I stared at them from my shade tree. The handball wall where they was gettin’ ready was flush white with smogless sunlight. They stood out black and tan, tall and short, boys and girls. But they all had wings for feet. It had rained the day before and there was still dew in the dark places, under trees and in the shadows cast by everything above us. I liked to play those spaces anyway, but the seldom few days of rain and the day right after the rain when everything was still shadowy and cool I loved even more. I didn’t understand athletes, the way they let the sun beat on them, how they wailed away at they own bodies with invented torments.
Of course lookin’ back now, I realize that we ran for a reason. Yeah, every game requires running, but it went well beyond that. We was still supposed to be staying seven feet apart back then, and the simplest game kids can play without touching, tackling, or smearing each other is to race, so running was encouraged by our institutions. But it was what the institutions didn’t give a thought to that really had us on the run. With the hard times and low funds, the school district had sold off all its yellow school buses, which meant we sometimes took the public transit, when it wadn’t running late or was so crowded grown-ass men body blocked us back to the street. Shameful as shit and frequent as the morning sun, we was forced to make a run for it. We booked it along boulevards under billboards that advertised all the things our families couldn’t dream to afford, sprinted through vacant lots and warehouse back alleys, hopped fences and trespassed private properties, and played the angles between the front and back bumpers of cars gridlocked in traffic. Our teachers understood why they pupils was always late, but that didn’t stop them from marking us down by the minute for our tardiness, so we ran to stay enrolled, and naturally necessity became the way we played, which made sense since all our games was really just a way to get ready for the world.
I was fittin’ to face the world hecka slow-footed and complected, a bad combination when you consider all the scrapes we people of the sun find ourselves in.
“Time to run,” DeMichael ordered.
I moped over to the wall and watched as the others knelt like ready predators, bodies planked perpendicular above drawbridge lever arms. I watched as shoulder muscles children ain’t even supposed to have flexed with weightless waiting, each hand shaped an empty pyramid against the gravel, and sneakers beat battle drums against the concrete wall.
I copied. Kneeling, I imagined I was a character, not in a cartoon clip but in one of them video games I couldn’t afford, was too scared to steal, and anyway would never have Daddy’s blessing to play. “ON YOUR MARKS,” DeMichael called from where he knelt, ready to race as well, the fifth predator, and I was just prey in the game, a peasant ’bout to be pillaged in Assassin’s Creed: DeMichael de’ Medici, a prostitute fittin’ to get iced in Grand Theft Auto: International Boulevard. “GET SET,” he said, even though I was still just figuring out what to do with my feet. “GO!”
I stood straight up, and like always everyone was two steps clear of me ’fore I even started moving. Trey took the lead. Miguel, who was beautiful, flew right behind him, and Keisha, taller’n all of us, taller’n a teacher or two, Usain Bolt–ed right after them. Free was short and small, but her legs rapidly disappeared into a whirling rainbow of green and orange and purple shorts and socks and shoes. The color wheel fled ahead and I gave up as usual, and then I caught an image of some interest from the corner of my eye—big, slow-ass DeMichael was lookin’ at me and I was lookin’ at him, and we was tied stride for stride, and then I was giving myself the beginnings of whiplash from trying to hold his gaze as he fell back from my pace. And now I was striding, knees up and out, proper form, and Miguel, who gave up winning the race and relaxed into less than a sprint, was coming back to me, too. I was close enough to him to see sweat sparkling the braided rope of brown hair that swung behind him. Keisha and Trey and Free flew away, and the dirt and grass and ants and bees that they shoveled up with each back kick freckled my face. I closed my eyes and imagined Miguel’s Rapunzel braid flying away and his toy head buckin’ back and forth. I thought how I had broke every toy my parents had ever bought me. Not outta anger, just experiments—how far could my plastic superhero fly when I threw dude? How fast could the toy car go when I revved it hecka hard? Whatever happened to that one with the wings and—never mind.
Keisha won, like always. Trey finished second, outrun at the very end once again. Free spun into third. And Miguel finished fourth. I was a fabulous fifth, but way ahead of DeMichael, who admitted afterward that he only made me run cuz he didn’t feel like finishing last. He didn’t expect that I would outrun him.
After the race, he pulled me by the arm so hard I thought I would come completely apart. It woulda been some shit. Boy succeeds for the first time ever at anything his daddy didn’t make him do, next minute he goes and gets hisself killed by a mutant ten-year-old: “Youngblood Stomped Out Just for Living.”
“You gotsta make one of, ya know, the other kids race,” he campaigned. “One of them slow friends you got.”
With my free hand, I wiped the crap off my face. I couldn’t make nobody do nothin’. I was thrilled I was faster’n DeMichael and scared of what he might still do with my arm. Keisha was walking back toward the tree balancing pebbles on the fingertips of her left hand and flicking them at Free with her free hand. Free ducked the pebbles like Muhammad Ali—no nerdy awkward slaps, no scared squinting eyes, just calm, cool fakes and feints—and she somehow kept talkin’ trash the whole time, too, tellin’ Keish how she was just tall and lucky to be that fast for a giraffe. I wanted to be that kind of cool.
Meanwhile, DeMichael hadn’t let go of my arm.
“I cain’t make nobody race if they don’t want to,” I whined, no Ali in me.
“Yes, you can.”
“No, I cain’t.”
He stared at me. This was going nowhere.
“Nah. How?”
“Family, just tell ’em I’ma kill ’em if they don’t. Ain’t hard.” If Free was Ali, DeMichael Quantavius Chesnutt Bradley was Mike Tyson crossed with a Glock.
He let go of my arm, and then he balled his fists kinda playfully and circled me and threw a couple jabs my way. They thudded painless, playful against my stiff shoulders, the light in his eyes surprising. He was just playin’. It dawned on me then that DeMichael had no intentions on hurting me.
*
I had running buddies after that—not in the sense of a kid with a crew of dudes who squad out wherever the leader orders them to go. Copeland Cane’s never been enough of a boss to snap my fingers and have disciples at my beck and call like that. I literally mean these jokers found it in they hearts to run with me. At recess. Around Rockwood. On the few and far between occasions when Daddy allowed me outside for somethin’ other’n unpaid labor. Now when we ran to and from school, I wadn’t running in my lane alone. We ran together, clowned, dozened, zigzagged into each other’s paths, figured out how fast we could fly by foot while talkin’ each other up at the same time. They had much more to say than I did. Where my siblings was all step-kids in Inglewood, they had the wisdom of eleven- and twelve-year-old elders at home to school them on knockin’ boots without making babies, ancient medicine marijuana, black god math and religion, and what it’s like when your fish start to swim or, for Keisha and Free, when you get your first cycle, not to mention breasts, butts, and bras.
Keisha had a coin that her orisha cousin gave to her as a birthday gift. It was silver colored, and on the front was a shield partway encircled by a wreath of leaves. On the back was a star, and the words that surrounded the star said some stuff in Spanish about freedom or somethin’, but Keisha insisted it was an ancient Swahili token from the lands of Timbuktu. Free said that that couldn’t be cuz Timbuktu is in a whole ’nother part of Africa from the Swahili lands and, besides, ain’t no Spanish spoken in Africa. To which Keisha came back that Free was always frontin’ like a know-it-all cuz she was light-bright and almost Arab. To which Free conceded, OK, it
probably was from Timbuktu Swahili if Keisha would let each of us hold it for one en-tire school day. That convinced Keisha of the greatness of her possession. So the following week each of us—Free, Miguel, Trey, even DeMichael, even me—got to hold the coin the whole school day and only returned it to Keish after we ran home to the Rock.
*
One of them days after recess raced away with us and the bell to go back to class rang, we dipped back into the little classroom, everyone except for Free, who stayed outside to say her prayers, and DeMichael, who I figured was praying to the ditch day gods cuz he was nowhere to be seen as soon as I left him in the dust during our daily race. I did my own thing: sat in the back of the room, last row, Jim Crow, just so I wouldn’t appear too eager to be taught. Stupid, I know, but I’m giving you true details, not no dreamt up story shaded a certain way to make me look like somethin’ I’m not. Two rows in front of me, Trey fell asleep as soon as his butt hit his chair, his head angling down into the bony pillow of his shoulder. Keisha sat up front in the middle seat. Even sitting down, she sat up straight and was a full head higher’n all us boys. Miguel, meanwhile, sat in the middle row, where three lovestruck girls tended to his braids. They giggled as the teacher talked. Free’s praying shadow rose from the ground and her actual body walked back inside and sat down in the seat next to Keisha. Her posture was perfect, just like Keisha’s. The teacher told the girls behind Miguel they needed to stop all that giggling or go outside. And then, without no warning, a woman burst into class in shrieks and hollers. She bug-eyed the room. Them eyes of hers terrified me, as did the tat on her throat that looked like a stenciled scar. Her Baghdad blowout hair shot straight up from her scalp. She paced around the front of the class mumbling to herself, and wadn’t no one trying to talk to her or touch her, cuz not only was she talkin’ to herself, she was bigger’n everyone in class, including our teacher, Ms. MacDonald, who was this small, extension-cord-thin, squirrelly-lookin’ lady with all the traits you’d expect of a second grade teacher: young, female, so white she probably thought mayonnaise was spicy. She even wore her mask perfectly and at all times, where the other teachers took theirs off as soon as the classroom door was closed.
Ms. MacDonald woulda been altogether too nice and too square for Oakland, except for them three tats she sported: one read NAMASTE in looping green letters, the second was an elephant in lotus position, and the third said ANARCHY. Ain’t nobody in the town a full four-sided square, not even the teachers. Half the class had practically dropped out the school during the shutdowns, when everything went online except for the kids who didn’t have no one tellin’ them to stay in they books. Now those kids were having a hard time with reading, writing, and wanting to be back in school. The other half of the class was like me, playing along like we hated school, too, meantime loving it on the low. But nobody, no matter how far they had fell behind, had a problem with Ms. MacDonald. So when the troubled woman made a straight line for her at the head of the class, being heroes and whatnot, we kids just froze like it was winter in a cold world.
The woman stopped mumbling and pacing and faced Ms. MacDonald. She got real quiet, and then she lunged and snatched the mask right off of Ms. MacDonald’s face. She struck at our teacher and both women went flying against the wall. The next thing I remember is a gang of flailing, open-handed scratching and smacking. Blood studded the whiteboard, slurring the spelling lesson that had just started. We stared like we was hypnotized. The women fell this way and that. Ms. MacDonald was the one screaming now, not to mention fighting for her life just as much as the crazy woman was trying to end it, or whatever it was she wanted to do. What the woman wanted no one knew, but the fight rolled on, bouncing off the front wall with the whiteboard to the walls on each side, like three-dimensional ping-pong. They battled back to the head of the class, where Ms. MacDonald stood when she taught us, but now the big woman had took hold of Ms. MacDonald’s bird neck and was going to town strangling the shit outta her. We, the students, finally came to. Somebody threw a book at the attacker. It missed.
“Punch her, Ms. MacDonald!” someone yelled. “In the stomach!”
Ms. MacDonald couldn’t do that. Her hands went limp and fell open at her sides, and her face turnt paler’n it knew it could get.
“Kill the bitch!” someone cried, and for a second it wadn’t clear whose side they was on. Then Keisha threw her old, eaten-up textbook and it caught the assailant in the ribs, which loosened her hold on Ms. MacDonald’s neck. Ms. MacDonald began fighting back again. She elbowed the crazy woman somewhere sensitive and the woman wailed, “It’s ants on me! Help me! It’s ants in my skin! Cain’t you help me? Why cain’t you help?!”
Her cry activated me and I jumped up and jetted for the door. I could hear others following me. I raced ahead and other feet followed. We became one big, bootleg relay team racing for the principal’s office. It was a short distance, maybe two hundred meters, maybe three hundred. Keisha and Trey caught up to me, but I was really running now and not even they could pass me. We burst thru Principal Morgan’s double doors all at once.
“HELLLLLP!”
“Ms. MacDonald is getting strangled!”
“Gettin’ killt!”
“Killed?” Principal Morgan peered over his mask at us.
I looked around the unorganized office space, gangs of files in folders on the floor, papers stacked like decks of cards about to be shuffled, and the boy serving out detention in the corner. DeMichael sat there, his body tilted against the wall in a cynical gangster lean. He looked up curious at the crowd that had formed. “Killed?” he parroted Principal Morgan.
“Killt!”
“You should come,” I said di-rectly to DeMichael. Kinda blurted it out like I ain’t know how to ask politely for things. Then I caught myself. I had never ordered nobody to do nothin’ ’fore that day, and here I was tellin’ DeMichael of all people what to do. I braced for somethin’ bad to happen, but all big homie did was nod his head and look to Principal Morgan.
“Can I?” DeMichael asked.
Principal Morgan lowered his mask and breathed heavy. Adults always seemed to know what was what. Even if they couldn’t fix it, they understood what the problems were and why the situation was hopeless. But not Principal Morgan. I could tell by his pancake face that he understood way less about what was going on than we did and it might take too long to get him up to speed. He looked over at DeMichael, then back at us. “Yes, DeMichael,” he decided, “you should come help.”
So we dashed back to the classroom. My lungs burnt with the taste of hot pennies and trampled dust. I leapt thru the open classroom door and was the first to try to jump on the woman, which meant I was the first to realize that tusslin’ with a dope fiend ain’t easy. She backhanded me to the ground and the left side of my face smacked the cold tile floor. I rolled over onto my side, curled up to protect myself, and watched the drama unfold from a fetal position. Big Keisha and little Free took they turns wrestling the woman and did a little better, probably on account of not being newborns. But they still was just kids, so she banked them both back into infancy as Principal Morgan, who was still in the womb, hung back like a bitch. Finally, after Trey was chucked aside, DeMichael moved in. The woman hesitated as he approached; she wadn’t counting on no full-grown man confronting her. Before she could defend herself, DeMichael threw a right cross that started in San Francisco, crossed the bridge, and made contact with a quaking bone-on-bone crack—a terrifying frozen moment in time. The woman jerked back and went to bed ’fore she hit the floor. Everyone just sorta went still wherever we stood, or in my case curled up, except for Ms. MacDonald, who was gasping back to life and returning to her European complexion. Then old dead-leg Principal Morgan made the next move. Old man got on his cell phone and called the po-lice cuz I think that was the only thing he knew how to do, call in the authorities. “Multiple assaults. Children and adults in danger,” he rattled off, eager than a muhfucka for the cops to arrive, which is sorta susp
ect for a black man, just my opinion.
Meanwhile, the assailant lay motionless, limbs lying at wrong angles and whatnot, like a Macy’s mannequin dropped from the fifth floor. Keisha and Free got up slow, dusting theyselves off, making sure they bodies still worked. I stayed laid out at eye level with the woman, watching her for signs of life. I heard a low gargle and then the sound of wind pressed thru too tight a space. She was snoring.
I think we was still staring slack-jawed when the po-lice showed up. They hustled into the classroom, five or six of them cats. From my front row seat on the floor, I seen DeMichael slide off into a corner of the classroom. He kept patting at the hand he hit the lady with like it was broke or scuffed or somethin’. The cops cuffed up homegirl even though she was slept dead away from that punch. Threw her body around like she was some dumpster trash, like she wadn’t still alive and snoring even though her snores reverberated the walls of the classroom. Then one of the mofos asked Morgan who had did the damage, and Morgan looked up and down and around till he seen DeMichael. I was expecting them to give him a hero’s welcome, maybe place a badge on him and promise him a job in some Hollywood, magical-ending type of stuff. But this was the hood, not Hollywood, so them niggas walked up on him with batons drawn, had him turn and face the wall and put his hands behind his back and shit, and then they cuffed cousin no different’n they cuffed the criminal, and later when I found it in me to stand up and look out the window as they left, I seen them put both of them in the same squad car. It was so shady, blood.
We ended up leaving school late and missing the bus back to Rockwood.
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 2