Hours later, Temperance is leading a “Mommyhood: The Christian Way” workshop for unwed mothers. She takes deep breaths, still trying to channel her mother’s certitude that this child was meant to be, ordained. The mothers around her are lollipop young, mainly from the projects, and chockablock with children. She can almost look at them now and not hurt. Before, her ovaries would ache just to be in this room with so many women who seemed to get pregnant if you so much as blew on them. Shanice begat Shanice Jr. begat Lativia begat LaRenée begat Jamelia begat Jameka. Begat, begetting, begotten.

Temperance had shared these thorny thoughts with Andrew once—confession, allegedly good for the soul and all. She had whispered that night, but her grievances somehow echoed in the cloistered silence of their bedroom. Why, Andrew, why? Why would God bless them and not her? Hadn’t she done everything right, everything expected? Waited to get her JD, her MRS. Why was she still waiting on her happily ever after? Andrew knuckled tears from her cheeks, his eyes filled with such tender disappointment, as he reminded her she was better than that, a woman of God—above such pretty, elitist notions. She bowed her head then. She listened as he prayed.

But sometimes, Lord. Sometimes.

He kept her in bed for days at a time. Sweating out her blowout. Edges and toes curling again and again. In moments between, she would lie along the stalk of him. Tracing twin scars along the hollow of his side. Battle wounds, he’d answered to questions unspoken. Ear to chest. Hairs tickling her cheek. His voice a grumbling lullaby telling tales of ancestors: of kings, of queens from Africa past. He claimed them by birthright. No genealogy sites traced his DNA across the diaspora. Yet by his estimate, he was descended from Sheba and Sundiata, from Makeda and Menelik. He joked about his credentials—a Morehouse, Princeton, and Harvard alum. Bread-and-buttered on the stoops of Bed-Stuy, where your street cred—the only pedigree that truly mattered—was measured by number of shots survived, by who and how many feared you.

He was cocky. Completely at ease in his skin and his identity. It was seductive as fuck. Head on his chest, Jennifer sometimes bit down on his nipple till she drew blood: craving him, suckling in that knowing ease for herself. She, the child of a timid mother, ever grateful for kitchen scraps. One of two Black girls in Scarsdale elementary class portraits, backdropped against classmates with skin the color of flash paper, burning memories of her away. Her mother had stayed mute on the subject of their culture. What did she know of her heritage? Her brilliant ancestry. No matter how many boardroom doors Jennifer walked through, sometimes she felt her steps falter—in the Ghanaian beauty shop, at Awing tribal meetings, she felt like a counterfeit African, felt the unworthiness of the maid’s child tiptoeing through the servants entrance, lightly, quietly, like she was walking on cowrie shells.

College tests you. There are Swahili 101 electives, classmates in Bantu knots, and kumbaya African Student Union meetings, monthly. Yes! Yet certain lessons are trying. A media studies class schools you on symbolic annihilation—the omission, the mis- or underrepresentation of whole peoples in book leaves, in film reels. And you remember your skin is the color of redaction. You remember confusion as old elementary school “friends” poke you online. Who are they? Their names are never next to yours in class photos, in yearbooks. Were you friends? Where is the evidence, the proof of life? Hives punch through your skin like pissy ellipses. Scratch them raw till a patient school therapist explains that this is how a body purges upset. No matter how long suppressed.

Try and try to forget. Your memory had always been fuzzy, tending toward breaks in the transmission, bald spots of time you had jokingly dubbed “selective amnesia.” But still moments remain. You, itty-bitty—all nappy plaits and teddy bear eyes. A soft one you were. Keen on gold stars. Undone by scolding. When you made mistakes—as children are wont to do—there were inconsolable fits of despair. Your worried mother gifted you a children’s book on self-esteem whose pages held a mirror. She bid you look. Singsonging of all the ways in which you were wonderful. You are smart. You are beautiful. You are worthy. You are kind. Your agile young mind struggled to absorb those images, so at odds with those of books and television, of schoolmates and teachers alike. The mirrored book grasped tight in your trusting hands. Look again, child. Mama told you. Look. But you were gumdrop young: tender-headed and tenderhearted. You turned from your likeness.   

“YOU COME WITH ME NOW,” Uma madam says one day, after breakfast. She has come prepared. A male guard comes forward and grabs my arm. 

“Where?” I say, wrenching free. He lets go. “Stop it! I need to talk to Gobind about the appeals.” 

“You walk or he will drag you,” says Uma madam in reply. 

Back in my cell, I gather my sleeping mat, my other salwar kameez, slip my feet into the rubber slippers, then look around for anything else that is mine. Nothing is.

Uma madam pulls my dupatta off my neck. When I grab at it, she clicks her tongue. “What use is modesty for you anymore?” she says. 

We walk down the corridor, the three of us, and a few women look up from inside their cells. The corridor is so dim they are no more than movement, shapes, smells, a belch. Perhaps sensing my fear, Uma madam finds it in her heart to explain. “You can’t have a dupatta in this place where you are going. Not allowed. What if you decide to hang yourself, what then? It has happened before.” After a pause, she says, “Nobody’s coming to see you, don’t worry about looking nice.” 

Uma madam unlocks a door at the far end of the corridor, which opens onto a staircase I have never seen. Though the day is dry and sunny, there is a puddle of water on the top step.
 
“Go down,” she says. 

When I don’t move, she insists, “Go! Don’t look so afraid, we don’t keep tigers down there.” 

I climb down, my slippers slapping the steps.

Sunday morning! Time to go to acting class. With my hips swinging like this and like that, I am walking past the guava seller.

“Brother,” I am calling, “what’s the time?” 

“Eight thirty,” he is grumbling, because he is not wishing to share with me the fruits of his wristwatch. Leave him. I am abandoning my stylish walk and running like a horse to the local railway station. On the train, while I am touching my chest and forehead, saying a prayer for those poor people who were dying a few days ago at this very station— 

“Who is pushing?” one aunty is shouting. “Stop it!” 

“This hijra couldn’t find a different compartment to hassle?” the peanut seller is hissing, as if I am not having ears. 

Nothing is simple for a person like me, not even one hour on the train. My chest is a man’s chest, and my breasts are made of rags. So what? Find me another woman in this whole city as truly woman as me.

In the middle of this crowd a legless beggar is coming down the corridor, sitting on a wheeled plank of wood which he is rolling on everybody’s feet. 

“Give me one coin,” he is whining. 

People are yelling at him. 

“Now you need to pass?” 

“No eyes or what?” 

“Where will I stand, on your head?” 

Now he is also shouting back, “Let me cut off your legs, then you see how you manage!”

It is true to god making me laugh and laugh. This is why I am liking the local trains. You can be burning one train, but you cannot be stopping our will to go to work, to class, to family if we have them. Every local train is like a film. On the train, I am observing faces, body movements, voices, fights. This is how people like me are learning. When this train is swaying, picking up speed, wind whipping my hair, I am putting my fingertips on the ceiling, making my body straight and tall for Mr. Debnath’s acting class.

AT HOME, AFTER DINNER, PT Sir sits back in his chair, gravy-wet fingers resting atop his plate, and tells his wife, “Strange thing happened today. Are you listening?”

 His wife is thin and short, her hair plaited such that it needs no rubber band at its taper. When she looks at him from her chair, it appears she has forgiven him for the forgotten tomatoes. 

Something has happened at the school, she thinks. A man teaching physical training to a group of girls, all of whom are growing breasts, their bellies cramping during menstruation, their skirts stained now and then. A bad situation is bound to arise.

“What happened?” she says fearfully. 

“There was a Jana Kalyan rally in the field behind the station,” he begins, “then one man climbed on a car—understand? Climbed on top of a car—and took out. . .Tell me what he took out!”

 “How will I know?” she says. When she bites into a milk sweet, white crumbs fall on her plate. “Gun, or what?” 

“Dagger!” he says, disappointed. The truth is always modest. He goes on, “But Katie Banerjee was there—” 

“Katie Banerjee!” 

“Then Bimala Pal also was there. Say what you like about her, she is a good orator. And she was saying some correct things, you know. Her speech was good.” 

His wife’s face sours. She pushes back her chair and its legs scrape the floor. “Speech sheech,” she says. “She is pandering to all these unemployed men. This is why our country is not going anywhere.” 

“They are feeding a lot of people with discounted rice,” he says. “And they are going to connect two hundred villages, two hundred, to the electricity grid in two years—” 

“You,” says his wife, “believe everything.” 

Mano’s job at the water treatment plant was easy and relentlessly boring—most days she wondered why they kept a receptionist at all. The water treatment facility was spared the public wrath of, say, the utilities department, where citizens regularly marched themselves down in person to shout about their bills. Nobody came to the water treatment office. People rarely called. She sipped the coffee while watching a few trout glide behind the glass of the tank that took up half the wall opposite her desk. Trout did better in the river’s upper sections, where the water was colder, but they could be found in the river down here as well, and Lloyd insisted on having a few in the office tank. Recently, the city had cut the budget for the tank service contractor, and she and Keith had both been pretending they didn’t notice how filthy things were getting in there. 

One way Mano passed the time was to spend hours, on-the-clock, with her oil pastels, working to capture the rosy blush of trout gills, the way the red stripe along the side of the greenbacks faded in and out, almost woven through the deep green-brown skin, the way the rainbows kept a consistent blush that practically glowed. She’d named every rainbow trout in the tank Stevie Nicks, while the greenback cutthroats were all Lindsey Buckinghams. The tank, full of river water, was meant to display the health of the ecosystem, but it also served as an early warning system. If something was killing fish in the river, it killed the fish in the tank, too. 

“Watch it, Jerry,” Smith said. “I stay here long enough, I’ll find those birds. This is an illegal chicken facility you’re running. New rules say you build them a special shed or you don’t raise them up anymore. It’s for their own good. For the good of everybody. Can’t be too careful with this bird flu thing.”

“Jesus, Smith,” I said. “Next you’ll come tell me that you have to lock all the people up inside sheds. For their own good. To keep safe. Is that what you want?” I know my history; I believe the government is capable of that, maybe even eager. The worst part of it, I think, would be the vicious establishment of the human pecking order inside the shed itself. 

Smith stared at me for a long time then, but he only shrugged, and he didn’t find the birds.

“You better get these weeds taken care of, Grace,” Smith said as he got in his truck, waving at my corral. That corral is a mess of puncture vine and Russian thistle since they took the water, with purple loosestrife blooms infesting the edges of my old irrigation ditch. “You know I have to report them.”

“Spray them yourself if you want,” I said. “The government is the only invasive weed I worry about these days.”

I worried for a while after Smith drove off, a plume of red dirt rising off the road behind him, about calling the government an invasive weed. They say we still have free speech, but it’s hard to tell for real anymore. 

Behind the playground, the proposed fracking site sits dark under starlight and gilded crescent moon. There are no fences or gates surrounding it. A single bulldozer sits lonely on the empty lot. She is a little afraid, but her backbone, sturdy and expansive, a tree trunk of mud and twigs, ice and granite, had widened with new rings. The machine’s cap opens just as the website said it would, and she pours both gallons of bleach into the oil reservoir. 

Sister does not know whether her efforts will ultimately charge anything at all, but for this moment, her joints have stopped aching. When the pain returns, suddenly, she closes her eyes. She imagines her doubt and her fear encapsulated by her pain. She imagines holding all of it in the palm of her hand, white-hot, imagines placing it humbly on an altar.

Please accept this offering, she prays. Turns out she can’t, after all these years, give God the silent treatment. She believes that He has seen her, that He always sees her, even when He doesn’t respond. 

Sister returns to the candle glow of the vestibule off the main sanctuary. She does not know whether to expect a blessing or a punishment. The silence sits still in the chapel air, breaks into particulates, clings like incense smoke. At dawn, there is a mini-Mardi Gras moment when sunlight streams through the strained-glass windows and lights the hard wooden pews with flecks of purple, gold, green. This beauty is neither miracle nor God’s voice. Sister sees this beauty every day, like the sunrise, no matter how she behaves.

   We had dozens of books. My father never bought us toys, and he always claimed that he was too broke to buy us new clothes, but somehow we each received at least three new books each month. Most of our books were nonfiction - short biographies, children’s encyclopedias, textbooks - because Dad was convinced that novels were for entertainment purposes only, and he always told us that we would have time for entertainment when we were old enough to make our own decisions. So Tayo and I would huddle in a single bed, his or mine, with a biography about George Washington, or a book about the invention of the telephone, and each of us would read a page and hand the flashlight over. 
  We eventually grew tired of these books, though, so we began to make up our own stories. Actually, Tayo made them up. Even though Tayo was younger than me, even though he looked up to me and followed me in every other part of our lives, he was a much better storyteller than I was. He was almost as good as Mom. 
     He always began: 
     “Once upon a time . . .”
 

   The following morning Dad woke us up with his good-morning song, and when we reached the garage we saw an old, thin, beat-up mattress on the floor. 
    “Put it in the back of the truck,” he said. “That’s where you guys will relax between your shifts.” 
     We placed the mattress where he told us, right up against the freezer, and we brought along a couple pillows so the bed would be even more comfortable. As we were reclining on it Dad appeared and stared at us. 
    “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Tayo, Femi, and I looked at each other, and then we looked around. Dad shook his head slowly. 
   “What about your books? What do you think this is? A time to rest? If you aren’t working then you’re reading! Go bring your books!” 
     We ran back inside and brought out a couple of books and placed them on the mattress. Dad surveyed the titles and shook his head again. 
     “Bring more. I expect each of you to finish one book each day.” 
     We brought more books and piled them high against the freezer. Dad nodded, then he settled in the driver’s seat and started the engine.

     I saw the long line as I approached the other truck, and I had to apologize many times because a few people thought I was trying to cut in front of them. I knocked on the back of the truck and Tayo opened it for me, and then he rushed back to Freddy with a package of ice cream in his hand. Ade was playing with a ball on the bed, and he giggled at me when I waved. I asked Tayo if they had any extra boxes of snow cones or Fudgsicles, and he shook his head. 
     I sprinted back and told Dad the news, and he dispatched Mom to the house to pick up more ice cream. We were already out of a few items by the time she returned, and a great cheer rose up as she walked through the crowd, carrying boxes of ice cream above her head. 
    I placed my hand on my father’s shoulder and he turned around and smiled at me. His smile was wide and wondrous. Suddenly I wanted to hug him and tell him it would always be like this. I wanted to tell him that he would always be a star.
 

What is the difference between beautiful girls and ordinary ones? My face was symmetrical. I’d taken Accutane. I wore the right things. None of it made a difference next to Tarryn. She had a shimmer about her, a light that I could never fully understand. I couldn’t even make eye contact with her. It was like staring at the headlights of a car on a dark road. Later, in my sorority, and even later at my job, I’d meet other women like her and wonder how they were made.
 

Mothers are strange women, with their round faces always turned down to their children à la sunflowers too fat with the weight of their own heads. Pre-me, my mother was an interesting person. She wore a bikini and drove a boxy green Barbie-ish convertible. Now she’s my mother and she says standard-issue banalities about any event (grocery store shopping, nephew’s baptism, lunch at Rita’s), such as, Oh, what a riot! and We had a lot of laughs! In a dark moment in high school I asked her why we were all alive. What was the point, etc. She said, Oh, Margot, if you think about it too much it loses all the shine. Then she laughed like she was at a banquet and I’d just told her a joke about a priest in a bar.

I never dreamed that I’d suddenly be adrift in the world as a civilian and not a sister. All of those long hours of carefully curated approval, the insane litany of songs during rush, the perfection of the head tilted just so at cameras, the sluggish dinner talks about what was on TV then and what would be on TV later and who had notes to Intro to Linguistics, all of that fraudulent cultivation of superficial friendship, gone. There had been so much potential to have people to love.