I sat in my heavy chair waiting for the sun, wondering if she would call and if I saw her would one of her boyfriends kill me. I wondered if she might die from AIDS and never call to warn me. Somewhere in the tangle of fears I fell asleep again.
Local Hero
My grandfather, and Sherman’s, was Theodore Brownley from Spiritville, Louisiana—a town that no longer exists.
Theodore moved to Brooklyn soon after the flood that washed Spiritville into the Mississippi in November 1949; at least that was what my cousin Sherman said that our grandfather told him. Grandpa Theodore came to Flatbush, bought an empty lot, built the house that Sherman was later born in, married Florida James from Brownsville, New York, and fathered three sons: Isaac, Blood, and my mother’s husband, Skill.
Florida bore their three sons in the first four years of marriage. The brothers Brownley courted three sisters born to Lucinda Cardwell, who lived with her brood across the street and down the block from the Brownley clan.
Three brides for three brothers, and, if you believe the rumors, there was some cross-pollination too.
My father, Skill Brownley, was married to Mint Cardwell. Our first cousin Theodora’s mom was Lana, and her father was Isaac. Blood married Nefertiti, then got killed in a bar fight just a year after she bore his son.
These names are very important because they are the stakes that hold down the billowing tent of my story, my lives. I am Stewart Cardwell-Brownley, born into the family of Skill Brownley—Grandpa Theodore’s youngest son. I have two brothers and one sister. Theodora had one sister and one brother. The three sisters that the Brownley brothers married had five other siblings. But the rest, even though I love them dearly, don’t figure much in the telling of my tale.
What matters is that Sherman, like his father, Blood, was killed in a street fight not three blocks from the house Theodore built. My first cousin Sherman did all things good and bad. He was a straight-A student, a Lothario of mythic proportions, nationally recognized for high school baseball and basketball, a devout Christian, a sometimes heavy drinker, and a street fighter. His hunger for truth was equaled only by his thirst for life. He could never get enough, and his heart was all over the place. I was closer to him than to anyone else in the Brownley clan. Partly because, even though he was only a year older than I, Sherman was my protector and teacher; he taught me almost everything I knew, including, though it seems unlikely, most things I learned after his death.
As a youth I was never very good in school or at athletics; neither was I popular. My parents never pushed me much, but they always offered to help me with schoolwork, and my father played catch with me and my younger brother Floyd on fair days in Prospect Park, when he wasn’t putting in overtime at the machine shop.
I had three friends through all the years of public school. Bespectacled Mister Pardon, Fat Jimmy Ellis, and Ballard “the Perv” Ingram. We would hang out on the lunch court before and after school, trading comic books and gossiping about the sex exploits of everyone else.
Every now and then Sherman would join us, usually waiting to hook up with some girl. We liked him because he was the best of us, all of us. He ran faster, stood his ground no matter the odds, and he could recite every school assignment by heart. At church he sang with the gospel choir, and afterward he’d make out with one of the church daughters in the storeroom behind the dais upon which the choir performed.
But even though he was a blazing star among assorted lumps of clay, Sherman would join me and my friends on the lunch court just as if he was one of us, talking about the X-Men and teachers he couldn’t stand.
I remember one day he asked short, squinty-eyed Ballard the Perv what comic book character he wanted to be.
“Not,” Sherman stipulated, “the one you like the most but the one you would be if you could be.”
Ball, which is what we called Ballard sometimes, scrunched up his eyes and stared at my first cousin like he might be a cop who needed the right answer or else he would kick some ass.
“The Thing,” Ball said at last. “The Thing from the Fantastic Four.”
Sherman smiled and winked at me.
“He’s ugly,” Fat Jimmy said.
“Yeah,” Ball replied, “but he’s got a secret power.”
“What power?” Mister asked. Mister Pardon was dark-skinned, like the rest of us, and named Mister, in the Southern black tradition, so that no white man could disrespect him. He was an exceptional student, though he stuttered when talking to anyone but us three and sometimes Sherman.
“His dick,” the Perv said. “It’s rough the way my uncle Billy says that girls like it, and it’s really big ’cause of those cosmic rays.”
Ball’s voice was so filled with wonder and desire that I was afraid Sherman might turn mean and make fun of him. I and my friends were all around thirteen, while my cousin was fourteen going on forty. Sherman could be cutting, and I had the urge, but not the nerve, to stand between him and Ball.
Sherman bit his lower lip and cut his eyes at the Perv.
“Yeah, right?” he said with a smile. “That’s what I always thought about the Hulk. You know like if the madder he get the stronger he is, then maybe the hornier he get the bigger his dick is.”
Ballard the Perv’s eyes opened wide, and I believed that he’d dream about being the Hulk for the next year.
One afternoon, more than a year after the bio-philosophical talk about the sexual prowess of superheroes, Sherman came up to me and my friends on the lunch court. This was unusual, because my cousin had graduated to high school and didn’t come by very much anymore.
Sherman sat down and greeted me and my friends. He told us about a fight he’d got in with a cop’s son. The kid was named Carl and was in the eleventh grade.
“I got beat down,” Sherman said, with a wry grin, “but I gave him a black eye and chipped his front tooth.”
Mister, Jimmy, and Ball had a hundred questions, but Sherman said, “We can talk about all that later. Right now I need Stew here to help me with somethin’.”
I was due home in less than an hour. My mother and father were very strict, and even though I hadn’t done very well at anything in particular, I always obeyed them and showed up on time. On the other hand, Sherman had never asked for my help before. He made sure to spend time with me a day or two each month. Once in a while I stayed over at the apartment where he and his mother, Titi, lived. At night, after she was asleep, Sherman would take me up to the roof, where he smoked cigarettes and drank sweet wine.
“You see down there in the alley?” he once asked me.
“Yeah, I see.”
“All kinds of things happen down there in the nighttime. People fuckin’ and fightin’, and sometimes they die. Right down there in the open but in the dark.”