*
The year I turnt thirteen, this white family decided to rent space close enough to Rockwood that they son, this blue-eyed boy pale than the moon, ended up zoned to our school. The system was not working for those white folks. Not that it was the school system’s fault that, unbeknownst to it, that mug harbored a menace and that menace was me.
We was in the same year, me and this boy, so we ended up in the same classes. For no good reason (unless you count stupidity), I perpetrated my first offenses against him, made it my personal mission to drive the little blond invader out the hood. Hand on any holy book you wanna give me, I confess it had somewhat to do with what his race symbolized to me and a whole lot more to do with hurting a child who showed up soft as wet bread, even softer’n yours truly. I turnt into a verbal DeMichael on his ass with none of DeMichael’s redeeming qualities.
When he first arrived I asked his name. From behind his food-stained mask, he twisted his tongue around somethin’ with, like, fifteen letters and one vowel. “Huh?” I responded. “Krzyzewski?” even though “Krzyzewski” wadn’t even close to what he had said. “Krzyzewski” was just the one name with a bunch of consonants that couldn’t cosign each other in English and a “ski” at the end that I knew how to pronounce. I believe it’s the name of a famous dead football coach, somethin’ of that nature, not that it mattered where I scavenged my slander. Snappin’ and joke crackin’ and a thousand plays on that boy’s name ensued during the course of that year. I even tried to rally the troops, talkin’ loud and lookin’ around as I clowned the pale problem, tryna encourage Miguel or Keisha or Free to join in. But they never paid me no mind when I got in that mode, almost like they knew I wadn’t fit to be followed. I think I twisted it around in my mind that that was just another challenge, along with gettin’ rid of the white boy, so I kept on with it, not lookin’ to nobody to do my dirty work with me—I’ma spare you the sad details.
Krzyzewski, home-trained to a fault, called me Copeland, my full name. I called him whatever the fuck I felt like and waited for him to roast me back or throw a punch or respond somehow in kind, all the while knowing he wouldn’t, knowing he couldn’t, because he was too small to retaliate and because for a boy without friends all attention is good attention no matter how he gets it.
Eventually none other than Black Hercules hisself stepped in, which caught me off guard because by then DeMichael hardly even came to campus. He had his hand on my shoulder ’fore I even knew he was on the premises. A man’s hand was clutching me in a school where wadn’t a single male educator on staff. I froze dead. That hand of his could debone me back to front. It came to me quiet as it was kept right then, right there between the three of us that I wadn’t only all by my lonely on my mission, I was just wrong.
DeMichael took his hand from my shoulder and someone else, probably Keisha or Free or maybe my conscience, said, “Leave it be, y’all, leave it be,” and the next thing I remember the teachers packed up the lessons and the semester came to a close. School let out as the May rains dropped a curtain between me and my identity as a teenage torturer. It was only when July arrived and the sun decided to stay for a while that I emerged out of doors and came to the realization that my mission was unsuccessful as well as awful: Krzyzewski’s fam had got ghost, U-Hauling it up outta there, which felt like an indictment against me, not a victory. Meanwhile, new invaders was arriving from all angles and in every ethnicity. The economics of America was gettin’ critical, and with the shutdowns that just wouldn’t quit and the job losses that that caused came the homelessness. Homeless camps on every corner, a new kind of ghetto flu. Old cars stacked bumper to bumper fifty, sixty, seventy vehicles deep, a windshield full of parking tickets to hide the whole family: Momma, Daddy, and the children living up in there. It was beyond anything anyone had ever seen. And don’t get it twisted, you won’t find Copeland Cane shedding a single tear for them hooptie hoppers. I hated that they was our new neighbors, crowding up every single side street in Oakland, even posting up inside the Rock amongst us hardworking people, like our lives wadn’t turnt tight enough without they no-rent-payin’ asses squatting in our space, what little space we could claim.
The rise in homelessness and the closeness of it shook me to the core. I knew my family was far from ballin’. I knew the homeless could be us and we could be them and wadn’t but some luck standing in between. I imagined living on the streets my own self, huddled up amongst my homeless kinfolk in a car if I was lucky.
As things was gettin’ worse, the town was steady gettin’ richer at the same time: walled, privately po-liced compounds that housed people way wealthier and way whiter’n Krzyzewski. They appeared like so many aliens on the surface of East Oakland. And like the aliens in all the stories ever told, we never did see these folks. We just knew they existed and that they kept a distance, but not socially. We knew they watched us from behind high walls and maybe they watched us on the news, too, the Soclear Alert Desk news, if I had to guess.
One day I looked up and the Rock was surrounded by hella rich folk and dirt fuckin’ poor people. That’s when I started to see just how wild the world was—not just Caucasians versus the complected, but somethin’ more complicated and crazier and deeper was happening to the hood. I came to regret my treatment of Krzyzewski and I wished that he would return. Forget coming back to our janky school, I wanted little homie to roll right up into Rockwood itself. Me and him would post up on the stoop outside our apartment and watch the ladies come and go. We’d hear them banter back and forth, the laughter, the snaps, the hair, the women who loved women and the women who loved men, not no division there to judge what was right or wrong—one community; the dreamer in his dream; the little things we ain’t deserve to lose. Then Krzyzewski could take me to his place and show me somethin’ that he knew. But that never happened. Krzyzewski was gone for good. Ain’t no do-overs in life, I learnt that the hard way. I never did see young Slav sahab again and now I know I never will.
*
Snaps folks round the way used to say:
How the city makes a mural for every people priced outta town. Hella black folks playin’ ball and blowin’ horns and spinnin’ records painted on walls in San Francisco.
Mexican food ain’t had but two ideas, beans and rice, and soul food ain’t had but one, diabetes.
And some things you just gotta live with, like your landlord, three-day notices, skunk weed, flu and mold fit to kill you, and mariachi music after midnight cuz it’s always somebody’s quinceañera.
Snaps that wadn’t so funny when you thought about them a little too long:
Like how a black baby woke up with wings and told his people, “I’m an angel!” and folks heard that and hollered back, “Nah, nigga, you’s a bat.”
And that black don’t crack, Jacq, it don’t even grow old—we just drop dead one day.
*
If you have the first clue about this thing we call the “ghetto flu,” you know what I mean by that last line, how folks just drop and whatnot. Hella hazards we had to deal with. Daddy told me that the man who owned our building, motherfucker owned half of East Oakland, and all you had to do was travel around that piece to see how the peckerwood played favorites. Ain’t renovated shit but to put up a li’l old gate that don’t keep nothin’ out. “Whatever happened to that Polish friend of yours from school? Left out that quick? Learnt they was white?” He was talkin’ about Krzyzewski and them. “Went somewhere got more than a dang gate goin’ for it,” Daddy could guarantee me that much.
Meanwhile, the run-down properties that our landlord was finna sell to the highest bidder got the rest of his attention and big checks, which left our hood, good old Rockwood, too black to love and too decent to improve. Wadn’t never no inspections, no clean-ups, no nothin’, not for us. And little by little, the Rock went from good to mediocre to downright moldy. Nah, I ain’t stutter—my terrible teens was shamefully fungus-filled. That mess climbed up our walls, it fed on our restrooms, and plai
n ran trains on anything that collected a teaspoon of moisture, which, when you live in Oakland, ain’t but about 95 percent of everything living and deceased. Matter fact, after low clouds and a hard rain it would be days where mold was our numero uno nemesis.
Mold could get all up in you, Daddy said, weaken your whole system. And then in the winter the flu would return and the city would shut us in and call our hood a health hazard, which maybe it was, cuz the sick would get ambulanced away every day, a lotta them folk never to return. If things kept up like this, the old man promised, wouldn’t be no neighborhood left ’fore we knew it.
Fortunately for us, Daddy had a solution—the solution, he promised. It was just a matter of perfecting the thing, which smelled like gasoline, but once he got the mixture just right it would be a wonderful, strawberry-smelling cleaning agent, an antidote that would whisk away the stench and the grime that stacked up at the same pace as poverty in the nooks and crannies of our housing unit. After he got done cleaning our place, he could clean up the rest of the Rock and then make a business of it, take his solution all over the Bay Area, ending environmental injustice one health hazard at a time, meanwhile making hisself enough bread to kiss East Oakland goodbye.
But it’s a lotta East Oakland, and a lotta environment, and even more injustice, so this whole plan was bound to be a while ’fore fruition. If you have ethics, which Daddy did, naturally you ain’t trying to add to the world’s problems, so even if the FDA ain’t involved in your enterprise that don’t mean you don’t test and refine your homemade product ’fore putting it to market. After all, the thing still gotta fulfill its advertised promise and not kill folks in the process. So Daddy hadn’t actually tested his solution. He was still working on the measurements and metrics, he told me. “Cain’t rush a good thing,” he claimed. “Alpha generation kids like you want aye’thing instant oatmeal, but that’s not how life work outside the microwave, boy.”
I couldn’t understand the hesitation. Daddy was the first to raise a complaint about how we all probably had mold spores and black lung from sittin’ up in these infestated-ass apartments. He pointed to the way things was changing around Oakland and how, hear this, the richer and the whiter the town got, the more news that came out about crime and poverty and illness. “They fittin’ to move us out,” he’d say. “They got big plans for this place that don’t include us. Last thing they wanna do is improve these old buildings,” he predicted.
Pre-diction: Cor-rect.
Yet his solution was to wait and de-liberate.
Every day I’d come home from school and see the men posted up outside our building, the boys playing basketball on the courts, and the girls princess-leanin’ against the moldy walls waiting on they shattered Prince Charmings. And I never stopped to kick it. Never made time to relate and conversate. It wadn’t that I thought I was better’n anybody or too good for the game, the girls, the mold. It was the simple fact that my old man would black my hide if I wadn’t home for his brand of homework, which included not a single grain of instant oatmeal.
Meanwhile, the mold only got blacker. Still, I never raised my voice to question the man’s judgment. Daddy was like the sun to me—you don’t go questioning the sun, you farm your crops, have your ass in before dark, and say your prayers. I loved him like you love the sun, totally, unquestioningly. The sun wakes you and puts you to work. And back in the days, I didn’t mind the work so much. I wanted to do what I could so that him and Momma could hit a gangster lean at the kitchen table, leaning against they walls without worrying what them walls had hid, not to mention not having to wash every dish twice just to keep the flu away.
About them dishes—Momma’s favorite was a beautiful cooking pot that she had schemed from a swap meet in Inglewood. When I was still in my preteens, we would make these annual L.A. trips where Daddy dropped off money with his old lady from his past life. He would spend some quality time with his other children. These sons of his were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, too big and too mannish for me to hang with. The swap meet and Momma’s company was way more interesting, the place was packed full of reggae music and Caribbean food and loud bartering vendors and customers crowded shoulder to shoulder. There was a Jamaican with glammed-up gold dreadlocks and regal dark skin who stood behind his booth and held court, going ham about a particular set of silverware, kitchen cutlery, and dishes like they was the Queen of England’s own—and maybe that was the case, cuz at least some of that stuff was very beautiful and very whatever the word is for old and fashionable and beautiful. I’m talkin’ gold gilt edges and elaborately carved scenes of angels flying, fluting, dancing with demons, naked women posed in lush garden settings, the children of the gods at play. It reminded me of the pictures in my school textbook that the art teacher made such a big deal about because they represented Renaissance this and that. I could tell Momma was interested by the firecrackers sparking off in her eyes. She took me by the hand and rushed us up to the Jamaican’s booth and peeled off her mask in a crowded public space for the first time since yours truly was rockin’ diapers. Words I never heard her use, in an accent unlike anything ever heard in our home, came flying out her mouth: she was channeling the ancestors and giving his Jamaican back to him like second nature. They talked to each other, some words lilting the way the Nigerians speak, so sharp inflected, yet so truly proper, while other words and phrases had that lo-fi Caribbean bass, each beat biding its time deep in the back of the throat. The Jamaican, whose black-and-gold mask rode low under his nose, was nodding and smiling from the corners of his eyes. He let her handle his fine dishware, snaking his long arms around people in the flowing, waterlike crowds to hand one item then the next to her. But Momma was the one with all the talkin’ now.
“G’wan do me one t’ing—sell it me if’n you cheap off ten percent. Deal?”
“Barter deal now, aye?” The Jamaican eyed her and chuckled, for there was no item up in that swap meet too good to be bartered.
Momma held firm to her request and met his narrowed eyes with her whole face. I felt her fingernails digging into me as she dug into the negotiation.
“OK now,” the Jamaican conceded after a minute. He was looking at the crowd that had formed behind us, either to buy more of his best things or to witness the negotiation—the practices of a different country, I guess, though to my knowledge Momma had never came close to leaving our country; barely had she even been off the West Coast. “Ten percent i’tis. But that don’t go for nobody else,” he shouted. He pulled his mask all the way off so that he could stare a little bit better back at all the staring eyes that had gathered behind us, people as interested as I was in the back-and-forth between the two Jamaicans, one of them immaculately conceived by herself just a few minutes prior.
*
One night Daddy held court a little too good for our good. Told me how it had been hella schemes since ’fore I was born to get us up out the paint, outta Oakland en-tirely. Told me how the fallout from ’20 was still fallin’: most folks was broke, but them boys and girls in tech, they was gettin’ richer’n Mansa Musa in Mecca, whatever that’s supposed to mean. (Do you know what that means, Jacqueline? Cuz I don’t.)* Anyway, instead of googling that mess, I thought about how if the old man wadn’t crazy, wadn’t a preacher without a church and parishioners, if he actually knew a thing or two, then we was straight up sitting ducks up in Rockwood.
I felt called, but prayer wouldn’t get us nowhere. Momma’s dishes would only be saved if someone on earth on the Rock did the saving. I stayed up till my folks fell asleep, then I snuck out to the hallway cupboard where Daddy kept the solution behind Momma’s momma’s momma’s quilts. There was this spot of what I believed was mold on one of Momma’s more beautiful dinner plates. It stood out black as the back of your neck on an otherwise perfect serving surface. Lookin’ back, maybe it wadn’t even mold, maybe it was just wear and rust, or maybe the imperfection had always been there. She had, after all, got it like she got everything, on firs
t sight in a crowded market, bargained off a man from another land. But I didn’t think about that. There it was, a plate that I tried never to eat off of due to its decay, the perfect test case for a cleansing. I didn’t consider for a second that Daddy’s solution could make the mold on the plate any worse’n it already was—either it killed it, or the mold lived on bigger and badder and blacker’n before.
Anyway, this spot had been haunting me. I shook every time it got brought out and food was placed on it, then shoveled into someone’s moth. I shivered every time it was loaded with leftovers and placed in our fridge, which was bad enough already with its janky old freezer that froze these big ol’ icicles that broke off and could damn near amputate your toe if you wadn’t mindful. The fridge would start to smell as stank as Alameda Beach, and even though I’ve heard claim that Europeans consider molded cheese some sorta high cultural grace, I’m not about to eat nothin’ that’s green, gray, black, and blue, the advanced melanations of severe mold growth according to my studies in Shit Trying to Kill Me. So I took the solution and put it to action. Jacq, real talk, just like Daddy promised, that mess worked. Worked real good with a couple pours and a little sizzle and fizzle. Our solution whisked the contagion clean away.
I wadn’t about to stop at an old English plate. The mold and the flu was all over our buildings, had been droppin’ folks like flies for years. Some things gotta die so that we can live, and this filth needed to go. A gang of shit needed to go. Rockwood needed a revolution, am I right? Am I crazy to think like this? Or was I just taking matters into my paws when wouldn’t nobody else do the damn thing?
The following afternoon, I hustled up some cowry shells from Miguel, who didn’t guard each dollar like it was the queen’s diamonds, the way Daddy did. I knew not to ask Keish, Free, or none of them others. They peoples was as stingy as the old man. Miguel was different, though. He would lend me some ends, no questions asked, no side-eyes turnt toward me, like either he liked me or it was more where his money came from, I couldn’t call it. All’s I knew was blood didn’t need to ask his momma for shit, he kept his skrilla in his sock.
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 4