Free Baby Brother's Blues by Pearl Cleage Page A

D.C. His mother had, of course, hoped he’d come back to Atlanta after he finished school, but as he tried to explain, there was no way to escape her shadow if he stayed in his hometown forever. In D.C., he could carve out his own place to be his own man. Kwame didn’t want being Precious Hargrove’s son to be his only claim to fame. She said she understood. To further mollify her, he agreed to spend the summer helping her get ready for the governor’s race. In the fall, he’d planned to return to D.C. permanently.
    Then he started dating Aretha, and everything changed. He couldn’t get enough of her. She was a working artist whose passionate paintings and dramatic, oversize photographs were already drawing national attention. Kwame had met her once or twice before, but she had been five years younger than he was. At seventeen, that had made a difference. At twenty-six, it didn’t. She fascinated him and he pursued her like a love-struck teenager.
    At first he thought it was just a lucky coincidence that brought this beautiful young woman into his orbit so often he began to dress a little more carefully when he went out in anticipation of seeing her. West End is a small, fairly self-contained community, and Aretha walked or rode her bike everywhere, but after he bumped into her three times in one week, he began to realize their meetings were more than mere happenstance.
    The idea flattered him immensely and he began to imagine making love to her. She was undeniably beautiful and naturally sexy. She was tall and strong without looking too hard or sinewy. She had flawless skin and her big brown eyes looked even bigger because of her close-cropped natural hair. Her breasts were always bouncing because of her long-legged stride and her hips were gracefully curvaceous.
    What if she had shown up three times because she was looking for him? Did that mean she wanted him, too?
He looked at himself in the mirror and liked what he saw. More than that, he liked whatever it was
she
saw. Maybe this beautiful, sensual creature was a gift from the gods to reward him for being a dutiful son. If that was the case, denying their generosity would almost certainly piss them off, which is never a good thing.
    One afternoon when they ran into each other again at the West End Newsstand, she invited him to come by her studio and see some of the new photographs she had been taking around the neighborhood. He immediately said yes and ordered them two cappuccinos to go, along with his copy of
The Washington Post.
As they strolled back to her place, Kwame was watching the way her earrings sparkled against the smooth skin of her long neck. He wanted to kiss her throat at the point right above her collarbone, before her neck flowed into the gentle slope of her shoulders.
    She lived and worked in an apartment owned by Blue Hamilton, her godfather, whom Kwame had known all his life. Blue had allowed Aretha to paint the door of the building where she lived turquoise to ward off what she called “the evil eye.” She assured him this was an accepted form of household protection in many North African countries. Blue said he didn’t believe in the evil eye, but if she wanted to paint it,
fine.
So she did. Kwame didn’t know much about the evil eye either, but by the time they walked the short distance to her apartment and passed through that blue door, they had stopped talking, allowing the sexual sparks between them to crackle and pop on their own like the last log on the campfire. They never got to the cappuccinos, though neither one seemed to mind.
    Afterward, Aretha would tell Kwame she remembered music on that walk from the West End News. He would tell her he didn’t remember music, only that the whole neighborhood smelled like roses. It was the sexiest safe sex he’d ever had, and from then on, she didn’t have to just happen to be passing by. They spent every waking moment together, and a lot of sleeping ones, too, curled up in each other’s