It’s 11:34 pm and Josephine is walking with me from the home goods store that we both do time at. She’s bigger than me, older than me, blacker than me, and she’s made this walk many times. She doesn’t need a ride the 3/4 of a mile to the subway in a crumbling and neglected Coney Island, Brooklyn – she is woman enough to walk there in the blank slate of night.
“I put God in front of me wherever I go … so I don’t worry.”
Josephine is from Jamaica and asked me if I’ve heard of it. “Jamaica?? Yes, of course.”
And yet her face is still maternal, gentle in her searching me for what I know about her home. This is at once so humble of a question, asked as if she expected me to either not care or not know of people and places beyond myself. It’s the kind of cautious question, testing to see if I could handle one of her most essential truths. I was both pissed and charmed by this question.
And we pulled our coats tighter around us in wind blowing up over the coast of Coney Island.
“I come from a dangerous country,” she says in my silence. “When it’s your time, there’s no fighting it.
I look at her face, stunned by her conviction, her stillness, her – what I read as a sort of - peace.
“I really believe that,” she says emphatically.
There’s something about what Josephine carries with her that has seen more than just twin towers falling and Brooklyn fighting and teenage mall massacres. There’s a different kind of killing she’s seen.
I get on the D train headed home and can only guess about the kind of violences that she’s witnessed, was drawn into, left.
What I know about Josephine’s home is what any white kid from a flyover state knows. Jamaica is peddled to college students as the bluest part of the Atlantic Ocean and the place to get the best ganja. It’s sold to the 25-45ers as a place to order fruity cocktails and set a Weight Watchers calendar for. It is shocking, this information from Josephine, this serious side to the real Destination Jamaica. I’m so used to American violence of neglect, ideologies and commerce. Here, in America, violence isn’t personal – it’s business. If it’s not historically or federally predicated, it’s generated mostly from our viral need to secure a home for ourselves. And that's big business.
But here, tonight, with Josephine, violence is personal. And an electric stillness passed over us in this cold, windy night.
She’s lived in the United States for some years now, enough to learn to survive on our streets and under our laws and without her most familiar landmarks of childhood. She’s worked at this home goods store for the past few years as a Manager On Duty, and she knows her place, her clientele and her inventory. She is who I ask when I need questions answered because she’s approachable and possesses a certain pride in her retail work.
And no irony is lost when an immigrant gains full-time administrative employment at a corporate home goods chain built on consumers’ need to find more ways to comfort themselves in their own private home tucked away from all the rampages of the world.
She, like many who emigrate away from a tumultuous home, carry with them a certain otherness, a secret of having seen and decided not to live that way. A certain sort of spirit from another life. With that otherness comes also a deep, sinewy want for a place that provides her comfort, belonging, a fashion she understood, a dirt in between her toes that felt right. Why Brooklyn is not really working for her, only she knows.
Later the next week, Josephine, Jermaine (another Manager On Duty) and I were making the walk to the train station. Colder than previous nights, this walk, they start talking about the coming winter, which inevitably leads Brooklynites to muse about where else they’d like to live. Josephine reveals her plan to relocate to Atlanta, Georgia, in a year, which leads Jermaine to offer up, “Aw yeh, for me, it’s Houston.”
I gasped so loud that I quite possibly swallowed a small wayward pigeon. “HOUSTON?? Like, Houston, TEXAS?!” What black man wants to live in Texas?
And I’m fraught with all my Southern mythologies taught to me in fundamentalist Christian havens called college prep secondary schools, and I have to realize that they, like me, have not felt safe in the home they were born into. Me in Memphis, Jermaine in Brooklyn, Josephine in Jamaica. And for some reason, I feel safe in the Brooklyn that Jermaine and Josephine long to leave behind. And Josephine and Jermaine feel safe in the South that I left far behind because it was dangerous for me, in its insidious and emotionally lazy hatefulness that’s tableclothed in AquaNet and crocheted doilies.
And it doesn’t make sense. And it makes me sad that deep in my soul, Brooklyn is the only place that’s really felt like home and for them, it’s not so much. And it’s sad that the Mother’s Face of Home is always changing, distorting and disfiguring our memories of what was at once a soft place to fall.
So in the meantime, we all live in Brooklyn. Josephine’s daughter came home last week complaining about the gunfire she saw in Crown Heights. And last night on Christmas Eve, I was approached by a wild-eyed stranger asking me to sit on his lap on the train. And in the meantime, we close our coats around us, holding ourselves tighter against the wind.
Crime and home. There will always be a certain sadness for the home that reared us and the home that wronged us in the very beginning. For this, we keep packing up our stuff and moving to the next place that will have us.
~~~
Other Links:
If Eminem was Jamaican
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