eyes on Socrates for the very first time. He and his sister, Hattie, watched from their
fifth-floor window as their neighbors Jeo and Dorothea Morrison stepped out of a camel-
colored Brougham with their five-year-old grandson and his small cardboard suitcase in
tow.
“Herbie, hush!” Hattie glanced over her shoulder and snapped her fingers twice. “You
see Miss Nita setting over there pretending to fuss with that doll baby’s hair when she
really listening at us. You know she repeat everything she hear! Besides”—she tucked a
strand of graying hair behind her ear, then turned back to the window and nodded
toward the slender boy who shuffled down the pathway nestled between his
grandparents—“the poor chile just saw his mama slit his daddy from neckbone to navel,
then they make him ride all the way from Alabama to Brooklyn with that crazy-ass Jeo
when everybody knows he’s blind in one eye and can’t see out the othern.” She grunted.
“And all you can talk about is how sweet he look.”
“Ah-yeah.” Herbie coughed and touched the corners of a starched white handkerchief to
his lips. “I reckon old J.J. did go out and get hisself gutted like a fish, and I’m glad Jeo
and that old struggle buggy didn’t tear up the road none too bad, but that thar boy is
sweet. Mark my words.”
Hattie peered closely as the trio approached the entrance to the building. She studied
Scooter’s willowy walk and the way his lean body seemed to move naturally against the
soft summer wind.
“Ain’t sweet,” she determined. “He small for his age is all. Look a bit like Diana Ross to
me. With all that pretty peanut-brittle skin and them big ol’ eyes, I thank he kinda cute.
Plus, Nita got her somebody to play with now. Be good for her to be around another
chile.”
Herbie coughed again, this time hacking up a thick wad of phlegm. Leaning out the open
window he pressed his index finger to the opening in his throat and hock-spit down into
the littered grass below. He rasped, “Don’t know ’bout that. They say the boy mute, too.
Jeo say the po-lice found him sucking his fanger and settin’ in four days’ wurf of his own
mess. I bet that’s why he cain’t talk. Stuff like that gotta do somethin’ to a boy. Make
him turn ’round inside hisself and ball up in his own shit.”
