When Angela had given birth to their daughter, Etta, Sonny was only fifteen years old. Angela was only fourteen. They’d said they were gonna get married and do things the right way, but when Angela’s parents found out she was pregnant and that the baby was Sonny’s, they’d sent her down to Alabama to stay with her family there until the baby was born, and then they wouldn’t let him see either girl when Angela came back up.

Sonny really had wanted to do right by Angela, by his daughter, but he was young and unemployed, and he figured Angela’s parents were probably right when they said he was basically good for nothing. It nearly broke his heart the day Angela married a young pastor who worked the revival circuits down south. The pastor would leave Angela in Harlem for months at a time, and Sonny thought if he could have her, he would never leave her.

But then he’d look at himself in the mirror sometimes, and he’d see features he didn’t recognize from his mother’s face. His nose wasn’t hers. Nor were his ears. He used to ask his mother about these features when he was young. He used to ask her where his nose, his ears, his lighter skin came from. He used to ask her about his father, and all she would say was that he didn’t have a father. He didn’t have a father, but he had turned out all right. “Right?” he would tease the man in the mirror. “Right?”

“She ain’t even a baby no more, Lucille. Look at her.”

The girl was hobbling around the apartment on her little sea legs. Lucille shot Sonny a killing look, snatched the child up, and left.

“And don’t go calling my mama for money now neither!” he shouted after her. He could hear her stomping all the way down the stairs and out into the street.

—

Two days later, Sonny was back at Jazzmine. He had asked the other folks who worked there when Amani would be back, but none of them knew.

“She go where the wind blow,” Blind Louis said, wiping down the bar. Sonny must have sighed a little, because soon Louis said, “I know that sound.”

“What sound?”

“You don’t want none, Sonny.”

“Why not?” Sonny asked. What could an old blind man possibly know about wanting a woman just from the sight of her?

“Ain’t just about the way a woman look, you gotta think about what’s in ’em too,” Louis answered, reading his mind. “Ain’t nothin’ in that woman worth wanting.”

Sonny didn’t listen. It took three more months for him to see Amani again. By that time he’d gone looking for her, dropping in at club after club, waiting to see some slow stroll make its way up to the stage.

When he found her, she was sitting at a table in the back of the club, sleeping. He had to get close to know this, so close he could hear the inhale and exhale of her breath as she snored. He looked around the room, but Amani was in a dark corner of the bar, and no one seemed to be looking for her. He pushed her arm. Nothing. He pushed her arm again, harder this time. Still nothing. On the third push, she rolled her head to one side so slowly, it was like a boulder moving. She blinked a couple of times, a slow, deliberate movement that brought her heavy lids and thick eyelashes together.

When she looked at him finally, Sonny could see why she might need to blink. Her eyes were bloodshot, the pupils dilated. She blinked twice more, this time quickly, and watching her, it suddenly occurred to Sonny that he hadn’t considered what he would do once he’d found her.

“You singing tonight?” he asked meekly.

“Do it look like I’m singing?”

Sonny didn’t answer. Amani started to stretch her neck and shoulders. She shook her whole body out. “What do you want, man?” she asked, seeing him again. “What do you want?”

“You,” Sonny admitted. He had wanted her since the day he saw her sing. It wasn’t her slow gait or the fact that her voice had reminded him of his favorite memory of his mother. It was that he had felt something in himself open up when she started singing that night, and he wanted to capture just a little bit more of that feeling, keep it for himself.

She shook her head at him and smiled a little. “Well, come on.”

They went out into the street. Sonny’s stepfather, Eli, liked to walk, and when he was around he used to take Sonny and Willie and Josephine all around town. Maybe that was how his mother had grown to like walking too, Sonny thought. He still remembered the day that she had walked with him all the way down into the white part of the city. He’d thought they would keep on going forever and ever, but she had stopped suddenly, and Sonny found himself disappointed, though he hadn’t been able to figure out why.

With Amani, Sonny passed by places he knew from his days on the housing team, jazz joints for the down-and-out, cheap food stands, barbershops, all with junkies on the street holding hats outstretched in their hands.

“You ain’t told me ’bout your name yet,” Sonny said as they stepped over a man lying in the middle of the street.

“Whatchu want to know?”

“You Muslim?”

Amani laughed at him a little. “Naw, I ain’t Muslim.” Sonny waited for her to speak. He had already said enough. He didn’t want to keep pressing her, showing her his desire, his weaknesses. He waited for her to speak. “Amani means ‘harmony’ in Swahili. When I started singing, I felt like I needed a new name. My mama named me Mary, and ain’t nobody gonna hit it big with a name like Mary. And I ain’t into all that Nation of Islam and Back to Africa business, but I saw Amani and I felt like it was mine. So I took it.”

“You ain’t into the ‘Back to Africa business,’ but you using an African name?” Sonny had put his politics behind him but could feel them creeping up. Amani was nearly half his age. The America she was born into was different from the one he had been born into. He resisted the urge to wag his finger at her.

“We can’t go back, can we?” She stopped walking and touched his arm. She looked more serious than she had all night, like she was only just considering that he was a real person and not someone she had dreamed up when he found her asleep. “We can’t go back to something we ain’t never been to in the first place. It ain’t ours anymore. This is.” She swept her hand in front of her, as though she were trying to catch all of Harlem in it, all of New York, all of America.

They finally got to a housing project way out in West Harlem. The building wasn’t locked, and when they entered the hallway, the first thing Sonny noticed was the row of dope fiends lining the walls. They looked like dummies, or like the corpse Sonny had seen when he walked into a funeral home to find the mortician manipulating a body, hooking the elbow up, turning the face left, bending the body at its back.

No one was manipulating these bodies in the hallway—no one that Sonny could see—but he knew immediately that it was a dope house, and suddenly what he hadn’t wanted to know about Amani’s slow, sleepy movements, her dilated pupils, became all too apparent. He grew nervous, but swallowed it down, because it was important to him that Amani not see that the longer he was with her, the more he began to feel that he had no control over himself.

They entered a room. A man cradling his own body curled up against the wall on a dirty mattress. Two women were tapping their arms, readying themselves for the needle a second man was holding. They didn’t even look up as Sonny and Amani entered.

Everywhere he looked, Sonny saw jazz instruments. Two horns, a bass, a sax. Amani set her things down and sat next to one of the girls, who finally looked up, nodded at them. Amani turned to Sonny, who was still hanging back, his hand still grazing the doorknob.

She didn’t say anything. The man passed the needle to the first girl. That girl passed the needle to the second. The second passed the needle to Amani, but she was still looking at Sonny. She was still silent.

Sonny watched her plunge the needle into her arm, watched her eyes roll back. When she looked at him again, she didn’t have to speak for him to hear her say, “This is me. You still want it?”

*

“Carson! Carson, I know you in there!”

He could hear the voice, but at the same time, he couldn’t hear it. He was living in his own head, and he could not tell where that ended and where the world began, and he didn’t want to answer the voice until he was sure he knew which side of things it was coming from.