What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

that he felt about her kept him up late and woke him early. When he felt desperate, he sent her Sun Ra and the Chicago Art Ensemble. When he felt certain, he sent her Cecil Taylor and Miles Davis. He wished he could play some instrument himself. Then he would go to her door and blow, like Anthony Braxton, all of the mathematical calculations of his love. More often he felt the sense of failed genius or felt simply failed, like his musician friend from the market. But even failure drove him on, as it had Clifford. So perhaps, he thought, if it really came to that, he would go to her door and play the air between them on an imaginary instrument, play the rays of the sun through the smog or the cold air, just like that Varo painting Tuyen had shown them, and then Jackie would recognize his love.

At home the sparring between him and Fitz subsided into a seething quiet in the mornings. Fitz wasn’t the type to remain quiet long, but Fitz’s voice, querulous and grumbling, receded against Oku’s preoccupation with Jackie. When his parents talked to him at breakfast, they seemed far away. He heard them, but didn’t hear them. He dropped his usual “Yeah, Pop” into the conversations, and they both noticed that he did it at inappropriate intervals. It irritated Fitz, who became more incensed at Oku after several mornings of inattention to his dominance at the breakfast table.

One morning in June, through the webbing of his daydreams of Jackie, Oku heard Fitz.

“Me no know, Claire, but me never see no report card come here. Me pay my money. Me put nuff energy in this here boy. Is a man he is, Claire. Me don’t like minding big man and no return ’pan it.”

Oku was about to interject with “Yeah, Pop” when the meaning reached him. A fury crept up his neck.

“Report card? Who’re you talking about?”

“You! Who else there ’bout?”

“Man, chill. You’re tripping. You must be out of your mind. I’m a grown man. Report card! I don’t have to answer to you!”

His mother felt the temperature of the room rise. She said nothing.

“Who you have to answer to then? Who put food on this table? Claire, you hearing this?” Fitz appealed to Claire as if he felt slightly off balance. She didn’t respond.

“Your bullshit is tired, man. You should pay us for listening to you crap all over the world every morning. Jesus Christ! Listen, I don’t owe you shit, all right?”

“Watch your language in front of your mother, boy.”

Oku burst out laughing at this, so sweet a laugh that his mother couldn’t help the muscles of her face jerking into a smile, her shoulders perilously close to collapsing in mirth. Fitz was the last one to talk about foul language. He looked at them both in shock. He rose with a wounded look and left the house, brushing Claire away as she followed him to the door.

“Mom, don’t worry,” Oku said when she returned. “I’ll move out. I have to anyway.”

“What about the university, then?”

“I’ll go back next year,” he said, acknowledging that he had not fooled her. “Promise. Just have to get my head together this summer. I’ll get a job and figure stuff out …”

“Don’t leave until you’re ready. You know Fitzy doesn’t mean anything by it.”

“He does, Mom. He’s so bitter, man. Jeez, he’s toxic. He’s always like pissed, you know. He should want better for me. But he just wants to drown me in that. I don’t want to live like that.”

“Well, I can’t tell you different. Only he didn’t start out like that.”

“You always forgive him.”

“He’s not a bad man. He doesn’t mean half of what he says. He’s not the only one like that. Striving makes you bitter.” She was thinking of all their friends. People just like them. Perfectionists, really. People who could not look at something beautiful without finding fault. There had to be something not so good lurking behind every smooth surface. If they worked hard for something and got it, it was not good enough. People who took nothing for granted. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t strive, mind you. I’m not saying you shouldn’t look for better. But understand, your father was only trying to do good for us.”

“No, he wasn’t. You worked too. You made this too, but he acts like a tyrant because … because he can. Jeez, I’m fed up. I’m not taking no stuff from him no more.”

“Well, as you say, it’s not him you have to please. It’s yourself. We can’t want things for you. You have to want them. So …”

“I’ll figure something out. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.” He reassured her as much as himself. He didn’t know where this feeling of evenness had come from. There had been a shift in his anxieties. He examined the new feeling now, turning it over, hoping it was going to last.

Around lunch he left the house, going … going where? he asked himself. Filling his day was suddenly no longer secretive. He’d sweated all winter over a confrontation with his father about the university and there it was. Simple. He felt relieved. He felt oddly self-conscious now that he wasn’t hiding from Fitz. He didn’t check to see if his mother was going out to the market today. He had nothing to do and he was embarrassed. All his actions so far had been against Fitz, against what Fitz represented, and now he was free and it felt strange. At least free of the pressure from Fitz. Free enough to take Fitz’s Buick sitting in the garage and drive up to Eglinton. He parked outside the barbershop and got out.

A couple of men had been in an intense conversation on the sidewalk. One of them addressed Oku.

“Hey, poet, what you saying, star?”

“Chilling, you know, man. What’s up with you?”

“Poet, brethren, tell me this. I’m trying to tell this man that communism could never work on this earth.”

“Why?”

“Because man