Jamel Brinkley, Graywolf Press, 2018
She constantly reread books from her high school English classes, and invited folks over to listen to the same old Miles and Billie records. These made up the entire soundtrack of her existence. I always recommended volumes of poetry and novels, offering to let her borrow my own copies, but she always refused. “I’m fine with these,” she said once, pointing down at her modest bookcase. “Just these. I’m happy getting to know them better.” She told me libraries made her nervous in college. “Huge buildings with all those books, all those writers and their opinions and worlds. I used to think I’d be wasting my opportunity if I didn’t try to read as many of those books as I could, but it’s too much, too hard to wrap your heart around. They look so graceful lined up on the shelves, not messing with each other, so neat. It’s nicer that way.
“Look at you, queen!”
He liked to call black women “queens”. I obsessed over this and constantly shouted complaints in my mind. In our attempts to love them, why did our women have to be queens? If we were kings and queens, then who were our subjects? It was impossible for every one of us to be royalty.
“So, homegirl at the store,” I said, just to say something. “She’s a real trip.”
“A queen,” he said.
“One of your old pieces?”
Micah looked at me like I was deranged. “What? She’s an elder, blood. She’s got kids my age. Keeps herself looking right, but that woman’s gotta be sixty years old.”
Even her body lies, I thought. But it didn’t feel like a lie, or not merely that, and this new feeling colored the way I had seen them hugging earlier. To so wholly throw yourself into fabrication, into falseness, stretching yourself into a different shape. People like that must have a constant need to be held.
The t-shirt I was wearing had the words MORE JUJU across the chest, declaring on behalf of its wearer powers that were African, magical, and sexual. Below this, two huge reddish spark plugs glowed. I was wearing it only because I needed to wash my clothes, but now I felt as though I’d been walking around all day making fraudulent claims.
Part of entering the world of capoeira angola is a constant training in vigilance, and not just during the actual playing of the game. Feints and trickery are generalized into a capoeira player’s worldview such that they are revealed to be an unavoidable part of the texture of life itself. I realize now how strange it is to exist otherwise, especially in a big city, and I marvel at people rushing, rushing, headlong into things, how full of trust they are, how they can’t see what often lurks behind the floating vapor of a smile. But isn’t the family the first arena of such knowledge? Isn’t it family that, in so many ways, determines our approach to life’s deceptions?
the Books that Bind 