His Last Wife

Maybe that was why she threw him off the roof. To quiet that constant quiz of who she was and what she could do to stop it.

With the Georgia breeze blowing over her skin in the jail yard, Kerry closed her eyes and imagined doing it. Being high up there on the roof over all of Atlanta around her. Her past a maze down below through the streets and highways. She could see I-85. Wasn’t that the way she’d taken to Coreen’s house that night when she was pregnant? When Tyrian was so heavy in her belly she could hardly walk? And she had to get up out of her bed and into her car, swollen ankles and all, to go out into the world to find her damn husband. Get him from another woman’s house, smack in the middle of the ghetto. Make him see her. His wife. His first wife.

She imagined her hands pressed against Jamison’s chest on that roof. Every question he’d ever asked her about who she was and how she could change, she turned on him. Who the fuck was he? How the fuck could he change? How the fuck could he do this to her? Promise her so much and then take it all away for some other woman? For Coreen? And a stroke of his ego?

She pushed.

She pushed.

She pushed.

She imagined pushing and pushing and pushing.

And he fell.

And he died.

And here she was, paying for it all.

Kerry opened her eyes and through tears, she looked out at what all her past had gotten her. Even though she hadn’t really killed her ex-husband, she knew that where she’d found herself had to have been linked to that past. What she was guilty of . . . what she wasn’t guilty of . . . none of it mattered. She only knew that if she wanted to change her future, to get out of that place, she had to change herself now. But how?

“What you doing out on the yard, sis? You ain’t never out here.”

Kerry turned and a woman she recognized as the leader of one of the groups sprinkled out on the yard had sat on the bench beside her. The social structure of the women on the jail yard was pretty much a mirror of the social structure they’d created as girls on the schoolyard. There were cool girls and nerdy girls. Good girls and bad girls. And then everything else in between clumped up in little gaggles around the open field. But now that they were women, the group titles had become more complex and even limited. There were the black women and white women. The lesbians and the straights. Rich and poor. Deadly. Marked for death.

The woman who’d just called Kerry “sis” belonged to what Kerry would describe as the earthy black chicks. The ones who probably wore head wraps up to the ceiling like Erykah Badu outside of jail and had likely gotten locked up for staging some kind of protest about legalizing marijuana or public breastfeeding. They all had dreadlocks and tattoos of ankhs and other symbols Kerry could

n’t recognize on their forearms and at the nape of their necks. They prayed in a group facing the east, like Muslims, in the morning and read poetry in the library at night. That’s where Kerry always saw them. And she’d heard the woman sitting beside her referred to as Auset. Sister Auset Supreme. She had a head of long, thick black hair that was a natural Afro, but from the back it hung below her elbows when she stood and walked across the yard. Her skin was a pale tawny and she had patches of freckles under each eye. She had a slender body that exposed her muscles and hinted at a lifestyle that probably included plant-based eating and lots of yoga. And while she looked not a day over twenty-five, something in her eyes and walk and the way the other “sistren” responded to her made it clear that she was much older—probably in her early forties or so.

“I come out here sometimes,” Kerry said, answering Auset’s question about why she was sitting on the yard. “Clear my mind. Get some air.” Kerry wiped her tears and tried to look away from Auset like it was even possible or necessary to hide her tears.

“Clear your mind out here? Seems impossible.” She smiled at Kerry. “I’m Auset.” She nodded deeply, almost bowing.

“I’m Ker—”

“I know who you are. We all do.”

“We?” Kerry repeated.

“The sistren. We know who you are.” Auset nodded toward her group sitting out in the grass toward the back of the yard. Had it not been for their inmate jail jumpers, they’d look like they were enjoying some late-evening picnic in Malcolm X Park. “I guess everyone here knows who you are, though.”

Kerry nodded.

“How are you holding up?”

“I’m not,” Kerry said bluntly and she felt good for not lying to be pleasant. And for some reason, she felt safe sharing that little vulnerability with the woman sitting beside her.

“Well, that’s okay, I guess. What you’re going through can’t be easy,” Auset said. “But then I guess it isn’t any more than what Sister Betty Shabazz or Sister Coretta Scott King went through. So, you can do it.”

Kerry laughed aloud. “Well, I wouldn’t dare put myself on their level. Not at all. Betty? Coretta? Kerry?” Kerry laughed some more. “Imagine that. Why don’t we just throw in Winnie Mandela and Kathleen Cleaver?”

“Right on.” Auset didn’t laugh with Kerry. She pumped a Black Power fist in the air. “How do you figure you’re not?”

“Not what?”

“Like them.”

“Well, I’m just me. And if you mean Jamison . . . it’s not—he’s not like one of those men. He wasn’t,” Kerry explained.