The Confession of Copeland Cane

by Keenan Norris

  I would need to choose a sport if I wanted to write, if I wanted to stay enrolled for that matter. But I wadn’t trying to be a part of any team that wanted me. The old football coach, Mr. Briggs, as part of his campaign not to get laid off for being a terrible math teacher, would approach me at lunch in the campus quad and say, “Hey, Cope. I hope you’re considering the gridiron. We could use you in our option offense as a wingback.” Or as a kick returner. Or a deep threat wide receiver. Or whatever other words he said to me that was supposed to mean somethin’ but didn’t. According to him, after he put an end to this abolition business once and for all, football would return like Christ Jesus.

  Then there was the basketball coach. I didn’t tell him ’bout the hitch in my shot, which I knew would only make me more of a candidate for his coaching, endless practice sessions, drills, camps, all that mess. Instead, I told the man that I feared being trash-talked by these kids I grew up with, cuz now I was seen as a sellout in they eyes, an Oreo, a coon, a crossover, for having went away to prep school. Black people, I told him, could be cruel that way. White people, real talk, love to hear us tell them that black people hold black people back, that we are our own worst enemy and that we would be so much better off if we could only get away from each other. The coach looked at me with somethin’ between sympathy for me and frustration about his own damn self: “I understand. That must be hard. People of color are the real racists. But please consider trying out. Everyone knows we’re a small prep school. We’re not supposed to be competitive with the inner-city schools. It’s like the reverse of standardized testing results. Those kids aren’t really children anyway. I don’t know what they put in the water over there, but something about it just isn’t normal; they hit puberty sooner, they’re bigger and faster and more aggressive. We don’t expect you to work miracles, but you might help us lose by less. Here’s a gratis pair of new Air Jordans. Aren’t they beautiful? Think about my offer. Just think about it. There’s more where those shoes came from.”

  Jacq, I flipped them shoes cold-blooded and avoided that man all year long.

  And that only accounts for me and the sports people done actually heard of.

  As for the boojiness, nobody in Rockwood could swim, so there went swimming, water polo, and rowing as possibilities for me. Matter fact, I wadn’t even aware polo or water polo or lacrosse or field hockey or any of that prep school stuff existed ’fore I arrived at Pied-montay. Whoever wanna claim that black people is naturally athletic ain’t seen black people naturally nearly drown in three feet of water or trip over ourselves doing whatever the fuck it is you do when you play badminton. The entire journalism class was on the junior varsity badminton team, by the way.

  When she asked about my athletic plans, I told the rowing coach that her sport reminded me of the work of Roman slaves, and anyway, I’m from the hood, which means I cain’t swim, which means our boat better never capsize. I told the water polo coach I couldn’t even tread water, excused myself from badminton by claiming to hate Ping-Pong, and let the lacrosse coach hear all about my bid in the Youth Control and how I was liable to weaponize whatever you put in my hands.

  I settled on track and field, because folks had seen me hustling from the bus to campus every day, so I knew that I couldn’t claim that I couldn’t run, and because with track and field the coaches wouldn’t pay me any mind all fall since the track season don’t begin till spring. That would give me the time I would need to get on top of my studies in the competitive environment of prep school and to try to write the thing that Mrs. Greenberg had told the managing editor to ask me to write.

  *

  When I was in grade school, my family plain didn’t own a computer. The few PCs up at the elementary school was so old and outdated that the keys on the keyboard would stay stuck till you karate chopped them suckers back to life or they would pop out like big-ass bullets flying right at your face. Would you rather use the letter A when you write your book report or have both your eyes at the end of class? Fuck gettin’ shot by the cops and going to jail and all the things people talk about when they talk about how hard it is in the hood, try typing two vowels down all the time. And you wonder why my vocab be lackin’ and backtrackin’. My best bet back in the day was the public library down the way, but the hours would get funky when the virus broke out, which it often did. So I never could count on technology. I rarely dealt with technology at all, unless it had to do with some old cell phone I had came up on and figured out how to use. I’m that rare alpha generation kid with hella penmanship skills, print or cursive, you take your pick. Texting and typing just ain’t the same to me as the handwritten word. If I’ve been writing and my joint comes up cramping after a little bit, that’s just what it’s gotta be: it’s like I trust my words more the more they hurt.

  I was supposed to write somethin’ personal and about social justice. What was social justice? Justice for the society, I assumed. It sounded like a *8:46 slogan. I thought about it a lot. I could write about the shit that happened to me on the island or the things that went down in jail. I thought about all the stuff that I could write about, and after a while my thoughts clustered around the cops, the correctional school, the Youth Control. I had no idea how to take all of that and melt it down to one clean thing.

  One day slipped away, then a week, then another and another. I wanted to do what Mrs. Greenberg and Erick had asked of me, I just needed to figure out somethin’ that was both personal and important to write about. I knew I needed to write about law enforcement somehow, ’bout how they jammed you up, exaggerated whatever you done wrong, locked you up, all the shit they put you thru once they had they hands on you. I would write about the system itself, the whole lick, everything that I now knew. I would write about it as a system, use the words that you would use, make it make sense in the way that I was learning in my other classes, to write from a thesis and supporting points down to a conclusion.

  I stayed up late the night before the last drop-dead deadline date for the final feature pieces that would be published by the end of the school term. Then, in them final hours, I went down into the landfill inside of me and dredged up what was there. My joint did seize somewhere between thumb and forefinger, a hard, jealous fucker of a cramp that wouldn’t let me go. But I kept writing and writing till the birds started chirping and my eyes started failing and my joint started shaking and I fell asleep. When I woke, like an hour later, I couldn’t care less about beating two eggs together to make breakfast or dressing to impress. I had to proofread what I had put to page. But what I found on that page, Jacq, it in no kinda way resembled what I had meant to write. It wadn’t in your voice. And it wadn’t in mines neither. It was somewhere between us, like our child come into the world, except with only my experiences to speak of. I had told the truth, which was that the cops came at me guns already drawn. I was unsuccessfully trying to do away with that mold, had my bottle in one hand, shooing away people who was talkin’ mess at me with the other. It seemed like the whole Rock was outside, and if they was my jury, I’m pretty sure they woulda voted a brother unanimously guilty without needing no recess to talk it over. But I had my mind on my mission and my mission on my mind. And then I heard the one warning I got:

  “STOP. IMMEDIATELY. PARA AHORA.”

  I understood in two languages not to move one muscle, so I stopped. Stood froze like a dead man. I knew it was po-lice behind me, and my first fear wadn’t guns but some outta pocket officer twice my size bum-rushing a brother and beating me into the ce-ment, several surgeries, months of rehab in the hospital drinking my dinner out a straw, learning how to speak and walk straight again. I was scared, but my mind was clear, which is where I think my luck was—most people either freeze and cain’t follow orders for nothin’ or lose it and do everything but what’s being instructed, not because they’re necessarily guilty but because that’s the kinda shit that happens on the worst day of your life.

  I was instructed to drop the bottle, which I did, its
liquids flooding the pavement, sloshing and crackling away. Then I was to keep my hands where they could be seen, which I kept them. Palms forward right the fuck where they was and turn slowly around, motherfucker. I remember that the sun broke thru the marine layer, a few spears of light pooling its white blood on the ce-ment in front of me. I looked into the light and that’s when I seen they Glocks, two men, two Glocks, four pavement-gray eyes all pointed right at me. To tell the truth, I wadn’t as scared as I shoulda been. It ain’t even process immediately; the cops was just doing they job, puttin’ a stop to things in the only way they knew how. I was mad about the mold, vexed I couldn’t kill it, especially seeing how every joker and they momma was surrounding me. I remember being thankful that five-oh acted civilized and didn’t put hands on a brother. I remember being mesmerized by the pools of light on the ground so early in the morning. I remember seeing out the corner of my eye a figure the height and slenderness and rusted-penny color of the old man falling to the ground knees-first in prayer. I remember just standing there, girl. Standing on the edge between life and death. But that fact was too fatal to register in my living mind. Only months later, in the dead space of the Youth Control, did I sit down in my mind and let myself consider what coulda been, how I coulda died right then, and missed out on my own incarceration.

  After I came home, I sat shunned upon my dumpsters and thought on it some more, what woulda became of my parents and whichever acquaintances would claim my memory. I wondered if Rockwood and East Oakland woulda burned. People held me at a distance alive, but dying young is the best way to get popular, the memory of you always worth more’n you was cared for alive. I wondered what woulda came of the cop, whichever one killed me, if he woulda been charged, even took to trial, and if his paid leave woulda came along with an involuntary manslaughter or murder charge, and in the end, when I was long since buried and the ashes of Oakland was wiped away by time and cold winter and the rain that washes everything underground, if the case woulda been dismissed, or settled, or if he mighta got a year, reduced to nine months for good behavior.

  Many might protest the po-lice, but none but the two that bore me would mourn me. The hood might knock in a few windows, light on fire a couple cars, let off a few shots, and remember me with a mural and a little altar of candles and teddy bears and the Virgin of Guadalupe even though I’m about as Catholic as I am Mexican. The authorities would lay the law, might kill a couple more, and of course in the end they would pass verdict on theyselves and keep it moving. And life would go on the same as before. Another young brother would drop a week later, wouldn’t matter from what, cuz once he was gone odds would be wouldn’t nothin’ come of it. And another would fall after him. And another after him. A different kid would meet you and interview for a scholarship to your school. And so on and on and on. So it was a lucky thing that your boy ain’t—I mean, that I did not die that day, because, as I published in the paper, one false move and these words woulda spilt from me speechless in blood red and black on the Rock.

  **✦

  That piece, once it was published in the final newsletter of the semester, brought me beaucoup attention, thanks be to you. You hooked it up, Jacq: Insta ads in the student social network. SnapSlack audio of me reading my article. And that wild e-brochure of all the students of color with our backs turnt to the camera like we was either rejecting racism or ’bout to be stopped, frisked, and cuffed up—that concept, which was all yours, was dope. I loved it for the way it made people have to stop and stare and think which they really wanted, us standing up for ourselves or us getting cuffed up by law enforcement.

  You was the real star of that show, but you knew better’n to get onstage and show out. (If only I could’ve figured out how to make the school happy and stay hid in the cut like you did.) You made me a sorta star and sent me into black excellence space, even if, as the same semester came to a close, the white kids from journalism class who had been lunchin’ with me and whatnot kinda fell back and stopped talkin’ to me for a minute, and when we would cross paths they would look at me hella sad, like I had been diagnosed with a terminal case of race and they was responsible for infecting me.

  Whatever issues they dealt with was not my problem. I felt good about myself. I had successfully transferred to the best school in the area, first of all. My grades might not be all that, but I was learning I could hold myself down single-handed in the same classes as these kids who had well-schooled parents and tutoring for days. And now I had done somethin’ that they couldn’t do, that nobody but me could do: write my story. I had put to paper somethin’ that forced folks to think about the complected people across town. I had put it down narratively enough to hold they attention and educatedly enough that nothin’ that I wrote could be mistaken for somethin’ I didn’t mean. And eventually the white kids warmed back up as much as they ever would, lunchin’, doin’ dovetails off the things I said in class to support the points I made and never outright saying when I got some shit dead wrong. I was finding Pied-montay cooperative, not competitive, not like Mrs. Greenberg had warned me it might be.

  *

  Mrs. Greenberg had also warned me about sports even as she acknowledged that the system was forcing me to play. “You know and I know that you were brought here to serve a public role for the high school,” she counseled via email. “They want you to be the new black face of the school, just as your friend Jacqueline was before you, and Simone before her, and Javon before her. Among them, Jacqueline is the only one who is not an athlete—I don’t count junior varsity badminton as a sport in quite the way that I do, say, varsity basketball. Is that wrong? Anti-Asian? The entire junior varsity team, save for Jacqueline, is lily white, so there’s that, I guess. Anyway, I haven’t heard you utter a word about sports, so I caution you not to be drawn into any endeavor that is not of your choosing, nor any that present health risks to you. For example, if the football team is revived, please look into the research on head trauma before even attending a practice session.”

  *

  The track was beautiful, all bouncy red rubber and gleaming white lane lines. I felt the extra bound in my spring-loaded steps just walking up the straightaway. I looked at the track coach, a thin old man whose body was doing the thing that thin old bodies do, which is wither away like a bar of soap. Old Irish Spring was leaning over at the waist, teaching two runners who I assumed to be sprinters how to set they blocks. It was one of them hella bright Indian summer days the Bay specializes in. I had to squint just to see clearly.

  One of the kids was a skinny, red-haired white boy who looked like he could be the coach’s grandson. Thru the white-hot sunshine I watched Old Irish Spring lose his patience with the boy and set the blocks hisself. I remembered my childhood races, alongside Keisha and Free and Miguel, using the handball wall to brace ourselves.

  I watched the white boy leave his blocks and glide into the aura of light that the September sun cast. Next, a short, powerfully built white girl with the kind of ass I hadn’t seen since East Oakland did the same rice cakes and flat water, despite her frame. The truth was, neither of them had any acceleration.

  I knew I could hang with these kids once I got in good enough shape. I figured, come spring semester, after a week or two of practice, I would be ready to outrun my teammates. I looked down the way to where a handful of former football players were up to somethin’ energetic and difficult. They ran and spun and jumped and yelled out complicated number sets inside another half-blinding circle of light so it was all one big hot white ball of invisible athletic fitness to me. Like, college-student-athlete-silhouetted-on-billboards-type athletic fitness. I didn’t think I’d ever care enough about athletics to dedicate myself to it like they were dedicated or like old boy who lent me his shoes to sell was dedicated. All that year, I would prove me right about myself: I lacked commitment. I lacked work ethic. I lacked performance. I never even tried to train, let alone race in the meets in March and April and May.

  Copeland Cane had oth
er interests and concerns. Rewind me back to that first moment on the track in November of my junior year in high school: I blinked the light out my eyes and gazed back from the real-deal athletes to the track athletes who I chose to compete with. Old Irish Spring and his crew of subprime athletes gleamed back at me. I didn’t let it blind me this time, though, and now I could see exactly what had blinded me. All of them wore gold track shoes. I looked back at the boys and they had on the same damn shoes, shoes that shone, that glittered, that price-tagged pretty good when I looked them up later. If I could get a complimentary pair off Old Irish Spring, them shits was gettin’ flipped.

  *

  I accepted Irish Spring’s offer and stuffed the shoebox in my backpack. Jacq, it was the end of fall, the beginning of winter, when that man recruited me with them shoes and I figured that I could chill on the sports thing for a few months. I didn’t know it was an indoor season in that sport and that it takes place in fall! Did you know that, Jacq?* Has anybody alive ever heard tale of indoor track and field?! I rest my damn case. (And, needless to say, your boy was caught flat-footed upon learning that this indoor season thing existed and was already on and poppin’—I told the coach, “Hold up, I’ma see you in springtime.”)

  Anyway, being that I wouldn’t be running races for a while, I didn’t even think to open the shoebox that that first pair of gold shoes came in or try them on or break them in, none of that. You know I sold them suckers fast as I could, like five minutes after having them handed to me. (Side note: Pied-montay Ave. is a great place to sell shoes just so long as you can keep out of eyesight of the private security that’s roaming everywhere. Hella people on that avenue will drop $100 on you easy as they comb they hair. This particular buyer was a white man about my height and build who wore a shirt that read BIG ISLAND ULTRAMARATHON: HELLA HAOLE! I remember appreciating that he didn’t look me up and down or ask me a gang of questions that might attract the attention of the authorities, he just slipped me the skrilla and went on his way.