Trinity by Zelda Lockhart

Author:Zelda Lockhart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

For the sake of any child born of his blood, B.J. had done the most valiant deed, gone into the vault of his memory, awakened by the sights and smells of his childhood home, and pulled forth the casualties of his bloodline. Pulled his beautiful Black boy soul back into his Black man body. Memories with their darkness contrasted the light and made sight possible, made love possible, and unobstructed the return of all the truth-tellers. He was witness to his parents’ death, and to so many deaths, and that was the truth that lived inside him. Flawed and human, as long as he was able, he would hold open the gates of memory for the girl-child’s return.

B.J. was awakened by the flat, round circles of his father’s eyes. Then the feel of Bennie’s hand on his shoulders where B.J. lay in the space between walking with the dead and the living.

“B.J.!” He heard Bennie calling him through the thick sweetness of morning. “B.J.!” Then he smelled the familiar exhaust from the 98, still running. Lenard’s call and Bennie’s call the same. He called back, “Yes, sir,” his voice hoarse like the six-year-old boy waking for Sunday school. When he sat up, he felt the whole heft of his body and every place it had gone and everything it had been through recollected now by his soul.

That afternoon, they stood over the markers; no one ever afforded headstones. “The one on the left is hers, the one on the right his,” the groundskeeper told them, but he didn’t remember to tell them which way to face.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Lenard kept saying to B.J.’s tearful agitated complaint, “How in the hell am I supposed to know which one is which?”

“It’s okay.”

Relieved that his nephew had lived through the night, Lenard walked out of the rusted gate of the Black cemetery that sat behind the Baptist church and left his nephew there to be at peace with his parents. B.J. folded his hands into each other in prayer, but that did not feel true for him, so he cupped them, making a bowl, his brown fingers like the cane of a woven basket. Without being coaxed, he had washed and shaved at his uncle’s motel. The naps of his Afro made a halo of brown where the sun scorched. He bowed his head and did not answer their call to be prayed over, just inhaled and exhaled, and whispered, “No more.”

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