Let me describe the house, because I think you'll feel better if you can see where I'm going to be shouted at.
It sits at the very end of Highway Road, past the last streetlamp, past the bus stop with the broken roof, past a small shop that sells nothing but bread and opinions. It is a one-storey building with a rusty gate, a crooked porch and a yard where grass grows only in the places you do not want it. There is a master bedroom, which belongs to my parents. There is a second room for my brother Derrick and me. There is a third, just big enough for a bed and a bookshelf, which belongs to my sister Jesse. There is a fourth, which we call the guest room, and which has never held a guest, because nobody has ever come to visit.
It is a good house, really. It is clean. The roof doesn't leak. A stranger would say, what a nice, quiet home.
A stranger would not hear it breathe.
* * *
I stopped at the gate.
I always stop at the gate. I do it the way some people stop at the edge of cold water, with one foot lifted, thinking surely there is a better way in. My heart does an odd little jump, and my stomach, which never gets scared of anything, suddenly remembers it has a conscience.
I call it the Gate of Hell. Not out loud. But in my head it has a sign.
WELCOME. PLEASE LEAVE YOUR HOPES WITH THE SECURITY GUARD. (THERE IS NO SECURITY GUARD.)
I was reading it again when I heard a voice from inside the yard.
It was a woman's voice, loud and sharp and delighted with its own indignation, like a cockerel that has just found a grievance. And there is only one voice in County A that sounds exactly like that.
"...I am only saying it for your own good, Mrs. Jackson!"
Mammy Ansah.
I groaned very softly, and cleaned my shirt with my hand, which achieved nothing, and tried to push my hair into some kind of shape. It had set itself into a stiff little twirl, like a stick of dried noodles. I patted it. It sprang back. I patted it again, and it gave me the look of a small, insulted animal.
Now, I must tell you about Mammy Ansah.
She lives two houses down. She is large, loud and wears her wrapper tied so tightly that it seems to be holding her opinions in. Her husband works abroad and sends money, and her son James is the biggest boy in my class, and she has therefore decided that she is the Moral Authority of Highway Road. She calls me a jinx. She calls me a pest. She once called me, to a priest, a "demon in short trousers."
The only thing I have ever done to her is exist at a distance of less than two houses.
I crept to the gate and peeked through the gap.
* * *
She was on our porch. My mother was standing in the doorway, arms folded, her head slightly bowed, in the patient attitude of a woman who has been told the same thing nine times.
"Why can't you just disown that boy?" Mammy Ansah was saying. She had a hand pressed to her chest as if the idea gave her pain. "I am telling you, Mrs. Jackson, as a friend. The earlier the better. Before he drags all of us into trouble."
"Mammy Ansah," said my mother, quietly. "This is my house."
"I'm not trying to—"
"Please mind your language."
I caught my breath. My mother does not speak like that. She is a small, soft-voiced woman, with a gentle face and a way of tucking her hair behind her ear when she is nervous. In all my twelve years, I have never heard her tell a neighbour what to do.
But she said it now. And she said it in a voice I had not heard before, level and calm, like a very deep well.
"So what if my son is a jinx?" she said. "I believe that one day he will be somebody great."
I stood very still behind the gate.
Somebody great.
I have a particular way of hearing words I am not used to. They arrive and sit in my head like guests who have knocked on the wrong door. I tried the sentence out, privately, with my mouth shut. Somebody great. It didn't fit. It was far too clean. It would not have gone with my clothes.
And then Mammy Ansah laughed.
She did not just chuckle. She threw her head back and let it out in the open air, a large, rolling, brassy laugh that must have been heard at the bus stop. "Somebody great! Oh, Mrs. Jackson! You must stop. That boy cannot even be my servant! He can't carry a bucket without losing the water!"
I took a step back. I wanted very much to go away. I wanted to go and find a small hole in the ground and live in it.
But my foot hit a stone.
It rattled. It was only a small stone. But in the stillness after Mammy Ansah's laugh, it sounded like a gong.
Everyone turned.
* * *
"Ah!" cried Mammy Ansah, pointing. She was delighted. "Here he is! Here comes your great son!"
I opened the gate. It made the horrible noise it always makes, a rusty groan like a goat getting up from a nap. I stepped inside with my head down and my hands together, the posture of a boy walking into a courtroom without a lawyer.
I could feel my mother's eyes on me. They were not angry. That surprised me. They were something much more complicated, a kind of tired, wincing, protective ache. She looked at my clothes, my face, my hair. I saw her lips press together.
Don't say anything, I thought. Please don't say anything to her. Please don't make it worse.
But there was a second look in my mother's face as well. It flickered across her eyes as quickly as a bird. I would have missed it if I had blinked.
It was pride.
I had no idea why. I was a filthy boy with mud in his eyebrows, and a ripped shirt, and nothing in his pockets but an empty biscuit wrapper. But she looked at me, just for a moment, as though I were a tall, clean, shining person in a good coat.
Then she turned her head toward Mammy Ansah. And the look changed.
It became a different look entirely. It said, as clearly as if she had spoken: Your visit has ended.
"Mammy Ansah," said my mother.
"It looks," said Mammy Ansah, stiffly, "as if you don't want to discipline him in front of me."
"Please."
"I only mean—"
"Please," said my mother, and pointed one hand, very politely, at the gate.
There was a moment of absolute stillness. A hen, somewhere in the yard, let out a small puzzled noise. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
Then Mammy Ansah lifted her chin, gathered her wrapper and swept down the porch steps with the stately outrage of a ship being forced to leave harbour. She passed me at the gate. She gave me a look that could have curdled milk.
"You," she said, "will come to a bad end."
"Good evening, Mammy Ansah," I said politely.
She almost tripped on the step.
* * *
When the gate had banged shut behind her, I let out my breath.
I want to tell you that I felt brave. That I felt happy, that I felt proud of my mother for what she had said. That is what a good son would have felt. But all I really felt was a sort of warm, wobbling dizziness, like a house settling after an earthquake. My knees did not feel quite like knees.
My mother walked slowly across the porch toward me.
Now, I knew what came next. I had been through it a hundred times. She would look me up and down. She would say, Where have you been? I would say, Nowhere. She would say, Don't lie to me. And then, because it was Monday, and because my father was in the house, and because the cane hung on the nail by the door, there would be a lecture, and then the cane, and then no supper.
I stood up straight. I kept my chin level. I put my hands behind my back so she would not see them shake.
She stopped in front of me.
For a long time, she said nothing at all.
Then she did something I did not expect. She reached out, slowly, and with the back of one finger she wiped a smear of mud from my cheek. It was only a small smear. It had been there since the park. It took her one stroke to remove it.
"You've got your father's eyes," she said, very quietly.
I blinked.
"I'm sorry?"
"Nothing." She dropped her hand. Her face closed, gently, like a shutter, and she was my mother again, tired and brisk, with a basin on her hip. "Go to the back. Wash. Leave those rags outside. And stay out of his way."
"Yes, Mum."
"JJ."
"Yes?"
She hesitated. She looked back at the house, at the dark window of the main bedroom, at the faint orange glow of a single lamp.
"Be careful tonight," she said. "Do not talk back. Do not try to be clever. Do not give him a reason."
"I never give him a reason."
"I know." Her voice almost broke. "That's what frightens me."
She went inside. The door closed softly.
I stood alone on the porch for a long time. Then I turned and, very slowly, because there was no other way, went round to the back of the house, looking for the washroom, the water and the only small corner of the world where I was allowed to be a person.