We Are A Haunting

by Tyriek White

Genres: Ghost; African American; African American Historical; Gothic

Synopsis

"What a beautiful, haunting and hued narrative of American living. I’m in love with this story and the way Tyriek White breathes life into these characters." —Jacqueline Woodson, MacArthur Fellow and author of Another Brooklyn

 

A poignant debut for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Jamel Brinkley, We Are a Haunting follows three generations of a working class family and their inherited ghosts: a story of hope and transformation.

 

In 1980’s Brooklyn, Key is enchanted with her world, glowing with her dreams. A charming and tender doula serving the Black women of her East New York neighborhood, she lives, like her mother, among the departed and learns to speak to and for them. Her untimely death leaves behind her mother Audrey, who is on the verge of losing the public housing apartment they once shared. Colly, Key’s grieving son, soon learns that he too has inherited this sacred gift and begins to slip into the liminal space between the living and the dead on his journey to self-realization.

 

In the present, an expulsion from school forces Colly across town where, feeling increasingly detached and disenchanted with the condition of his community, he begins to realize that he must, ultimately, be accountable to the place he is from. After college, having forged an understanding of friendship, kinship, community, and how to foster love in places where it seems impossible, Colly returns to East New York to work toward addressing structural neglect and the crumbling blocks of New York City public housing he was born to; discovering a collective path forward from the wreckages of the past. A supernatural family saga, a searing social critique, and a lyrical and potent account of displaced lives, We Are a Haunting unravels the threads connecting the past, present, and future, and depicts the palpable, breathing essence of the neglected corridors of a pulsing city with pathos and poise.

Release date: April 25, 2023

Publisher: Astra House

Print pages: 272

Sample

 

PROLOGUE

One day, I fell backward into a scar in the world, a fall sudden and lasting. A portal took me whole, sent me traveling across a pulse that could split me down the middle. I tumbled out the other side, a terrible moaning like a hive of meat bees.

I had been pedaling down the block on an unkempt length of road on Flatlands, barreling ahead, ripping along twisted storefronts and storage lots. The smell of hot metal filled the air, lodged itself at the back of my tongue and burned as I tried to catch my breath. I had reached the Belt Parkway and the creek widened, blooming into the bay and into the Atlantic, the dark basin, murky with trash and wildlife, boats twinkling in the distance. The water emptied into a reservoir where it was drained and then treated. There were heating and waste stations, chimneys that gagged out heavy smoke and stray embers into the clouds over the land. A bridge reached over the harbor, kept Far Rockaway at bay, the lights from ferries and small boats parting the darkness. In the distance, I saw the shape of Boulevard through the fog, apartments stacked atop one another, our city in the clouds, embassies of time, crashing dimensions and histories, the cursed, the lost, the all-seeing. No different from Ingersoll Houses, or Marcus Garvey, or Tilden; Chelsea, or Pink Houses, or Brevoort; Farragut, or Walt Whitman Houses, or Baisley Park. No different from Saint Nicholas, or Queensbridge, or Mott Haven.

You died without telling me what it was like to be in two places, without designation, without home, no matter how hard you try to make one for yourself.

When I reach out for you, tipping over, into a slippage of time. I feel my body grow open, my hand wrapped in another. This is Nana, blood rushing to her fingers, her hands the color of pink salt. We are in the doorjamb of a temporary house. I see a shoal of folk near the center of a settlement farther down, along the gray water. I follow the sound. A dirt path like a welt stretching toward the sea. I slip through the cattails and the buttonbushes, under the river birches and needles of the bald cypress. The smell stays with me, on my hands and in my hair. The smoke above the huts on the beach carried spiced meats and greens. Through the bramble, the band of sweet pepperbush, I see the shore open up, the ocean flat. Cloudy. The person standing in front of me didn’t look like anyone I knew but felt like you. A ways down the beach I heard a crowd; the smell of fresh meats and spices from an open market. High tide sounds like a stampede. My feet are sinking into the loam, the wet paste of sand and dirt. I am barefoot in the duckweed. You see me, the same expression in my dreams, a sad smile.

“Oh, baby, when did it hurt so bad?” you ask. Not why does it hurt, or where does it hurt, but when? I feel like all the times, the time before me, an ache that was precolonial, a Paleolithic expanse of sorrow. You are Cybele carved in Anatolian stone.

“You were just gone one morning,” I tell you. “And I know it sounds like I blame you but I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Are love and sacrifice not dark synonyms for one another?”

I turn away, take a few steps up the beach. When all felt lost, being seen through your grief, really seen, was all that mattered. What if, I always thought, if I never met you, never felt you gone because you weren’t there in the first place. In my mind, it was like being without something from birth—sight or a limb—and how it compared to having the thing, losing it, then living the rest of a life without it. Inevitably, the thing dries and crumbles like sand and one is forced to dream away the incessant drum of missing, make themselves anew. When you died, Pop told me I’d only think of life in two phases: life with you and life without you. Said when he lost his own mother, folk could only see him as an unfinished body, what was sundered, removed. Never how he created a new whole, had to reimagine what those parts left could amount to. After he’d finished his stories, I would try to drift to sleep without thinking about the old him, the sawed-through flesh and muscle, the hacking of bone, the dark blood that painted the emergency room. I tried to imagine anything else besides the yellows and browns his body leaked, the pus, the clotting of fluid, a cursive written on his skin and across smocks and sinking through sheets. If I never knew you, perhaps I’d still be who I was before you died. I would never do the hard work of looking beyond myself to see others suffering along with me, that the world and the human condition were threaded around the work of community, our care for one another. I feel my gut stir when I look back at you—remorse. I want you to know the new ways I could love, which I had learned for better or for worse.

“Here,” you say, easing me into the current. A cool wind from the ocean had pelted sand into my hair. It stung my eyes, made me shiver down to my toes. There was a hole in the night sky, where it all goes in the end, some giant we’ve mistaken for sun or light. I have this strange feeling of culmination, what could be made of all those histories, an infinite process—hilltop city of seven waters. “I’ll tell you everything.”

BEFORE YOU LEAVE (2008)

There are mostly women in housing court. It’s not like men don’t get put out—she had put Virgil out years ago, in the middle of night, and that was her husband. This was just who was left. When a home is emptied out, usually the men take what they can and the women are left to put it all back together again. They were old and young, exhausted, often bounced around buildings, across plazas, directed to addresses across town. You need to go here for a copy of your voucher. The main housing office can verify your proof of address. This form needs to be notarized. Women who worked all kinds of hours to keep a roof over somebody head. Women like Momma, Audrey thought, who would’ve spent a lifetime in waiting rooms, behind counters or glass windows, filling out paperwork—all to keep it together.

The central air nipped at the tender parts of her arms, the pinch of flesh above the elbow. The judge listened to the statements her landlord made. Audrey was sixty-three and fed up with it all: the ring cycle, the taxing of spirit, the cost of forms, subway fare. There was a young woman Audrey kept seeing at the main desk asking questions. She was a nurse at Methodist; Audrey knew because she was still in her scrubs. The woman explained how she had walked from Ingersoll Houses, down the stretch of Myrtle to Jay Street, to get here. Now she had to walk to Atlantic, all the way across the park, to get to work. Audrey asked what she was here for.

“My brother did something stupid,” the woman said, almost through closed eyelids. “Now they can evict me and my son ’cause my name is on the lease.”

Audrey couldn’t afford an attorney, but her cousin, Gloria, had a son who just passed the bar and worked as a public advocate at a nonprofit. Demetrius was a nervous boy, with hands like saucers that seemed too large for his wiry frame. He kept adjusting his cuffs when he spoke to the judge. “Social Security hasn’t increased her benefits in years, and with medication, cost of living . . .”

“It’s still not up to your client to make that decision,” the judge said, which Audrey found peculiar.

She hadn’t paid last month’s due, nor had she cared to the month before. Not even the month before that. She continued writing her checks for her rent-controlled apartment, all for the same amount as she had before the last increase. The landlord wouldn’t even call somebody about the ceiling or the stuff that came up out of the drains every so often, but he asked for extra dollars more each month. In that regard, yes, she was guilty.

When they filed out of the courtroom, Demetrius turned to her to apologize.

“It’s all right, baby,” Audrey said, and shrugged. “What can you do?”

“If I can get them to give us another day,” he said, holding open the door for her.

The sun was hardly over the other side of the East River, laboring over the skyline, peeking through the alleys and streets. She waved the young man away and caught the subway back down to Flatbush, flipping through the New York Post.

Audrey got off at her stop and walked toward her building. There were women her age gathered by the corner, dressed in polished leather flats and church hats, Watchtower pamphlets in hand. The ladies who ran the tenant association sat outside on the sidewalk, gossiping in beach chairs. Their husbands played dominos out front the bodegas or tuned their cars up in their driveways. They would be out there until dusk, drinking cold beer across from the park.

When Audrey finally closed the door behind her, she dropped her bags and removed her clothes. Turned the kettle on. Let the silence wash over her, looking out the window as light strained through the blinds. Shadows moved across the apartment walls. She watched them flutter, looked along her shelf—the glass figurines, the decorative plaques from the senior center, wood-sculpted ornaments, picture frames of her grandbabies Satoia and Colly pouting at her, the ceramic succulents, the actual succulents planted in small clay pots.

Audrey had the impulse to call her her granddaughter the night before. Key had been gone a year or so. Now she looked down at her from a family portrait done at a shop at the Albee Square mall, those precious babies on either side of their mother in their Sunday clothes. Behind them was Dante, the husband, with those heavy eyes of his.

Where are you going to go? she asked Virgil. He sat in an armchair across the room, grunting at something only he could see.

Are you going to stay here?

Still no answer. He didn’t say much when he was alive either.

• • •

THE JUNE HEAT set the day in its lap and wrapped the city in its arms as proof. Audrey pulled a weed from the soft soil of the small garden and wondered whether the day had ever wanted room to grow. It sits all day and every day, the world in its lap, watching trees stretch toward its light. Audrey looked up, jealous of the day, wondering, Is it ever jealous of me?

As the sun hung over the trees, the mosquitoes would join, a song of blood. Audrey usually worked in the mornings, before the heat, planting green onion and cucumber. Today, she had to begin a little before noon. The soil was dark and rich between her fingers. The garden was a square plot behind her apartment building. When she had found it years ago, abandoned and littered with drug vials, soda cans, and other scraps, she had cleared the plot out and begun putting down a layer of topsoil. She then began working her tiny piece of land, despite her bad knees and lower back that flared up if she bent too long.

Audrey gathered some of what she had been growing. Sweet blueberries, tomatoes across from mustard greens, leeks, and a couple peaches from a slender tree. Being close to the soil cooled her skin under the noon sun. It took her mind away from the fact that it would be gone soon. Her home wouldn’t belong to her anymore, as if it ever had.

When she was a young girl, she would spend every summer on her grandfather’s farm. She hated it. It was the fifties, and Audrey was more interested in going to the cotillions, the debutante balls, drinking tea with fancy Southern women who offered their homes for plantation tours—than toiling over farmwork. She watched a carrot seed grow and milled around, doing a bunch of yard work when she’d rather just clean the house. You’ll thank me later, her father would say. He showed her how to plant the seeds, in rows along the furrows they made, measuring how deep into the earth, how far apart. His big hands kneaded hers into the cool, damp soil. She was more interested in the movie theater that offered tickets for ten cents, the diner so crowded at midnight that folk spilled out onto its back porch, the boys who were wide as the trees that lined her grandfather’s property.

Back then every boy in North Carolina had a car and no reasonable curfew. They spoke slowly, more to her body’s cadence. Not like Georgia boys or Mississippi boys, too fast with mouths full of rocks or gold. Virgil was no different, talking to her as sweet and slow as growing molasses. He was sun-dried and tall, blocking the sunrays from her eyes when she looked up at him. He was just a boy then, genuine, but with something unquenchable behind his eyes. He drove his car too fast and came home when the sun was just above the hills. Audrey hoped to beat the morning, before the dew set over the land like a spirit, before her grandfather—old as all hell—rolled out of bed to check the farm.

The sun climbing higher and higher, her grandfather would ride into town on the back of his wagon, tumbling among the canvas bags stuffed with the potatoes he’d harvested. He had been a sharecropper as a young man, on the same plantation he had worked as a boy. He always told the story of how he got the farm, how a slave ended up with a few acres for some crops and a mule. Her father forced them to sit around and listen, sprawled across the carpet of Grandpa’s den, warming their hands around mugs of lemon juice and honey in boiled water. At the end of one of those summers, as the sun rose later and later, one morning the carrot was fully bloomed. She stared in wonder, this orange stump with roots disappearing into the soil. It was the brightest thing she had ever seen.

Audrey looked up now, sweating, surrounded by fruit flies. Across the street were building fronts, lopsided and too close to one another, packed along the sidewalk like crooked teeth. Nina Simone’s live interpretation of “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” played from her stereo, a cheap wireless speaker shoved into the soil, tucked somewhere between the greens and peaches. Key had bought it for her one Christmas, tired of her mother’s complaining about cheap earbuds. Above her hung a billboard advertising an old discount at Jack’s World from years ago. Car horns blared over the distant buzz of construction and busy halal carts. Her joints throbbed, her knees heavy with water.

• • •

"RENT CONTROLLED?" JOYCE EXCLAIMED, from behind the smoke of a cigarette. Her blood was hot and streaked her butterscotch skin, even in the winter. Despite the wrinkles around her eyes, she still looked like a little girl with two missing teeth and ponytail braids. “I’d give anything to hear you say that back in Warren County.”

They sat at the kitchen table of Joyce’s apartment on the eleventh floor, hollering over the running water and sirens below. The windows were wide open because she was cooking at least three pounds of pork shoulder for a baby shower. She catered; Joyce and her son would show up with a dozen aluminum pans, wire chafers, and some Sterno cans. She even made coquito in the winter and sold it around the neighborhood. “What poor Spanish woman did you scam out of her recipe?” Audrey would tease.

Joyce got up and moved to the stove. Joyce had worn her sureness in her shoulders since she was young, ambling through the world with an ease that may well have been just pure luck. Even though Audrey had looked after her when they were girls, she had always felt Joyce didn’t need much of anyone. Audrey had always been jealous of that, she herself an awkward thing tumbling through life, bumping its edges like finding your way through a dark room. It was like everyone else had the light on.

“Where do you even go after forty years?” Audrey asked no one. Her sister put the top back on some collards.

“Maybe we should put you in a home?”

“If you don’t quit it,” said Audrey.

“You know I’ll put you up,” Joyce said through a grin. “It’ll be like when we used to sleep in the cellar during them hurricane warnings.”

“And Momma would let us eat all the sweets we could bring down there.”

They laughed, Audrey leaning back before rubbing her knees. Joyce checked the oven once more.

“Don’t nobody owe you anything,” Joyce was saying. “And you don’t owe nobody. If you were to up and leave, no one would complain.”

It was simple enough—she could just up and leave. It was so simple, it seemed foolish not to. But people mistake being poor for complacency. Audrey knew she couldn’t afford to stay. Even so, she could raise the money. She could go to her church; the pastor was happy raising impromptu offerings for members in need. They could have a fish fry and raffle, Audrey thought, invite the whole neighborhood. She imagined Joyce with some obscene amount of whiting, hands caked in flour and seasoning. Key, with her kids hanging at her hip, would serve folks who’d wandered by from the smell, the line snaking halfway down the block. When Audrey thought about it, her face grew hot with tears. If she did raise money from other poor people, she wouldn’t give it to some landlord. She had worked all her life in Brooklyn and deserved not to be kicked out of her own city. Deserved not be taken advantage of for the rest of her life. Normal people didn’t have to transcend their surroundings. Maybe something else was wrong and there was a reason women like her found themselves in courtrooms, in shelters, or on the streets, or dead. Why should she have to transcend a goddamn thing?

• • •

AUDREY WAS IN love with Virgil around the summer of 1969, when she had seen him one morning on her way to work. It was a new city, not on fire anymore but still full of smoke. The uprisings had changed the city—not toward a solution for the certain death Black folk felt around them, to which they responded with fire, but toward something maybe worse. The glass and debris would be cleaned from the streets. Virgil had moved north a few years ago—to make a real living, he’d told her. That’s just what folk did back then. He worked at the navy yard and smelled of seashell and burning metal. He lived with his wife and kid in a lopsided walk-up in Bushwick. He’d come by almost every weekend for Audrey, something she waited for all week. She had grown to be of this place, looked like she belonged in New York like subway tokens and Anthora cups. Big hair, gold hoops, and long, knee-length coats. She’d run out when he’d pulled up to her apartment, soca blasting out the windows of his white ’68 Corona. Joyce, who lived with her for a while, would kiss her cheek, waving from the front steps as the van pulled off.

Audrey had a studio in Flatbush, above a fish restaurant that left the room heavy and damp from the steam below. Sometimes she’d invite him up. Virgil told her his dreams, how he wanted to tour with a band through a dozen cities. He had his eye on this Fender bass guitar. It had caught his eye through a shopwindow on his way to the docks.

“What about the yard? Ain’t you say you might get moved up to the main building?”

“I thought so, too,” he said, looking down at her wiry hands. “New shift leader. I could’ve stayed down south if I wanted to be somebody’s boy.”

His hair coiled, snapping at the teeth of her comb as she ran it through, black like the shell of a beetle gathering food in the moonlight. Bringing his face up to hers, she saw in his eyes what she’d already felt—an almost painful desire to be washed in some kind of infinite. She slept with him in the middle of her apartment, seeing only the lines of his skin under a silver half-moon and halogen street lamps.

Virgil reminded Audrey of Warren, the back of her grandfather’s wagon, the cool balm of morning before the day would break open and sunlight would heat the fields. Virgil had been brought to her because he ran errands with traders in town. Really, it was his eyes, Audrey thought—reflective pools that led down the same endless path she’d grown familiar with. “My mother always said if you were dropped into a well,” Virgil would tell her, “you don’t find your way out by looking down.” They spent that whole summer together, making their way through the city and everything it could offer. The matinees for less than a dollar on Tuesday mornings, sitting under the cherry blossoms in Prospect Park, getting pink sepals in the tight curls of their hair. ...