed jeans and a green shirt that clutched her muscle-strong arms. Her hands were folded in her lap. I tried not to look too hard at her; her calm body made me nervous. My whole life that woman had made me nervous with love for her. She told me no matter what I was her only Thing; she told me—when the schoolkids called me strange because of my stutter and crooked nose—that I’d always have her. So I was hers.
 After a few moments, when I didn’t move the van, Mama tapped my wrist.
 “Claudia,” she said. “You can’t get sick on me. You sick?”
 I shook my head and licked my lips. Icy feelings shot back and forth in my hands.
 “You eat something ’fore we left? I didn’t see you,” she