By Danyel Smith

From the Prologue

Paige and I are sisters.

Everyone always says how close we are. Teachers, friends, the random relative. Grinning or turning their lips down or searching Mom’s gestures for meaning, that’s what they say: Paige and Pinch are so close.

They don’t know the half of it. They’ve no idea how hard we played — especially as little kids. Played like we knew just how ugly things could get.

Dashed and pedaled until we damn near popped.

Until we were sweaty and shades darker and almost in pain.

But we’re from Oakland. And Oakland builds quality. Folks who creep but don’t crawl. Melt down, but don’t vaporize. I move around — Oakland, anyway. So I know the Bay Area creates righteous people who deal with splendor and sting, sham and certainty, gray velvet fog and lemon–glass sunshine — all while just getting from Point A to Point B.

I know this because I can see. I watch. And this place — with its indigo–green jewel of a lake and its underdog nature and dead downtown and Southern Negro mores and shiny liberal whiteness and slow–motion port and fifty–cent tacos and fern–cloaked hills and baby tunnels and beckoning bridges and Victorian crack–houses and modern manors from which you can see San Francisco twinkling and Marin sleeping and after that straight to God’s cool pacific pond — it had to be Oakland that pasted Paige and I together. It would be Oakland that pulled us apart.

Life, though, had a lot to do with it. And death, too.

* * *

The year was 1989. April. I was twenty–two. Paige, twenty–four.

It had gotten to where my sister and I were living on opposite sides of the country. Maybe her husband had chosen New York City. Maybe New York was as far as either one of them could envision.

So I was flying on a Friday, to the end of my sister’s imagination. Not to get her, or even to try to talk sense to her. I was going to see Paige. It’s what she wanted, even if she didn’t realize it. To be seen. Maybe I wanted her to see me, too.

Had been about six months since she and her husband left Oakland. By the time I landed at JFK airport, she and he’d been split up for about twelve weeks. Their two–year marriage had already defied lots of ugliness, and until they went away, I thought the relationship might last ten or twelve years.

The ride from the airport was more of a thrill than the flight. New freeway and new hotels — new to me, anyway. Close rows of houses and then a freeway that ran along the ocean, or a river, and then blocks and blocks of tall buildings with small stores on the first floors. A billion yellow taxis and stunted childless parks and then what had to be the Lower East Side. It’s what my sister called her new neighborhood. Cab pulled up to the address, I got my bag from the trunk, and my head together to surprise Paige. It was cold. Cold as January back home. A fat man with a snug overcoat was coming out so I walked in without having to buzz. Walked up four flights of stairs and then knocked. Took a while before Paige opened the door.

‘Oh my God!’

Put my hands on my hips, smiled like ta–da!

‘Pinch you did not come all the way out here!’ Her eyes were dry, brown, and bright with fake life. She liked to say that eyes like hers were sold by the box and stuffed in otters’ heads at natural history museums.

‘I did I did!’

We spent ten minutes pulling in luggage, and she made me relate how, from the moment the thought came to my mind, I’d come to be where she was. Paige wanted details about who gave me money, the ride to San Francisco airport, and who knew I was traveling. I told her all while she sat across from me on a beanbag. Paige pressed her eyelids together and then started squeezing oil from the meaty part of her nose. Then she held a hand mirror to her face, checked her tongue for sores. There was nothing wrong with my sister. Not with her face, or her body, anyway.

Paige stayed in the weekend I was in New York, only left the grimy building Friday night to rummage the corner deli for tortellinis, bubbly water, honey, and the best of their second-rate lemons. She went to the sticky-floored store in nightclothes and a long coat, said to me on that Saturday morning that she’d moved to New York to get from California’s hard-core, winterless beauty, and to bravely walk through blowing snow.

I looked at her, and then looked out the window. Said, ‘What snow?’

Paige said she’d stopped looking for loveliness at Queens, on the way in from Kennedy. She hadn’t looked at anything except what shone or made a lot of noise. Things were old enough to scare her in New York. The freeways were called highways, and were cracked and laneless. I nodded in agreement when she said that people’s cars, no matter the color, were beaten, graying, and overworked. I picked up one of the books she had in a stack on the floor. A history of witches. Biography of Mary McLeod Bethune.

‘There’s no expectation of cleanliness here,’ she said. ‘The living is mean. And clannish.’

I could tell Paige didn’t want to learn the place. We sat up and watched CNN or the network, not the local news, didn’t glance at the local dailies still being delivered to her apartment in the last tenant’s name. Paige hadn’t memorized radio station call numbers, had yet to go out partying on the weekends at all.

* * *

When the pilot said we were over Illinois, all I saw were brown, tan and green squares of land. My first time outside of California. The furthest I’ve been from Oakland, ever.

I know Oakland is the best place in the world because I was raised there, went to school there, and because I’ve been, with my sister, on about a thousand field trips to Places of Interest around there. Paige was one to ask question after question of the tour guides, and she retains facts as long as they come in the form of a story in which the right people halfway triumph. I take in what the tour guides say, but I’ve always been more apt to remember what was going on during the field trip as opposed to the history of Alcatraz Island or Lake Merritt.

And just the fact that Oakland has Lake Merritt is almost enough. It’s a big, park–lined lake, right in the middle of town. Plus there are universities all around the Bay Area, so even when they aren’t, people seem smart and like they have some culture. In line at the post office, old Black Panthers tell stories about Huey and Eldridge and feeling like men. Not that Paige and I used to go, but people our age remember each other from Panther day care and free breakfasts. My mother does keep a photo of Bobby Seale holding me when I was fourteen months old — though lots of people in Oakland have photos like that. Mom says the Panthers gave the best parties.

People call our mother Gwen or Gigi, depending on whether they know her from work or from life. She was born in Oakland, went to high school, a year of trade school, then she had Paige. Two years later, I appeared. Nine and a half months in her stomach, I must have wanted to stay. In the pictures of Mom, Paige, and I from that time, Mom looks about thirteen. Teeth need braces. Her brown eyes brilliant, happy, and terrified, like a girl on her first whirligig.

Before I was born, Mom left our father. Can’t say that I’m bothered about it, but neither one of us would know homeboy if he was standing next to us on the BART platform. For a while we were coming up just fine. Mom got a lot of help from her grandparents. My great–grandmother had one daughter, an only child named Elizabeth. She’s Paige and I’s grand–mother, and when Mom got herself a job at the phone company, and found a two–bedroom apartment across from San Antonio Park near East Oakland, Gram Liz made sure Mom had plates and cups and a crib and an iron at her new spot. Then Gram Liz moved to Los Angeles for a good job at Pacific Southwest Airlines. Gram Liz wasn’t old school, or even very old.

Mom collected likenesses of pineapples — ceramic, wooden, metal, just little knickknacks. They sat around on everything. She told us they were a symbol of welcome and family affection.

‘What’s a symbol?’ I asked Mom that.

‘Something,’ Mom said, ‘that means something else.’

‘Why have symbols?’ is what Paige wanted to know. ‘If you mean “welcome,” why not just have a sign that says it?’

‘Pineapples look better in the house.’

‘But it’s still a pineapple,’ Paige said. ‘It means food.’

Mom was at her jobs a lot when it was just the three of us. She did days at the phone company, half–nights bookkeeping for a place jammed with bolts of velvet. Paige and I would be up there sometimes. We pulled tassels from cartons, tied them to us and marched through groves of brocade. But for our great–grandparents, we never had baby–sitters. Mom would leave me with Paige from the time I was five. We had toys, watched television. One time I bruised my ribs jumping off the bed, but I’d have done that if Mom had been home. I had to go to emergency, and Mom told the doctor she’d been in the other room. We did fine.

During the week, after school, Mom took us to the library for books about glass elevators, and slaves who got away. Sometimes she told us stuff we didn’t know — like that pickles were really cucumbers, and that Gram Liz had been defiant and bossy as a young woman, smoked Virginia Slims, worked on the naval base in Alameda, dated whomever she wanted, white or black, started social clubs with her girlfriends, and drank bourbon and pop from champagne flutes. Mom told us that Gram had never told her much about how life got lived or how boys were dealt with. Had let Mom grow up like a weed, but still close to the shade of the house Mom’s dad had left Gram when he died at the veterans’ hospital, from some type of hemorrhage, at twenty–four. Gram Liz never got married again. Didn’t get along with Nannah or Grandpa. I couldn’t imagine any–one rebelling against our great–grandparents. Or being anything but happy in their house.

In the tiny backyard of our own triplex, we read comics with a thick Chinese boy named Theo who lived with his parents, our landlords, in a front apartment downstairs. In our living room, there was a poster — it was of six identical human silhouettes, yellow, green, blue, purple, hot pink, maroon, each touching the other. All with afros, and looking serene. The caption was SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE COLORED. Mom tried to explain it, but I didn’t get it.

In our room was a framed print that looked drawn by a child. Next to a shakily sketched yellow flower was WAR IS UNHEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS. I didn’t get that one, either — the words met each other, in a circle, in my brain. The poster wasn’t a symbol, based on what Mom and Paige had said. The print stated the obvious. But if whoever made the poster meant it the way it was written, why would there be the need for one?

And why would it be printed in kiddy scrawl?

Like it was one thing and meant something else?