The Brooklyn Rail

Tyriek White is the 2023 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize winner for his debut We Are a Haunting. Set in East New York, Brooklyn, the novel follows Colly, a teen growing up in public housing who is left under the guardianship of an absent father when his mother dies from cancer. But since Key and Colly possess the same supernatural ability to see and communicate with the dead, they continue their bond even after her death. The novel alternates between Key's life in New York in the 80s and 90s and Colly's from the early 2000s to the present day. White elegantly uses Key and Colly's communion with ghosts to contextualize present-day fights against the gentrification of Black and brown communities and the city's systematic neglect of public housing within a larger history of Black displacement and forced migration in the Western world.

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THE CURSE OF HAM,
WE ARE WITH YOU, DEATH
IS NOT THE END

KEY (1990/2008)

I am misplaced, lost in moments I believe to be linear. The same place, different texture; my apartment, the wax shredded by grit, the moths gorging themselves on fabric. The walls are the same, only dirtier and more worn. I anticipate the tick of the clock but it doesn’t come. He is there. The boy. Sleeping. He feels familiar in a way I know as a part of me. They doubt the women who raise boys, doubt the men they become. The men they’d become would be emotional. Soft. Maybe they should be softer.

Even in sleep his brow is tight, a knot of worry and intensity. I know what could be. The kind of place you retreat into until you see no way out. It was knowing vulnerability well enough to do away with it, to keep private or amongst friends. Life in a place like this was to know too much about everything. People like you and I keep this thing going, the American project. You see the cobwebs under the stage, the gears that make the curtains open, the ropes and smoke machines. You see what this world really is, what it can do to the best of us, how it protects the worst. Eventually you open your eyes, look up at me, look through me. You are afraid and it breaks me open because I would never hurt you. Eyes crossed, gaze just beyond what is in front of him. What life did he look pass to get to me, years away in this very doorway? Or maybe, what life have I gone past to get to you?

He didn’t have language for what was happening to him, could only dream and wake with me reaching across. I want to speak his name, have it break through the sodden, temporal wall between us like the hook of a rod through the bass’ cheek. I want my voice to soothe him, warm seawater around the ankles, a balm for his clammy skin that turned cold when he looked at me. He fills the room with funk because he couldn’t stop sweating over the chill in the room. I want to lie next to you, let you know my own funk until you recognize it as your own, until I am familiar to you.

I want you to stand in the doorway I’m in, your fingers along the corners of the frame, your eyes on me but not on me, to a place tucked far enough to seek me out. Your collar wet and rung out. The wrinkle in your face isn’t affliction, but stone. You are wild. How can I hate what you can become? Like any mother, I can only fear it.

JUST AS THERE are innumerable futures, there are many possible histories.

I see you again, on the floor of my home, curling up with what seemed like a stomachache. Behind that crooked doorway is water hushed still. Now his eyes stare off, unmoving, flat plates transparent in the light from my window. Why does he punish himself? I think about all the hurt I accrued through the years, bound at the base of my neck and at the bottom of my belly, chewed me out like tobacco dip until it was wet pulp. I think of Mama, who still walks around with her hurt, brings it to church, dresses it all up in nice things only to dress it down in a faded mirror. I think of my mother and grandfather. All this hurt was passed down and it will keep going, ramifications down the timeline, wood splinter in blood that would dissolve eventually, scar the capillary.

Is that why you were pulling me here? To see where this timeline goes? To change something?

I roam the house, years from now. It is fading into the gray slate it was when I first rented and spent years cleaning, scrubbing and hiding things. Marks on the walls with frames, grime-filled corners with philodendrons and Dracaenas. In the kitchen, the shelves are no longer filled with Heart of palm, queen olives, artichoke bruschetta, baby corn, Calabrian chili peppers, cauliflower, whole mushrooms, chicken gnocchi soup, manzanilla olives stuffed with pimento. Instead it is instant ramen, tuna, brightly colored snack food, and fried spam.

I THINK IT will be worse for you. Mama said something interesting the other day. She said the world has changed more in the last twenty, thirty years than she’s ever known. It would only get worse. I had gone over to her house to help her and Joyce prepare for the church luncheon. Joyce sold personalized dinners two nights a week. Friends and neighbors called in for

a menu and she’d bring a container of fried chicken or whiting, vegan lasagna, barbecue pulled pork, and a choice of two sides, usually buttered rice, stewed potatoes, or sweet yams. This was her first large order. I told Mama she better get in where she fit in. When my aunt stepped to the back to take a call, I confronted her.

“I can see Virgil.” She froze, looked at me, her own daughter telling her about her hauntings. “And I know you can, too. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Things like that you keep to yourself.”

“How long?”

“Years after he died. You musta been about eight or nine. But Virgil is my haunting. No child should have to deal with a parent’s ghosts.”

“It’s inevitable, Mama, it all adds up. From you to Grandma Lucy, all the way back then. Even if we don’t know it. You might as well be honest.”

“I’m being honest about it now.”

“I thought I was crazy,” I said.

“That’s not what I wanted to do, baby. I just never, I just, I had to let him go myself.”

I listened to my mother’s breathing, the bounce of her heart. She was fussy, brow damp as she layered the flattened pasta.

“I see your father,” she said. “And I stare at him every day ’cause I don’t know how to make him leave this time. He sits in that ugly chair and doesn’t say a word to me. Guess all of it stays with us. We’re a family of ghosts, of half-living. I don’t know what’s really there, but I know it’s real to me.”

I SEE YOU now, Colly, at the foot of my bed, hands holding on to something, your head down and sunk between the bony peaks of your shoulders. I wish you knew I was here at this moment, in all the moments. It hurts to know I will leave you someday. I don’t mean to. I only ever meant to love you, protect you as much as I could from a world I tried to make over, make better. As much as I could. That’s all we can strive to do. But I decided this wouldn’t be your world. These six blocks, this land of stone and burning metal, all the way down to the bedrock. I come to you, but little do you know you came to me.

And suddenly you are falling, pendant—then falling—into kingdom. Into a basin of diaspora, edging out of physicality, you feel everything. You look at your feet and your hands but what is seeing? What you have seen, we have seen and wept. And something tells you that you can see what we have seen if you really look. You are where we have always existed. Where I falls away from You and the welling you’ve felt all along, all from living, spills out. You are home, and we are with you. My hands reach for you, years from now, like always. I teach you to walk. They clam up, the hands given to me. How else can I hold the heads of my children as they weep into me? They were given to me by my ancestors and the sea that claimed them somewhere between what is known as Africa and the Americas. I’d lost their names centuries ago until I named them myself. The building of empires made us into orphans. Not the product of a place, but a process of history, an inadequacy to cope with time as much as resources. Our origin is wrapped up in the mapping of what became the New World. The only thing that can be passed down is loss. The church will tell you your God can’t look like you, can’t see you beyond the curse of Ham, can’t hear the water beneath the desert lines in your hands. The news will tell you that it is your culture that is depraved, lacking—and we are all waiting for the damn thing to implode. It is your habits, the attitudes of the women who gave you quarters out their purse, the skewed values of the men who bought you hoagies when you got them cigarettes. It is simply who you are. Governments will rinse the blood from their hands by night. By morning: the natives died from weakness, not genocide, and you sold your own into chattel slavery. The ivory tower will mock the mortals you raised to sainthood yet worship their own. They will worship what is rational as the only true thing, as an artifact of their brilliance, as shining examples of acuity. All they have given the world. To us. Weighing down the heavens with his vows, writes Virgil. Have me in the Kingdom of the Dead, carving out the rocky flanks of Cumae, through that cold, enormous cavern pierced by a hundred tunnels, a hundred mouths with as many voices rushing out. No golden branch or doves to guide me to you. I didn’t want to have to go down to those mourning fields and come get you.

You’ll be given a city emptied, cracked in half—the air will be full of lead and settle at the bottom of your lungs, pulling you down as you move through the world. You are living every moment of a place, every pain and joy. Being from a community means contending with the history of a space; it reflects every move, every choice you believe to exist in a vacuum. Every institution fails us until, finally, the land will too. Being a family just means we can’t fail each other.

I have lived a life where you died in my arms. You reached out to me and I held you on the way down. You mustn’t. When you reach across space and time I can only watch, inch away and hope you can let go.

I have lived all the lives so I could know what is possible.

I will meet you near the debris of the wrack line, kelp tangled around plastic bottles and glass. I will wait by an anxious tide, under a pale sky. The water is resinous, polluted from the soot of the steam plant near the coast. You feel like you don’t have anything in this world, like it won’t miss you back. But you understand the fire I put in you, a furnace you’ve fit your grief in. I want to tell you that you’ll come out of this. You’ll find something you love enough to make you get out of bed each day, something that will make you feel good enough to take care of yourself. You just have to find your way.

There is no celebration, no exalting of the children who return. Along our shore we await a home that hardly is ours anymore. Sometimes I feel as if we’ll never leave this shore. Are we waiting for a sign? Are we afraid? It could be we know how. Maybe we belonged here, in America, deserved nothing more than to be exiled to this far corner of the world. Halfway living and halfway dying. Even in death we could not part with this place. We are a haunting.

I will wait for you by the shore, follow you into the dark to the end.

Excerpted from We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White. Published by Astra House. Copyright © 2023 by Tyriek White. All rights reserved.