"Adale" [Excerpt from Blue Talk and Love]

         by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

              Clusters of church women moved down Broadway in low, clinking heels, past the police barricades and heaps of renovation lumber that lined some of the blocks. At the corners, they gathered, piling into town car cabs on their way to Sunday service.  Dominique recognized some of the women in one group from her mother’s church. She paused and gave a dutiful smile as she approached, just as the women piled into a maroon Lincoln. One woman in a plush fur coat rolled down the back window and stuck her hand out into the air in front of the new GNC Nutrition Store.

            “Hey, baby!” Her lips were painted a bright, festive red. She gave Dominique a wide smile from the cavern of the cab.

            “Hi.” Dominique smiled benignly again and rested her hand on her belly. She couldn’t remember the woman’s name, and she was sure the woman didn’t remember hers, but it didn’t matter. She was a woman from the church, Dominique was Mrs. Potter’s daughter, and that was that. This easy anonymity was comforting. “How you doin’ this mornin’?”

            “Fine, sugar, don’t pay to complain.” The woman smiled and pointed to Dominique’s stomach. “When you due?”

            “Three-and-a-half weeks.” Now a real smile spread on Dominique’s face, her skin warming in the cold. “Hopefully she’ll be a Valentine’s baby.”

            “Well, God bless you!” The cab began to roll forward. “Tell your mother I said happy New Year! Tell her make sure she call me fore y’all go upstate. My sister’s up there—Ella, you remember, used to work at the World Trade. She been up there a year now. Say the quiet gets to her, but leas’ she can pay the rent easy. Told me she taken to gardening. Turnips, of all the things.” She sighed. “Anyway, tell your mama we’ll miss her. This place is changing faster than I-don’t-know what. But I wish y’all the best. Specially that little one!” She pointed to Dominique’s belly again. Then she gave a final smile and the window screeched up into its groove as the car sped ahead.

            Cold air smacking her teeth, Dominique thought of Adale, and of the place she would think have to think of as home when the family left Harlem. She imagined her baby girl born into a buildingless place of cars and malls and dark trees whose bushy green tops crowded the sky. There would be no music on the streets, no subways or corner stores. What there would be was a thick sun like in the commercials. There would be mud, grass, her and her family out there, somewhere, in a short two-bedroom house, but with heat, the rent paid, more and better food to eat. It could be alright for Adale to grow up someplace like that, Dominique practiced telling herself. She closed her eyes and tried to believe it, feeling the baby kick.

Blue Talk and Love is now available on Amazon. 

"Wolfpack" [Excerpt from Blue Talk and Love]

by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

This is a story that matters, so listen. I’ma tell it. I am in the courthouse, a big, old, wooden room, counting the last seconds of my freedom as they tick away .

“Sticks and stones may break my bones,” the judge says in our sentencing. He tells us that’s what we should have thought when the man threatened to rape us, came at us on the street. “Sticks and stones” was the command that should have traveled like blood from our brains to our bodies. Not DUCK, not BLOCK, not PROTECT YOURSELF, YOUR GIRL. As though “I’ll fuck you straight” was just a pack of words.

“Words don’t justify hurting a human being” he says.

I wonder if either of them will ever know how hard it is to think human, to behuman, when someone is threatening to knock, force, fuck the you out of you.

I will be nineteen tomorrow. The next time I am able to run through a sprinkler on my mother’s street, kiss my girlfriend in a quiet room, make myself a turkey sandwich, dance or sing with no one watching, I will be thirty. I will never remember a bloody knife in my hand. No one will ever have to prove it was there.

Blue Talk and Love is now available on Amazon. 

"Snow Fight" [Excerpt from Blue Talk and Love]

by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
 

This old white nigga starts talking and everybody on the train shuts up real tight for a second. Then they start screaming, “Eeeeeh! Eeeeeeh!” cheering like on the basketball court watching Pito and Slimminy try to murder each other one-on-one, or when Sonjra and Ana-Rosario skipped Mr. Dominic’s math class to go snatch clothes from on two-fifth and rocked their new Baby Phat jeans straight through eighth period, still with the plastic lock tags on. They ain’t even hear what he said, and I’m not gonna front—I didn’t really hear it either, it was so loud. I was just surprised to see him put down his newspaper and open his mouth, and even more surprised to see the snow fall out.

I always wondered what one of those random old white niggas on the train would do if you touched them or winked at them, rubbed your ass up on them one time when it was crowded or something. I thought maybe they would turn pink and start sweating and pull on they necktie like that old video for “Baby Got Back”—Sir Mix-a-Lot, I think—when the white dude sees the black girl with the phatty and it hits him too close, closer than white people like to go.

Me, I sit with my homegirl Patricia and she teaches me words in Spanish. When Chris and them act up she tells me they acting mad “bobo,” and when Scaprioni starts sweating like the white dude in the video, his face shining like a ham hock, she says “Que parece cerdo.” I laugh, ‘cause my homegirl is funny, and ‘cause I like how things she say in Spanish be so close to what I think in English. I don’t know, shit like that is just funny to me.

Blue Talk and Love is now available on Amazon.