Lee, Kenny, Wayne, Joel, me and my brother Alan are expected to go to college, not walk into sorrow’s kitchen and lick out all the pots. Yet, I’m the only one who hasn’t spent time on a cell block, making collect calls asking for money to be put on his books. I’m not the smartest. At the time, we think that’s Alan. We all have our talents. We come from good homes. So, it is not why me, it is why not all of us? 

Before video games are much better than pinball, long after all the L7squares are tucked into bed, forget our curfews, if you hear any noise, me and the boys are out under the stars in Kenny’s backyard, passing around brown bagged bottles of malt liquor, talking trash in a pungent haze off smoking joint and Newport menthols – I am the only one we know who smoking anything doesn’t do nothing for me but that’s not why me – None of us are saints we all are sinners. Red eyed, slack jawed, weaving, bobbing, staggering, pointing, stomping, bending, twisting, we blend into the tales we tell.

Thick in the don’t fake the funk or your nose will grow, I see my index finger wagging the too loose cuff of a jacket bought big so I won’t outgrow it before the end of the school year. Wayne’s afro is shaped like an ancient Egyptian headdress. Lee heard his voice on cassette, thought he sounds too much like his sister, now he murmurs everything, trying to get more bass. Kenny’s over enthusiasm. Alan’s lips turning blue because he doesn’t know when to let go of the roach. Joel hunched like an old man. 

It’s Joel I’m wagging my finger at. He’s just said that if an atomic bomb is dropped, those drills we do in school won’t do jack. We’ll be incinerated before we know what hit us. I tell him I will survive. He flings his cigarette at his feet, spits on it. I will survive, I say, because I’m the best storyteller, and somebody’s got to live to tell the tale as only the Devil doesn’t need faith, for his tail has wagged with God in His heaven. 

Say what now? Wayne stumbles back against a shed next to rows of young cornstalks, rumpling tin. Laughing tears without sound. A bottle almost dropped, caught, the bag crumples around it. Is this apathy brought on by the things we do, or do we seek these things because they feed our apathetic hunger? 

◆

Light years in time away from that time, across the water about an hour up I-95, quarantined by COVID-19’s hold on Philadelphia, I may have ignored a parental be home by ten o’clock, escaped getting locked up, now I’m locked down under a mayor’s be off the streets by nine. The media is wall-to-wall debates over the effectiveness of masks, decrying ventilator shortages, New York City’s mass burials in trenches, tens of thousands dead nationwide. Even ESPN talks nonstop, the virus, the virus, because sports are shut down. 

Everyone who can is teleworking from our kitchen tables. Fast food workers are first responders. Washington: Father of His Country, Episode Three has just started on The History Channel. It is either that or stare out at the empty street like a housecat. My grandmother’s maiden name is Washington. Her father, a full blooded Maasai who became a preacher. The Reverend George Washington meets my great-grandmother, a full-blooded Blackfoot named Viola, decades younger but like him, because that other George Washington won his pursuit of happiness, she will never see her people again. 

My first professional job is at the William J Green Federal Building, at 6^th and Arch, in Philadelphia. I can see what remains of that other George Washington’s Philadelphia residence from my sixth-floor office window. So, I may experience this documentary a little differently even without those branches of my family tree. 

Grey Flannel, silk tie a montage of hues to compliment a designer ensemble more appropriate for the single life than to get a promotion. Hand tooled leather satchel, fresh shined, cap toe, calf skin oxfords, cashmere overcoat, I have strolled between the tall glass doors, up into the ten-story Green Building, flashing my work I.D at the guards at the metal detector, like could this be me? Immersed in funk so deep? If my boys could see me now. Hiding out from the apathy. 

Every Friday after pay Thursday, me and my new crew, noticeably older, mostly women – it can get rough, ain’t no half-stepping, not many men can hang – we hang out at J.B Winchell’s (now a Ross Department Store) at 8^th and Market, three blocks from where George Washington actually slept here. A huge hole, the Disney pipedream, mocks the city from beneath dark tarp behind those of us with our backs to window panels running the length of the dining area. The latest jams. The highest fashion. We let the people see just who we think we are. 

Yet there’s an air of the 18^th century. Maybe because to get here we often pass a troupe of colonial reenactors – men in tri-cornered hats, frock coats, breeches, stockings, and buckled shoes, women in bonnets, bodices trimmed with lace, and silk slippers under the flow of petticoats. We are always on the look out for horse drawn carriages. The scent of horse drawn carriages. Clip clop, clip clop. Elfreth Alley, the oldest residential street in America, is a cobblestone lane, not that much has changed since colonial times, not that far from here, and there it is on this History Channel docudrama like a home movie before my time. 

At lunch time, sometimes, leaving the all the way dull, dark, concrete, and steel, tinted glass of the Green Building, I loosen my tie and steal away to the water fountain and fresh air on six acres of wide tree lined lanes in Washington/nee Congo Square. The Square makes me feel like I did as a child, before the malt liquor, the secondhand smoke, the apathy, when opening a pack of Topps baseball cards and finding that one player to complete a team checklist made the sun shine brighter and my step lighter. 

In George Washington’s time, my people, slave and free, gather in Congo Square to visit the ancestors. We celebrate them with the drum, the songs, the food, dances, and rituals native to our motherlands, much as the African diaspora comes together today at the Festival of Odunde on South Street. 

I can stand in the shadow of the monument to thousands of Revolutionary War soldiers buried under The Square. There is nothing for our dead or the victims of a yellow fever epidemic that grips the city in 1793. In 2020, just like 1793, blacks are originally thought immune to a virus that strikes the public-at-large. On that premise, in 1793, black nurses volunteer where others fear to tread. Their immunity is a myth some don’t live to disdain. 

In 2020, the President says – The disinfectant [bleach] knocks it [COVID] out in one minute. One minute. Is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside? Almost a cleaning. It [bleach] gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on the lungs.

The History Channel docudrama talks about that other George Washington’s avoidance of Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act. I know about it from R_____, an older coworker at the Green Building with a sandpaper baritone – The Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act grants freedom to any slave who lives in the state continuously for six months. Ole Massa George, he would shuttle his slaves back and forth to Virginia, or just over the river to Jersey, every six months. That’s how he complied with the law; you understand. Have you heard of Ona Judge? She was 22, not that much younger than you. Massa George wanted to give her away as a wedding gift, like she was steak knives. Miss Judge ran. George gave up the presidency. He carried his pursuit of Miss Judge to the end of his life. You know why, don’t you? Giving Miss Judge away as a gift was one thing. It showed his power over her. You see what I’m saying? But letting a young servant woman choose who she would do the giving too, on her terms, that’s not how the game is played. 

I haven’t thought of R_____ in a long time. He is the closest my playing Hemmingway gets to a Gertrude Stein, and Paris is closer to Philadelphia than that. All R_____ does is take me seriously when with no experience to respect, without having sat down to write the first word, I announce, I’m going to write a novel. 

I think my audacity amuses R_____. He doesn’t live to see my first short story in print, but he probably would be less surprised, as it is still hard for me to believe a stranger can be moved by words on paper. I meet an agent at the Hurston Wright Writer’s Conference at Howard University. The agent invites me to Harlem. And a way we go. Except we don’t. She promises and promises to send my manuscript out. It never happens. This turns out to be a blessing that neither of us would have believed at the time I let her go.

It is years before I sit down to mark up another blank page with confidence. I still haven’t completely rid myself of a youthful insolence I don’t think so at the time, and I only get away with walking through life the way I did because I can make people laugh when they shouldn’t. Which can be maddening when the situation is no laughing matter, even while we laugh. Which I think is part of my charm. It isn’t, but not all the time. 

I don’t take myself seriously enough: The principal of my high school tells me this is because tricks my boys have to be serious about come too easily for me. My mother says this is because I have never wanted anything badly enough. Looking back, a strong argument can be made that I was looking life in the eye, daring it to prove it was tough enough to make me take it seriously. Or, though my arms may be too short to box with God, I was challenging the Devil to keep up with my foot work, but if I had bothered to take a look up at the bandstand, guess whose fiddle was leading the tune? 

American ideas of individual liberty and separation of powers owe a substantial debt to the Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois have been a functioning democracy for centuries when in 1744, Canassatego, tells a delegation from the colonies – Our wise forefathers established a union and amity between the [original] Five Nations. This has made us formidable. This has given us great weight and authority with our neighboring Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy and by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken you will acquire much strength and power; therefore, whatever befalls you, do not fall out with one another. 

On the History Channel, a slave in a fine colonial butler’s uniform, powdered wig, and blinding white gloves, sets a jet-black jewel box on a high polished mahogany dining table. The slave opens the lid with great care. There they are. George Washington’s dentures are partially teeth taken out of the mouths of living men. The top row is large and filed across at a very slight too perfect curve from incisors to molars. The bottom row is spread out, narrow, sharp, misshapen. The plates that join them are a greyish lead-tin alloy flat across the outer surface and connected by a hinge. 

I cannot see that denture without seeing a man who looks like me held down and forced to open his mouth. Colonial pliers are crude clumsy things. Under the best of circumstances having a tooth pulled is a barbaric affair. It is likely no one deems it necessary to explain to this human being what is being done to him – Open your mouth. Hold still. Wider … What’s it? Just my tool, boy. Nothing to be alarmed about. Hold him, now. Don’t struggle. If yah bite me, a nasty bit of business ye’ll have coming your way, I can promise yah that … As the History Channel goes to commercial, I remember that pain as though it were my own. 

Opposites attract. I come to ‘The City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection,’ meet a city girl. I remember that pain like it could not have been my own. Both the Maasai and the Blackfoot, my grandmother’s parents, are nomadic peoples. Maybe that’s why anything you can take away from me, reminds me that it was never mind to begin with, and anything I give to you was only mine while I had it. City Girl and I play grown up with no plan other than that we know exactly who we don’t want to be. Such an apathetic city girl. Such an apathetic boondocks boy. Tick. Tick. Boom! Our timer starts counting down at hello. 

My first attempt at a novel begins at me and City Girl’s clumsy, hexagonal, glass top kitchen table with a pilfered federal government dictionary, a remaindered, The St. Martin’s Handbook, the scent of City Girl’s nail polish and the experience I’ve picked up writing rebuttals to workplace disciplinary actions as a defendant, then as a union rep, then responding to the agency’s congressional inquiries from expensive lawyers. What I don’t know I think I can figure it out or it will come to me as I go. Or in scientific terms I learn much later – this is akin to machine learning, with myself as the machine, and the goal to make my character’s autonoetic consciousness pass my Turing test. Keep in mind that the real danger of artificial intelligence is that it does not realize its false wisdom. You don’t need sentience for that. 

Some times, past many midnights deep into early mornings my scribbling from within begins to expand my grasp on a without I didn’t even know I was doing without. I have always read, always felt that certain writers have left things for me. I know there is no way these writers could have known they are writing to me. Just as I have no way to know who will take what I say how they will. Writing is like growing a tree from a seedling. It cannot be predicted who that tree will give comfort, shade, fruit, limbs to climb, a trunk to hide behind, lumber, firewood, or where its seeds may be carried, its ideas take root. 

Going into the Green Building, eight hours a day, Monday thru Friday, on time, every time, working a job that not only hates me, it keeps me away from birds and bees and flowers, sunshine and freedom. The concentration this demands forces me to hone discipline into something finely tempered that I can wield in any situation, instead of rolling it up, striking a match to it, closing my eyes and smoking trees, like my boys started out before they expanded their art form. I write it down, revise it and revise it, and revise it some more, arranging it like chords, melodies, and rhythms into a chiaroscuro with solos, jump cuts, combinations, rearrangements, and repetitions, that but for the wind in my ears and the ground moving so fast beneath me, my feet don’t feel like they ever touch down. Am I even breathing? It doesn’t feel like I need too. 

However, from the time we are born, our parents haven’t just lectured discipline at me and my boys, they have given us a living example. There’s an art to this too. Like all art, it lies in the eye of the beholder. Me and my boys can’t see our opportunities, as such, as much as we see would be required of us to take advantage of them, as much as we think we see we would have to let others take advantage of us to so little advantage is just too much for us. Discipline as an art form just doesn’t move us. We can’t dig it – Its too didactic, baby. 

We have discipline confused with conformity. In our defense, this is the way discipline is curated to us. Or to put this in a way that we could see it, you beat your opponent by being more disciplined, not less. Or those great books I hated in high school, turns out I only hated the way greatness was thrust upon me. 

Sometimes I sit in Congo Square wishing back nights beneath streetlights in my hometown, where deer, rabbit and hoot owl are all that benefit from the illumination over lonely stretches of tree lined sidewalks in front of neat homes with immaculate lawns, rose bushes, flower gardens, and vegetable rows near the back fence, usually beside an old tool shed. Crickets chirp, fireflies flash, Lee turns to me, when Lee is still Lee, when Lee is still here, when all of us are still us. 

One night, humidity heavy off of the river three blocks from the end of the street, in the middle of summer, and lights of Wilmington, Delaware tiny on the other side of the water, we’re leaving Joel’s house – Joel lives around the corner and up the block from us. Our street and the one crossing his dead end at acres of mostly black spruce, maple, and pine in tangled woodland marsh hiding wild blueberries, blackberries, grapes, swarms of mosquitoes. Watch out for a snake! Snakes like grapes. Joel challenges me to a race, showing off for Lee. We all do that. To the second telephone pole, he says – On your mark … Ready … Set …. Joel gives up long before I blow his doors off, long before I reach the first pole and start to coast, lest I don’t finish and Joel does, declaring victory that way.

On the way home, Lee is telling me nobody is as fast as we are. You hear me? We should never race. I’m slow to catch on, Lee might not be as fast as Joel. In fact, he’s the least athletic of all of us, living off of an older brother’s reputation. But I am allowed in skate parties and house parties I’m too young to get in because the older kids love Lee’s brother and I’m with Lee. 

A fall day, we’re playing two-hand touch in the street. A breeze through leaves, turning red, yellow, orange, and brown on the grass. Five-on-five. A lot of girls out here on Kenny’s front step doing each other’s hair, smoking Newports, watching us occasionally sneaking peaks at them between plays. Fourth and goal on the five-yard line. Joel and I on opposite sides of the ball. I’m the quarterback. He’s the rusher. 

Hike! I drop back with ball, scanning the field. 

One Mississippi … Two Mississippi … Joel counts, ready to race across the line of scrimmage at me, unblocked, as soon as he counts ‘Five Mississippi.’ 

Three Mississippi. 

Huh! I shake. 

Joel’s shook in the opposite direction. 

I Sprint. Can’t catch me. Touchdown! Yellow fire hydrant. Push. Joel pushes me. Yellow. Bang. My knee. Nozzle. Throb up through my soul. My teeth. Nauseous. Blink. Yellow comes off, marks my blue denim knee. Eyes won’t focus. Silly rabbit, what am I doing trying to suck back the water coming out of my eyes are watering? Will myself steady. Spike the ball. We win. I quit. 

Kenny’s sister, Kate, drops her brush. Am I okay? The savage satisfaction on Joel’s face makes me laugh. I will see that look again, time and again at The Green Building, black, but never blue, no matter what they do to me. Even if there is no end zone for me and the game doesn’t end until management wins, but that’s in the future, right now, my knee is throbbing red hot and I’m seeing blinding white. 

Eventually Kate will feel loved but not needed. I cannot convince Kate that being wanted is better than being needed. I get it. Being needed is leverage. But the thing about leverage, nobody likes having it held over them. Regardless of the consequences, in the end they retaliate. Which is why the scorpion that convinced the frog to carry him across the lake stung him midstream even though that meant the scorpion would drown as they both go down. 

Kenny is the youngest of our crew. His family takes over old man Freeman’s place after he passes. The rest of my boys live in the same houses we grew up in. Christmas time. Bundled up in our new coats. We’re out in front of a house boarded up for sale, across town, off the side street from a shanty Irish bar on a crisp new moon night so dark it’s hard to see the brown bagged bottles passing between gloved hands. The slurred honest in Kenny’s voice should embarrass us both, talking about two years before then, how I keep up with a freight train he and Lee jump and I won’t because of the legend of a kid losing his leg that way – You should’ve been had to stop running. Way before we got back across town. Lee said you won’t even get winded. You glide like a deer. It is beautiful, man. For real, though. 

One spring, I’ll come home, Kate will be holding her and Lee’s baby. Long before that, Kate and I were better as friends. Lee needed Kate. He didn’t want her. I’ve already said my piece about leverage. Kate tells me Kenny is a fleeing felon. Armed robbery. I never see him again. Lee tries to sell me on the virtues of shooting heroin – The first few times, your body is going to fight it. You’re gonna vomit, big time. Its rough, man. I gotta tell you. But after that, your system gets used to it. After that, you can get high as a kite. I can’t wait for you to try it. Its not like herb. You’ll dig this. Swear to God.

Wayne, Kenny’s cousin, as we walk home from meeting up at the basketball courts too dark to see the rims good. We have no ball anyway. He, coming from the YMCA, me, from the Tasty-Freeze. Wayne lights a Newport, flings the match to the raw spring air as we pass the high school track, kicking spiked sycamore balls from under foot. A day earlier, I finish second in my first official race, an 800-meter run. A puff of smoke. Notes like a guitar banged. Wayne – It hurt’d me when you let that white boy beat you. 

I give up. I do. The pain too much. Sharper with every breath. Each stride heavier than the last. Thud! Thud!! Thud!!! Besides, second place in my first track meet, my name in the local newspaper … I won’t quit on myself again. I win the 800 meters at Tri-County, break the school record. My last memory of Wayne is on a rainy night, I’m newly old enough to be legally in a bar, out with a woman I put on a pedestal when I was a freshman and she was a senior in high school – Turns out, only my expectations were chiseled in stone. We hear a boom, think its thunder, look up from our table, Wayne is getting put out, angry, falling down, drunk, dressed like his clothes are his home. I doubt he recognizes me or himself. Wayne is a stranger to how we used to be, and so am I, just with a better memory. 

My brother, Alan, three years younger, becomes the little brother Joel never had. They bond over their arch nemesis: Me. One lazy spring morning in the sunshine, out on our grandparents’ back step. Alan walks up on me reading. He’s zipping a blue windbreaker that has three reefer seed holes tiny and clustered under and opposite his heart. Alan tells me that he, Joel, and Joel’s way older sister’s way older boyfriend, T-Ray, were in T-Ray’s car smoking joint – When T-Ray sees how easily these young boys can run in the house and come back out with folding money, he will introduce them to smoking cocaine – The coke is free until you no longer are from it, but on this day, T-Ray has Joel and Alan in the shade of the popular tree on the corner, biding his time: 

WDAS on the FM dial. George Benson. The Greatest Love of All. Alan tells me I burst through a hedge opening on the far end of the yard on my way out to the main highway. Track having taken me to college by now. Nobody says anything until the song ends, Alan says – It’s like we’re all thinking the same thing. George Benson is putting the music to you like this is NFL Films and you’re Walter Payton or somebody. Man, I sure wish you could see you run. Joel says, you’re going to escape this. 

By this is meant, I’m going to escape what none of us really believe we can. Which is not just this one-horse town, shy a shoe. It’s what this town does to the soul. A lot of people leave. All my boys get out. This is a town you carry it with you. It drags you back. Soon it can convince you, you never tried to escape. You haven’t got the heart. 

We think that’s all we have to do: Escape. We get out in the world. The easiest way is to the military, or maybe it’s college, a job, relatives invite us to stay with them. We get in the classroom, unprepared, because our high school teachers were even worse than they treated us. We get too busy spending money to be where we’re supposed to be to make it. Our tour of duty ends. We fall in with the wrong crowd, Aunt Viv and Uncle Phil bid us we’ve overstayed our welcome, we’re no longer welcome in Bel-Air. 

Near the end of Washington: Father of His County that other George Washington takes his daily stroll from the President’s House at 5^th and Market, showing himself to the people, first among equals. One block over, on Chestnut, he winds his pocket watch by the clock atop Independence Hall, sticks it back in his vest pocket and heads back to Market, crossing the path I take to Congo Square.

It’s easy to see the cobblestone streets these once were, loud with the clip clop of horses’ hooves and rattling carriages, instead of those things being the luxury tourist novelty they have become. Hot dogs and soft pretzels, mustard and relish aromas are replaced by pies fresh out of Dutch ovens and roast beef on a clockwork-jack. The women carry frilly umbrellas, their gowns flowing wide onto petticoats. The men wear frocks open onto waist coats, sporting jabot collars. I do too. Here comes The Father of His Country with that one-dollar bill expression, a result of trying to keep in place that denture contraption. 

There’s Wayne with that asymmetrical Old Kingdom afro, but in a frock, jabot, britches, and hosiery. Lee quiet because his voice is too much like his sister. Kenny trying not to be so eager. Alan’s lips singed blue from pulling on the roach. Joel is not impressed, puffing up to stretch the buttons of a powder blue silk vest snug around his middle. He’s tugging cuffs of ruffled shirt sleeve inside his dark frock coat: 

“He has news of Ona Judge is what he says to the President. Going for the punchline, as usual, instead of asking the man something serious. Like how does the President see his pursuit of happiness beside his own? His George and Viola Washington? The President’s Ona Judge? And not only that, he’s told us this all before. None of this is new, Lee. Lee, check it out, Lee. He wears a suit and tie to work. He meets a girl from the city. He becomes a writer. Even what if he could meet that other George Washington? All of it. None of this is new, Lee. Only it was a ridiculous success story the last time.” 

“Yeah,” I say, “Because at that time it was only a dream.” 

“This aloofness is why he is the only one of you who didn’t have to crawl back.” It’s Kate, coming up behind me in a jasmine perfumed ruffle of taffeta emerald green skirts whirling, a high pink collar, emerald parasol, and monstrosity of an emerald hat piled wide and high. “He never cared about anyone or anything besides himself.” 

“He cared. Just not enough to let it get in his way,” Lee mumbles. His coat and vest are dark blue with black paisleys, his jabot collar silver. 

“For him, this writing is just like running beside that train. Remember, Lee?” Kenny says, all in maroon and blue. 

“Still and all, I see why he didn’t need to get high.” Wayne is in gold. 

“His running was his high. Now writing is.” Alan doffs his hat tricorn hat, fidgeting, Alan always has to fidget, now its with the folds in the button around the hat’s cockade. “We needed leverage,” Kate says, striking the cobblestones with her parasol. “Kate, if we had leverage over him, how would we have used it?” Lee asks. “Like we did over each other?” 

“I didn’t notice it before. You all talk about me in the third person, right to my face.” “So, what if we do?” Joel says. 

“I’m turning the page.” 

“Freedman’s progeny, you may choose to turn the page,” The President says. “However, this shall bear no effect in that you remain the book in which that page be writ large.” 

The way that we were raised, for all that we are taught and all that we are given, time isn’t a part of that. I am not saying we weren’t loved. Our parents didn’t spend the time doing nothing with us, like we could hang around with each other with nothing to do, all day and half the night. Our parents didn’t get to know us. I cannot remember once when one of us couldn’t hang because he was doing something with his parents that didn’t involve getting into a car. One conversation where home life came up where we weren’t voicing a grievance. We were loved but we never felt liked. Besides being loyal we really didn’t know how to be good to one another either. I’d say, our generation comes by our apathy honest. 

In that other George Washington’s book is writ a page about a trusted slave and valet, William Lee – no relation to our Lee. William Lee rides into the heat of every battle at his master’s side – keeper of the spyglass and a spare horse. William Lee is also responsible for combing Washington’s red hair – powdered white as was the fashion – and ribboning it. 

In the History Channel docudrama, William Lee is probably the butler handling Washington’s denture. Anyone who has seen a portrait of that other George Washington with a horse in the background, that is William Lee holding the reigns, caricatured with a peculiar simian docility the same way Phillis Wheatley is on the cover of her poetry book, as that is how white artists flattered the ‘noble’ savage back then. 

William Lee and the other slaves who fight on the side of The Colonies are promised their freedom if their side wins. However, Washington holds that losing the free labor of black Revolutionary War heroes would be unfair to their masters – himself, the biggest slave holder in America, included. 

The music builds in the docudrama as George and Martha Washington’s carriage returns them from the Presidency to Mount Vernon, down a long country road through golden sun-drenched plantation fields not yet filled with their slaves laboring a backbreaking harvest. That George Washington taps the black coachman’s shoulder. George and Martha enjoy walking the rest of the way. If the coachman spurring the now empty carriage ahead is William Lee, it is believed William Lee will never see again, the free wife he is forced to leave behind in Philadelphia. Which makes him driving the empty carriage prophetic. 

The Mount Vernon Society claims they do not know whether William Lee’s forced loyalty is out of affection for that George Washington or out of the privileges afforded his status as the slave of a powerful master. Thomas Jefferson’s biographers reminisce the same over Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ ‘Me First’ relationship. 

To love your oppressor, you have to love your oppression. The only brutality worse than slavery is to get caught trying to escape slavery’s total leverage over their bodies and slaves still flee. It would not surprise me, a writer myself, if the yearn for freedom Thomas Jefferson writes so elegantly in the Declaration of Independence isn’t Jefferson channeling Sally Hemings in much the same way George Washington’s relationship to William Lee may have influenced his views on slavery – as an intellectual exercise. 

Washington: Father of His Country makes this George Washington’s great-grandson realize that whiteness is a form of shareholder oppression. The Founding Majority Shareholders convinced minority shareholders in America Inc., to call a shirt the same color as their complexion ‘beige’ and their face ‘white’ and call a shirt identical to my complexion ‘brown’ and my face ‘black’ as compensation for loyalty against their own best self-interest. 

Why you and not me? Alan asks, my brother is the last of us I will see, just before my time at the Green Building ends, he on the other side of a counter separated from me by thick Plexiglas. We are speaking into old-fashioned, hard, black, plastic phones attached to steel cords that feel slippery like a snake twisting, and me trying to ignore the prison guard.

I tell Alan that never married me had a dream I never leave home, Kate and I get married, have a daughter, grow old together. We host Thanksgiving dinner. Our daughter is home from college with her first published short story. Everyone is so proud. After dessert, drinks in hand, the party moves into the front room. I mention that I wrote a little in high school. Kate doesn’t remember that. First thing in the morning, I’m up in our attic, opening and moving boxes. I can’t find my old folder. My daughter must hear me above her ceiling. A stair step creaks. Here she comes, covering a yawn, nana’s eyes in Kate’s face, wanting to know what I’m doing in the attic so early in the morning. I explain myself. My daughter helps me search even though she doesn’t believe her father could write a story. She says she hasn’t seen me open a book since she was a little girl and I used to read Aesop’s Fables to her. 

Alan says, only a writer would describe a dream the way I do.