King, The Man.

New York City, 1995

"...when you remember me, remember who I was - let go of who I became. When you speak of me, say the second thing on your mind. When your heart buckles under the weight of the past, recall how I held you and nurtured you before time consumed my heart".

" Hey, Chuck! Why did they call you 'Three' when you lived here?" hollered his wife from the upstairs room. There was a hollowness to the brick terraces of Old Harlem that carried sound so clearly that he feared the sound of his tears hitting his feet would give him away. This was the first quiet moment he'd had with his dad in 3 decades.

"You'll figure it out, Honey." Three called back feebly.

"... I hope this helps," this was the final line of the last will and testament of Charles Williams II. It read like a suicide note, but for the fact that Three knew his father died peacefully in the very armchair he now sat. Attached to the letter was a royalty check from Columbus Records for $ 20,0349. The letter had been scrawled quite deliberately; the handwriting was neat, with few corrections. His father's signature was flanked either side by his attorneys' own written names. The little black book which had the letter neatly folded between its covers was delivered with the news that Three was now an orphan.

Everywhere he looked, ghosts now filled the room. Three could hear his wife and daughters' footsteps upstairs, but they were not the only presence he felt. Whisps of lost shadows caught his swollen eyes. Paths, tread across centuries converged in tiny chips in walls and skids in the wooden flooring.

The terraced row that his father's apartment sat on was probably one of the oldest in Harlem. It had been worn by the faithful footsteps of every wave of immigration since 1866. He could almost hear the living and dying breaths of those huddled masses that sought the shade of the towering metropolis.

"The House is yours too. I'm sorry I didn't take care take as much care as I should've with it. Columbus finally sent me the money they owed me for that work I did with Zawinul. A little lick of paint, and I imagine the place would fetch a nice price. I hope it helps".

He traced with his eyes the paths that those footsteps of former times must have paced about the house, engaged in daily life, bustling and buzzing as the city demanded. So, too, could he sense the spirit of those journeys' ends, tracks stopped amidst the walk of life.

Much had happened in this room. Here, his father had told him, was where they'd heard the news of Brother Malcolm's assassination. In the same room, a summer later, they hosted Auntie Gloria and Uncle Reginald's wedding. The same room where his family had introduced Three to the world in '69.

Three's real name was Charles, like his father and his father's father. His mother, Helen, had a knack for nicknames that stuck. The family knew Charles II as 'King.' It was from him that she got her own nickname which affectionately ran around the neighborhood, 'Queenie.' Even though his recollection of his father was blurry, he was sure that everything the man touched, turned to "cool". "You the man King!" followed King around like his name, and even young Three knew that the man was local royalty.

Three remembered the early years with King with an artificial longing, for he was too young to remember the man honestly. It was like a perfect picture - a motionless image, a true and false recollection because it was a memory captured by someone else. The one thing he could remember with certainty was the sound of the saxophone in the early mornings. King was not a godly person like Queenie, who had busied herself with morning readings from the Word. Three, remembered, however, the taste of his father's coffee in the air and the soulful brown hue of the avant-garde notes. King called jazz music "the soul of black folk - if such a thing existed." He diligently worked as producer and songwriter, and by '74, had hit his stride in what by then was a waning Harlem Renaissance. King was well on his way to becoming the man.

King was a broad-breasted, dark, and striking man. He spoke in a thundering baritone that told the best bedtime stories. In those early years, Three would have said he was even a happy man. He was a man that pursued a dream; Three could give him that. King and Queenie were from the era of dreamers, bridge-builders, and revolutionaries. Three could see through his father's eyes, now that they would never open again, the cost of an unfulfilled dream.

"Why?" said Three, the air shallow in his lungs. He shut his eyes tightly. It was the same thing that his father said the day it became just the two of them.

Maybe they weren't expecting it because the age demanded that dreamers only die as martyrs, stolen from the world in the middle of their parade to a promised place. Or perhaps, Three thought, everyone expected dreamers would have the chance to speak their dream - that dreams don't fade into the abyss. He barely knew Queenie, but Three was sure she had dreams, and he'd learned that the world snatches dreams away - those fulfilled, those in-process, and even those yet undiscovered; they all find their way to a place beyond grasp, possibly even beyond the promised place. One may have called it an act of God - Queenie was the lone casualty when a driver veered off the road and into the sidewalk.

"She'll live through her faithful husband and loving son," said the Pastor. Even at five years old, Three knew that who Queenie was, was uniquely herself, and for a man to proclaim that she'd live through him and his father was a betrayal of her thoughts and voice and dreams - which all belonged to her and her alone.

King was a different man after that. The pillar of his home no longer stood. He then found his crutch to be a liquor bottle. Men crumble under lighter circumstances - the crutch he used to walk through life at one point ceased to be just drink and become the enchanting foreign crystals that were sprinkled over the living and dead in Black America.

King had barely held it together for two summers before he'd abdicated his fatherhood completely. Three had gone to live with Queenie's mother in Newark. He eventually went to Malcolm X Shabazz High School there and found the seeds planted by Brother Malcolm to be budding into the trees that became his sense of worth, his hope in community, and his own household with its own strong pillar.

"Hey, come and look at this, Chuck" Three's wife Tamika came bounding down the stairs into the living room, stopping in her tracks as she saw his eyes raised to the sky, standing motionless. His Newark people called him Chuck, and he began to see where Three may, one time have fit in this picture - Chuck didn't seem to belong here.

"Wh- why would the man wanna die on his own?" his voice cracked liked vinyl as he spoke.

"I don't know" her honesty was disarming.

She went over to him and held his head in her hands. She dragged his head back to the earth, and with it, a dam of teardrops burst from his face.

It wasn't clear to him who she was comforting - whether it be Three, Or Chuck, or maybe even King - her flaundering to keep him from swaying pacified him eventually.

"What I do know is that you've got to forgive yourself." She held him tight "otherwise; you'll never forgive him".

"Why" he felt all the unfulfilled dreams of all the spirits that had paced the room. "I always said I'd come back for him - Why didn't I come back."

"Chuck..." she trailed. Even her words could fail.

"I thought when I'd made it, then maybe I'd be good enough - strong enough for the both of us." His arms were heavy and limp in her embrace, his shoulders high.

"Now you can't be," she said bluntly.

"'Mika..." Chuck inherited King's booming voice, but it had lost all its power.

"We are who are, baby," she wiped the tears from his face with her palms, "mistakes and all - we're a product of our truth; however messy. We're a product of our history, however far away we've moved from it. I never knew the man. All I know is that he left your daughters a legacy. We can't...".

He knew what she was trying to say.

"We can't dream for the dead" his head was bowed, and his hands trembled, and his knees buckled, but he nodded.

"We can't dream for the dead, Chuck," she laughed shakily, "but upstairs, that's your life and your dream up there. We gotta pick up the bits and pieces of the man's dream and help it count for something".

"OK," he grasped her fingers firmly, "I'll be up."

He read the opening lines of the letter one more time, with new, living eyes.

"Three - I always wished I was man enough to speak to you face to face. But the truth is I'm not. I haven't got a great deal of time, but I want to leave you and your family with all I've got..."

"You the man, King" the words were heavy on his tongue, "You the man."