Wadn’t no big deal, we was late for everything. We just did what we always did when the city forgot about us: me and my friends, if I could call them that, jetted thru our alleyways, jumped over our fences, ran underneath billboards and in between gridlocked cars. There was just no DeMichael following behind us now.
Rumors flew around about what happened to big bruh, rumors that the po-lice actually charged DeMichael with a crime, sent him to juvie behind saving Ms. MacDonald’s life, rumors which, lookin’ back on it now, I take to be true because the boy did disappear on us for quite a time after the incident. I was a kid, so it all kinda washed over me back-day. But knowing what I know now about the way the world works, I suspect DeMichael really did catch a case that day. The perils of Young Black Hercules, I suppose. The moral of the story is: being a hero idn’t the way to go, let the lady die. Keep your cape in the closet. Don’t try that Luke Cage shit in real life. It might just cost you a chunk out your childhood.
In them early days, we bore witness, never testified, lived and learnt and forgot the lessons. The crackhead came and went. Ms. MacDonald took a week off to heal from her injuries and then she returned, same as ever, still our favorite teacher despite her weird white girl ways. Business returned to usual. Even DeMichael would be back around eventually, bigger and badder’n before, and quieter and less playful, too. But I never did spend time thinkin’ about it, not back then. The world was simple, as was Copeland Cane. The po-lice and our principal were bad. And so was crack. And to mess with Black Hercules was to mess with your very life.
**✦
We were not a family of street protestors. No *8:46 marches for us back in the day. No, ma’am. When them streets started talkin’, we hushed up. Daddy’s notion of safety meant our family stayed our butts at home whenever protests about anything sparked off anywhere in town. Which might be why my worldview was so simple—I stayed home.
In that small apartment home where I was sheltered, the old man never missed a chance to go dark mode on me and Momma. The same po-lice who had welcomed white terrorists into the White House and the Capitol Building on live TV would shoot black people dead for talkin’ outta turn to them, or staying silent when told to speak, or standing still in a suburb, or moving too much while being beat down. Wadn’t none of these protests finna change none of that.
“The same old bullshit,” he would declare. “Y’all don’t know how it go. But I do. I’m older’n the both of you combined.”
Which wadn’t quite true, he wadn’t that old. But we would nod our heads nevertheless, just so he would feel like he had proved his point. But the only thing that proves anything is time. Look at me now, got these fools wanting me dead or in jail, and they’a tell you to your face it ain’t personal, it’s the law—the old man got that one right.
But back in the day, his declarations had us headed for the door any ex-cuse we could find. Like when my hairline slanted even slightly offline and Daddy went on a tear, Momma would use my grooming as her reason to hustle me exit stage out the apartment and off the Rock and over to the old Nation of Islam barbershop on MacArthur and Eighty-Third. I swear, that barbershop and the swap meet became our little hideout from the hopeless politics of our people.
’Fore I go any further, please understand that visiting the Nation barbershop had nothin’ to do with religion. Do not get it twisted, Momma was no more a Muslim than she was the president. A Bible and hella pessimism is all that lady got faith in far as I can tell. But she admired the Muslims’ ways, they black suits, clean white undershirts, red bow ties, red, black, and green face masks, and the fact that rain or shine they was always on time. No funny business with the Muslims, they ain’t try and push up and flirt with her or leave for ten minutes halfway thru a cut to smoke a blunt or bet the Sunday football games. They could be counted on to be neat and clean and punctual with they stuff. They abided all the governor’s safety protocols. The most law-abiding folks you would ever wanna meet. But then the Nation barbershop closed. The brothers who ran it wadn’t much for social media—they only posted quotations from Message to the Blackman in America on they IG—so we had to find out they had shuttered by Momma deciding she was tired of my naps, taking off work early to walk me over there, and finding out that the Muslims had been swapped out for a burrito joint. It was things like that, when he got wind of it, practically sent Daddy into convulsions: “See what I been tellin’ you, Sherelle? My best bet is to get me a conk and rename myself Raul if I wanna get hired out here.” Not that he was ever interested in having any job that someone would have to hire him for. But that didn’t stop him from railing ’bout how black folks was the first to lose work in the shutdowns, the first to come up short on rent, the first to be evicted. The American Black Man had got shafted for hundreds of years by all kinda newcomers: Europeans, Mexicans, Asians, Africans—forget build that wall, Daddy wanted land walls, seawalls, sound walls, nets, quotas, and a big ol’ money order to Mexico to keep them jokers at home.
Didn’t help that our fellow peoples of color wadn’t exactly Martin Luther King they damn selves, especially the ones who loved hip-hop so much they couldn’t help but put a “nigga” in every sentence they spoke as we sat one row behind them at the aid office or waited in line next to them at the taco truck. Daddy would politely ask these Asian and Mexican and Middle Eastern boys to upgrade they vocabulary: “Y’all need to shut the hell up. Aye’body wanna be a nigga, and then the cops come and ain’t a one of y’all black.”
“Yo, calm down, my nigga,” would come the response.
“I. Said. Don’t. Say. That. Mess,” Daddy would say. And you’ll notice outta respect to that di-rect heritage yours truly don’t say that word to this day, unless the niggas ain’t black.
But them niggas had no need to heed our heritage, which meant things was bound to get heated: they “niggas” would turn to “niggers,” and our requests would turn to threats, and then security would have to show up and me and the old man would have to get gone ’fore the cops came. An interesting cat, Daddy was.
Me and Momma walked down MacArthur to a storefront with a metal plaque hanged out front that read BARBERS and a dim light that glowed behind a curtained window, the type of place that didn’t follow no health codes, didn’t have no masks, and turnt out the lights soon as the po-lice came up the street. If you think everybody obeyed them restrictions it’s only cuz you wadn’t in the hood, where you can die a hundred different ways and folks is used to taking heaven-and-hell chances scrambling to make a living. Momma tried to turn the knob, but it was locked. I watched the solitary light rock back and forth, a weak old bulb suspended from the ceiling by a single dirty white string. A man unlocked and opened the door, and we walked into what was not a barbershop but a simple room, an SRO really, with that one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling like a lonely moon and a barbershop chair right beneath it, and a medicine cabinet nailed to the wall behind the chair, and a second chair—wooden, rickety, narrow-assed—posted opposite the barbershop chair. Momma, who always masks up in close quarters outside her home, went and sat in the wood chair while the man who had opened the door, a tall, wiry-thin brother built like Daddy but with dollar signs tatted above both eyebrows and teardrops engraved along both his cheekbones, one of them cats who looks like he just climbed out an Oakland pothole, this man of all men was to put his razor to my head and neck.
The strange man went about gettin’ his blades and things together, and then he asked over his shoulder if Momma wanted me to have the usual low-cut, faded and tapered in the back, the hairstyle of 95 percent of all black males in America and on earth. And then, interestingly, after she answered, “Yes, ain’t nothin’ new in East Oakland,” he asked me, “What about you, sir? That what you want?”
I wadn’t nobody but my momma’s child. She had the money so she had the say-so, so it never ever occurred to a young grasshopper that his opinion mattered much. I wadn’t at the speakin’-my-mind stage of development just yet. Which is why I just
nodded my assent, a word I hadn’t read to know back then.
I looked at Momma, whose unmasked eyes stared at the man, who, I assume, kept his eyes on my head. “You got a good head of hair,” the man said. Back then, my hair had an evenness to it even when it grew too long that barbers appreciated out loud: Boy, you tellin’ me you ain’t took nothin’ to this jungle and it’s never flat on one side? And: It stay like that even when you run around and tussle at recess and be a full-fledged boy?
Tufts of thick black hair started to fall like snow from a smoke-filled sky. My body went rigid as his blade slid just above the lobes of my brain. He ticked it along my jugular and the lightbulb flickered and I realized my life was his. I worried the strange man was fittin’ to slice me on accident, that unsanitized instrument of his transmitting ghetto gangrene into my bloodstream. It was bad enough we had to worry about the flu snatchin’ us dead without going and courting other unknown diseases. I watched Momma watching the man. Her eyes was hard and ready—I figured she was focused on “if this goes down, then what do I gotta do next?” type strategies. She worked as a hospital orderly but she coulda made good in the military, that woman. She turnt them hard eyes toward me. I knew if I flinched and showed my fear, she’d slap me rigid right there, and once we got home I would have more to fear from her’n from blood with the mean tats and the razor.
He buzzed along both my temples, pinpointing my line not once, not twice, but thrice; hecka detailed, this dude. Then somethin’ funny happened: the strange man finished with my line and then he did my fade, and then instead of dabbin’ that stuff that burns the bacteria off, he lathered my whole head with this soothing stuff. It went from wet to warm, from warm to cool. Then he shampooed my scalp and took my head in his hands all delicate, like I was somethin’ too fine to damage, and massaged my lobes, my temples, my whole head. As he worked, he hummed a song about a diamond in the back and a sunroof top, and Momma started to nod along to his rhythm. I nodded my head in his grasp and I realized just how unpredictable this life would be, and I closed my eyes and slept off completely and didn’t come to till he was finished.
I never did see brother man or his barbershop again. We moved on. The ghetto flu burnt itself out, things opened back up, folks took off they masks, and we began to explore the changes that had came to East Oakland. We began to frequent a newly opened barbershop on Seventy-Ninth next to an auto repair place underneath a billboard that advertised football tickets in football season, and basketball tickets in basketball season, and European vacations couldn’t no one below the sign afford the rest of the year. (It wadn’t till real recently that I realized that all that signage is meant for the people on the freeway that fly past us.) This shop had a lot more going for it’n two chairs and a lightbulb, but the people that came with the furniture left much to be desired. The barbers, all men, was constantly carrying on, trying to get Momma’s number and talkin’ loose about they own women, calling them “broads,”
“jump-offs,”
“gold diggers,” and “dream killers,” filling my young impressionable mind with all the dog food that dudes like this gobble up. On top of it, not a single one of them fools wore a mask, and some of them even went on about how the health and safety stuff was just a white devil plot to track and control complected people.
Miguel from school was a regular there, too, since his hair required much care. Maybe we bonded in that barbershop, I cain’t call it. It was a different kinda education, that’s for sure. Them dudes schooled us in things that textbooks won’t tell you: they knew the address of every black-owned barbecue and side-door catfish spot and underground nightclub and weed gate and ho stroll, every back road where the white and black and brown devil cops took the girls who refused jail. And they offered that knowledge freely. Me and Miguel just listened and took hood notes, him maybe more studious about it than me.
To hear the barbers tell it, the cops had STDs from the streets and loyal wives at home in they sheets. The barbers didn’t seem like saints they own selves. The old head who cut my hair was the type to brag how he had been faithful to the same two broads for the past five years. He’d talk about his girlfriends to me when I was in the chair, how they complemented each other and what he called “the relative merits of monogamy versus two at a time,” till Momma would get tired of it and speak up from behind her mask that he needed to shut the hell up and stop corrupting her son and to take his ass to church or a mosque or a Buddhist temple cuz he needed Jesus in his life. That didn’t make much sense, especially seeing as her tongue idn’t exactly a prayer book, but everybody understood what she meant. The barbers stopped talkin’ about women altogether and took up the wholesome subject of sports gambling.
Momma truly hated that place. When one morning Rockwood awoke to the industrial-grade odor of barbecued hot combs, razor metal, and Sulfur8, I think she was happy. We went and stood outside in the courtyard where we could see the flames lick up over East Oakland in orange spirals that turnt to ink-black smoke as they flew, drawing a Muslimina’s veil over the morning sun. Folks broadcasted live and di-rect every theory they could think of for the fire, and some fool from across the way in Ravenscourt set off one of them cherry bomb fireworks that trembles the ce-ment like God’s heartbeat.
“Maybe it’s an act of God,” I said. It was a term I had heard in the news when a tornado tore up houses in faraway places like Arkansas and Georgia.
“Cope,” Daddy said, “if it’s a Lord above, He don’t have time for what’s going down in Oakland.”
Neither did the media. I know cuz I checked the next day and it was a story about the ongoing violent unrest from Far Right and Far Left political whatnot and this and that, and it was a story about the stock market or stock exchange or somethin’ breakin’ hella records, and it was a story flexin’ a new genius phone that was still in production at the time that would do everything faster and better and more trackable. And it was like the fire never even happened. Wadn’t nothin local ’bout our news, which is why I never paid it attention till it started paying attention to me.
When it came to the news, God, and anything else that told him how to think, Daddy wadn’t having it. “Prayer won’t get you nowhere,” he liked to say. Matter fact, I remember him saying it that very morning right after he said the bit about God and Oakland. It rhymed, which meant it stayed with you when he said it, which is why Momma held on to it and turnt it around on him a month later when it still wadn’t no operating barbershops and my dome was turning fully funkdafied.
“Prayer won’t get us nowhere,” Momma chided. “We cain’t find a decent barbershop within walking distance. Look at him! Boy looks like a young Michael Jackson on crack. How you plan to handle this, old man?”
I knew for a fact Daddy couldn’t care less about my hair. He had lost his back when dinosaurs and Dru Down was roaming Oakland, so what kinda fur coat covered his boy’s head just wadn’t his concern. But Momma pressed: “You see somethin’s wrong, Copeland Cane, you gotta change it. We cain’t let another generation go untended to. Ain’t that what you always tellin’ this child of yours? Don’t make yourself a hypocrite now.”
She had him boxed in by his own mandate, and Daddy paused for a long uncomfortable time. Then he spoke: “Sherelle Rowland, there’s somethin’ ’bout you, ol’ girl, I cain’t stand ’bout myself. It’s like you in my head. I need to start cuttin’ hair again.”
“You fittin’ to cut my hair?” I asked. Remember, the man’s totally bald. Not a hair follicle graces that dome. I questioned his experience, let alone his skill.
“Hush,” he chided. “Don’t go doubtin’ me now, Cope. Done forgot more ’bout cuttin’ heads’n yo’ young butt ever gon’ know.”
I looked at him, not trusting. “But you’re bald,” I said.
“You don’t have to touch the flame to know it burns, boy. Now have some damn faith.”
Apparently, the old man had took care not only of his hair-challenged head but the heads of many a bro
ther on the Rock back in the day in the ’80s and ’90s. All of that experience blessed his razor. Back at school, Keisha and Free asked who new was handling my hair. Them two can put anything, don’t matter what it is, on social media in the morning and it’ll have five hundred followers ’fore lunch is served, na’mean?
So one girl told another and another till the news found somebody’s mother, and easy as gossip Daddy had messed around and found hisself the barber not just to his boy, but to a whole curious clientele that was, all counted, me and several short-haired women deep. Whenever we really was down to the sugar water and shutdown rations, he would put his inventioneering on hold and focus solely on the cuttin’ of heads. His clientele was women who wanted they heads shaved close, but ain’t feel like puttin’ up with the smart remarks from they sisters at the salon, not to mention the #metoo moments that men’s shops trafficked in. They never had to worry about that with the old man. Daddy didn’t play those games, and the absence of any men besides hisself and yours truly, whose fish had yet to swim, made our home a place a woman wouldn’t mind gettin’ her hair cut.
Daddy’s barbershop was the back porch of our apartment. The ladies would bop on in in they basketball shorts and puffy jackets, some old scarf thrown across they face, and give Momma a nod, dap me up, and sit down in the dinner table chair—“Come on wit’ it, dreamer. Keep this head right.” The straight girls came clanging in in they high heels and designer masks, with a momma’s switch in they hips, and they would sigh and sit down and say, “OK, dreamer, gimme that Toni Braxton, gimme that blond Goapele one mo’ ’gin.”
Lookin’ back, it was special. Now, if you wadn’t lookin’ back but was in that time and place and it was your job, like some old-timey Charles Dickens street child, to scurry the floor sweepin’ up the loose locks, fetchin’ the barber his different razors, and whatnot, then it was simple hard labor that would have you tight for life—or at least till you find someone to take your frustration out on.
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 3