Cadgie’s eyes rolled up into his head. Principal Moses closed his eyes, pursed his lips, and brought his hands up to his lips as if he were in prayer. Vice-Principal Schnapple just continued to stare at Prez as though Prez represented everything he despised in Negro youth.
“Besides,” continued Prez, “where’s the other guy? How come I’m the only one in trouble? Just because he wasn’t good enough to beat me doesn’t mean he’s not just as much to blame as me for what happened.”
Prez looked Vice-Principal Schnapple right in the eyes. To his surprise, Mr. Schnapple broke their eye contact. He lowered his head, crossed his arms in front of him as if he had gotten a sudden chill and said, “Well, you know, Mr. Downs, you have a point there. We cannot reasonably ask any of you to simply take a beating, now can we? However, if a teacher is around, you should approach that teacher and make the teacher aware of the threat you perceive. And I can assure you that Mr. Frederick Schnapple will also be getting his reprimand, especially for committing the offense of causing trouble at another school amongst students not even his age. However, Mr. Frederick Schnapple cannot be here right now because he is with his mother at the hospital getting his broken jaw wired up.”
Principal Moses flinched. Cadgie was ready to break Mr. Schnapple’s jaw. And Prez just continued looking at Mr. Schnapple. Sensing the tension in his uncle, he asked, “Is it alright if I go now, Principal Moses? It won’t happen again, sir. I’m sorry about your son, Mr. Schnapple.”
“Yes. Yes, you may leave now. See you bright and early Monday morning. And no more of this kind of behavior from you, Mr. Downs. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
23
Saturday, June 18th 1960
“What are you doing in the dictionary so early on a Saturday morning, Preston Junior?”
“Just looking up a word, Ma.” He loved the fat Webster’s dictionary his mother had given him for his thirteenth birthday
“Gussie, we’re late and your aunt is waiting. Come along now. What are you doing in the bathroom?”
“Maybe he fell in, Mama.”
Mattie gave Prez that “Don’t-you-dare-mess-with-me-this-morning” look.
“Well, what’s the word? Maybe I can help.”
Of course, Prez knew that his mother probably knew the definition of the word he was looking for, and therefore, the correct spelling, which was really throwing him off. But he needed to do these things for himself. And besides, maybe she was just being nosy.
“It’s alright, Ma. I can find it.”
“Gussie,” Mattie pounded on the bathroom door, “open this door this minute.”
The door opened and Gussie stood there with his pants still around his ankles, tears coming down his face.
“What’s wrong?” asked a now-concerned Mattie. Gussie knew how to play the tears card.
“There’s no toilet paper.”
“Well, why didn’t you just say so?”
“I thought you’d be mad at me.”
“Oh, Gussie, why would I be mad at you because we ran out of toilet paper? Preston Junior, go next door to see if the Hendersons have any.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Prez cut Gussie an evil stare. He had to get up from the dictionary and his writing pad. As he went out the door, he was still going over in his mind what he had just read: “A showy trinket or ornament such as would please a child, a piece of finery of little worth, a pretty trifle; a gewgaw (!)” He had to make some sense of it all before he and his boys made their way over to Lincoln Park.
With Gussie’s butt duly wiped, Mattie rushed out the door, pulling Gussie along. Prez watched them from the front window until he was sure they were around the corner, then waited a few more minutes to be sure his mother wouldn’t double back on him as she had done many times before, claiming to have forgotten this or that. Then he’d be out the door to meet up with his friends at Lincoln Park.
Washington, D.C. is in the South. Make no mistake about that. It’s below both Mason-Dixon lines: the real one surveyed in the 1760s that delineated the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and the metaphorical one of the 1860s that separated the slave states of the South from those of the “free” North. Washington gets hot and muggy like any good southern city, but Lincoln Park was an oasis.
*
The locals, of course, did not do their hopping, darting, and flitting at high noon when the bountiful sun had a habit of punishing such infidels by transforming its oozing heat into a hot mallet. So, it was with a sense of bewilderment that Prez and his crew had first encountered Prince Eduardo Flowers that previous Friday.
“What the fuck’s he wearin’, man?”
“I dunno. Looks like pajamas!”
“I’ve never seen pajamas with a hood.”
“You got that right. Whatever he’s wearin’ looks real stupid to me. What’s he doin’ Prez, some kinda karate?”
Prez was agape. He had never seen such a fluid display of speed, power, and control, lightning-fast hand movements and powerful kicks, performed with ballet-like spins and leaps. The hooded figure crouched, ducked, parried, and kicked from ground level while doing what appeared to be push-ups on one arm. And that’s when Prez noticed.
“You know, y’all ought to shut up. That dude is bad.”
His boys fell into an instant silence. None of them had ever heard Prez refer to anybody as “bad.”
“Yeah, y’all. Just shut up and check the cat out. Y’all so busy bein’ stupid that you haven’t noticed he’s crippled.”
There, under the shade of a magnolia tree, the punching, lunging, spinning, crouching, leaping, kicking figure came to an abrupt halt. He was perfectly motionless, standing perfectly balanced on that one good leg. The other leg, along with his arm on the same side, were slightly shriveled. His eyes were closed. His breathing, imperceptible.
Prez and his friends moved in closer to get a better look. This guy looked strange to them. He had Negro skin alright, but his eyes looked almost Chinese. And his hair was long, straight, and glossy black.
“Prez, what the fuck’s he doin’?”
“Shut up, Tons. It’s his religion. We have to be quiet until he’s finished.”
“Finished what?” said Dee Cee. “He looks kind of stupid if you ask me.”
Prez noticed the dude’s eyes open and his head lift to see who had just uttered such a remark.
“Dee Cee. I said shut up, man.” But it was too late.
“You there,” came the voice from beneath the hood. “You must learn that the gift of silence must be treasured whether it is being given or received. Do you know the crane? Ahh . . . you don’t. It’s a bird, a tall bird that wades in water to fish and fight. It is always silent while on one leg out of respect for the mission nature has allotted to it. You, my big friend, would see the bird and think it fragile and vulnerable on one leg. Just like you think I am in the crane stance. But you cannot push me over. Would you care to try?”
Dee Cee went over and gave him a push. Sure enough, the hooded figure didn’t budge.
“I didn’t push you too hard that time.”
“Well, you may push harder.”
Dee Cee gave him a harder shove. Again, the cat in the pajamas was rock solid.
“Aww. What are you afraid of, Dee Cee?” said Tons. “I’ll push the chump.”
Tons rushed at the motionless figure with both of his arms outstretched and his big beefy hands in front like a battering ram. Just when he should have made contact, he was spun and flipped to the ground.
Prez and the rest of the gang doubled over with laughter.
“You weren’t supposed to do that,” said Tons, looking up from the ground.
“No, sir. You weren’t supposed to do what you did,” replied the strange-looking Negro with the Chinese eyes.
This w
as how they came to meet Eduardo Flowers. The boys immediately began calling him the Flower. For the rest of that day they sat under a magnolia tree while the Flower told them tales of how kung fu had opened up worlds of opportunity to a poor kid who had been hobbled by polio.
“I come to this park all the time, since I was a boy. My Filipino mother would bring me. My Negro father wouldn’t come here. Well, he did once, and the police came and beat him and arrested him. For me, this park has always been a haven. It connects me with my childhood. No one has ever bothered me. They do not know that I am an American Negro. The police see a funny-looking foreigner limping along who could not possibly present a threat to their authority, so they shun me. The other whites see a cripple from another land, so they pity me. No one sees a man. Except you boys. That is why I love the way you call me the Flower. What a lovely expression of affection and respect. Where I teach, the whites bow very low and call me Master Flowers. They are afraid of me because they know I could kill them with a single blow. They also want to take from me that which cannot be theirs to possess, my skills and my knowledge. They really don’t respect me. And you,” he said, turning to Prez, “I’ve watched you for a long time, coming over to your corner to try to prove your manhood. I must say you have some prodigious talents.”
“I don’t know what that word means.”
“Ah-ha! You are indeed a smart one.”
“No. I don’t know what the word means.”
“It means you have enormous potential to learn and to grow as a man because your natural openness and honesty pushes you to seek the truth. And, therefore, you would make an excellent student. You have great fighting instincts and lightning reflexes. And yes, you can hit pretty hard, for a boxer on the corner, I suppose, even though you do not understand the way of the fist, nor your inner power. You also do not understand the nature of conflict. The first task of a great fighter is to avoid conflict by seeking resolutions to disagreements. Otherwise, you will be doomed to be defeated one day, by the only one who can truly defeat you: yourself. Ah. I see my car is here. The Secret Service have come to take me to my dojo where I give them instruction.”
A shiny black Chevrolet Impala pulled up to the curb with its chrome reflecting a blinding array of the spectrum of sunlight, as if it were a prism.
“Wow!” said Brennie-Man, “check that out.”
“Please,” said the Flower Man, “do not be impressed by baubles.”
As he hobbled away towards the car, Prez yelled after him, “What’s a bauble?”
“It’s what the whites used to trick the Indians into giving away Manhattan Island.”
“What?” said Prez.
“You will tell me next time, won’t you, Mr. Prez?”
24
Saturday, June 25, 1960
“You see the Flower anywhere, Dee Cee?”
“Naw, Prez.”
They were standing under the magnolia tree where they had met the Flower.
“Hey, Prez. You should hear the cats singin’ over by the park house. They blowin’, man. They doin’ all the Platters’ stuff, man. C’mon.”
“Maybe later. I want to wait a bit longer.” Prez sat down on the grass. “You know, sometimes I can still smell it.”
“Smell what, Prez?”
“All the stuff in the air the night Mr. Richardson’s place burned. Like smoke and fire, and soot, and a rotten smell, man. Like, I smelled this funny smell in the air when the cop shot Alvin. It’s all rolled into one smell, man. It gets all up in my nostrils and it bothers me.”
“Yeah, man. Well, his store is right across the street. I mean it used to be. And it didn’t happen all that long ago. So, you gonna smell something for a while.”
“But it’s not that, it’s not just that kind of a smell after a fire. I told you. It’s something else, something worse than just a fire smell.”
“Prez, man, what can be a worse smell than a burning building?”
“Skin, man.”
“What?”
“The smell of skin burning.”
Tons left Prez lying in the grass under the magnolia tree looking up through the branches watching puffy clouds drift by. Prez thought about his father and the times they used to spend looking up at the faces in the clouds. He wondered why, as he got older, he could no longer see faces in the clouds. Thinking about his father made him hurt inside so he squeezed his eyes tight to keep from crying. When he opened them again, there was a face staring down at him. Her brown eyes, alive in a perpetual smile, gleamed at him from behind heavy eyelashes. Her wide mouth was so full it seemed in a perpetual pout. She had golden freckles on her nose and cheeks. Her hair was swept up in braided space buns.
“You are Prez, aren’t you? Your friends told me you were over here lying in the grass. Hm. You don’t look so tough. But I guess you are. At least, that’s what people say.”
“Who are you?”
“My father thinks you’re special, too. But he thinks before you reach the destination that life has set for you, you will have a great detour, or something like that. He talks funny sometimes.”
“Your father is the Flower?”
“Who?”
“Mr. Flowers. He’s your father?”
“Yes, he is. I’m Tala.” She offered Prez her hand.
“Oh, I’m Preston. Preston Coleman Downs, Junior,” he said as he took her hand and realized that he didn’t quite know what to do with it. If he shook it too firmly, he could come off looking like a dude trying to be tough. If he shook it too loosely, she could think he was weak. So, he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. For a split second he felt her hand flinch as if she would jerk it away. But when he looked up at her face, she seemed just as bewildered as him.
“Do you always do that when you meet a girl?”
“I’ve never done that before.”
“You’ve never kissed a girl’s hand before.”
“No. Never.”
“You ever kiss a girl before?”
“Not really.”
“What does that mean, ‘not really’?”
“It means I’ve been close, but I’ve never really kissed a girl before.”
“Well, Mr. Preston Coleman Downs, Junior, I guess that means you’re a virgin.”
Prez’s eyes widened, his face flushed. “No, I mean a kiss that I started.”
“Oh, I get it,” smirked Tala, “you’re just so fine you don’t have to start a kiss because all the girls can’t wait to get their lips on you. Is that it?”
“Yeah, well I s’pose you could say that. But, it’s ’cause I don’t want to, you dig. I mean, I could have, you know, lots of times. You know, started a kiss. But I figured I should wait until the right girl came along; you know. Why rush it?”
“Do you always sweat on your nose and upper lip when you’re nervous?”
“Who says I’m nervous? What’s there to be nervous about? I don’t see no shit to be nervous about.”
“So, you do always sweat in those funny places when you’re nervous, huh?”
“Yeah,” said Prez and he burst out laughing.
Tala laughed, too, which made Prez laugh harder. Tala laughed more then blurted out, “You make me nervous, too.”
“But I’m doing the sweating!” laughed Prez.
“Oh. My stomach is hurting. I’ve got to stop this laughing.”
“Me too,” said Prez. “Okay, let’s stop.”
Wiping their eyes and trying to right themselves, they both turned and saw Prez’s gang standing there looking at both of them like they were nuts. This made them start laughing again.
“What the heck’s so funny, Prez?” said Dee Cee.
“We were just talkin’ ’bout yo’ mama,” blurted Tala, still laughing.
“Oh, shit!” said Prez, “You can joan, too?”
; “Yo’ mama so ugly, the blacksmith put horseshoes on her by mistake!”
Prez abruptly stopped laughing. “Wait a minute, girl! Whose mama you talkin’ about?”
“It’s okay, Prez,” cut in Tons, “yo’ mama so ugly, they don’t even use no horseshoes when she’s around, they just use her instead!”
“Wait a minute, whose mama you talkin’ ’bout, sucker!” Prez was getting mad.
“Naw, naw, naw,” said Sticks, who had just showed up in time to wade into the dozens, unaware that Prez was starting to think all the joanin’ was directed at him, “yo’ mama so ugly the horses refuse to step on her! Yeah! They throw the rider off first and get the hell outta there!”
“That’s your ass, Sticks,” said Prez as he made to go after him.
“What, man! I ain’t talkin’ ’bout yo’ mama.”
“Well, whose mama you talkin’ ’bout then, punk?”
“Whose mama did you think we were talkin’ ’bout, Mr. Prez?” interjected Tala, who was now no longer laughing.
“I thought Dee Cee’s,” said Prez, irritated at himself for sounding whiny and for even answering the question. He could get mad if he wanted to and didn’t need to explain anything to this girl, no matter how beautiful she happened to be, no matter how much he was drawn to her.
“Well, so it’s okay for us to talk about Dee Cee’s mama but not yours?”
Prez turned and faced her directly. He put his hands on his hips, cocked his head to one side and said through lips drawn taut with smugness, “That’s right.”
“No. It’s not right. Besides, joanin’ is just having fun. It doesn’t mean anything about anybody’s mother, really. It’s just one of us trying to out-clever everybody else. That’s all. My father’s right, you are going to be your own worst enemy.”
“What’s this, girl? Makin’ up words now? ‘Out-clever,’ huh? What dictionary am I goin’ to find that in?”
Quick as a flash, Tala’s fingernails struck out at Prez’s face. Quicker than a flash, Prez caught her by her wrist. She was stunned, but only momentarily. She kicked out, catching Prez hard on his shin, breaking the skin and causing a spot of blood to appear. It hurt so bad, Prez couldn’t keep his eyes from watering. But he wouldn’t let her go, nor allow his face or body to show any of the pain that was bursting around his shin like an electric shock.
Exile Blues Page 14