2009

CALVIN JONES WATCHED THE OFFICER rummage through his knapsack, take his green card from his wallet, open his pack of cigarettes, and remove the three joints. He became numb as the cool metal handcuffs were slipped over his wrists for a third time. His late father would’ve told him, “Boy, I eh make stupid children. What wrong with you?”

Sitting in the patrol car’s back seat, Calvin felt like he had when he had first arrived in New York. Back then, he had feared the overhead trains careening off their tracks and falling on him. He remembered his mother’s hand pulling his as she maneuvered them through the crowded Brooklyn sidewalks to his middle school. “Child, hustle nah,” she said. “You in America now.” Calvin hadn’t lived with her since he was eight, when she left him in Trinidad with his father. Three years later, when he came to Brooklyn, she had hugged away his loneliness. She bought him his first suit, a navy jacket and pants with a light blue button-down long-sleeved shirt, and told him he would make new American friends. He looked at her in awe.

When they arrived at the school, Calvin saw a group of students on the steps, laughing and slapping each other’s hands. He felt like an American boy, carrying a backpack with Michael Jackson’s photo on the front. He had let go of his mother’s hand, not wanting his potential friends to see her cuddling him. It was his first autumn day, and he hoped it would snow.

Calvin stared out of the police car as it moved through the Brooklyn neighborhood. Snow was piled between the streets and sidewalks. This city had been his home for the last eleven years. He wished he were anywhere else.

 

Arriving at the Seventy-Seventh Precinct, Calvin followed the two officers into the large waiting room. A Black cop stood behind the front counter. Another sat at one of the desks. Calvin walked to the back of the room, avoiding their eyes.

Earlier that week he had met his friends at the Chinese-Cuban restaurant on Broadway and talked about plans for spring break. Two friends wanted to go to Florida, while Calvin thought of Costa Rica. The cop who had arrested him took his knapsack and directed him to the seats across from the processing desk. In his mind, Calvin saw iguanas sunning on lush trees, waterfalls, and golden sands.

“Put him in the cell,” the desk officer said.

Calvin stood. “Who me?”

The officer ignored his question. Calvin’s fear intensified. He knew this night wouldn’t end like the one a year ago or the year before that. Then, he had received only desk appearance tickets, and he used sick days to go and pay the fines. He pretended the two encounters had never happened and told no one. Now Calvin complied as the officer took his fingerprints, knowing that each print moved him deeper into a system that ended young Black men’s dreams. The officer instructed him to keep a neutral face for his mug shot, and he stared blankly. He asked for the knitted cap taken from him at the time of his arrest.

Back in the waiting room, uncuffed, he tucked his dreadlocks under the cap. A Black woman was banging her walking stick on the front counter and screaming, “Where is my son?” The officer grabbed the stick and told her to sit or leave the premises. She sat down near the entrance, muttering. The last person Calvin wanted to telephone was his mother. He didn’t want to hear the disappointment in her voice. In the early years, in Brooklyn, she had worked in the hospital during the week and two weekends a month as a nanny on Long Island.

“Boy, watch yourself,” she would tell him. “Don’t make me feel shame. Don’t talk back to the teachers like these American children. Keep your hands to yourself. Stay far from the police. Come straight home.” Her list always ended with, “Don’t break my heart like your father.” Calvin had obeyed, except for smoking weed when he started high school.

After ten p.m. Calvin telephoned his mother and stepfather, Godfrey. He hoped she had left for her midnight to seven a.m. nursing shift at the same hospital where he worked in IT. When Godfrey answered, Calvin sighed.

“Eh-eh! Calvin, you good?”

Calvin hesitated. He felt ashamed to tell Godfrey about his arrest, but he believed his stepfather would listen calmly and show understanding.

“I’m at the Seventy-Seventh Precinct.” Calvin heard muffled voices in the background. So his mother hadn’t left for work. “Hey, Godfrey?”

“Sorry. I was talking to Evelyn. What happened?”

“I got arrested for weed. The cops are taking me to central booking.”

“You going to need a lawyer. Don’t worry. I know someone. His name is Hansen.”

“Okay. I got to go,” Calvin said, hoping to avoid speaking with his mother.

“Wait, Evelyn wants to talk to you.”

Calvin held the phone away from his ear, bracing for a tirade of accusations.

“What am I supposed to tell these people at work?”

His mother’s calm surprised him. Calvin hadn’t thought about losing his job or how embarrassed she would feel explaining his arrest to her coworkers. Although they worked in different departments, she had helped Calvin prepare for his job interview.

“I’m sorry.”

“You sorry?” Evelyn said and hung the phone up.

Calvin listened to the buzzing dial tone. He imagined the news of his arrest spreading among the nurses in his mother’s maternity unit and the staff waiting in line at the cafeteria. Evelyn, peppered with questions, would keep working, tapping her polished nails on the keyboard as she checked her patients’ notes and prepped them to see the physician. Calvin dreaded the looming attention.

 

At one a.m., Calvin walked into the fifteen-by-twenty-foot holding cell full of primarily Black and brown men packed on rows of steel benches. The odor of unwashed flesh was like rotten onions. Too exhausted for panic, Calvin took the sandwich and fruit punch from the officer and squeezed onto a seat against the wall. The chatter in the cell irritated him. He kept looking at his watch as if it could tell him how the day would end. Calvin wondered what his life would’ve been if he had stayed in Trinidad.

The night before his mother left for New York, he heard his father telling her he loved his island and didn’t need to look to another country for anything more. His father had visited them in Brooklyn but never stayed long. In the early years, Calvin spoke with him on the telephone monthly and received birthday and Christmas gifts. On his sixteenth birthday, his father telephoned him from London, where his steel band was touring. Calvin always hoped their relationship would progress from awkward hugs and strained conversations, and he imagined his father playing soccer with him and his posse in Prospect Park, but Calvin hadn’t seen him since his high school graduation five years ago. Still, nothing had prepared him for his father’s funeral in Trinidad two months earlier.

Calvin couldn’t look at his father in his coffin. Instead, he focused on his sparkling chrome tenor steel pan on its stand near the altar. After reading a psalm, Calvin paused at the brown casket. His old man looked sharp in a black suit, a white rose pinned to the jacket pocket. In death as in life, the collar of his white shirt was left open. Calvin thought of the photograph of his father wearing a stingy brim hat and smiling into the camera like a man with a secret. He felt the tears on his cheeks and retreated to his seat. Then, a pannist struck his father’s tenor pan, and the sound reverberated through the church. Calvin sat mesmerized as the man caressed the notes to “How Great Thou Art.” The congregation raised their voices, and when the rhythm changed from pure melody to an improvised rendition, the people got up and danced in the aisles. Calvin wished he had told his father how much he loved him.

The voices in the holding cell droned on. A guy in a denim jacket lay curled on the floor, yelling curse words. When a man with his hair cut close to his scalp and his dark skin sagging at the jawline stepped on the guy’s hand on his way to the toilet, he jumped to his feet and screamed, “What the fuck?” The chatter in the cell died.

“Cut the shit,” someone yelled.

Everyone laughed, and the guy pulled his denim jacket closed and sat back down on the floor. Calvin felt spacy, as if he were perched on the dirty beige wall behind his seat, observing the officer announcing the docket numbers for arraignment and new characters filling the space.

 

By eleven the following morning, when he heard his docket number called, Calvin hadn’t slept or used the partitioned toilet at the back of the cell. He tucked his shirt into his pants and folded his collar outside his crewneck sweater. He followed the court officer through the dim hallway to another holding cell and sat behind a young white guy who looked more scared than he did.

“Calvin Jones, you have a visitor,” the court officer said.

He had hoped for a Black lawyer, but when Calvin entered the interview room he saw a middle-aged white man in a black suit standing at a corner desk. His eyes were blue and alert.

“Hey, Calvin. Richard Hansen. Godfrey hired me to represent you.” Calvin shook his hand and observed his gold, star-shaped cufflinks. “Rough twenty-four hours?”

“Yeah.” Calvin massaged his wrist. “How do you know my stepfather?”

“We go way back to when I was a social worker and we worked in the same city agency.” Richard removed a folder, pad, and pen from his briefcase. “I read the police report of the incident. Now tell me how you saw it.”

Calvin gave him a detailed account of the encounter. “I didn’t expect the cops would be out there stopping and frisking brothers on such a cold-ass night.”

Richard explained that since he’d possessed only a small amount of weed, the case could result in a fine like the two prior arrests, but that some prosecutors and judges had taken a closer look at third offenses. “Do you need anything?”

Calvin folded his arms. He didn’t trust that Richard could help him, for all his intentions. “I don’t want to go to Rikers Island. Let them deport me to Trinidad instead.”

“I want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

 

With his hands cuffed behind his back, Calvin followed the court officer into the courtroom. He bowed his head as he passed his mother and Godfrey on the front bench. After Richard pled his case, the judge denied his request to dismiss the charges but agreed to release Calvin on his own recognizance until the trial date.

Richard turned to Calvin and said quietly, “This is my request to you: Stay low. Don’t give the cops another reason to arrest you.”

Calvin tapped his fingers on the table. “They stopped and frisked me four times this month. Tell them to stay low.”

“I can’t do that. But you can leave your weed at home.”

Calvin forced a smile and nodded. Then he walked over and hugged Godfrey, avoiding his mother’s stare until she pulled him into her and whispered, “Look where you reach. You are better than this.”

He felt cut open with a dull knife. Refusing Godfrey’s offer of a ride, Calvin headed to the subway station. As he stepped through the turnstile, he heard steel pan notes. He leaned against a post and listened to the pannist’s soulful rendition of “Autumn Leaves.” It was carnival season in Trinidad, and the Panorama competitions between the top steel bands would be starting. Calvin imagined this pannist counting down the days until he could shed his woolen scarf and coat and board a plane that would take him straight to the energy of the pan yards.

Calvin remembered his father practicing with his band day and night, years ago when he still lived on the island. At Calvin’s last carnival in Trinidad, on the final competition night, he waited at the side of the stage. When the band had won, his father’s eyes lit up like the night sky. He grabbed Calvin, lifted him on his shoulders, and danced.

 

Entering his apartment, Calvin bolted to his bathroom and stepped under the shower, still in his sweater. The water gushed over his dreadlocks and into his mouth. He removed his wet clothes and scrubbed his skin until it hurt, trying to remove the stench of the holding cell. He leaned against the tile wall, closing his eyes as if it would keep out his terror of going to Rikers Island. He had heard his coworker Delroy’s stories of his brother wearing his underwear when he took showers, afraid of getting raped. After two inmates jumped him in the day room, Calvin remembered Delroy’s relief that his brother had a respite in the jail’s hospital.

What would the judge sentence him to for three joints? He could get at least two weeks in Rikers for a third offense. He shook the water from his hair and gathered his locs, tying them away from his face. He would miss the long showers he took twice a day, the Saturday morning soccer games in Prospect Park with his friends, even sitting with his boss in staff meetings at the hospital. Calvin hadn’t maintained enduring love relationships, as he was dazzled by every woman who had crossed his path. Still, at twenty-two, losing his freedom made his insides shake like coconut jelly.

Reaching for a joint hidden in his bathroom cabinet, Calvin lit it, regretting leaving his apartment the night he encountered the cops. He sat at his living room window, looking at the city’s lights and smoking. Calvin loved the smell of weed and the euphoria that transported him anywhere his mind took him. Listening to music, he imagined playing all the instruments simultaneously, and the notes became gold and silver threads stretching out his Brooklyn window to the moon and his father’s pan yard.

 

“Boy, come learn your culture,” his father said as they entered the large, open pan yard with its galvanized roof and lights strung up on poles. Calvin, nine years old, had strolled between various sized steel pans, some stacked on the cement floor, others displayed on stands.

“What smells so strong? Like something burning,” Calvin had asked his father.

“Them fellas smoking weed.”

“What is that?”

“I’ll tell you when you get a little older. Come pay attention.” Andrew handed Calvin a pair of pan sticks. “You see these steel pans in here? Some men died to bring this instrument into being right here on this little island. So, before you can play God’s music, you must learn to hold the sticks properly.”

Calvin eagerly followed his father’s instructions and spent the rest of the week holding the sticks between his thumb and index finger, wrapping his other fingers around it. In a rhythmic motion, he tapped the pan stick on his forearm, keeping his wrist loose like his father had shown him. Soon he graduated to the tenor pan. He spent weeks learning the scales, lightly hitting the notes as he moved from one part of the surface to another.

At one of his lessons, Calvin met Miss Sarah. Her large dangling earrings brushed against his father’s face as she leaned in to speak to him. Watching them, Calvin wanted to know what Miss Sarah had said to widen his smile like he had forgotten his wife.

“Do you know my mother?” Calvin asked her. “She is in New York but coming back home soon.”

His father pulled him to the side. “Miss Sarah is a friend. Now, go and practice rolling on the C note. You remember how to do that?”

“I think so,” Calvin mumbled. He hit the C note with his right hand and then his left, alternating back and forth. He glanced over at his father with Miss Sarah. “Roll faster,” his father called.

After dinner one night, when his father had been drilling him on the day’s pan lessons, Calvin asked him if he would take another trip to New York. After his mother first left, he had traveled there, promising to bring her back to Trinidad. Instead, he returned alone, with gifts Evelyn had sent for Calvin and his grandmothers. His father didn’t speak of his visit except to complain about being stuck in a snowstorm.

“Nah. Your mother doesn’t want to come back home,” his father said, laughing. “She likes New York and caring for other people’s children than her own.”

Calvin wanted to run to his bedroom, but he touched his father’s hand and asked, “Pa, you like Miss Sarah more than Ma?”

“Child, I eh make stupid children.” He laughed and hugged Calvin. “Don’t worry yourself about your mother and me.”

Calvin joined his mother two years later in New York and felt the weight of his parents’ mutual animosity. He was a boy and didn’t know much about love, but he longed for the safety he felt when his father sweet-talked his mother and made her laugh.

“Is Pa coming to live with us here?” Calvin had asked his mother.

“Your father left this family first, you hear me?” Evelyn said as she unpacked his suitcase. “Andrew loves his pan music and outside women more than you and me.”

Calvin saw his mother’s tears. He had met Miss Sarah and seen his father’s joy when he played with his band, and from then on, Calvin didn’t counter his mother’s views of his father or embrace any memory of him.

 

On Monday, Calvin clocked at the hospital. He pulled his black sweater over his wrists to hide the bruises. He wanted to speak to Delroy, his union representative, before he told his boss about the arrest. Calvin figured if he had to go to jail for a week or so, he could use his vacation time and no one would know. He watched his boss in his office, wearing his usual navy pinstriped suit, looking relaxed as he tucked the phone receiver into the crook of his neck. Calvin wondered how Tom would react to his arrest.

Calvin had seen both sides of his supervisory skills: the Tom who invited the tech crew to dinner and drinks at a sports bar every other month, and the Tom who had suspended his friend Jorge for coming in late three times in a month. Calvin avoided the heated office discussions about the suspension, believing Tom had warned the team about the lateness policy and was a good boss.

Later that afternoon Calvin entered his boss’s office, praying that Tom, who had treated him with respect for the last three years, would still see him and not another Black man on his way to Rikers Island. He hoped the veil between employee and boss would disappear, that Tom would treat him as a colleague.

“Hey, what’s up?” Tom waved Calvin in.

Calvin took a deep breath. “It’s about my job.”

“You’re leaving?”

“No.” Calvin started coughing.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

Tom reached behind his desk and tossed Calvin a bottle of water.

Calvin unscrewed the cap, avoiding Tom’s eyes. “I got arrested last Friday.”

“What?” Tom leaned forward. “You don’t look like a violent guy.”

Calvin screwed the cap back on. “The cops found weed on me,” he said. He tried to gauge Tom’s reaction to calculate how much he could reveal.

“You smoke marijuana?” Tom’s smile faded as he reached for his pen. Calvin shifted in his seat and began to explain how the cops had stopped him. Tom grimaced at the judge’s decision, and Calvin held off on telling him about his two prior arrests.

“Is there anything more?”

“No. Am I going to lose my job?”

Tom looked at his notepad. “I have to report this to HR. I’ll get back to you.”

When Calvin stood up, Tom reached over his desk and shook his hand—the last time they had shaken hands had been at Calvin’s final job interview. He wondered if Tom had decided to fire him.

“Should I come to work tomorrow?”

“Take a vacation day. You spoke to your union rep?”

“Yeah.” Calvin closed the door. He wanted to ask if he had a job to return to, but he didn’t want to appear desperate.

Returning to his cubicle, Calvin cleaned his desk, shredding the unwanted documents. At the end of his shift, he pushed the chair against his desk, reached for his knapsack, and clocked out. He looked back at the office he had called his second home. The four-person night crew sat at their workstations, lost in thought like subway riders, oblivious to each other’s terror. Tom called the team huddle and stood before the board, reviewing assignments. He didn’t look in Calvin’s direction or wish him a safe night as he normally did with all his staff. Maybe the arrest had disappointed Tom as it had done with his family.

Calvin headed to the cafeteria to meet Delroy. They had met at Calvin’s first union meeting, and Delroy reminded Calvin of his father. They both knew how to work a room, and depending on which end of the room Delroy landed on, he could seamlessly switch from standard English to Jamaican Patois. Delroy was sitting at a table near the coffee machine, and Calvin slid into the chair opposite him.

“You ever see dis? Trouble in de house,” Calvin said.

“Fe dat likkle bit a herb?”

“Damn, that cop got his teeth in me. Ready to put another little Black boy in Rikers.”

“Bwoy, dat place a battlefield. Dem nearly kill me brother.”

Calvin tapped on the table. “How he doing?”

“Dem deport him.”

“He lucky. I ready to bolt outta here.”

“Wha’?”

“Delroy, I eh go make it in Rikers. Dem cop might as well shoot me.”

“I hear prison in Trinidad worst.” Delroy leaned toward him. “Bwoy, keep your backside quiet. I will talk to my friends in the HR office. I gone.”

Calvin watched Delroy stroll to the elevator. They were family, island boys building new oars and floating on the tide.

 

The HR director asked Calvin to meet with her the following afternoon. He waited outside the HR conference room, gearing up to appeal his case. Calvin imagined sit-ting across from her, making eye contact, telling her how sorry he felt for jeopardizing his job. He would ask for another chance to continue working in a position where he had excelled, received outstanding evaluations, and earned two employee of the month awards.

But after calling him in, she didn’t give him time to speak. She informed him that she had read Tom’s report on the incident and had heard glowing praise for his work, but she had to terminate his employment. Calvin took his bag and walked out of the building into the cold. Despite his disappointment, he felt relieved. He would now focus his energy on his upcoming trial.

That night, staring at his television’s blank screen, Calvin thought of the holding cell. A young white guy in the row ahead of him had been telling an older Black man that it would be his first time at Rikers. “Brother man,” said the older guy, “you must calm down before you get to the island.” Then he looked back at Calvin and said, “They’ll eat him up in two days.” Calvin had tightened his fist as the older man placed his arm around the young man’s shoulder.

 

As he awaited his trial date, Calvin resisted returning to his parents’ home in the Bronx. He got work at a print shop during the day and as a busboy at a Jamaican restaurant at night. On weekends, he cleaned the backyard of the brownstone across from his building. When he had finished packing the last items into trash bags, Mrs. Johnston, the elderly owner, asked him to plant sunflower shoots she had germinated in a seed kit. Calvin had helped his grandmother plant her garden and wanted to feel the soil on his hands.

The following weekend, he donned gardening gloves and dug the pitchfork into the ground, loosening the soil and removing rocks and weeds. Mrs. Johnston joined him with the tray of green shoots and sat on the step while Calvin dug holes and planted them twelve inches apart, giving them room to grow. Mrs. Johnston reminisced about her mother’s garden in Barbados as he watered the young plants. Calvin had never seen her so animated. The little plants were no more than six inches tall, and Calvin hoped they would survive. As he was leaving, Mrs. Johnston gave him a basket with three tomatoes and a head of lettuce.

“You could return the basket next week and check on the shoots,” she said.

Calvin showed up the following weekend, tended the plants, and kept returning to Mrs. Johnston’s yard until his court date.

 

Two and a half months later, Calvin awoke at six a.m. to meet with Richard Hansen at the Brooklyn courthouse. In the full-length mirror in his bedroom, his reflection looked somber in his dark navy suit, white long-sleeved shirt, and red and black striped tie. He had worn the same clothes to his father’s funeral in Trinidad four and a half months earlier. When he covered his hair with a knitted cap, he realized his jacket’s cuffs still smelled like the sea.

After moving to New York, he had stopped attending church, but before entering the courtroom he bowed his head and asked his ancestors to bless and keep him strong, no matter the outcome. He nodded to his mother and stepfather and listened to Richard plead his case, reading a character reference letter written by his parents.

“Your honor,” Richard said, “I submit this letter, along with other character reference letters from Mr. Jones’s former supervisor at Kings County Hospital, Mr. Tom Tambey, and a former coworker, Mr. Delroy Thomas.”

Calvin watched the judge’s face as she read through the letters. When she raised her head and turned in his direction, he lowered his eyes, hoping she had believed his parents’ words. Calvin is a good man and will do better in the future. We beg you to give him another chance.

He grimaced as he listened to the prosecutor paint him as an addict who had broken the law thrice. Calvin thought of how he had judged his father for arriving late at his high school graduation ceremony and missing his walk to the stage to receive his diploma. Afterward, when his father reached to hug him, Calvin pulled away and, under his breath, called him a loser. He didn’t know if he had heard him, but after his father left he felt bitterly ashamed.

“Tell me, how much marijuana did the defendant possess on the night of the arrest?” the judge asked the prosecutor.

“He had three joints.”

The judge looked over at Calvin. “I don’t want to see you in my courtroom again.”

Calvin rose. “Yes, your honor.”

When the judge ruled in his favor, dismissing the prosecutor’s charges, he screamed inwardly. Calvin hugged Richard and cried.

“Remember the judge’s warning. Lose my number.”

Calvin laughed and held up both thumbs. “Richard, you took care of me. It’s the least I can do for you.”

He met his parents for lunch at a Thai restaurant. Tulips were blooming in a wooden planter across the street. Spring was here. The waitress directed them to a booth near the sushi bar, and Calvin sat across from his parents. The gold specks in the black laminate table reminded him of his mother’s story that when she was still in Trinidad, she had heard that the streets of New York sparkled like gold.

“So, what are you going to do now?” she asked.

“I’m going back to Trinidad.”

“Why would you do such a fool thing?” Godfrey asked.

Calvin glared at his stepfather, a response that surprised them both. “I’m sorry,” Calvin said.

“Are you going to answer the question?” his mother asked.

Calvin kept thinking of his paternal grandmother’s words to his father after his mother’s departure to America: “Boy, get your spirit back.” It was as if she were now speaking to him. He knew he had to leave New York, if only for a short while. He shifted in his chair. “Evelyn, I need a break. I don’t have a job to keep me here.”

“Eh-eh, so we on first names now? No more ‘Mama’?”

“I’ve put my classes on hold.” Calvin knew what was coming, but he didn’t care. He had survived the holding cell and could survive his mother’s pained look.

“I brought you out of Trinidad for this? A slap in my face?”

“I know how much you sacrificed to bring me to New York.” Calvin glanced at the sushi chef, who looked away.

Evelyn leaned toward Calvin. “What do you know about my sacrifice? I worked two and three jobs to make a better life for us. On top of that, I still went to nursing school. You get a second chance at life, and now you’re flinging it out the window like that?”

Calvin squirmed. Two women were staring in his direction. He lowered his voice, “I’m sorry. I never wanted to hurt you as Papa did, but I loved him as much as I loved you.”

“What did Andrew ever do for you?”

Calvin stood up. “I got to go.”

He couldn’t explain to her that he wanted to go back and find the pieces of himself that he had lost.

On his way back to his apartment, Calvin stopped at the barbershop. He removed the knitted cap that covered his shoulder-length dreadlocks.

“Shave it off,” Calvin said.

“You sure?”

Calvin nodded. When he had started dreading his hair at seventeen, his mother had disapproved. She asked if he was becoming a Rastafarian like his father’s friends. But Calvin wasn’t growing his hair to make a political statement or embrace anything other than himself. He liked the freedom of not having to ask permission from anyone.

As the clumps of hair fell and pooled on the barbershop floor, he wanted to cry. But Calvin would’ve surrendered his very skin to the barber’s skillful hands to remove the invisible stains from the holding cell. He had grown every strand of hair in defiance, thinking he was free. Calvin smiled, seeing his father’s face in the mirror, a pleasing face to carry him through life. He felt weightless. He could’ve been boarding the bus to Rikers Island.

Strolling along Nostrand Avenue, Calvin savored the street he had called home. He stepped out of the way as a woman ducked into a shoe store. He rooted for a man on his bicycle racing across the street to beat a red light. He visited a Trini bakery and bought sweet bread. The smell took him back to his grandmother’s kitchen in the seaside village of Moruga, where he had buried his father.

Leaving the cemetery, he had gone to the sea as the tide came in, removed his shoes, and stepped onto the sand, watching the sun recede below the horizon. The sea shimmered like a sequined carpet. Calvin stretched his hands toward the sky, feeling its limitlessness. He had left one island for another, wrapped in the folds of his mother’s dreams. Standing at the island’s edge, Calvin had become the vast ocean lapping shorelines, flowing between past and present, its white foam churning over rocks, making them smooth. He felt the wind’s embrace urging him on. Stepping back into the Brooklyn street, he imagined feeling that wind again.

 

 

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Arlene Quiyou Pena was born in Trinidad and immigrated to New York City with her family when she was fourteen. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Southern New Hampshire University, and her work has appeared in Assignment and My Trinidad.

 

 

 

Photo by Bret Lama on Unsplash