note books

The big man who lives next door is called Stanley. He stands six foot six tall and weighs more than three hundred. He looks like a retired wrestler. He walks on the balls of his feet, light and smooth like Jackie Gleeson used to dance.  Stanley lives with his wife Dona and his grandchildren. Nathaniel is a mixed race boy and Alisa is growing up fast becoming a woman. Their mother is there sometimes but she lives across town with her latest boyfriend. Stan and Dona  tend her children because it’s better that way since their daughter has some issues. When they first moved in I was a little shocked because they were not our kind of people at all. It seemed like they’d dropped in from some hillbilly community or maybe a trailer park. They were loud and always had a cigarette in their mouth and the German Shepherd was usually on a chain out back; sometimes cowboy music played on the radio and Stanley was frequently under a car fixing something or other. Once he strung a heav...

Sometimes I see Arni as a kind of living shrine. She is 92, close to the age my mother died. My mother left when I was three and I only saw her once again much later. When I look at Jamaican Arni I know I am looking at a woman who has spent almost a century in this world and I replace her wrinkled black face with that of my mother’s. They traveled  the long road of life separately at the same time. Arni is from Jamaica and Bibsi her daughter  brought her to Brooklyn thirty years ago and now they live together in this fifth floor rent controlled apartment around the corner from Underhill Avenue, in a stately brick apartment building in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Bibsi was a good daughter and though we all knew her as Bibsi, her real name was Mrs. Eunice Montgomery. Of course that was not her real name for like most Caribbean black people, she was the descendants of slaves and somewhere forgotten in the dim past was her African  family name. She had a little business on the ...