The Black Kids

by Christina Hammonds Reed

  The Wednesday before last, I should’ve gone with Lucia to say goodbye to Damarís. Damarís put Band-Aids on my boo-boos and fed me ice cream and let the Chinese girl and me make forts out of her couch cushions. Instead, I did something awful. Or, I guess, I did something human.

  Okay. Here goes. Like I said earlier, I’m mostly a good person. Or I used to think so, but now I’m not so sure.

  Kimberly thinks she and Michael are going to lose their virginity to each other, but that won’t happen, because I had sex with Michael while Lucia sat in Damarís’s tiny kitchen among the boxes, saying goodbye.

  This is how it happened:

  Courtney and Kimberly and Heather and I sat on the front steps. Trevor and Michael joined us. Trevor kept sliding down the banister and walking back up to the top and sliding down again. Heather drew stick figures across Courtney’s thigh with a ballpoint pen. Kimberly rested her chin against Michael’s knees while he stroked her hair, and I tried not to feel anything at all.

  The rain started to fall in big fat droplets, and we were bored. Eventually, Courtney and Kimberly decided they’d rather be bored and dry at the mall. Heather left to check out this new band recording their demo at her grandfather’s studio. Trevor lingered for a bit, until he too decided there was somewhere else he’d rather be. Then it was just the two of us.

  “Wanna chill in my car?” Michael said.

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  Normally, we would’ve been listening to something. We’re always listening to something. But that day there was only the drill of rain against Michael’s tinny car roof, loud like we were inside a drum.

  “Inhale,” he said. I breathed in.

  “You know my dad tried to kill himself when I was a kid?” he said.

  “That’s fucked up.”

  “I was the one who found him.”

  I wonder what it would be like to walk in on my dad, blue and belted around his neck. It’s weird to think of a real body hanging right in front of you, like it does in one of those lynching photographs with the white kids eating cotton candy and pointing.

  “What’s he like?”

  “I don’t know him well. He works, and when he’s not working, he’s golfing or whatever. He embezzled from his old company. That’s why he tried to kill himself.”

  My secrets came out in a rush through my guts. Jo’s failure to fly, and a few others that had wrapped themselves around my organs and often tried to slither up my throat. I wanted to give them to Michael in his shit-green tin can of a car, but also I was a little afraid. Sometimes when we talk, I feel like he’s just trying to stare right into my brain itself, but more often than that I get the impression he’s not actually hearing me at all.

  Then I thought, Maybe it’s okay to tell everything to somebody who doesn’t really hear you. Your secrets still stay yours, somehow.

  “My sister fell off the roof when we were younger. I think she did it on purpose—like, to hurt herself. But after it happened, we all just pretended it was an accident. It feels like we’re always pretending things are okay when they’re not. Like we’re the goddamn Huxtables or whatever. But we’re not. Nobody is. It makes me feel like I’m the fucking crazy one, somehow.”

  Michael held my face in his hands. He didn’t say anything, and I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me at all, but I didn’t care. Then he leaned in and kissed me, and I kissed him back. It was the first time we’d ever actually kissed, though a few weeks before we’d come dangerously close. The kissing would’ve been bad enough, but we didn’t stop there.

  I remember the way the leather of his varsity jacket squeaked as he moved. He grabbed me by my waist and pulled me in closer. The stick shift dug into my side as he tried to pull my leg over toward him. He placed his hand on my boob and moved it around like he was trying to open a doorknob.

  “Do you wanna move to the back seat?” he whispered.

  No scratched at the back of my throat, but he kissed it away before it could come out.

  Anyway, neither of us knew what we were doing.

  Now I think maybe we were holding on to each other to keep from drowning.

  It hurt a little bit, but not as much as I thought it would, and afterward we laid back and held hands.

  Morgan was the first person who taught me about sex. Well, technically, she taught me how to put my Barbies’ perfect plastic bodies together, rub them a bit, and close the curtain to their canopy bed. A canopy bed would’ve been a much more romantic place to rub bodies than Michael’s shitbox of a Chevy Nova.

  “First, they kiss,” Morgan said.

  “And then?” I said.

  Morgan didn’t know the specifics, just the rubbing.

  “Good girls keep their legs together,” my mother told me offhandedly sophomore year as we were watching a talk-show special on teen moms. No specifics.

  In the car with Michael, I thought of that parade of beleaguered teenage girls and their pudgy babies. Were they bad girls, then? Was I now a bad girl?

  I thought I was going to vomit.

  “Wait…,” he said as I climbed over him and pushed and pulled against the car door, willing it to open.

  “You can’t go out in that. It’s pouring.” He tried to pull my arm back. “You’ll get sick.”

  “Rain doesn’t make you sick.”

  We struggled in an awkward push and pull. Finally, he let me go.

  It wasn’t supposed to rain that day. The water soaked through my thin dress as I ran across the parking lot until I was some heavy, waterlogged version of myself.

  “Ash!” Michael called after me, but only just the once.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE WORLD OUTSIDE is still. A singular insomniac bird chirps off and on. My head is pounding. I shouldn’t have had so much to drink at Lana’s. Sometimes when I drink too much, I wake up way earlier than I normally would and can’t get back to sleep. Before I woke up, I was dreaming of falling, and when I opened my eyes, my stomach felt like it was in my throat. After staring at the ceiling for a while, thinking about all the things I shouldn’t have done in the entirety of my seventeen years on earth and all the things I should do, I decide to call Jo.

  “Hello?” Harrison says into the phone like he’s still in the middle of a dream.

  “Hi. May I speak to my sister?” I say. “It’s Ashley. Ashley Bennett.”

  After some rustling and muttering, Jo answers, “What’s wrong, Ash?”

  “Nothing. Everything.”

  “Are you okay? Are Mom and Dad okay?”

  “They’re fine. It’s not that.… Everyone’s all right. I wanted to know you’re all right. You haven’t been answering any of their calls.… They’re worried about you.”

  She sighs. “I’m as well as can be expected.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The rebellion. It’s dying. They’re militarizing the streets.”

  “Jo, this isn’t something for you to take one of your stands on,” I say.

  “People have been dying,” she says. “That’s the whole reason for the rebellion. That’s the whole reason for taking one of my stands. Protesting isn’t supposed to be easy. Revolution isn’t easy. Not when you’re trying to dismantle an entire system.”

  “You’re a revolutionary now?”

  “You sound like Valerie,” she exhales with a deep sigh.

  “Mom just wants you to be safe.”

  “Worrying about being safe is what’s dangerous, what deters progress. We get treated like some crazy fringe group—”

  “Who’s we?” I interrupt.

  “The Revolutionary Communist Party, Ashley,” Jo says, like I’m supposed to know who the hell she’s talking about. “But what’s so crazy about wanting people to be equal? Capitalism doesn’t work, Ash. This country isn’t taking care of all its people—just the ones with the right skin color, the right genitals, the highest bank accounts. You don’t have to be crazy to acknowledge that. If we don’t do something now, then
when?” She pauses for a moment. “Can you keep a secret?”

  Not this again.

  “I thought about what you said. You’re right. Flyers aren’t enough. People throw them away. You gotta do something more permanent.”

  “I definitely didn’t say that part,” I say.

  “I’ve been writing on the walls with spray paint. Slogans here and there.”

  “Why can’t you collect clothes and cans of food or whatever like a normal person? They can arrest you for graffitiing. Doing graffiti? Whatever.”

  “It’s not graffiti. It’s a movement,” she says defensively. “Hold on a second.”

  I hear soft static, then a bit of rustling and movement.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m on the cordless. I stepped outside. Harrison’s gotta be up for work in a few hours.”

  A fire destroyed an electronics store on Pico and Fairfax, and a Vons nearby was looted. This is super close to Jo’s place.

  I imagine Jo sitting on the steps in front of her house in this twilight, the two of us looking out at the sky at the same time, like little lost Fievel and his sister in An American Tail.

  Years ago, when that wildfire burned down the hillside and Daddy refused to leave, Jo was the one who left first.

  She was nine and had packed her own suitcase and mine with clothes and Handi-Snacks and Fruit Roll-Ups. Jo was a tiny kid, not much larger than me, even though we were years apart. The suitcases were as large as us both, and sometimes we would take turns hiding inside and zipping ourselves up so that all we could feel was dark; then we would roll each other along on the wheels and pretend to go to far-off places.

  “We’re in Paris!” the sister pushing the suitcase would narrate to the sister inside.

  “We’re in Istanbul!”

  “Now we’re in Djibouti!” and then we would laugh, because booty.

  Until eventually it got to be too much, and the suitcase sister would scream to be let out: “I can’t breathe!”

  “We’re going,” Jo said to my dad.

  She grabbed me by the hand, and we started walking down the hill. She’d brought her softball bat with her in case of coyotes, and she let it dangle from her small right hand like a warning. A family of squirrels ran past.

  “Get back here,” my mother shouted.

  “Now,” my father added.

  My father and mother looked on incredulously as Jo and I kept walking.

  Jo gripped my hand tighter still.

  “I’m the parent; you do as I say,” Daddy shouted.

  We were halfway down the road by then, past the emptied driveways of our neighbors who’d already fled. In a few more steps, we’d turn the corner and disappear.

  “Girls!” Lucia yelled, “¡Eschuchen a sus padres!”

  I turned back to look at Lucia. Jo and I stood in the middle of the road. One of my hands held on to Jo’s, and the other to my blond Skipper doll with all the hair cut off. Our adults were starting to look small.

  “Maybe we should go back,” I said.

  “It’ll be alright,” Jo said.

  That was all before.

  “I don’t want to lie to Mom and Dad for you anymore, Jo…”

  “Then don’t. Just don’t tell them. It’s not like they tell us anything about themselves. They’re so damned secretive, even about the stuff we should know. It’s like we materialized out of thin air, according to them.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Ask Dad about Grandma Shirley.”

  “What’s Grandma Shirley got to do with anything?”

  I hear her inhale and exhale deeply again.

  “Forget it.”

  “The looters are fucking over people like Uncle Ronnie, too, you know? Not just bad people or corporations. You can’t treat people like collateral damage… Just come home. It’s safer here.… When are you gonna stop being mad?” I say.

  A siren grows louder and louder in the background.

  “Morgan’s here while Uncle Ronnie guards the shop. She shot out the Parkers’ tires with Daddy’s gun. You would’ve loved it.”

  “Those assholes.” She laughs.

  “I miss you,” I say.

  “I miss you, too.”

  “Come home.”

  “This city is our home. All of it,” Jo says as the one siren becomes a chorus screaming somewhere out there.

  Home: A Personal History

  This is where we’re from, best as I can tell from the breadcrumbs that my parents and Grandma Opal and Uncle Ronnie have left that lead to the story of us. Our grandparents moved to Los Angeles from the South, all of them. They drove across the country carrying with them in their veins all that trauma and all that hope and used it to lay the bricks for lives brighter than the ones they left. Nobody’s actually from Los Angeles, except for those of us who are.

  The canals and the pier in Venice were dreamed up by a developer and tobacco mogul named Abbot Kinney, who envisioned it as kind of a Coney Island West. At least Coney Island was built by black people fleeing the South. Even though they built it, black people couldn’t live near the boardwalk and canals, because racism, so instead they settled in Oakwood, which was a small community set aside for black folks. This is where my mother’s mother, Grandma Opal, settled when she eventually moved here with her brother Wallace. She was the first of my grandparents to make their way west. My mother’s father, Grandpa Moses, settled downtown in Little Tokyo, or, as it was known at the time, Bronzeville. Blacks were able to move in because the Japanese who’d previously lived there had been sent to internment camps. Grandpa Moses was an accountant, and my grandma was a trained actress and singer folks said would’ve been huge, if only she hadn’t had the misfortune of looking too black.

  “I could’ve been bigger than Dorothy Dandridge, or even Hazel Scott! I was lighter than Hazel, you know? My nose was keener…,” Grandma Opal would say on occasion, whenever somebody brought it up.

  “What does that mean?” I asked, but before Grandma Opal could tell me what a keen nose was and what that had to do with anything, my mother shooed me into the next room. If you look closely at some of the films of the era, you can see Grandma Opal’s beautiful smile and long legs dancing across the background.

  Meanwhile, according to Uncle Ronnie, my dad’s mother, Grandma Shirley, moved out here with her mother; her sister, Minnie; and two brothers, Gordon and Elijah, who would be lost during World War II. They crammed together into a house in what was then a working class but stable neighborhood that would eventually, after years of government neglect and discriminatory policies, become the hood. But before that, there were new trees and fresh lawns and neighbors who looked out for one another, the kind of neighbors who would stand next to you and tell you all their business and try to get into yours as you watered the lawn. All of them came to Los Angeles to be free from Jim Crow, to claim what they could of the orange groves and the ocean breeze and the sunshine. Even if they were a little disappointed, even if it wasn’t exactly as advertised, still it was better than.

  Grandma Shirley started Shirley’s Vacuum Repair Spot a few blocks from that house sometime in the late fifties. Grandpa Charles ended up dying in the war, like her big brothers, and so she used her savings from working for years in factories plus what the country paid her for her husband’s sacrifice to open the store. With the earnings from the store, she eventually bought a home of her own. There’s a photo of my dad and Uncle Ronnie holding her hands at the store’s grand opening, all of them beaming. My dad looks like a nerd in huge Coke-bottle glasses and, somehow, a black-boy cowlick. Uncle Ronnie is clearly feeling himself in a leather jacket that looks like he loved it so much he probably wore it to bed. It’s the only photo of the three of them my dad has in the house.

  This is how we came to be: Darla was my father’s college girlfriend, a hairdresser. He would sit next to her doing homework, or studying, or just staring at her while she did her clients’ hair. Darla wasn’t in colleg
e, but they’d grown up with each other and started dating during their senior year of high school. My father would go over to her house and stay for days at a time. “Her parents took in strays” is how my dad phrased it. He liked her place because, unlike his, there was enough space to sit and think and write and be. Darla was quiet and very kind, according to both my parents. My parents met when my mother came in to get her hair done, and there was my father, next to Darla, watching. My mother said she stole glances at him in the mirror, and he at her, the entire time Darla straightened and curled the length of my mother’s long hair.

  “What are you studying?” my mother finally worked up the nerve to ask.

  My father told her, and even though they weren’t studying the same thing—they weren’t even at the same school—my mother said, “We should study together sometime.”

  Right in front of Darla, he said, “Okay.”

  It wasn’t very smart of my mother to do that while Darla still had a hot curling iron in her hand. If you look closely, you can still see the exact dark moment kind Darla lost my father and found my mother’s right temple.

  They never told me that story directly; I overheard it while they were hosting a dinner party and were feeling extra in love and extra social for a few months.

  So you see, she wasn’t wrong, my sister. Jo and me, we’ve got the hood in us as much as the beach, as much as Downtown, and even as much as Hollywood itself; the length of Los Angeles stretched in our veins like the crisp lines of a vacuum across carpet.

  I don’t know anything about before my grandparents got to California. I guess I never really thought to ask.

  Home: 5:13 a.m. Today.

  It’s still late when I hang up with Jo and walk downstairs to grab a glass of water. Or, I guess I should say, early. My dad is up watching the news coverage of the riots on television, although I don’t know how he can bear to keep the TV on anymore. He’s sprawled out on the couch in his pajamas, a pillow tucked under his head and one under his arm like a teddy bear.