Naomi smiled when she received Amir’s note to ask her out during History class because it confirmed her beliefs—that she was different and special, destined for a normal life of marriage, a house, and kids—not the life she pined to escape. Unlike her legacy, she’d tell her children about boarding a bus out of East Oakland to Park Place, the legendary theatre with soft lights and a fancy interior where they watched her favorite movie Love Jones. As they playfully argued about the ambiguous ending, he placed her hand over his heart. Naomi didn’t feel lust or even the stirrings of puppy love, but more importantly safe.
On their way back home, they strolled through the East Lake community.
“The houses are so beautiful and colorful,” Naomi said. “Victorian.”
She studied his wide brown eyes, ran her hand on top of his fade as he pointed a mocha-colored hand to a teal Victorian. “Our possible future,” he replied.
“Do you think you’ll ever love me?”
He tightened his hand around hers. “I already do.”
She kissed him on the cheek.
After Amir dropped Naomi off, she told her younger sister, Ashanti, that she’d met her future husband, that she’d grow to love him for his honesty and security. “I’ll pass down love, not whatever Mom gave to us.”
Ashanti rolled her eyes and brushed her short hair. “You’re so fucking fake.”
“We can’t all be savage hoes like you.”
“We can’t all be delusional like you either.” Ashanti smiled and stuck her tongue out.
Naomi believed she was different when her father went to prison the first time. He’d seen an optimism and wisdom in her deep brown eyes. calmer than the midnight waters, and urged to hold onto it. She did by writing him monthly, but he never wrote back.
She kept her thoughts close like doves that she’d hope she could release with that realization. To prove she was better than where she’d come from, and in Amir she saw that chance. At sixteen, she was sure they’d be an old couple catching matinees at Park Place. But the next time they’d be at Park Place is when they’d moved on to other people.
Amir and Naomi lived in Oakland, the East Bay town known for Lake Merritt, the rolling fog, and Indian summers that ended with warm, gentle evenings, but they didn’t live in the gentrified neighborhoods on postcards near yoga studios, sustainable communal farms and hipster cafes with Tibetan flags and affirmation-named drinks.
They lived in East Oakland, the largest part of town frightening to the yuppy transplants and liberals, where boys in hoodies and sagging jeans hung out on East Fourteenth St. because they had no work to go to, and where girls with large hoop earrings and airbrushed t-shirts of murdered loved ones pushed their babies in strollers.
Naomi learned neighborhood rules through osmosis. Missing posters of Black children that news never covered, police sirens and gunshots reminded her that home would never be safe.
The evening of the assault, she’d walked past such a poster when a man pulled a knife on her, forcing her silence or else he’d slash her throat like a whore. He pushed her into an alley, slammed her against the cold concrete, unzipped his pants and shoved himself inside her. A virgin, she screamed with the shock and pain of being ripped open, for her life, hoping one of those baggy-jeaned boys would save her. Nobody came.
Afterward she ran home and told her mother, who took her to the hospital and called the cops. Wearing a thin paper gown that scratched her breasts, she repeated the story to the officer who raised a suspicious brow with every answer.
No, she didn’t know the man.
No, she wasn’t wearing anything tight or revealing.
No, r*pe wasn’t too strong of a word.
The police caught the man, but released him due to lack of evidence.
Naomi only walked out at night with her sister and, when they started going together, Amir. She was fifteen when that happened.
Now she’s twice as old.
“Congratulations!” a group of women yelled as Naomi took the picture.
Ashanti’s baby shower. For once, their house was abundant with love. Showing off her baby bump in a soft blue crop top, Ashanti proudly waddled as she collected her gifts: second-hand infant clothing, a used stroller, a thrift-store crib, and motherly advice. Ashanti was a good actress, smiling like her condition did not phase her when Naomi remembered how she’d consoled Ashanti in their shared bedroom after she’d revealed her pregnancy to the father, and he informed her that he’d never marry her.
But she had that glow. Naomi and her mother agreed to care for the baby while Ashanti worked at the Dollar Store and finished her GED at night school.
“What are you going to do after school?” Ashanti asked Naomi as they cleaned up. “You’ve got the brains for college.”
Naomi shook her head. “College is expensive.”
“What about a baby?”
Naomi looked at her own flat midsection and felt nauseous. “That’s not the life I want.”
The next day Naomi cut class to go to Planned Parenthood for birth control.
“I want to see it,” Amir said.
Naomi handed him the crinkled plastic pill case as they both lay naked, tangled in a heap of tumbled sheets on a spring afternoon at her mother’s house. They stole the rare moments when either of them had an empty house to indulge themselves in one another and other vices. She’d steal some of her mother’s beers and Amir brought Dutch Masters to smoke before and a dime bag afterward. Maturity meant engaging in forbidden activities like lying to her mother that she was still a virgin, because in that household, the assault didn’t count.
She ran her hands along his sternum as he examined the packet. They’d traded condoms for pills to feel closer. “Why you taking them anyway?”
“You don’t want me to get pregnant, do you?”
“I want you to have my baby,” he snorted and laughed. He was higher than a transatlantic flight. “Am I not worth it?”
“It’s not that,” she said.
She leaned her head on his chest as she searched for the right answer. He’d graduated to hanging out with those East Fourteenth Street bums that ran whenever the cops saw them. She didn’t want to be a teen mom, like her mom and Ashanti. She wanted to be married first.
“We’re only seventeen. I want us to be ready. I want to get a job first.”
“We don’t need to worry about that,” he replied. “I got you.”
She kissed him.
That summer, Naomi graduated. She attended beauty school and worked as a hairstylist, specializing in weave sew-ins and installations. Work left her with little time and tough hands but enough money to help her mother and her niece, Sasha. Amir graduated from Laney Community College. Sasha kissed him as soon as he walked across the stage, ready to start their life together.
But their future remained stagnant, a fantasy, like winning the lottery or winning a game show. She worked more hours to save for a deposit, but her mother kept asking for extra cash for rent, utilities, and her beer. Naomi often escaped to her shared room to pontificate on her own fantasies with Amir.
“Just you watch,” he said. “We’ll get a house in Piedmont, a boy and a girl, and then fluffy-ass Pomeranians. I’ll take you to Nairobi for your twenty-fifth birthday.”
“Nigga you’re high,” Naomi said. She attempted to keep that hope at arm’s length.
“Don’t believe me? You should.”
Wherever she returned from her downtown receptionist job, Naomi’s mother always complained about how stressful them white folks were, of running out of cereal because one of them had finished the box, of returning home to a noisy toddler and grown women yapping like teens. Most of all, she’d confessed after downing a six pack on a Friday evening, she was stressed about having kids by that bum ass nigga who couldn’t keep a legal job, whom she’d lost to hood rats and hoes, then to prison.
Her mother gave Naomi a copy of a lease in the Fruitvale district for her twenty-second birthday.
“Get out of my house,” her mother slurred as she sipped her seventh beer. “Looking like your ugly ass daddy.”
Naomi set two steaming plates of fried liver with smothered onions, collard greens, and sweet potatoes at both sides of her small dinner table as she looked with pride at the only men she’d loved in her life—Amir and her father. Her father had changed his legal name from Alton to Mohammod; his scrawny frame now dense and muscular, picking Naomi like a kitten; his religion from Baptist to Nation of Islam under Yusef Bey’s guidance, the owner of Your Black Muslim Bakery. Naomi’s father discussed his new landscaping career.
Amir caressed her hand underneath the table, soothing her stress. Hope scared her as she listened to him talk between bites. Her father hadn’t held down a legit job for longer than six months, but when he surprised her with hoop earrings or a new handbag, she learned from her mother to never ask where he got the money.
“I’m worried about him,” Naomi said to her father. She motioned to Amir as he washed dishes. “He can’t find work. I pay most of the bills. We couldn’t have kids like this.”
Her father sipped his tea, the cup almost disappearing in his strong hands. “You’re becoming your mom. You gonna stop speaking to me too?”
Naomi felt like a kid when he scolded her. “You’ve been in his position before. I’m asking for your help. He’s a good man. Educated. But he lacks ambition. Maybe you could mentor him? Does Mr. Bey need help?”
He handed her a business card. “Tell Amir to call.”
“Happy birthday!” a group of women and children shouted as Naomi took the picture.
Sasha’s sixth birthday. Ashanti’s coworkers and friends bought reasonable gifts from their server jobs. Crayons, coloring books, and stickers, but Naomi was Sasha’s favorite for the pink monogram backpack and turquoise and grey Nikes all the rage on the playground.
Naomi and Amir helped Ashanti clean up the plates of the neglected store-bought cake and melted Dollar Store ice cream while Sasha showed off to her friends.
Ashanti shrugged. “When you don’t have kids, you got it like that.”
Naomi winced. No, they didn’t have it like that. Amir’s work with Mr. Bey solved money problems but created others. She no longer welcomed an evening alone to watch reality TV in peace. Now, she’d send frantic texts where he was. He stopped cleaning up, leaving Naomi to finish it before her salon shifts, and to prove a point she topped. He bought a car cash without consulting her.
Naomi shook her head as Ashanti laughed. Naomi only let Ashanti see what she wanted her to see. That Amir was loyal, trustworthy, employed and faithful. He’d never been to jail, cheated, or hit Naomi. Still, Naomi felt stuck. She didn’t share the questions about marriage, how he’d removed her birth control pills and she got a new set and took them at her work instead of at home.
“Why don’t y’all have kids yet?” Ashanti asked.
Because he won’t marry me, Naomi wanted to say. Instead she looked at Amir.
“When the money is right,” she said.
“When the time is right,” he replied.
Naomi began her twenty-fifth birthday with a long examination in her bathroom mirror on a search and destroy mission for inevitable signs of aging. The crow’s feet, the puffy bags, the little black moles that lined her mother’s face like a constellation. The salon celebrated with bottles of Moscato and Amadale for screwdrivers, but Naomi felt hollow as she sipped her drinks. Took broke to celebrate, too tired to talk about it, too exhausted to deal with Amir.
Naomi rolled her eyes as she clicked off a late-night episode of Maury as Amir returned home late again, this time with an obligatory cake and Dollar Store ice cream. She sipped her wine and refused to eat the cake.
“My life’s a mess,” she said. “I’m just a single hairdresser for awful weaves. What happened to Nairobi? Is there someone else?”
“Never.”
“Then why do you come home late all the time? Are you dealing drugs?”
Amir grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around her. Mr. Bey and her father advised him to sell in between orders. “They’re professional about it, sweetheart. I’ll take you to Nairobi when we’re thirty.”
“You know how I feel about drugs. That’s what got my dad locked up, and you’re going to sell that crap?”
“I found something I’m good at.”
“Will we ever get married?”
“Marriage is for old folks and white folks,” he replied.
“We’re not white, and we won’t stay young forever. You should’ve asked by now.”
He stormed into the bedroom.
She followed him.
“Don’t throw our future away behind drugs,” she said.
“I’m trying to do right by you,” he replied. “For the past two years I’ve listened to your dad complain about how I’m not a man—”
“I helped you find that fucking job!” she shouted. “Why can’t you get off your ass and do more with your life?”
He faced her. “Accept who I am. I accepted how spoiled and selfish you are,” he shouted back. He calmed down and caressed her shoulders. “I’m sorry for yelling, but we’ve got to love for love. Why isn’t that enough?”
Naomi leaned back against the closet room and surveyed the mess of the room and her life. She loved him for safety, but his safety couldn’t pay bills, make him ambitious, marry her.
“I don’t always want to be broke. I want a better life. One better than this.”
Amir searched through their dresser and tossed the birth control back at her. “Flush these, because I won’t be in your life.”
Naomi slept on the couch and awoke in the middle of the night to clean the apartment. She circled apartment ads in The Oakland Tribune and tossed it to Amir with a note: she’d booked him a room at Hedenburger Motel 6 for the night. She recommended that he use his share of rent to cover the hotel until he found a place, because he couldn’t stay in her house.
“Yes, I accept the charges,” Naomi slurred over the phone.
It was formerly Alton, formerly the free Mohammad, now the incarcerated Mohammad back in jail over drug charges after an informant named him as one of Yusef Bey’s runners.
“Look,” Naomi huffed, “I know Mom and I don’t get along, but I see why she didn’t want to visit last time you were free. Why didn’t you ever write me back?”
“It’s a conspiracy,” he replied.
She hung up and opened a second bottle of cheap wine and planted herself in front of the TV, eager for sleep. Home wasn’t a welcoming place of home-cooked meals, foot massages, and folded clothes. Takeout and wine became her companions for her life now; without a partner, child, or a job she liked. Naomi had hated when her mother got drunk and pitied her regrets and choices, yet here she was. As she stumbled off to bed, she saw a hooded shadow by her window. She found a comfort in the silent figure, thinking of when Amir used to walk outside with her at night, but that morphed into fear when she heard a quick shake and felt an explosive rattle. In her house slippers and flannel pajamas, she ran outside and screamed at the sight of her car engulfed in flames and smoke. Her car had been bombed.
She had to move out of Fruitvale.
Naomi told her coworkers that she’d switched from wine to champagne because it felt fancier, but it was really because she got drunk faster with champagne. She moved to a downtown studio in Alice St., across the street from the McDonald’s where reporter Chauncey Bailey was assassinated. She could only handle the loneliness and emptiness of Saturdays with alcohol, and with it, she settled in for a private viewing of Love Jones.
Now that Naomi was older than the movie’s heroine, she noticed the errors; the leads kept dating other people, tried to convince themselves it was a physical affair; the heroine’s best friend gave terrible advice; how foolish it was to pretend that love comes around daily or even annually, but these thoughts clouded her real fears. That she’d expected Amir to support her, marry her, and father their children; that she drank to avoid the memories that usurped her mind; nights lying next to him and watching TV, tasking the recipes he made for her, returning to a fun home with his mismatched socks everywhere and his razor next to hers in the bathroom.
That he took her nostalgia and future with him, and she feared never getting that back, not even in her favorite movie.
To offer her support over Ashanti’s abortion and newest breakup, Naomi took her sister and niece out to IHOP on a rainy Saturday morning. They sipped coffee and reminisced about when their mother took them there on their way to visit their father in prison. Naomi ignored talking about Ashanti’s recent boyfriend throwing a coffee mug that must’ve reminded her of the beating their mother took from boyfriends or the real occasion.
“I’ve got to set a good example and be strong for her,” Ashanti said. She motioned to Sasha who was reading a Judy Blume novel.
“I wish I felt as confident about my own life,” Naomi replied.
Ashanti rolled her eyes. “Girl, you’ve got to snap out of this. You’ve gained fifteen pounds, stopped wearing makeup and now you’ve got your hair in those locs, looking like Predator’s little sister. There’s too many men to be stressed out over one.” She leaned over. “Pipe makes the world go ’round!”
Naomi cast a glance at Ashanti. She couldn’t explain that whenever she saw the police arrest a Black man, she wondered if she’d ended the promising future they could’ve had together and forced him to a dangerous one?
“Amir’s the only man I’ve felt safe with after the assault. I wish I could get him back because we were safer together.”
“Was safety enough?” Ashanti asked.
“I wanted it to be.”
Ashanti cut into her egg, the runny yolk spilling onto the clean white plate. “I feel you.”
Naomi ignored her French toast. Ashanti didn’t get it.
Naomi’s newest client requested a full weave for her fourteen-year-old daughter like Keyshia Cole’s Kool-Aid red hair on her album cover, The Way It Is.
“She’s too young for that,” Naomi said.
The client snatched her credit card back. “I’m not letting some Hotep Hoe do my baby’s hair.”
Naomi decided to look for a new job.
“Bang bang. My baby shot me down,” Naomi’s students sang in the classroom.
The school was on lockdown. A weapon had been fired on school grounds and security urged all students to remain with their after-school advisors. Naomi worked for Skyline, the same middle school she had attended while she earned her Associates at Laney College during the night. Oakland was a tough school district. To combat the high turnover, the school district opened liberal lateral-entry programs. Naomi’s signed a contract with the school to teach for five years if the district agreed to pay her college tuition.
To calm her seventh graders ,she played Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and braided her student Audra’s hair. They talked about high school options, basketball, and poetry.
Naomi jumped when she heard a knock. It was Sean, the History teacher. “The lockdown is over,” he said.
“Thanks,” Naomi replied.
“We were talking about Audre Lorde,” Audra said. “We should read her instead of stupid-ass Steinbeck.”
“I agree. I’ll try to sneak her in tomorrow.” He turned to Naomi. “How are you?”
“Better now that’s over with,” Naomi replied. She blushed thinking of how she’d gushed to Ashanti about Sean weeks before.
“Ms. Naomi, you have a beautiful smile,” he said. “See you ladies around.”
“Oh snap! Ms. Naomi found her baby daddy?” Audra laughed.
Naomi shook her head. “You like him.”
Audra laughed. “I don’t like boys. Them other teachers are bitches, but you’re cool.”
She smiled at Audra’s and Sean’s compliment. “Don’t curse,” she replied.
It could’ve been Amir.
An apparent accident where a BART worker thought he pulled out his taster but shot him. The charges were upgraded to murder.
Naomi and Sean held up signs along with hundreds at City Hall, urging for Oscar Grant’s justice, a young man who wanted to celebrate New Year’s Eve now dead. He’d been murdered outside of Fruitvale station. She cheered as Audra, now a Sophomore, spoke passionately into the microphone, demanding that the city officials not only care about the posh enclaves of the hills and Piedmont, but also the flatland comprising youth, victims to the streets and police.
“It’s so good to see her evolution,” Sean said. “As Malcolm X said, ‘No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.'”
“That was Assata Shakur,” Naomi replied. “She also said no revolutionary woman can have a reactionary man.”
Audra was right. After the lockdown, Sean had snuck an Audre Lorde book of poetry into Naomi’s inbox and asked her to read it with him. For her birthday he gave her a pair of Topaz earrings, but Naomi was aware of her past. She avoided discussions of the future and focused on the present.
“Want to go to Sonoma County for wine tasting on spring break?”
She’d heard this line before with Amir. “I’ll believe you when I see proof.”
He opened his wallet and showered her the ticket receipt. “Believe me now?”
She hugged him.
Oakland was collapsing. Changing.
First Chauncey Bailey, then Oscar Grant, now this. Park Place was closing. “Some corporation is turning it into luxury apartments,” Sean recited as he read the newspaper.
“We already have enough of those,” Naomi replied. She handed him a donut.
“I saw so many movies when I first moved here from Sacramento. Last viewing is Love Jones next Thursday. Want to go?”
“We could dress up!” Naomi said.
The next Thursday they treated it like a traditional date night. Sean dressed in a blue suit he wore from the debate team and Naomi in a tight red dress, and went to Park Place. During the movie Naomi took in the details of the red interior and soft lighting which gave the theatre a plush feel. She remembered her first date with Amir, when the world was ahead of her and she was more innocent in her beliefs. Now, watching the ambiguous ending she couldn’t tell if it was a beginning for the couple or a celebration of the new life, they gave each other.
Naomi and Sean laughed like carefree teens when she saw a man with glowing mocha colored skin and wide brown eyes dressed in a suit with a long haired, thick redbone who was likely his date.
Amir turned around and waved to Naomi. He grabbed his date’s hand before he walked up to Naomi and hugged her with open arms. Naomi inhaled the scene of his cologne and realized they still and likely would always fit together.
“Naomi!” he said. “It’s been so long! This is Rashida.”
They all shook hands.
“Your hair looks great. How have you been?” Amir asked.
“Dad went back to prison. I moved. Became a teacher. Met this amazing man. You?”
“I was homeless for a few months until I joined the Army. Then I lived between Alaska and Kuwait, but I’ve moved back now. Going to school for my Bachelors and I’m going to open my own landscaping business. Your dad was right,” he replied.
“You were her first love,” Sean said.
“First love is sweet when you’re young,” Rashida said with an eye roll.
“She’s a great woman. I grew up when she kicked me out. Took wisdom to see that,” Amir said.
“Do you ever regret losing her?” Sean asked. He interlaced his fingers between Naomi’s.
“My only regret was that you were my first love but not my last. Do you?”
Naomi could’ve given him a sanitized version, but she didn’t want to betray her heart. She looked back at Sean who nodded as she came forward to Amir.
She whispered in Amir’s ear, “We never lost, we both are in better places.” She stumbled on her words when Amir touched her Topaz earrings. “You know I’m not good with these types of things.”
Amir nodded. “I know.”
************
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