Forbidden Desire

James McBride's writing class is now in session.

In the midst of a near riot over the distribution of free cheese in a dank basement in a housing project in South Brooklyn, the author of Deacon King Kong, sketches Potts' second visit to "The Cause." Potts an NYPD Sergeant arrives with a number of underlings and other police to investigate recent murders.

That's the surface story. The hypertext is that Potts, an Irish cop, is intensely drawn to Sister Ghee, a black resident of The Cause, yet there is only so far he can go; he's on official business, after all. Yet McBride makes no attempt to censor Pott's thoughts, and therein lies—at least for us, the readers of this brilliant novel—the sweet fruits of forbidden desire.

"Potts turned his attention to Sister Gee. Even on an early, bleak Saturday in that musty, crowded basement, she looked lovely as an Irish spring morning."

"She smiled thinly. She didn't seem happy to see him. 'Seems like you brought the whole force today,' she said."

Potts tells the other residents to speak to the other policemen while he asks Sister Gee, "'Can I speak to you outside?'"

"She followed Potts up the ramp and outside. When they were in the plaza, he turned to her, placed his hands in his pockets and frowned at the ground. She noticed he was wearing a double-breasted sergeant's jacket. He looked quite sharp, she thought, and also bothered. Finally, he looked at her."

Their dialogue—fast as lightning—reveal two people on the same wavelength:

"I will not say I told you so."

"Good."

"But as you know, there's been an incident."

"I heard."

"All of it?"

"No, just rumors. I don't believe in rumors."

The conversation goes back and forth. At certain points Sister Gee is using Potts to find out what happened at the crime scene, and, at other points, Potts is using Sister Gee to understand the background of what actually happened.

Right after she decides that Sportcoat, the principal protagonist, was having an affair with Sister Bibb, she protects her to Potts, telling him, "Sister Bibb wouldn't hurt a fly…"

Potts says, "It's called evidence. I have to ask."

"Potts stared at her. That smile, he thought, is like a rainbow. He tried to keep his voice even, official."

When we readers become aware that Sister Gee has been skirting the truth, misrepresenting, she thought to her herself, "I'll keep lying, just to fold into that big shoulder and see him smile and tell a joke in that heavy, pretty voice he got, the way he did that first day in church.

She smiled a sad, genuine one this time and felt her heart fall to earth as she said the words that brought light to his heart every time he heard them. "Come on back then. Hurry back, if you wanna…"

Potts forced himself to check his emotions. He was at work. People were dead… The best he could get out of it was standing right in front of him, as gorgeous and kind a woman as he'd ever seen.

"We better go back down lest they think we're out here ordering Chinese." He turned to head down the ramp until she touched his arm, stopping him. [They have a quick little exchange of dialogue about the murder that took place. We readers are hanging on the writer's every word, praying something will happen between the man and the woman. More than a little touch on the arm. As readers, I think it's fair to say, we're a little disappointed when nothing happens.

Then, after the cops have left, maybe it's the recent presence of Potts and his fellow cops that gives Sister Gee new insight into her situation and her neighbors and the human tragedies playing out all around her in the housing projects of South Brooklyn.

"Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before; they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise…."

"She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, they realized. She read it on their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die. The sight of Beanie's mother howling at her son's coffin would haunt them…"

I'm thinking of the outrage expressed by the relatives of loved ones lost to the domestic terrorist/racist who struck just the Saturday before last at the supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y. To a person all the deceased were victims of a hate-crime, just as Beanie was.

The moment of insight James McBride is describing continues: "…all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within the sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man's dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugar-cane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white power."

The lesson is over. James McBride has just taught us how to make forbidden desire a part of an official investigation that solves nothing yet leaves us feeling achingly sad.