Grip Trilogy Box Set

“Find your own girl.” I chuckle but pull her back to my chest, crossing my arms at her waist. She crosses her arms to hold my elbows and tilts her head into my neck.

“Now that I’m out, I can.” Mateo’s laughter fades, and he looks at me seriously for the first time all day. “I gotta thank you again, Marl.”

I shift, tightening my arms around Bristol. I hope he doesn’t make a big deal out of this, especially with everyone gathering around. Bristol glances up at me, the question in her eyes.

“Did he tell you what he did?” Mateo asks Bristol. She shakes her head and waits for him to go on.

“I got pulled over in Vegas for some shit I didn’t do.” Mateo twists his lips into a grimace. “Wrong place, wrong time. I got caught up in some other nigga’s drama and couldn’t get uncaught.”

“What happened?” Bristol asks, not flinching at his use of the N word. She’s been around enough now that she’s used to it. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, but it won’t be the last time she’ll hear it while managing a hip-hop artist, and certainly not the last if she’s around my friends.

“I was rotting in a Vegas jail.” Mateo runs his hand over his goatee thoughtfully. “The bail was high enough for nosebleeds. I couldn’t touch it—no one could.” Mateo flashes me a look of chagrin. “Well, no one I wanted to call.”

Surprise is evident on Bristol’s face when she looks up at me. “You didn’t know?” she asks.

“No.” I tuck my chin deeper into the clean, sweet scent of her neck. “I was on tour, and this knucklehead didn’t call me.”

“I didn’t want to be one of them dudes always needing shit from your homey when he makes it big, expecting stuff,” Mateo says, a frown sketching his disgust. “Grip was the last person I wanted to call.”

“Which is ridiculous.” I roll my eyes at the proud stubbornness he’s always had, even when we were kids. “This was jail, not asking me for a hookup. As soon as Ma let me know what was up, I sent a little something to help.”

“A little something?” Mateo snorts. “A hundred thousand dollars ain’t a little something, Marl. I’d been sitting in that jail for two months.”

Indignation scratches me from the inside when I think of Mateo and thousands of others like him rotting in jail, innocent but unable to make bail.

“It’s a rigged system.” My voice comes out abrasive in the soft mass of Bristol’s hair. “As long as there are people financially benefitting from the imprisonment of others, our justice system can’t be pure. Prison should not be a business.”

I clamp my lips over the other things I would say. It’s not a night for my soapbox, and once I start talking about mass incarceration and the other things that affect Black, brown, and poor people disproportionately, I won’t be able to shut up. It’s a party, not a protest.

“And that’s why you’re going to New York,” Ma says, startling me since I didn’t notice her take the spot beside me in the yard. “To learn how you can help our boys, right?”

“Right.” I stretch my arm to bring her to one side, shift Bristol to the other, and lay a kiss on the top of Ma’s head.

“Okay,” she says to change the subject, passing her grin around to everyone in the circle. “We ate. We played. We smoked.”

She points to Mateo in the middle of a long draw on the blunt he pulled from his pocket.

“I hope you brought enough of that for everybody.” She doesn’t pause for the laughter that follows her words. “But I want to say a few things before we go home, before Marlon leaves for New York tomorrow.”

If I could blush, I would—maybe I am under all my melanin.

“Now Marlon thought it was silly to have a going away party since he’ll be back,” she says, “and is only gone for the semester, but I’m just as proud of him for him doing this as I am of his platinum records. I always told him how important education was for everyone, but especially for little Black boys.”

The sun has gone down, and tiki lamps around the perimeter cast patches of light in her small back yard. In the half-dark, I search my mother’s face. She’s changed so little in some ways, the skin at her eyes and neck still smooth and taut, but so much in others. Raising a boy in this neighborhood by herself took its toll. She always has a joke, always makes us laugh, but every person here knows the losses she’s endured and the sacrifices she made, mostly for me. She focuses her intense stare on my face with the steady eyes that, for most of my life, shaped what I see.

“I’d come home from working my second job some nights,” she goes on, “and Marlon would be up reading or reciting a poem for school. He was a roughneck, don’t get me wrong.”

My chuckle joins everyone else’s laughter.

“But he was smart.” Ma wears her proud smile like a badge. “This is a hard life, and a hard place to grow up. It’s a rock that too many break themselves on, but you broke the rock, Marlon. You never let a place, a neighborhood, or our circumstances define you. You’re a mold-breaker. You always have been.”

Her eyes drift to Bristol, quiet and still against me, watching my mother as closely as I am.

“You keep living your life exactly as you see fit.” She smiles at Bris-tol. “Trust your gut. Trust your heart. They haven’t steered you wrong yet, and I’m proud of you.”

I’m unexpectedly moved by her words, by all the support surrounding me. Every face, every smile, every person in this backyard loves me. Some of them didn’t understand when I took a bus every day to another world at the performing arts school. Some of them didn’t understand when I was sweeping studio floors instead of getting a “real” job or going to college right out of high school. Some of them don’t really understand why, with a platinum album and a successful music career, I feel the need to go to NYU at all. Some of them don’t understand why the girl cuddled against my chest, who in most ways is completely foreign to them and to this life, is the center of my world. They don’t understand, but they support, and on the cusp of this new chapter in my life, unsure of what happens next, that’s all I can ask for.

Chapter 10