The Black Kids

by Christina Hammonds Reed

“I thought you were white,” I say.

  She laughs and pulls me to my feet.

  “ ‘It don’t matter if you’re black or white.’ ” She does her best Michael Jackson impression, which is really pretty terrible.

  She-Ra purrs an assent.

  * * *

  The black kids are supernice to me, but they have years of history with one another, the kind I used to have with my friends, so I feel like an interloper. Kimberly and Courtney and Heather and I have years of inside jokes, years of knowing what the slightest eyebrow raise means, what a twitch of the face tells. I don’t know any of this stuff about my new friends, or if they even consider me a new friend at all.

  “Man, I need a motherfucking car,” Fat Albert says. He wheezes as we walk. I really should be calling him Percy now.

  “You and me both,” Tarrell says.

  Candace invited everybody to her house after we finished volunteering with Julia and Tarrell’s youth group, because she lives just a few blocks away. Julia, Tarrell, Percy, LaShawn, and I walk toward Candace’s house. Our hands are sweaty from plastic gloves and calloused from shovel handles. The Timberlands I borrowed from Jo are giving me nasty-ass blisters, so each step feels like a potential land mine of blood and gross. I’ve done more manual labor today than I think I’ve done in my entire life. Still, there’s something about searching for the beauty under the wreckage that has me pumped—hopeful, even.

  Or maybe it’s because LaShawn and I kinda hang behind the rest of them with each other, and every so often our hands graze each other and we don’t pull away. He should hate me; I honestly don’t understand why he doesn’t, but I’m grateful. Sometimes we love the people we should hate, and we hate the people we love, and we’re topsy-turvy, but it’s like the song my dad likes to put on the record player when he’s had a little too much to drink: “It’s a thin line between love and hate.”

  “Are you sure it’s okay that I’m coming? I don’t want to impose myself,” I whisper to LaShawn. “What if they don’t actually like me but they’re being nice because of, like, racial solidarity or whatever?”

  “Girl, what? Racial solidarity?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrug my shoulders.

  “Everybody likes you,” he says.

  “That’s not even remotely true, and you know it,” I say.

  “Well… yeah.” He laughs. “But I like you, and they’re my friends. You’re fine.”

  Ranchero music drifts in from another block as we walk.

  “You know, they act like we don’t belong here, like we’re just a bunch of thugs or illegals and the city would be better off without us. But we helped build this shit. We’re fucking genesis.”

  “Here he goes again,” Candace says. “This nigga walk around talking about LA like it’s a girl he got a crush on. ‘Did you know LA this? Did you know LA that?’ ”

  LaShawn ignores her and continues.

  Of the forty-four original founders of LA, only two were white. Twenty-six had some African ancestry. Sixteen were Indians or Mestizos.

  Some of the wealthiest of them were the brothers Andrés and Pío Pico—of mixed Native American, Black, and Mexican ancestry. Pío Pico would become governor of Alta California before it became part of the United States. Andrés eventually became a senator after statehood. His son’s house is the second-oldest residence in Los Angeles.

  Pico Boulevard runs the length of the city, from the ocean air in Santa Monica all the way to the smoggy history in Downtown. It passes by Santa Monica High School, Westside Pavilion, the Fox Studios, a snooty country club, the Museum of Tolerance, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. It passes through poor areas and rich areas and areas in between, through famous people and nobodies, through Black people, Mexican people, Persian people, Greek people, Jewish people, and Korean people, and everyone in between. If you get on the 30 and settle in, there it is out a smudged bus window, behind a gang tag, a curse, or an etched declaration love; all of Los Angeles on just one boulevard named after a nigger.

  And before us there were the Tongva.

  On the corner of La Brea and Pico, next to where a shopping mall went up in flames, somebody spray-painted in black along a white brick wall, LOOK WHAT YOU CREATED.

  “All I’m saying is, this shit is ours as much as anybody else’s,” LaShawn says.

  “Don’t need no history lesson to know all that. Look at us. We here.” Candace gestures around the neighborhood and up at the sky, like not solely Los Angeles but the whole world is ours.

  The front steps of Candace’s house are lined in a Spanish-looking tile. The path is lined in bright-yellow flowers. It’s a small home but pretty, minus the pointed metal gates on the windows. A big blue pit bull tumbles over itself as it rushes full speed from some hidey-hole. It barks at us from behind a metal fence.

  “Don’t mind Horace,” Candace says.

  “He gon’ eat my face?” Fat Albert says.

  “Horace is a girl.” Candace laughs and starts to open the gate to her home.

  “But you didn’t say no, though,” Fat Albert says, and backs away from the dog.

  “Horace, sit. Stay,” she says, and Horace does.

  We walk through Candace’s house to a wood-paneled den, where her little brother sits on a worn black leather sofa playing video games. A fan rotates its neck, blowing breath back and forth, but the room’s still stuffy.

  “Out!” she says.

  “No,” he says, and somersaults Sonic once more into Dr. Robotnik. Robotnik waddles toward his escape pod and Sonic chases after him, mere seconds from beating the evil scientist, when Candace pulls the power cord from the wall. Her brother starts yelling at her in Igbo, and I swear I see actual tears in his eyes.

  Julia and Tarrell curl up on opposite ends of the couch. Fat Albert plugs the Genesis back into the wall; the controller looks tiny in his hands. He passes the other controller to Tarrell, but Julia snatches it from him.

  “Let’s give Lisa Turtle a makeover!” Candace squeals.

  The black kids still call me Lisa Turtle, only now it’s to my face, and I can’t get too upset ’cause it’s far better than being called Fat Albert.

  “I don’t know.” I look over at LaShawn.

  “C’mon, let us! Candace lives for makeovers.” Julia claps her hands.

  “Do I look that awful?” I say. The last time I had a makeover was when we were in fifth grade and Kimberly informed me that I should straighten my hair and start wearing mascara if I was ever gonna get boys to like me.

  “Let me braid your hair for you, at least,” Candace says. She opens a three-tiered caddy and wiggles out two bags of braid hair. She pats the floor by her.

  “Sit.”

  Candace carries herself like a princess, like she could be anything at all. When she tells me to sit, it sounds like a royal edict. So I do.

  She takes a rattail comb and rakes the metal tip across my scalp, parting my hair into several sections. LaShawn sits next to me on the floor, legs crossed.

  “So, what’s the deal with you two?” Fat Albert says. “Everybody in this room knows this boy been had a crush on you for years.”

  I look at LaShawn but he turns away, his face red as a Jordan jersey.

  “You know, people think black folks don’t blush, but we do,” Julia says. “Like right now you’re blushing like a motherfucker.”

  “I am not,” LaShawn says.

  “Boy, why you lying?”

  “Put your head down,” Candace says to me. There’s such an intimacy in the feeling of another person’s hands in your hair, greasing and parting across your bare scalp, your brain at their fingertips.

  Julia and Fat Albert load Streets of Rage while Candace works her way through my head. Julia tries to play as Blaze, probably because she’s the girl and arguably the fastest character, but Fat Albert selects her before Julia gets a chance.

  “Too slow!”

  Together, they wal
k as the girl and the black guy down the city street, beating people up. They’re supposed to be working together, but Julia keeps snatching up the food and weapons and then “accidentally” attacking Percy, who keeps yelling, “Stop hitting me, fool!” while Tarrell alternately yells, “Yo, go get that dude over there!” and “Why y’all so sorry?”

  Candace’s parents come home together. They yell out greetings and look as though they’re leaning on each other so as not to fall over. Her father is a security guard at the same hospital where her mother works as a nurse, and they spend all day on their feet. In Nigeria, they had servants, Candace says.

  Candace’s father has the biggest, warmest brown face I’ve ever seen, like a sculptor took those cheesy images of the sun smiling and made them into a real person. They talk to Candace for a bit in their language. Her parents have thick voices, their words like skipping stones. Then the house absorbs them into itself. Her father turns on a drumbeat from inside its bowels.

  “What is that?”

  “My daddy loves himself some Fela.”

  I make a mental note to find out what “Fela” is.

  “Hey, did you guys know Lana Haskins isn’t white?” I say.

  “Girl, duh,” Fat Albert says.

  “She’s half-Egyptian,” Julia says, like this was somehow common knowledge.

  “Her white ass is, like, literally African American,” Tarrell says, and everybody laughs.

  I am he as you are me as you are we as we are all together.

  I like being part of this we. It’s weird how sometimes you can be part of us and sometimes you can be part of them, and find a way to be at home in both.

  “Done. Want beads?” Candace asks.

  My mother thinks beads look tacky, but I like the little wooden balls Candace has in her box of hair goodies. They look like somebody tore apart a necklace and placed its pretty entrails in your hair.

  “Sure!” I say.

  “What you wanna bet them white girls at school will see you and be like, ‘Omigod! You know, I got my hair braided in Mexico once,’ ” Julia says, and we start to laugh.

  Candace hands me a mirror, and it’s like I’m looking at myself but not. I run my hand down the length of my hair. The thin ropes are thicker than the ones I got when I was little, but just as pretty.

  “You look incredible,” LaShawn turns to me and says.

  Then the whole room starts echoing his words as Tarrell, Julia, Percy, and Candace proceed to mock the shit out of him.

  “He’s right, though,” Percy says. “Candace got Lisa Turtle looking like a goddamn Nubian princess.”

  Then he belly laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever said and smiles at me. “You’re all right after all, Lisa Turtle. You’re all right.”

  LaShawn winks at me.

  I flip my hair to the side and hear the click-clack of wooden beads like a drumbeat, my hair a kind of music drowning out everything else.

  The world is so big and we’re so little; still each bead announces, “I’m here!”

  CHAPTER 24

  THE COURTROOM SMELLS like the past. The shellacked court reporter clacks in shorthand the details of my sister’s supposed crime. Sunspots dot the top of the judge’s head like speckles on an egg. He looks to be shrinking into his robes. The arresting officer takes the stand, a man who seems to be on a collision course with every doorway he enters, and the doorway might actually lose. He’s hard, hair shorn, militarily erect, a recent Gulf War vet. He tells his side of the story succinctly—an agitated crowd, a Molotov cocktail, a building on fire.

  Jo purses her lips as he speaks; her whole body screams, but she doesn’t interject. I don’t know whether you’d know that if you didn’t know her, but she’s my sister, so I can tell the frustration in the twitch of her eyebrow, or in the way she scratches at the dry patch of stress behind her ear.

  “This is your fault,” my father said during a quick break to Harrison, who, for once, fought back.

  “Have you met your daughter? Do you know her at all? Your daughter doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do,” Harrison spat back.

  Jo said calmly, “Auntie Carol says Grant’s one of the best. It’ll be okay. Everything will be fine.”

  Grant is Jo’s lawyer. He fiddles with his watch occasionally while the prosecution speaks—not checking the time but checking to see if time is still there. He carries himself exactly like Mr. Katz, a man used to getting what he wants. A man for whom no danger is imminent. He’s confident in his remarks to the jury, charming. His slicked hair has a bit of gray at the temples, and his eyes are a beachy blue. His suit is perfectly tailored to the body he clearly approaches like one of his legal briefs, sculpting, erasing, adding until it’s perfect. He looks like he belongs to one of those corporate clusters you see out in the water on weekends, floating on uninitiated surfboards, waiting for the wave on which they can briefly be somebody else. When he speaks to us, he smiles when it’s appropriate and looks serious while talking about serious things. He speaks down just a little, because that’s how he speaks to everyone.

  Jo thinks he’s a twat. Still, she’s grateful.

  When the jury foreman eventually reads Jo’s verdict, my father will grip the arm of his chair to steady himself. My mother will grip him, her mouth wrapped around a whispered “No!”

  I’ll surprise myself by crying out, and some of the jurors will look over at me with pity, but most will look down or away.

  When the jury acquitted the officers, the man who struck Rodney King the most, Officer Laurence M. Powell, smiled and said, “I am very happy, very happy.”

  When asked what he would say to those upset by the verdicts, Powell said, “I don’t think I have to respond to them. They have to respond to themselves and make their own decision. I don’t think there’s anything I can do to change their feelings.”

  Jo will be shaking when she rises to hear her sentence, her pale-pink nail polish already bitten down. Her future will look different than any of us thought it would. Sixteen months isn’t all that long, and yet it might as well be forever. I try to picture us when we’re both older and she’s a former felon.

  “We’re gonna fight this,” Grant says, without an ounce of condescension, to my parents, who stand there in shock, our worlds turned upside down.

  Because she’s not considered a flight risk, Jo will have several weeks before she has to self-surrender. Until then, she waits.

  When LaShawn calls that night to ask me how things went, he will sit with me in silence while I try to remember how to breathe.

  But that is not yet. That’s after.

  * * *

  Before:

  The jacarandas are in bloom, and their pretty purple petals line whole blocks. The fires got some of them, but not all. We stand in the middle of burned-out buildings, graffiti on the sidewalk under our feet. Power lines stretch across the sky in messy stripes. It occurs to me halfway through the morning that the reason the sky looks weird is ’cause I don’t see power lines like this in my neighborhood.

  I watch the succession of planes, sometimes two or three at a time, into and out of Los Angeles; more people, less people.

  Less people. Ronnie and Morgan are leaving Los Angeles as soon as Morgan graduates. Last week they went to Las Vegas to scope out new places to build old dreams.

  Grandma Shirley’s store is much smaller than I remember it—not much larger than our living room, although I suppose our living room is pretty large, as far as these things go. The carpet is boring gray but freshly put in and still plush underfoot, perfect for demonstrating the workings of a freshly repaired vacuum. It was soiled by the looters, but an old family friend is gonna come by and steam it at a huge discount. A pity clean. I can’t help thinking what it must be like knowing that your neighbors, maybe even some people you considered friends, were among those trying to take what little it took generations to build.

  A few older folks stop by to reminisce and offer Ronnie their condolen
ces. They look at my father as though trying to place him, until they do.

  “Haven’t seen you round these parts in years!” they say, or “You forgot all about us, Craig!” And even though he’s a grown-ass man with a good-ass job and a large-ass house in a nice-ass neighborhood, my dad looks like a little-ass boy, reprimanded.

  The big window in front is boarded up with plywood until Uncle Ronnie can have it replaced. Usually, that window is bordered with seasonal decorations that Ole Felix painstakingly paints every few months, more frequently if it’s holiday season. Ole Felix isn’t that old at all—only a handful of years older than my dad—but he has arthritis that makes him bend like a much older person. He lived on the block and used to help look after Ronnie and my dad when their mother was at her worst. According to Ronnie, his designs are getting less intricate as his arthritis advances.

  When Ole Felix sees my dad, he just holds him, less like a peer and more like a father, and neither of them says a word for a really long time.

  “These are my daughters, Ashley and Josephine,” my dad says.

  “I remember them when they were but so big.” Ole Felix gestures down to knee-height and looks at us like he’s proud of us for the act of growing. “You got a beautiful family now, Craig. Just beautiful.”

  Together we pick through the rubble and try to find things to keep.

  I try to pretend like I’m Indiana Jones, but it feels like we’re grave-robbing, except the grave is our grandma’s, or maybe our whole family’s. Every once in a while, my dad and Ronnie find something that makes them lean on each other, and you can tell what they found belonged to their mother.

  They seem happy to be in the space together, joking and laughing about old times.

  “Girls, come here…,” Daddy shouts from deep inside the store.

  Jo and I follow his voice to the little cramped office in the back. He lifts up a heavy antique front-desk push bell, the kind of thing used to summon somebody from somewhere deep inside. And guess what shape it’s in? It’s a turtle! My father, the turtle, with his antique turtle bell.