Thrust: A Novel

“You are going to meet my father. When you’re an older man, I mean. My mother told me. You’re going to meet me again too, only I’ll be younger, just a girl. I know, I know. Don’t be afraid or confused. My father and my baby brother and I — when you’re older, you’re going to take care of us for a little while, like I’m taking care of you now. I am carrying you through this grief so that you don’t die or become terrible. Your father is gone. My father will die too. Everyone goes back to the motherwaters eventually. Then becomes something else.”

Laisvė stayed for a month. When she told me she’d be leaving, I gave her my knife. An object to carry, to prove we were real.

—

The next time I saw Laisvė—the second time — she was a child, just like she’d told me. Her father was frantically looking for work and somewhere to stay. And I was an older man. There was a baby boy too, but that story took a very sad turn.

When I met Aster, I wasn’t entirely sure it was her. But I knew Aster was a man who needed help, like a boy who’d lost his parents. I could feel it radiating out of him. Turns out, he’d lost his whole heart. He was gutted, living a kind of ghost-life. From what I understood, his wife had drowned, and his boy would float away, and there is just no way for a body to bear that weight. I understood I should love him. I mean, for fuck’s sake, whatever love means.

Love isn’t what we’ve been told it is.

Time isn’t either.

What it amounts to is, I met that young woman, I met that girl, out of order. Stories don’t care how we tell them. Stories take any shape they want. Not all stories happen with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I’ve come to understand maybe they never do. End, that is.

I remembered something about my own mother when Laisvė left that first time. I remembered her saying to me, This is not the end of your story. It is the beginning.

Over the years, I always thought that Laisvė must have wanted a baby — that that’s why she came to me when I was twenty and she was a young woman. I even wondered if maybe she got pregnant when she was with me. But when I met her again as a child, I saw the error in that story. She didn’t want to have a baby.

I know because of something that happened when I met her again, when she was a girl. One morning, I was drinking coffee and Aster was showering and Laisvė was standing near the front window looking out at I don’t know what. I started wondering aloud about what she wanted to do, or be, when she grew up. “Someday you’ll fall in love,” I said. “Maybe start a family.” I don’t know why I said that. Maybe because of the piece of her future that I’d seen, or maybe just how her mess of black hair fell down her back and the way her shoulders squared off against the light from the window. She didn’t know what a beautiful young woman she would turn out to be.

She turned around and looked at me. “That right belongs to the planet, to plants and animals,” she said.

“What right?” I asked.

“The right to make a family. Species, genome, family…”

I’ll admit, I worried for her after that. I wasn’t sure of how she was in the head, of how she could possibly deal with it all. But when she came into my life with Aster, and I was an older man, I could not have loved them more. What else was there to do but love them? It was my turn to take care of something besides myself.

Ethnography 5

I started working at The Crisis in 1918. I worked under Jessie Redmon Fauset. What a time that was. The novels she would write changed my life. Her characters were Black working men and women — professionals. She was more than a mentor to me. So much more. She was a mirror I could use to see myself; she was a portal I could step through to something more. She wanted literature to split open so that more voices and stories and bodies could get through — forging a second passage as proud and profound artists. She birthed and nourished so many important voices: Langston Hughes. Countee Cullen. Claude McKay. Jean Toomer. Zora Neale Hurston. Arna Bontemps. Charles Chesnutt. Her younger half brother Arthur Fauset, the folklorist and activist.