Percy

A novel excerpt

Slacks, shoes, whatever tie, and Percy was out the door, moving. It had never been so easy to tackle the morning. He inhaled as deeply as he could and sailed past the corner bodega onto Broadway. When he’d cleared sight of the brownstone, he lit a cigarette, smoke and breath funneling from his mouth against the cold air of Harlem. Music down the block: You know very well what you are / You’re my sugar thing, my chocolate star. . . . It was a song he and Nyela had loved lifetimes ago, when he was a poet and she was a student and no one’s mother.

The song was louder, closer, as he moved down the avenue. It had been a hit back in the early ’80s, and for him it had carried a thrilling breath of grownness and freedom ever since. It reminded him of the time after his childhood climb from the projects of Harlem and before his return to Sugar Hill years later as someone’s father, someone’s husband, a homeowner with a good job and a family. He undid his collar as he walked, and while the song spun forward, he opened his mouth, ready to just go ahead and sing: Here I am, this love’s for you / Hey baby, sweet as honey dew. . . . At the corner, the song caught him off guard, the lyrics interrupted by the milky-voiced rapper he recognized as his daughter Malaya’s new favorite. He leaned on the cracked front banister of an old brownstone and put his briefcase down to listen. Today, he was free to listen, to sit on a stranger’s stoop in his neighborhood and enjoy Harlem’s music just for the hell of it.

It was all a dream / I used to read Word Up! magazine . . .

As the song played, Percy thought of how he’d make his announcement to Nyela. They argued often for years, mostly about bills and Malaya’s weight, and it had come to the point that silence seemed like his best defense. “You think saying no to her will kill her,” Nyela once said to him. “You think you can make up for your hunger by letting her eat herself to death.” She was not entirely wrong, but the cruelty stung him. Nyela had grown up in a neat, two-story home with parents who had both graduated high school. She was destined for the Black middle class, and she knew it. Her face was bright with this future, her eyes brimmed with it. It was this look that had drawn him to her, and yet it also meant she could never understand what hunger was to him. And so he said nothing. Silence had become a third partner for them, and over the years, the weight of the job and the house and even Malaya came to press on him so that even if he could move or speak freely, the truth was, he wouldn’t know where to go or what to say.

This announcement would be the biggest thing he’d said all year, easily, and perhaps for all the years they’d been together: that he had lost the board of education project to the White, thirty-year-old golden boy Scott Clarkson, that he’d failed to make partner, and that he’d quit. As much as he’d feared and dreamed of the day, the act itself was simple. Two syllables, a couple minutes spent packing, and Percy was free.

He couldn’t say he hadn’t seen it coming, looking back on it now. The project had had all the components of a disaster — a too-quick turnaround, a demanding, unfriendly client who didn’t know what he wanted, and a budget that would cover only half of the client’s ever-proliferating list of needs. In business school, this was the kind of thing Percy would’ve seen as a welcome challenge, an opportunity to shine. But now, with each week of mounting pressure at Banfield and Conway and the thickening loneliness at home in Harlem, he found himself...