LITMIR.BIZ

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gin fan and tossed into the Tallahatchie River to punish him, his cousin’s story claims, for wolf-whistling a white woman.

      The tape plays on and I listen for the Till train’s entry into the station. Listening as I still listen some Sunday mornings for the scratchy music from my mother’s cracked black plastic radio tuned to WAMO at the end of the dial. My fair-skinned mother humming along as she spray-starches and irons one of my brown-skinned father’s white shirts for church. White shirts with collars and breasts ironed stiff, my father wears under his waiter’s jacket six days a week downtown in a dining room in Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh, a restaurant that used to be barred by a gold rope across the entrance, by a hostess notoriously uncordial towards colored folk who dared to eat there. Louis Till must have owned a white shirt. My father’s white shirt for church Sunday morning was more perfectly white and gleaming than the perfect ones worn to work every weekday and Saturday. My father’s hardness and absence crackled in those white shirts he demanded be kept spotless, wrinkle-free. In a room rented after he left us for good, gospel plays on a radio while he removes a laundered white shirt from its cellophane wrapper. He turns his back to me to put it on. When he’s facing me again, I watch his thick, dark fingers button the shirt, tremble to work gold-rimmed cuff links into tiny holes.

      Even as a boy fourteen years old, Emmett Till’s age when Emmett Till was murdered, I understood my father hated those white shirts. Hated them and loved them, too. I also understood, boy or not, I was a large enough boy to get my ass out of bed and help my mother the night I heard a terrible crash in our living room. I knew my parents were fighting, but instead of rushing to save my mother, I lay petrified, pretending to sleep, afraid of a white shirt glowing in the darkness of the adjoining room. I held my breath, waited for my mother’s footsteps to prove she was alive and had managed to pick herself up from the floor.

      My father had been waiting for my mother. I knew this without spying on him. How could I sleep while my father sits out there waiting for my mother, waiting with the lights off in the other room, not a sound for hour after hour except music playing in my head and the snoring of my siblings. Rakhim in bed beside me was the worst. On good nights the other kids’ restlessness and nasty noises were quieted by sounds of my mother busy in the kitchen, scrubbing dirty pots, rinsing, drying, stacking dishes. The rasp of a crooked cupboard door that never shuts first try. The last thing every evening she runs water for a cool drink then washes her cup and puts it away for coffee next morning. Same cup she uses all day so she doesn’t make extra work. Plate, knife, fork and spoon set out for my father each night he’s not home for dinner so he knows there’s food in the fridge to warm up if he hasn’t eaten on the job or smuggled home fancy leftovers from late night private parties he works. Last final thing, she switches off the kitchen light, and the yellow bar under our bedroom door dims.

      Some nights I keep listening after my mother leaves the kitchen, crosses the living room, into the hall. Listen past the point she’s probably asleep in the tiny room squeezed into a corner of a landing at the top of stairs that go down to the Lemingtons’ apartment. My parents’ room is a room far enough away to muffle their whispers, their preparations for sleep on those rare nights they go to bed together. Though certain nights, I think I hear the blue crackle of a white shirt as my father pulls it off, or hear my mother alone in their bedroom humming gospel like she hums when she’s up very late waiting for my father to come home and he doesn’t, and she hums herself to sleep curled on the couch. Always gone when I jump up first thing next morning to check.

      No matter how long I listen, sooner or later my vigil fails. I drop off and lose her. Worst nights, lying awake beside my youngest brother Rakhim, I worry and worry that everything I love and hate will be gone in the morning and never return. I listen long after my mother finishes her last little things, turns off the kitchen light and the bright inch under the door is replaced by faint illumination leaking in from a lamp by the front door she always leaves on for my father. I wonder if my mother’s sleeping or not in the bedroom, more closet than room, where she’s supposed to be. Wonder if she’s full of worries about my father. My siblings. Me.

      The night of the terrible crash came right after three days and nights my father never made it home. Not home late as usual. Not home early or late. Not ever. No father for three days. No warnings in the morning from my mother to the younger kids, Shhhh. Hush all that noise, youall. Shush and eat your cereal. You know your father’s sleeping. You know you better not wake up your father. No father’s snores when I pass the bedroom landing on my way to school.

      On the bad night my father returns early. Nine, ten o’clock. Very early for him, anyway, and he knocks softly then fumbles in his deep pockets for keys to let himself in. My mother’s out. Very late for her. A rare night she’s not home, and good boy me has performed his duties, bedded down the other kids at the exact hour, in the precise fashion, almost, my mother commanded. Don’t be mean to your little brothers and sister. Firm but nice with them. And don’t you dare sit up waiting for me like you think you’re my mother. Soon enough I’ll be sitting up all night worrying because you think you’re grown enough to run the streets till dawn, she said. But I couldn’t help staying awake.

      Music’s playing in my head, fast and slow, rhythms change, words change, Rakhim’s wheezing snores mixed in, blues mixed with gospel, mixed with R & B, the Dells and Diablos, Drifters and Spaniels and Midnighters singing my songs on WAMO. Love music mixed with worry music mixed with dance music mixed with desire and fear of things I didn’t know the names of yet. Worried maybe I never would. Worried it all might vanish.

      No light brightens the crack below the door. My father snapped it off when he came in and discovered my mother not at home. After three days gone, I’d begun to believe he’d left for good, but then I hear his key in the lock and he’s back home that night before my mother. Mother late. Father early. Strange turnabout. Me faking sleep. I wasn’t spying on my father, but I could hear his breathing, heartbeats, pounding of his thoughts, his big hands gripping his knees. I could hear his stillness in the overstuffed armchair everybody called Daddy’s Chair. His impatience and anger fill the silence with unthinkable acts, unspeakable words, hard and heavy as fists.

      I pretended not to know why I was scared, though if I had tried, I could have said why. I was old enough to understand nearly everything. It was all in the music. In the talk in Henderson’s Barbershop. Woman who’s a wife and mother got no damned business out in the street, don’t care whatever goddamned sister you say you with, no goddamned business out in the street this goddamn time of night. Did I hear those particular words that night or are they blues words, gospel words, barbershop words dreamed, heard before the fact or after the fact of my mother’s body striking the floor, a sound that would have awakened me even if I’d been asleep as far away as the place old thunder and lightning, fire and brimstone Reverend Felder of Homewood AME Zion promised God would pitch bad black boys.

      The singer’s daughter tells her brother she overheard one of the church young folk ask: Willie Mae Ford Smith. Who that? Then Say Amen, Somebody’s camera retreats for a long shot to frame the once-upon-a-time gospel queen’s children within the airplane hangar immensity of an empty steel shell with steel girders holding up a steel groined, vaulted ceiling, the section of a Chicago train station they reached by driving earlier in the video down a ramp at whose entrance light blazed in a checkerboard pattern from overhead grates, shafts of smoking brilliance pouring into the obscurity below, obscurity only slightly relieved here, inside the station, by illumination from begrimed panels in a ceiling miles away it seems from where the brother and sister stand now after they have parked underground, exited outdoors, then entered the station. They instinctively huddle closer together as they talk in whispers, as any two people or small group of persons likely would talk in a gloomy space that dwarfs them, dwarfs their voices whether they speak softly or shout. Big-boned, wide-hipped, large brown people whispering small things, simple, deep things, a call-and-response of reminiscence, holding on, letting go until there is no bottom, no sides, no ceiling to the station, no secrets, no down or up or come or go.

      I pause the tape. Is it the Twelfth Street Station. What does it remember. Is a train station able to gaze at itself, revive the past, double it, a double as quiet as the face, the moving lips of my reflection within a mirror. Quiet as silences within

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