The Confession of Copeland Cane

by Keenan Norris

  Finally, the door eased open and a small woman emerged from behind it. Her hair was hived in a du-rag and her yellow Warrior T-shirt hung loose from her shoulders. She had a raw yellow tint to her eyes that I had only seen in the homeless and people half dead from the virus. She studied me and the big man behind me: “Who you is?”

  I introduced myself and DeMichael. “We’re here on behalf of the Pied-montay High Times-Picayune,” I said. “The what?”

  “Our—my school newsletter,” I explained.

  “Boy, y’all don’t look na’n official.” She put her hand over her chest and coughed and laughed at the same time. “What you here for, my nephew Sherrod? They oughta be ’shamed of theyselves, got y’all black kids recruitin’ each other like it’s a business.”

  “No, ma’am. I’m actually here to interview Sherrod—”

  “Sherrod don’t need to answer any questions. As far as we’re concerned, he’s happy to go to school right where he goes to school.”

  “I’m here to interview him for the school newsletter, not for recruitment purposes.”

  “Child, get woke. It’s the same thing. I imagine they ain’t pay y’all to do this?”

  I shook my head. The only person gettin’ paid—in shoes—was DeMichael, and that didn’t feel like it was worth explaining.

  “Well, they damn sure gon’ have to pay me. You know, they fittin’ to tear down Ravenscourt. Already done cleaned out half of it. Then where we gonna go? What good is an education in Oakland or Pied-montay if we don’t have nowhere to live in Oakland or Pied-montay? Here I am with three kids ain’t even my own who I gotta shelter, gotta feed, clothe, and send to school. Ain’t just Sherrod. Just cuz his brothers don’t get straight As don’t mean they eat less or they don’t need a roof over they head. We need money, living money, not just some old tuition forgiveness.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We can leave.”

  “Look here,” Auntie said. “It’s got nothin’ to do with y’all. I don’t want y’all to think we don’t got no love for y’all cuz it ain’t the case. How about this? Sherrod don’t need to talk to you right now, but I do need to talk to whoever run y’all’s school. Whoever has his hands in that budget is who I need to speak with. So I’ma give you my number and my email, and you’re gonna go back to that school and tell the man with the money to contact me. Can you do that?”

  I nodded, not because I agreed with the plan but because I had no idea what else to do. Kinda stunned and impressed that she wadn’t too scared to make demands, suddenly I was wondering if this was how I shoulda handled my interview with the principal.

  “In the meanwhile, write yo’ little article. Tell them people how good a student Sherrod is. And tell them how he has to live. Tell them what you seen today in Ravenscourt. Half the apartments vacant. A fire in the western quadrant, might as well be the Ghost Ship over there. Tell them how it’s nowhere for children to play here. Tell them these things. Tell them straight. Where y’all came from?”

  “Rockwood.”

  Her eyes widened with surprise and she cocked her head to the side. “Well, hell! I woulda figured y’all for some downtown nigroes. Well, at least you.” She looked at me. “Yo’ friend behind you’s clearly yo’ bodyguard. Y’all be careful in Rockwood, ya hear. It’s a gang war on the Rock right now, nigroes firing shots in the morning time. Ain’t safe.”

  We thanked her for her time and walked back along the concourse and down the floors. It was nothin’ there to be scared of, contrary to everything I had ever heard. We seen the three Witnesses again and the prettiest one smiled at me. We seen three girls dressed in they school uniforms playing double Dutch on the second-floor concourse. We seen four boys on the bottom floor playing trampoline on a dirty old mattress someone had put outta doors. We seen two more lighting firecrackers at a far edge of the courtyard. We seen an old man the color of winter midnight with a big white beard and a white Afro as round as the world crouched like a grasshopper upon an empty oil drum. He was singing in Spanish. We seen homeless crowded in front of a food aid station in the shadow of the burnt western quadrant. We seen a woman sellin’ empanadas and a man sellin’ roses and a boy and a girl who was blowing bubbles back and forth to each other, laughing and smiling, and a mural that read:

  THE CITY IS COVERED IN OUR DEAD FRIENDS NAMES

  Maybe I was just a pawn for Pied-montay. I couldn’t call it. Still, I decided that I would write about Ravenscourt, all of it, everything that I had seen. I couldn’t guarantee Sherrod the money he and his fam actually needed, but I could tell they story.

  As we crossed the street and walked back onto the Rock, DeMichael said, “It’s like birds. One has its song, another has a different song. Hella different songs. But they all jus’ birds, and if you shoot them out the air, they all gon’ fall the same.”

  *

  Later, at night, when it was just me and the explosions sounding away lonely as I was, I wrote my piece and I wondered about things. If we were all just the same kinda bird with so many songs, like DeMichael said, then what made my song special enough to write up in the Picayune? What was so special about me that I might become the “conscience of the campus community” one day if I could commit to communicating with my editors in an informative and efficient manner while also staying on deadline? It wadn’t too much to ask, which was why, when I thought about why I hadn’t done that shit to the best of my ability, I realized that somethin’ was holding me back. I knew I could do what the newsletter required of me, and I knew a gang of other folks who could do it, too, who would never even have the chance cuz wadn’t no one checkin’ for them in the first place. Why was I important enough for Pied-montay and for the newsletter and all that yang while DeMichael and Miguel and the others had to stay theyselves on the Rock? I asked myself this, and the only answer that came to me is ain’t shit special about me, not special enough at least.

  Maybe, I figured, it was just a matter of quitting the newsletter. Writing was complicated and compromising and uncontrollable in ways I couldn’t even explain to myself, let alone to anyone else. Maybe I should just drop the Sherrod story and drop the journalism class, and then I could take regular PE and I could quit the track team. I pictured my responsibilities falling like dominoes and a dude in the Rockwood courtyard scoopin’ up them bones by the handful and demanding his money right then and there.

  I wadn’t in no position to go demanding things of the prep school. It was them that had brought me in on they dime, not the other way around. I couldn’t just go making my own rules. Nor could I just go being a normal-ass student. It would not work. I was there to fulfill a public role. I knew that and they knew I knew it. I might not mess with the “conscience of the campus community” thing too tough, but it was no point in pretending that I could drop everything all at once.

  Plus, quitting wouldn’t change shit. It wouldn’t change the fact that people in Pied-montay lived longer, lived better, had more money, more education, more everything, compared to people in places like Rockwood. It wouldn’t change the fact that either you was one of the lucky ones to be born or be brought there, or you was one of the unlucky ones not to have that happen for you. I was one of the lucky jokers. It wadn’t a thing I could do or write or quit that would change that.

  I wondered about you, Ms. Jacqueline, because you traveled between the two realities, the two communities. Maybe you thought of yourself as uninteresting because your suburban story was too similar to the white people who do most of the reading, but it’s somethin’ unique in you cain’t nobody else claim. It’s that you’re black and it’s that you’re you and it’s that you see how to tell a story without having to grab a mic and go in. It’s so many other stories in you.

  And who would want my story anyway if to tell it they would have to live it? You’re a much better storyteller, because you can sit between these two worlds and not have to be dipped so deep in either you might never get out long enough to tell about it. That’s a kind of luck,
boss. You’re lucky as rollin’ seven and eleven. Like the luck that you wadn’t stuck with your pops in Rockwood 24/7/365. If that was your life, you would see what living in a dying neighborhood was really all about: your landlord hawkin’ you, threatening you with eviction even though he already got the rent on time. Junkies rollin’ up on you with holes in they face, asking questions no one can answer. Shoestring pimps all up in your business as you try to walk to school in the morning, wanting your number, your name. Cops callin’ you out your name for walking down the street after dark. Cops who would tell me to get my ass inside like we was under curfew after dark. Negroes who didn’t give a damn about no po-lice but hated each other all day and all night. Mexicans who hated each other all day and all night. The noise all night long. The fireworks, the fires, the gunshots at three in the morning. Seeing all that would get in your soul and might silence you even when you spoke, just like it did me for the longest.

  It was only luck—that superstar momma of yours—that kept you safely off the Rock five days outta seven. And it was only luck that I had met a man on the train that was the reason why I was able to transfer away from all the drama of the Rock to a better place, a better school. So I was lucky, too, even if not as lucky as you. But you was making real moves, earning the type of grades and meeting the caliber of people that would pave your way in the world. I was a mediocre student, a bad networker with no connections of any promise besides yourself. I felt absolutely ordinary, just another bird. Which was why I was only gettin’ tuition forgiveness, not no extras. I thought how Sherrod’s auntie would probably get that money she wanted. After all, Sherrod was actually exceptional. He was not lucky one bit living hell up in Ravenscourt, but he was thriving yet and still. The article that I would write about him would show why the little homie deserved a duffel bag full of funds. But what it would say about me and what I deserved, I did not know.

  *

  In philosophy class, our teacher Mr. Marquard dropped jewels on a daily basis. “Do we have free will?” he asked us one day as the computer monitors clicked on and class started. “Or are we simply selected by circumstance to be who we are?”

  Some girl with school-spirit-dyed brick-gold hair got on her phone and reported that “free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.” She smiled a perfect pearly smile. It’s more dentist offices in one square block out there than in all of deep East Oakland.

  “Thank you, Wikipedia,” Mr. Marquard said. “Do you think that you have free will—that is the question. You won’t find the answer on your phone.” He stared down the girl with the perfect pearlies and bricks of gold for hair.

  “Yes, of course,” the boy J. Northcutt, who would one day be our valedictorian, said.

  “Why are you of that opinion?” Mr. Marquard asked him.

  J. Northcutt tapped his boat shoes, making a beat that actually slapped pretty hard—I ain’t gonna front, dude had rhythm. “People do not have free will in material terms. A person might go to school, work really hard, get straight As, perfect scores on all of his standardized tests, SATs, all the etceteras, but his academic success is still overdetermined by certain factors: parental guidance in his academics, like the fact that both my parents are college professors; family wealth, which might allow him the time to study rather than work to help support the family—not to mention that they’ll be able to afford tutoring for him—”

  “Even the neighborhood you’re from is based on how much money your family has at their disposal,” the girl who would compete with him all that year and the next for that valedictory status interrupted. “There’s a million reasons why we don’t have free will. You don’t need to list each and every one of them to make your point. There’s no free will.”

  “But he maintains that there is,” Mr. Marquard insisted. “Why?”

  Northcutt stared some daggers at homegirl and got back into his groove. “It’s the mind. Ralph Ellison writes at the end of Invisible Man that by going underground he whipped everything but the mind. No matter how deleterious the circumstances people have found themselves in, they have always made art, song, music, poetry, dance. Think about London during the blitz, when people held waltzes in the bomb shelters. Even if you’re chained to a stake in the ground on a desert island, you still have recourse to your mind. You can think, fantasize, philosophize, dream.”

  “And you would define that as freedom?” Mr. Marquard asked. “Chained to a stake in the desert?”

  “Desert island,” the valedictorian noted. “Let me ask you, sir, was Jesus free?”

  “The government jailed and crucified him,” Mr. Marquard responded. “But I concede that spiritually he was free.” Checkmate like a mug.

  I sat back in awe of this young nigga Northcutt’s unwhipped mind. Here I had came from the Rock and from the island and from the reformatory, where my mind was steady being whipped, flipped, and fucked with, and somehow thinkin’ I might have anything to say about anything when I was only an empty cipher. I was even celebrated for my story about almost being shot, like that’s somehow original in the hood. Only to find that it was kids like the valedictorian who were so far advanced of me that we might as well be from different centuries or somethin’. I was so impressed by these kids who could reference world literature and history in the same sentence just to make a point about philosophy. These kids who didn’t even flinch at holding it down in intellectual conversation and debate with teachers who was damn near Stanford professors in they own right. I determined to get on that level, the valedictory level, in my mind even if my grades, which was weighted down by Rockwood, would never show it. But about that free will thing …

  “The issue that Althusser—remember, he’s the crazy French guy who killed his wife, we read his essay on ideology—that guy would take issue with your argument,” Mr. Marquard rejoindered, “because it romanticizes the intellect. It presumes an inviolate status for the intellect when, in fact, the intellect is imbricated by the ideologies that surround and overlay it and that, in a sense, have brought it into being. If you’ve learned to speak by mimicking your parents and babysitters, the fundamental means by which you articulate the world around you is already predetermined by their ideologies. You don’t know what a boy or a girl is, you know what they are called. That’s why when someone transitions from one gender to another, they enter a second space that people don’t quite understand because there are so few names for it (not for them, you see, but for their social role; we are our social roles). For that matter, you do not know yourself, you don’t know who you are except in the context of how you are known by the social world around you. You know your role, or, put another way, you know only how you are hailed.”

  *

  In the end, I think we’re all hella hailed, am I right? Ain’t no way to know what we do cuzza pure free will. Whatever white folks call freedom, we know we ain’t free from them, let alone from ourselves. Very few black folks is ballin’ financially and spiritually free to where they can just move however they want. And if you cain’t move however you want, you ain’t free by definition. How could it be any other way when they brung us here as property? A hundred-somethin’ years since slavery and what can we claim? We don’t own no private schools. We don’t own no banks. We don’t own the po-lice that po-lice us. No codes. No laws. No religion. No government that’s our own.

  In the dark when I’d think about you, Jacq, and the school, it wadn’t the philosopher who killed his wife that I thought about, it was the principal, it was the po-lice, it was prison, it was the island. I don’t wanna say we was slaves, cuz what slaves you know ever had the things we was given? But we damn sure wadn’t free.

  *

  I remember the day: we was at school, of course. I got no idea what you was up to, homegirl, besides being brilliant, but I know I was well into writing my B+ essay exam for the existentialism section of Mr. Marquard’s philosophy class when two BART cops arrested the crew of train dancers right
there on the downtown BART platform. His sahabs took the cuffs quietly, but Mr. America wadn’t having it, wouldn’t take the harassment, and bucked back by refusing to silence his speakers. I wouldn’t be surprised if the big homie kept on dancing right in those cops’ faces. Four officers beat the crap out of him, knocked the Nikes he had bought off of me half price clean from Mr. America’s feet and wrenched my man’s shoulder from its socket as they busted him up right there for everyone to see. But somehow wadn’t no video footage, no body cams, and word was the cell phones of bystanders was confiscated, the recordings scrubbed by some presidential technology that law enforcement has now.

  That very same day Milwaukee PD, who apparently wadn’t as woke to the new methods, messed around and released the body cam footage of officers using excessive force against a college basketball player. Three separate body cams show the athlete being confronted by cops in a Walgreens parking lot where he’d illegally parked his car. The first officer calls for backup and then, like they had heard the bat call, beaucoup squad cars is on the scene. The athlete remains calm, explains hisself while the officers hover around him like drones. Then he puts his hand in his pocket and on cue the cops collapse on him, wrestling his slender ass to the ground, beating and tasering the brother till he’s left limp.

  Meanwhile, in Miami, the Olympic weightlifter Richie Prosciutto went 51/50: while in the midst of a workout at his local gym, Prosciutto, it was reported, started raving ’bout the FBI having a vendetta against him. He blocked the gym exits with weightlifting equipment. He chucked dumbbells at his fellow patrons, breaking out a window in the process. Po-lice arrived on scene and took the Olympian into custody on an involuntary psych hold without arrest, let alone tasers and batons.*