The Black Kids

by Christina Hammonds Reed

  “Go out with me?” Jose says. It’s the first time he’s said it for real and not just as a joke.

  On the television, the man drags himself into his truck and tries to drive away. The people at the intersection continue to throw anger at passing cars. From up above it looks like somewhere I’ve driven through a thousand times, but also somewhere I’ve never been. I bet my dad would know where it is.

  “Okay,” Lucia says softly to Jose, and I look over at her because she’s going home to Guatemala and what’s the point of even going on a date when you’re gonna leave, but maybe that bloodied truck driver made her forget, or maybe he reminded her why she left. Or maybe being around Jose makes her think she might want to stick around a little bit longer.

  Jose completes the rest of the transaction in silence.

  On our way home, as we cross the street, Lucia reaches for my hand like she used to when I was little, and even though I haven’t done so in a long time, I hold it.

  * * *

  By the time we get home, the city is burning. The buildings are stripped bare, and people yank the guts through their skeletons.

  Lucia hands me a small envelope.

  “The Katzes said it was accidentally delivered to them, and they kept forgetting to bring it over.”

  “You open it,” I say. My heart feels like it’s going to fall right out my chest and splat right on the kitchen floor.

  “It’s your future, mija.”

  The envelope says my future has been wait-listed.

  I want to cry. I’m in at other schools—really good schools, even—but Stanford is the school I want. Close to home, but far enough away to be some other me. Somewhere I can briefly stop being a sister and a daughter, but only an hour’s flight away in case Jo needs me. I don’t know for what, exactly; maybe in case her broken brain delivers a rough uppercut and she needs me to pull her up, squirt some water in her mouth, ice her bruises, and tell her to keep fighting. I need to be somewhere I can still feel the ocean, my ocean, in my hair and skin. I’m convinced Stanford is the only place I’ll thrive. I want to throw up. I want to disappear. I want to crawl into a hole with embarrassment. I feel all of these things and burn up in their atmosphere as I hurtle down.

  Lucia pats me on the thigh. “Everything’ll work out alright.”

  Instead of crying, I watch.

  * * *

  Up goes a shoe store.

  Up goes a laundromat.

  Up goes a TV repair store.

  Up goes a mattress store.

  Up goes a liquor store.

  All of it goes up.

  * * *

  My mother calls me from her car phone. “It’s going to be a while. I’m going to try to take the 101 to the 405 and see if that’s better. I’m afraid to get on the 10.”

  My father calls me from his car phone. “I’m okay. I’ll get there when I get there. It’s bad. Really bad. Stay home, okay? Promise you won’t try to go out with your friends. Not tonight.”

  “I promise.”

  I call Jo from our living room. The phone rings and rings, and I’m afraid she’s not there, but she is.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “Of course I’m not. It’s so wrong. I’m so tired of this shit. They had the goddamn evidence right in front of their faces. It was right there, Ashley! I mean, they don’t fucking see us even when they’re looking right at us.” Usually when Jo goes on about one of her causes, it feels so far away—like she’s angry because she knows she should be and not because she actually feels that shit in her kidneys. But this… this feels different. Even I feel it somewhere in my innards, pulsing.

  “You should come home,” I say, “until everything’s blown over.”

  “I’m not leaving Harrison here alone,” she says. Stupid Harrison. Just because he maybe survived tetanus doesn’t mean he can save her from everything else.

  “Just bring him here with you!”

  “I’m not subjecting him to Mom again after what happened at dinner.”

  “Is it him you’re really concerned about, or you?” I say.

  She doesn’t respond.

  “Jo… don’t do anything stupid, please?” I think of her handcuffed to her high school flagpole, fighting for brown people halfway across the world. She spent her suspension calling our local congressperson. Jo’s the kind of person who would accidentally find herself in the middle of somebody else’s riot.

  “Dude. What the hell, Ash?”

  The phone clicks, and then my sister’s gone.

  DURING

  CHAPTER 6

  LAST NIGHT, A Guatemalan immigrant was attacked by the crowd. They launched a car stereo at his head, stripped off his clothes, and spray-painted his whole body black, including his privates. Then they doused him in gas. A black preacher threw his body over the man and raised a Bible at the crowd like he was performing a group exorcism and yelled, “Kill him, and you have to kill me, too.” In many of the worst-hit areas, the police are nowhere to be found.

  My mother shakes her head in disbelief. She stands, lips slightly parted, her tongue waiting for words that won’t come. The heart of the violence is around Normandie and Florence. Without the police, there’s nobody’s around to stanch the bleeding. Even so, all throughout the body of the city there is trauma, all of us slowly going into shock.

  “Josephine needs to bring her stubborn ass here,” my mother mutters. My mother calls my sister by her full name only when she’s pissed or scared, or both.

  When the news finally cuts to commercial, my mother takes a VHS tape and shoves it into the machine’s mouth. The sun isn’t even up yet and we’re going to exercise damn near a full hour before it’s time to get ready for school, which she used to do with Jo every morning for as long as I can remember. Then Jo went off to college, and my mother started aggressively waking me up to join her, whether I wanted to or not.

  When my mother turns to look at me, I think she’s gonna say something about the riots, or, like, maybe that I should stay home from school today. According to the news, lots of schools in the hardest-hit parts of LA have shut down as a result of the riots.

  Instead, my mother says, “Don’t you think it’s time to throw that shirt away?”

  I’m wearing the same thing I wore to bed, an extra-long, bleach-stained “Where’s the Beef” T-shirt, courtesy of Jo’s emptied closet, and sleep shorts with dancing penguins. My mother is in a leotard that’s tighter than I’m comfortable with. It’s lavender, cut high up her hips, and she wears a pair of teal bicycle shorts under it that match her faded terry cloth headband. I can’t be bothered to wear exercise clothes when the sun itself isn’t even up, much less color-coordinate in my own home. Besides, I just got my heart broken by a university. I feel the weight of my failure with every beat. I stayed up all night thinking about what I did wrong, whether my personal statement wasn’t personal enough, whether I should’ve done extra extracurriculars, about that one B I got in PE freshman year, all because I suck at stupid badminton. Who the hell plays badminton in real life? I don’t think I even got three consecutive hours of sleep. I’ve read that people actually die of broken hearts. I really shouldn’t be exercising under these conditions.

  I decide that I’m definitely gonna ask my mom if I can stay home from school today when we’re done and she’s got that post-exercise high when, even though you’re dripping in sweat and sore, you got the endorphins swirling around you and making you feel like just because you moved for a few minutes you can do anything. Like give your child twenty dollars.

  We fast-forward through the weird courtroom sketch about piracy and throw ourselves right into the diner dance floor 1950s nostalgia rendered in flashes of neon. Richard Simmons is perfect. His voice is high, his ’fro slightly receding, his shorts receded. His tan thighs are smooth as silk and his sneakers bright as bleach. He’s flanked by a lady in deep purple who looks a little like a California Raisin and a brunette in pants that are trying to eat her whole.


  My mother and I begin to dip and writhe sensually with Richard to “Fever.”

  It definitely feels inappropriate to writhe sensually with one’s mother.

  “You got that fever!” Richard purrs.

  “You got that fever, Ashley?” My mother laughs and squeezes her butt cheeks along with everyone onscreen.

  “I got something,” I huff.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” my father yells from the kitchen.

  “Let me see you sizzle,” Richard says.

  My father is on the phone arguing with my uncle Ronnie while we exercise. Uncle Ronnie is my father’s balding older brother who likes to give him shit about where we live and how we talk and most other things about us. I think he’s afraid my dad thinks he’s better than him, or maybe he’s afraid that he actually is. Ronnie refuses to give up his hair because it used to be his pride and joy—long, inky spirals that he wore in two braids throughout the 1960s and ’70s, until the early ’80s hit. When the economy got fucked, so did Uncle Ronnie’s hair. Now his hairline’s receded so his forehead looks like low tide. It does seem a bit unfair that one brother should have so much and the other not even so much as his hair, but I guess that’s just the way it is. They’re arguing over my grandmother’s store, which is in the hood, which is on fire. Not the store itself, though; not yet.

  My grandmother is long dead and the business should be too, but Uncle Ronnie has kept it alive by the skin of his teeth, as my dad says. Repairing vacuums isn’t as lucrative as it once was, not that my grandma Shirley ever made all that much to begin with. Now when things break, sometimes it’s easier to just buy another one. Still, Shirley’s Vacuum Repair Spot stays. Uncle Ronnie sells vacuum accessories, repairs broken vacuums, and refurbishes discarded vacuums to be sold. Also, inside the store a woman named Guadalupe sells homemade tamales for a dollar each. The tamales do better than the vacuum stuff, even if technically Uncle Ronnie doesn’t have a food permit.

  “You gotta adapt with the times,” Ronnie always says.

  “Just come here.” My father puts the phone on speaker as he prepares his morning coffee.

  “I’m not leaving Mama’s store,” Ronnie says.

  “Dammit, Ronnie.” My father says this often when he’s on the phone with my uncle.

  “Hug yourself!” Richard Simmons says.

  “Is that Sweatin’ to the Oldies?” Ronnie says, and my dad quickly takes him off speakerphone.

  “Tell him to bring Morgan here, at least,” my mother shouts as she crunches her elbow to her knee.

  My cousin Morgan and I should be close because we’re the same age and grew up less than twenty miles from each other, but there are palm trees and freeways and brotherly beefs between us, so we’re not. When my grandmother died, she didn’t leave a will, and so Uncle Ronnie and my dad decided that Ronnie should take care of the store and stay in her old house with his family, which is where he’d been staying all along. The house is mint-colored with a large front window and a small front porch, perfect for watching the world go by. There’s a lemon tree in front that drops its fruit in the front yard. Uncle Ronnie’s neighbors steal the lemons, which he doesn’t mind, because what’s he gonna do with that many lemons, anyway? Sometimes passing kids will take them to pelt each other with, and when they do, the street is covered in lemon splats. When we were little, Morgan and her sister Tanya liked to throw them at Jo and me. Lemons hurt when they hit you; not like softballs, but definitely more than Nerf balls. Once Morgan hit me in the head with one and actually knocked me off my feet.

  The video comes to an end and we get to my favorite part, where the success stories dance off into the sunset. My favorite is a man named Michael Hebranko who somehow lost 780 pounds sweating to the oldies, which is like making six and a half of me disappear. I saw him on Oprah, and it made me cry. I couldn’t imagine all that hunger just weighing on your heart for years.

  We land once more on the news. The Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza was hit. The rioters didn’t burn down the mall or anything, just did a bit of light looting. Baldwin Hills is where our parents used to take us to sit on Black Santa, even though the first year we did it, I guess it was a bit of culture shock, because my mom said five-year-old Jo threw a huge tantrum and insisted he wasn’t the real Santa. It was important to our mother that we sit on and demand things from a jolly black stranger, instead of a jolly white stranger.

  These things matter, she said, even if you don’t know it yet.

  It seemed a little silly when I was little, but now I think she was right. If all the heroes in our stories are white, what does that make us? I’m glad we left out cookies and dairy-free eggnog for a fat black old man, even if he was imaginary. The face of our joy had gray whiskers as nappy as the hair atop my head and blasted James Brown Sings Christmas Songs and the Jackson 5 Christmas Album. I like that, for the brief window he was real, Santa looked like what I’d imagine my grandpa to look like, if I’d still had one.

  I wonder if my cousin Morgan took pictures with Black Santa, or if these things don’t matter as much when you’re surrounded by black people as they do when you’re surrounded by white people. In any case, Santa’s definitely safe. It’s April. Morgan, however, is not.

  “What’d he say?” My mother walks over to my father now that we’ve cooled down.

  “He said maybe.”

  “You hear that, Ashley? Your cousin’s coming. Maybe.”

  “Hey, can I stay home from school today?”

  She pauses briefly to consider it. Too briefly. Before she can continue, I try to make my case.

  “Since Morgan’s coming…”

  “No.”

  So much for that.

  “But I can take you to school today, if you want,” she says. “It’s been a while… we could drive through McDonald’s for breakfast! You used to love doing that.”

  “Mom, I have to get into my prom dress in, like, three days.”

  “Right. It was just a thought…” She pats me on the shoulder, then turns and heads up the stairs.

  On television, the brunette reporter chases down passing looters. Her hair’s lightly flipped, and she wears a white mock turtleneck under a denim shirt tucked into denim jeans, like she went through her wardrobe and decided that only denim on denim was appropriate to wear in a riot. She catches up to a Latino man in a thin white tank top, with a handlebar mustache and socks leaping up to touch the bottoms of his baggy basketball shorts. Her voice is shrill as she jogs besides him, mic in hand.

  “What did you get?” she asks.

  “Shoes,” he says.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Right here.”

  “Why did you do this?”

  “I don’t know. Because it’s free.”

  “Don’t you know that it’s wrong?”

  The looter shrugs and runs away, the shoes boxes practically spilling from his arms.

  Outside, the Parker boys hold real guns; hunting rifles, I think. It’s early, but they sit on their lawns in the fresh morning dew, taking breaths like little bombs. Their lawn chairs sag in ratty squares beneath them.

  I told you earlier that Tim and Todd Parker blew up our mailbox when we first moved into our house. We weren’t sure if they did it because we’re black or because they’re delinquents, but it’s probably both. They’re almost thirty now, with faces that drip straight into their necks, and they still haven’t moved out. My mother says one or possibly both of them are simple, but simple don’t excuse racist.

  “Nobody’s coming here, boys,” my next-door neighbor, Mr. Katz, yells across at them as he picks up his morning paper. Last night, after the protests grew violent near the Parker Center, rioters made their way over to City Hall and then threw bricks through the windows of the Los Angeles Times building, and even trashed some of the offices. Still, somehow we got today’s paper.

  The Katzes are like the Jewish Barbie and Ken, perfectly tan and thin with muscles that lightly ripple through their surfaces.
I think Mr. and Mrs. Katz are in their early thirties, but they could be as old as early forties. They’re so tan I can’t quite tell. Mr. Katz has the easy confidence of a man for whom nearly everything has been easy. If he says nothing is coming, nothing’s coming. Except his paper.

  “Gotta stay vigilant just in case,” one Parker boy says as though he’s now a little unsure of it himself.

  “Yeah. Just in case,” the simple one says.

  The Parkers are mostly friendly to us these days, but sometimes they’re not. They seem to go through neighborly phases depending on what’s going on in the news, like they’re on some sort of racist swing being pushed closer, then away, then closer. The Olympics and Flo-Jo, closer. The Rainbow Coalition, away. The Central Park Five? Way away. When my parents confronted the Parkers about the mailbox, my mother said that Mrs. Parker had responded, “My boys would never do a thing like that. We’re very tolerant people.”

  Fuck being tolerated.

  Mr. Katz shakes his head at the Parkers. He’s wearing flannel boxers and an absurd silk robe that hangs on him a little like a cape. He turns around to wave at Lucia and me as we get into the car to head to school.

  “Ay,” Lucia murmurs, “he doesn’t believe in clothes?”

  But she says it like she doesn’t entirely mind.

  Once, Jo and I saw the Katzes having sex in their pool, which was notable because later that same day they had a pool party, with little kids and everything. We both thought that was deeply unsanitary. That said, the Katzes are very nice perverts, and not racist at all—as far as we can tell, anyway. You never really know. They have not one but two Clinton-Gore signs on their lawn.

  “You’re still going to school today, in this?” Mr. Katz says.

  “Unfortunately,” I shout over.

  “Well… good for you, I guess. Go get those As! Stay out of trouble!” Mr. Katz winks as we pull away.

  The Parkers adjust themselves and wave at me as I stare out the car window. Their hard guns rest across their soft legs like a threat.