I, Zombie

Jeffery could still feel that original wound, but he no longer limped. He walked just as unsteadily on both legs. And what control he could exert over where they took him seemed to come from resignation. That’s how he could somewhat operate his body. The less he struggled, the more say he had in where he went. He could steer by thinking about a place, by leaning into the walls of his own self—not aggressively, that didn’t work—but just a gradual lean, like guiding a bowling ball after it had already left his hand. It reminded Jeffery of the Buddhists he’d read about, their fascination with water, how it flowed to fill any vessel, how it moved around a pier rather than put up a fight and try and bash through it.

It was one of his dad’s books, a ratty paperback passed to him on the stoop, a book he’d never finished. His old man was always bringing him worn books with chipped edges and broken spines that smelled of wet rope and low tide. He said he read them while the ferry was waiting on passengers. Jeffery never asked where his father got the books, always assumed he stole them from those racks of dollar paperbacks crazy white bookstore owners left on the sidewalk like a temptation. He tended to assume the worst about his old man. It was hard not to, growing up in a nest with his momma’s hate—all those vile thoughts regurgitated and forced down Jeffery’s open beak.

Most of the books his father gave him went in the trash. He would try and read them, try and sell them, but they rarely took to him or were taken up by others. The only book his old man ever gave him that he read cover to cover was the one on sculpture. It was a guilty pleasure, that book. Not sure what the draw was, and Jeffery had never told anyone about it. His father had brought it one day to show Jeffery where he worked. There was a picture of two sculptures by the water, two towers. The Pylons, the book called them. They sat on the edge of the Hudson right there at the World Trade Center where his father’s boat docked six times a day.

“A black man made these,” his father had said.

The picture showed the two sculptures looking out over the river toward Jersey, a big clock on the other side that his father said all the men in suits could see clear across the Hudson so they could manage their time, clock in and clock out, cinch up or loosen their ties.

“This is where we been,” his old man had said, tapping one of the towers. It was a blocky structure, the corners sharp and built of heavy stone. It had sections, like the body of an insect, six or seven of them. They got more squat toward the bottom, all of them pointing down into the earth. It was the saddest thing Jeffery had ever seen, this coming before he’d seen war. Something about the heavy weight of those sections, crushing each other, made it the most heartbreaking of sights.

It looked like the sculpture was being driven into the earth, the sections on top weighing the others down, the ones on the bottom squashed and flattened. And maybe those towers could represent anything a person wanted to see, but Jeffery saw what his old man saw. This was their race captured by a brother sculptor; this was the generations piling up on those that came before. Once you saw it like that, it was impossible to see anything else.

“And this is us dreamin’,” his father said, running his finger across the neighboring tower. “This is hope.”

If the stone sculpture made Jeffery frown without knowing why, if it made his gut sink, this one made him suck in his breath. It was a sculpture crafted of air. A wire frame, twisting and weaving, pointing up like smoke rising toward the sky. It was a sister’s braids. It was a dozen long-fingered hands interlocked with glory, the blue sky caught between their palms. It was the flutter above a choir as those voices and arms and those gaping sleeves raised up and lost themselves in their own song.

A black man had made these, his father had told him. This was where he worked.

That chapter was about a man named Martin. Here were these two towers, sadness and joy, hope and resignation, side by side. It was a father on a stoop, back bent, the years driving him toward his grave. It was a son with a thrust chest and lifted chin, full of dreams and news of enlistment. It was a boy signing up for a thing he didn’t know, vigor in his limbs, hopes and wishes of becoming a man in other men’s eyes. It was a sculpture of the before and after, of that man returning home, cast out of a war he understood even less having looked it in its eyes, his belly a knot of scars from where they’d pulled out bits of Hummer, shoved him back together, sewn him up.