The Taste of Salt Read Online Free PDF Page A

and walks to him, puts a hand squarely on his back and lets it rest there for a few moments. Tick turns his eyes from the mantel after a minute and looks at him, but he doesn’t offer an embrace. Daddy nods once more and then steps toward me. I stand up and he puts his arms around me. Like an awkward teenager, I stand there with my arms hanging straight down my sides. He pushes me away from him and looks into my eyes but doesn’t speak. He sighs and turns to my mother, saying, “So, Sarah—we’ll talk?”
    â€œYes, Ray. We will.” She gives him a real hug and walkshim to the door. Tick and I stare after them, united in bafflement and anxiety, like we used to be. Not like two people in their thirties. More like a couple of kids.
    My mother comes back. “Well, I’d better get dinner started,” she says, her voice twinkling like a television mother’s. And with that, she goes off to the kitchen. Tick looks at me for a long moment. “Damn,” he says, “ain’t that something. With Daddy, I mean?”
    â€œIt’s something, all right. He looks good, huh?”
    Tick sits down in Daddy’s chair and looks out the window. “I guess.”
    â€œHe might be able to help you, you know. He’s … well … he’s been there, right?”
    Tick looked away from me, through me, his eyes hard. “No one has been where I’ve been. No one.” After all the phone calls and the worry and the agony, when he says that, that is the most frightened I’ve been.

Three
    I’m a scientist. I like to get to the bottom of things, to state the working hypothesis quickly. Narrative is not my specialty. But when I stop to think about it, in some ways, telling a story is like science. Trying to understand how a system works, what makes it function or not function, that’s part of what a story does. Nothing is unrelated to the things that came before it. It’s true of evolution and it’s true of a family. I am, in part, the sum of all who came before me, my parents and brother, their parents and siblings, and on and on, back onto the slave ships and then back farther, back to Ghana and the slave castles at Elmina and to wherever my ancestors were before that.
    So right now I’m going to leave the scene with my brother and my parents. Indulge me as I tell the story of afamily, the story of my family. I will invite in other voices, because one thing I’ve learned in science is that the first truth you see is rarely the whole truth. I will hypothesize and extrapolate, if you will. I will even imagine scenes I did not witness, speak the thoughts of other people. Theories can’t be formed and understanding can’t be reached without hypothesis, extrapolation, and though we in the biz don’t like to admit it, imagination. So I’ll start in 1969, five years before I was born. That year, my father, Ray Henderson, met my mother, Sarah Jenkins. Back then, Cleveland was only beginning its long, slow decline. Despite the riots in Hough in 1966 and King’s death just a couple of years later, there was still plenty of industrial work available right in the city. My father worked at the Coit Road GM plant for nearly twenty years. Do you know how many car doors he must have attached in that amount of time? The mind reels. And drinking steadily much of the time. He never missed a day of work either. I don’t know how he did it. Any more than I knew how to get him to stop.
    In 1969, long before he could even have dreamed how things would go in his life, he was a tall, good-looking twenty-nine-year-old with money in his pocket and a smooth, sweet way of whistling.
    Back then, a man could always find work if he waswilling. There was money to be made in Cleveland, and plenty of places to spend it. East 105th Street glowed like the Las Vegas strip. Every Saturday night, there’d be folks pimpwalking up and down the street, going