Brother

In the present, Jelly shows up at Michael’s house at Aisha’s invitation. Michael is unpleasantly surprised to find him on the couch, still recognizable although changed by what Michael identifies as guilt as well as the passage of 10 years. Aisha whispers that she didn’t expect him to come when she invited him. Besides, it was Mother who let him in and who offered him a place to sleep when she discovered he needed one. Michael looks again and sees that Mother is sitting next to Jelly on the couch. As he watches, Jelly gently places a pair of headphones—connected to an old-fashioned Walkman of all things—over her ears.

Jelly disappears soon afterwards, taking the backpack that appears to hold all his worldly possessions with him, and Michael hopes he might have left for good. But Jelly returns a few hours later with bags of groceries, and he sets about making a feast. It turns out he can cook well. Soon, Mother and Aisha are helping him. Michael leaves them in the kitchen and heads to his shift at the Easy Buy, grateful for the distraction. But Manny intercepts him before he can leave at the end of his shift. He's heard about Jelly’s visit, and he warns Michael that he can’t have his employees associated with “criminals, degenerates” or “lowlifes.” 

Michael doesn’t go home immediately; he circles the block while trying to figure out what to do. When he does go back, there’s a police car parked nearby. Two officers are inside the house—along with dozens of strangers. Michael scans the room but can’t find his mother. One of the police officers, a decent woman named Bev whom Michael recognizes from her beat in the Park, explains that they are following up on a noise complaint from the neighbors. Michael is relieved that it’s not more serious, but he’s still deeply upset by having police in his house.

After the police leave, Michael takes a proper look at the guests. He resents the liberties they’ve taken, especially putting on his mother’s records to play. He thinks of them as “lowlifes” and “intruders.” And then he sees his mother, sitting on the couch listening to Jelly’s Walkman and looking through the suitcase of photographs and memorabilia she normally hides away in her closet. He pushes through the crowd and drags her from the couch, pushing her toward her room over Jelly’s protest that his friends—who have heard Francis’s story—have just come to pay their respects. Michael replies that he just wants them gone. He escorts Mother to her room, where he stands at the door listening to the guests clean up and file out. Afterwards, he finds Jelly’s Walkman on the couch. He presses play and the song that starts transports him back to Desirea’s.

In a flashback, Michael remembers how the atmosphere in the neighborhood shifted after Anton’s death. The police stop kids with increasing frequency and their questions become more hostile. Public discourse in the newspapers and on TV turns tough on crime. Francis starts letting Michael hang out at Desirea’s more regularly. It’s a barbershop run by a man named Dru, but it’s also like a secret club for the young men who pass their time there. Slowly, Michael gets to know the regulars: Kev, Gene, and Abdi; the “official neighborhood Beauties” Carla, Yash, and Meeshi; the big-talking (but girl-shy) Raj; and the Professa, a man in his early 20s who teaches Michael how to appreciate the music that Jelly makes.

Jelly’s music becomes a constant soundtrack to the goings-on at Desirea’s. He and Francis scour the city’s thrift shops and garage sales for records, which he mixes on a DJ set up that’s easily the most expensive thing anyone in their crowd has ever seen. Francis and Jelly always let the gang hear their new records unmixed at first, giving them an education in the classics: Toots and the Maytals, Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Harry Belafonte. Then, Jelly gets to work mixing them up and making them into something new. The summer of the shootings, Francis and Jelly are hoping to attract the attention of a talent scout at a major hip-hop competition in the city.

Something else big happens that summer, too: on a day when Samuel is working a late shift, Aisha invites Michael over and they have sex for the first time. Beforehand, Aisha gently teases Michael about his haircut—one he’s copied from Francis. He needs to be his own person, she gently suggests, even if she understands why he looks up to and tries to emulate his popular older brother. Girls flock to Francis, although he doesn’t seem to notice. But not Aisha.

In the present, Michael helps himself to the dregs of abandoned beers and wine bottles, and then he starts looking at the photographs from Mother’s suitcase. Aisha quietly joins him on the couch. She identifies the white building in the background of many of the Trinidad snapshots as the church of the Spiritual Baptists—nicknamed the Shouter Baptists for their fervor. Their loud style of worship was outlawed in Trinidad for a long time, she says. But she had to find that out on her own when she went to Trinidad; Samuel never talked about it. Suddenly, Michael remembers seeing Samuel singing a song in French for Francis on the street outside the Waldorf in the winter before Francis’s death.  

Before Michael can tell Aisha about this memory, Jelly walks through the front door with a bottle of carpet cleaner in his hand. He waits awkwardly until Aisha beckons him in, and then he goes to work on a wine stain on the living room carpet. Aisha retrieves a flyer from among her things, and she finally explains to Michael how she got back in touch with Jelly. A few days after Samuel’s death, when she was wandering around downtown, a kid handed her a flyer advertising a performance by, among others, DJ Djeli. She was drawn to the idea of a djeli—a griot or “storyteller with memory” and so she went and enjoyed herself.

Michael wonders if the boys at Desirea’s meant to evoke the djeli when they gave Jelly his nickname, or if it was coincidental. Jelly turns to Michael and offers to leave. Michael says that Jelly and Aisha can both stay for one more night, but he warns them to take it slow with his mother—she’s broken, and they need to “go slow” with her.

Michael remembers Francis’s and Jelly’s dress rehearsal for their audition, at Desirea’s. It was the night after he and Aisha had sex, and they went to the show together. Dru let Aisha in immediately but gave Michael grief about having to show ID. In the barbershop, a beautiful young woman was taking the stage as Francis and Jelly spun records, knitting together old and new. Francis called out “Volume!” and the crowd began to chant “volume” back at him.