Now my mama is singing me to sleep, humming near my ear, Bless the child, and I’m waking as a man twenty-one years old, and I’m going to Walpole till I’m thirty. Sweet-faced Rita has scrubbed herself clean for the trial. She says it was all my idea and she was afraid, who wouldn’t be? Seven men see their own wives, their own daughters, and pray no man like me ever touches their pretty white things. They think they can put me away. They think locked doors and steel bars keep them safe. Five women see their own good selves and swear they’d never do what Rita did if not by force.

I want to tell them how different she can be, how she looks when she’s strung out, too jittery to talk, when her jaw goes so tight the tendons pop in her neck. I want to tell them how she begged me, Please Jimmy please, how she said it was so easy, her old neighborhood, her own people, habits she could predict, dogs she could calm. I want to ask them, Do black men drive your streets alone? I want to tell them, I was in the back, on the floor, covered by a blanket. She drove. She waited in the car, watching you, while I broke windows, emptied jewelry boxes, hunted furs.

Next thing I know I’m in prison and she’s on probation and Mama’s telling me, You got to stay alive. Ninety-two times she says it. Once a month for eight years, then one month she doesn’t show, and the next week Bernice comes, says Mama’s sick and aren’t I ashamed. Then Mama comes again, three more times, but she’s looking yellowish, not her high yellow but some new dirty yellow that even fills her eyes. She’s not losing her weight but it’s slipping down around her in strange ways, hanging heavy and low, so when she walks toward me, she looks like a woman dragging her own body. My baby. That’s all she says. But I know the rest. Then Bernice is there again, shaking her head, telling me one more time how Mama gave up her life to give us a decent chance and she’s got reason to be proud — little Leroy a schoolteacher, Bernice a nurse. I mean to remind her, You feed mashed-up peas to old ladies with no teeth. You slip bedpans under wrinkled white asses. Wearing a uniform don’t make you no nurse, Bernice. But I just say, Lucky for Mama the two of you turned out so fine. I grin but Bernice isn’t smiling; Bernice is crossing her big arms over her big chest. I see her fall to her knees as if her body is folding under her. I see her face crumple as if she’s just been struck. And I’m not in prison. I’m free, but just barely, and I see my own dark hands in too-small white gloves, five other men like me, lifting the box and Mama in it, the light through stained glass glowing above us and that terrible wailing, the women crying but not Mama, the women singing as if they still believe in their all-merciful God, as if they’ve forgotten their sons: sacrificed, dead, in solitary, on the street, rotting in a jungle, needles in their arms, fans tied around their necks, as if they don’t look up at Jesus and say, What a waste.

I remembered my own small hands in the other white gloves; I thought my skin would stain them. I would never be washed clean. But I was, baptized and redeemed. The white robes swirled, dragged me down, blinded me, and I thought, I can’t swim, I’m going to die, and this is why my father wouldn’t come to church today — the preacher in black is letting me die, is holding my head under, he wants me to die, it’s necessary. I remember the stories my mother and I read, forbidden stories, our secret: cities crumbling, land scorched, plagues of frogs and gnats, plagues of boils and hail, seas and rivers turned to blood, and then, suddenly, I am rising and I am alive, spared by grace. The whole church trembles around me, women singing, telling Moses to let their people go, sweet low voices urging the children to wade in the water, but I know it’s too deep, too dark, and I wasn’t wading, I was drowning, but the voices are triumphant, the walls are tumbling down. Easter morning light blazes through colored glass; John baptizes Jesus above the water where we are baptized. I am shivering, cold, crying. Mama is sobbing too; I hear her voice above the others, but I know she’s happy. I know that Jesus is alive again just as I am alive, and I have never been this clean, and I am going to be good forever, and I am going to love Jesus who has saved me through his suffering, and I am going to forgive my father who has forsaken me. I am high and righteous and without doubt. I am ten years old.

These same women are still singing about that same damn river, like this time they’re really going to cross it, when everybody knows they’re stuck here just like me and not one of us can swim; the only river we see is thick as oil and just as black, so what’s the point of even trying when you’d be frozen stiff in two minutes and sinking like the bag of sticks and bones you are, and still they won’t stop swaying, as if they have no bones, as if the air is water and they are under it, and they are swimming, and they cannot be drowned, as if women have a way of breathing that men don’t. I’m choking. I look at Leroy to see if he’s drowning too, to see if he’s gasping, remembering Mama, our love for her, our guilt, but he’s not guilty, he’s a good clean boy, a teacher, clever little Leroy making numbers split in pieces, making them all come together right again. Nothing can be lost, he says, and he believes it. I say, Didn’t you ever want anything? And he looks at me like I’m talking shit, which I suppose I am, but I still wonder, Why didn’t you feel it, that buzz in your veins, the music playing; why didn’t you ever close your eyes and forget who it was Mama told you not to touch? Didn’t we have the same blind father? Didn’t you ever wonder where Mama got her gold eyes? Didn’t the rabbitman ever fly through your open window?

Twenty years now and I still want to ask my brother the same questions. Twenty years and I still want to tell our mama I’m sorry — but I know there are times sorry don’t mean a thing. I want to ask her, Do you blame me? And I want to ask her, Should I go out in the snow? I almost hear her answer, but I don’t go.

Digging graves, hauling garbage, snaking sewers — I’ve done every filthy job, and now, two years, something halfway decent, graveyard shift but no graves. It’s good work, steady, because there are always broken windows, busted doors. Fires burst glass; cars jump curbs; bullets tear through locks; police crack wood — always — so I don’t have to worry, and Mama would be proud.

I’m alone with it, boards and nails, the hammer pounding. I strike straight, hold the place in my mind, like Daddy said. It’s winter. My bare hands split at the knuckles, my bare hands bleed in the cold. Wind burns my ears, but I don’t mind. I don’t want anything — not money, not music, not a woman. I know how desires come, one hooked to the other, and I’m glad my heart is a fist, shattered on a prison wall, so I don’t have to think I might still play — because I can’t, and it’s not just the bones broken. But sometimes I hear the sound underneath the sound: it’s summer, it’s hot, the radios are blasting — brothers rapping, Spanish boys pleading, bad girls bitching — nobody knows a love song — then the gun goes off, far away, and I hear that too, and later, sirens wailing. There’s an argument downstairs, the Puerto Rican girl and her Anglo boyfriend, cursing in different languages. All those sounds are the song, pieces of it, but I’m listening for the one sound below it all, the one that pulls us down, the one that keeps us safe. Then I catch it: it’s the rain that’s stopped — it’s the cars passing on the wet street — it’s the soft hiss of tires through water, and it almost breaks me.

If I could find Rita now I’d tell her she was right: junk is better than jazz. It’s fast and it doesn’t hurt you the way the music does. It’s easy. It takes you and you don’t have to do anything. It holds you tighter than you’ve ever been held. You think it loves you. It knows where to lick and when to stop. When it hums in your veins, it says, Don’t worry, I’m with you now.