child, I think. She moves with an athletic grace and economy. Jamila chatters incessantly and makes friends easily. A blithe, fey quality attracts people to her. Already she’s aware of the seductive power of her enormous, curly eyelashes, the deep, brown pools of her eyes. She’s remarkably sophisticated in conversation, in her capacity to listen and concentrate on what other people are saying. She grasps abstract ideas quickly, intuitively. Her early flirtation with death has without a doubt stamped her personality. She’s curious about graveyards. Keeps track of them when we make trips. When we go to the beach, Mom, there’s three. Like her brother, Jake, whom she resembles in skin tone and features, she possesses the gift of feeling. One of her good friends, Vass, resides in the Laramie cemetery. Jamila picked up this buddy by reading his name on a large headstone visible from the road and greets him cheerily whenever we drive past the clutter of tombstones abutting the fence on Fifteenth Street.
Jamila, tell me about going to see Robby. What do you remember about going to visit him?
Usually when we go there, when we go there . . . the visiting place . . . he eats an apple. And he wears braids. Or sometimes he would . . . got that? . . . get Doritos instead.
Yes, I got that, smartass. I’ll write it down. You just try to remember what you think when we visit.
Looks like Stevie Wonder.
What else?
I remember him being sort of happy . . . happy to see us.
Why sort of?
Well, because he was sort of happy to see us and not happy he was in jail.
Anything else?
I think about him getting out of cage.
Should they let him out?
Yes. Because he wants to see people and be around other people and have life outside of him and jail.
Do you remember anything he said?
It’s nice to see you. I remember Robby saying that. And the activity place. Crayons and stuff. Telling the names of characters up on the wall.
Do you talk to people about Robby?
No. It’s sort of like a secret. It’s a secret because other people . . . why would they be interested in it, because they don’t see him and they don’t know him and it’s not none of their business.
Would you talk to anyone about him?
Maybe one of my special friends like Jens. He would know what I’m talking about. Even though he’s the youngest of all of us in Open School. I know Jens would understand more than anybody else because he would understand more. Like if I told Claire she would just say, Oh. She wouldn’t know what I was talking about, but Jens he would tell me a different story and I would know he would understand.
Anything else you can remember?
One time when we went there and we were finding out we couldn’t see him that day, I heard him call and say come back another time.
Why’s he in jail?
So that he doesn’t go out and do the same thing again. They’re keeping him there till they think that he won’t do the same thing again.
When everybody’s finally ready and in, I back the Volvo station wagon down the steep, cobblestone street to the intersection of Tokay and Seagirt. There I can turn around, ease the wagon’s rear end into Seagirt, point us toward Bennett Street, and we’re on our way. Backing down Tokay can be a real trick at busy traffic times of day. It’s a chore anytime, fighting the high, broken curb, the blind corners where cars from Seagirt and Bricelyn pop into Tokay. Cars come at you shuddering down the hill, cars behind your back gun their engines for a running start up Tokay. In Homewood you still get points for laying rubber, for flying full blast down the precipitous, potholed slopes of streets like Tokay and Seagirt. People enjoy tearing up big, shiny cars. But early in the morning, at the hour we shoot for when we visit you in prison, the streets are relatively quiet.
Down Tokay, left on Bennett, seven blocks over to Braddock till it crosses Penn Avenue, and Homewood’s behind us. That quick. That little snatch of Bennett, then Braddock till it crosses Penn carry us past the heart of the ghetto. Or where the heart once was. Since 1860 black people have lived in a pocket of streets, dirt paths before they were paved, between Homewood Avenue and Dunfermline Street. Kelly, Hamilton, Tioga, Cassina, Susquehanna, Finance—Braddock Avenue touches them all before passing under a concrete bridge that launches trains into the sky of Homewood. The railroad tracks linking this bridge on Braddock with the one over Homewood Avenue separate Homewood from the once predominantly white neighborhoods along its southern edge. When we lived on Finance Street those tracks marked one border of my world. Across Finance the pavement ended. A steep, weed-covered embankment rose to the railroad tracks. Before you were born, my sleep was couched in the rhythm of trains. Some nights I’d lie awake waiting for the crash of steel wheels, for the iron fist to grab me and shake me, for the long, echoing silence afterward to carry me away. Homewood was a valley between the thunder of the tracks and the quiet hills to the east, hills like Bruston, up whose flanks narrow streets meandered or, like Tokay, shot straight to the sky.
Homewood’s always been the wrong side of the tracks from the perspective of its white neighbors south of Penn Avenue. On the wrong side of the tracks—under the tracks, if the truth be told—in a deep hollow between Penn and the abrupt rise of Bruston Hill. When we leave for the prison the five minutes we spend negotiating an edge of this valley seem to take forever. Traffic lights on every corner attempt to slow down people for whom driving is not so much a means of moving from one place to another as a display of aggression, fearlessness, and style. When you drive an automobile in Homewood you commit yourself to a serious game of chicken. On narrow, two-way streets like Finance you automatically whip down the center, claiming it, daring anyone to buck your play. Inside your car with WAMO cooking on the radio, you are lord and master and anyplace your tires kiss becomes your domain. Jesus have mercy on the chump who doesn’t get out your way.
The trip to visit you in prison begins with me behind the wheel, backing down Tokay then trying to run a string of green lights to get us quickly out of Homewood. No matter how skillfully I cheat on yellow, one or two red lights catch us and that’s part of the reason it seems to take so long to cover a short distance. But being stalled by a red light does not slow us down as much as the weight of the Homewood streets in my imagination. The streets had been my stomping ground, my briar patch. The place I’d fled from with all my might, the place always snatching me back.
Memories of the streets are dense, impacted. Threads of guilt bind each tapestry of associations. Guilt bright red as the black blood sealed beneath Homewood’s sidewalks. Someone had stripped Homewood bare, mounted it, and ridden it till it collapsed and lay dying, sprawled beneath the rider, who still spurred it and bounced up and down and screamed, Giddyup. I knew someone had done that to Homewood, to its people, to me. The evidence plain as day through the windshield of my car: an atrocious crime had been committed and I had witnessed it, continued to witness it during those short visits home each summer or for the Christmas holidays, yet I did nothing about what I saw. Not the crime, not the damage that had been wrought. I knew too much but most of the time counted myself lucky because I had escaped and wasn’t required to act on what I knew. Today, this morning on the way to visit you in Western Penitentiary, the rape of Homewood was being consummated, was flourishing in broad daylight, and nobody, including me, was uttering a mumbling word.
A need to go slowly, to register each detail of violated terrain competes with an urge to get the hell out before some doped-up fool without insurance or a pot to piss in comes barreling out of a side street and totals my new Volvo wagon. Cords at the back of my neck ache. Street names trigger flashbacks. Uncle Ote’s laughing voice, the blue-flowered china bowl in my grandmother’s closet, Aunt Geraldine sneaking me a hot sausage smothered in peppers and onions from DiLeo’s late on Saturday night, hiding in the stiff weeds on the hillside, riding on Big Melvin’s shoulders. Melvin was a giant and twenty years old but played with us kids and was dumber than a stone and died under the wheels of a bread truck because he was too dumb to cross Tioga Street.