On the subway back to her father’s apartment after seeing her brother, she looks up and realizes she’s sitting across from Sylvia. However, simply being in Brooklyn unsettles her. When August says that she already misses their father, her brother simply replies, “All praise to Allah for calling him home.”Īugust no longer fears death-in the 20 years since she last lived in Brooklyn, she has become an anthropologist who travels the world and studies how other cultures respond to death. August’s brother is still religious and playfully tries to convince August to settle down with a good Islamic man, but August easily sidesteps this lighthearted suggestion by assuring him that she’s doing well. Sitting in a diner, they ask each other how they’re doing. Now, though, she and her brother have just said goodbye to their father, who died of liver cancer. While August’s brother had religion to cope with the absence of their mother, she had her friend group, which helped her navigate the transition from girlhood to womanhood. In those days, August’s father and brother focused on their devotion to the Nation of Islam while August invested herself in her friendships with Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi. August reflects on her early childhood: she thinks about how she and her brother grew up in Brooklyn without a mother, though she felt for a long time that this didn’t mean her mother was actually dead.
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