It was automatic, Jacq: my hand shot up and so did the rest of me, rising from my seat. Deadrich pointed toward me. “Yes, right there.”
We met eyes, me and him. I could tell he really was inspired to take action by his glittering, hopeful gaze. But he was also confused—not about the actions to take, but about me. I could tell he recognized me, but he tripped over my name: “Yes, yes, young man. What is your question?”
This nigga, I thought. To him, I’m nothin’ but the nigga done sold him his shoes. If he cain’t remember my name, does he even remember my scholarship? I wanted action and I wanted to be recognized for who I was, which, put simpler, simply means that I was hella tight when I started to speak. “Let’s talk about taking action,” I said. “What y’all, any of y’all”—I looked from Deadrich to the comedian to the professor—“plan to do for—for”—Mr. America? Captain America? Captain Black America? I caught myself in the void and realized that I didn’t know my man’s government name. I didn’t know his name. His crew never called him nothin’ but street names. Nobody at the event that night had spoke his name cuz they did not know it to raise it. I lowered my voice. “What are you doin’ here?” I said. I cut him off ’fore he could answer. “Why is we listening to you when you don’t know why you’re here? We know why we’re here, but they got you directing shit like we don’t know our own problems?”
“Now there’s no need to use profanity,” Deadrich rejoindered, still all smiley and hella contradictory. He turnt so he wadn’t lookin’ straight at me anymore but at everyone and no one at the same time. “This has been such a rich evening of discussion. There’s so much to process. I’ll come back to you, OK? Other questions! Yes, you in the beautiful red head scarf thingamajigger.”
I wanted to stand up again and take some kinda action, but instead I looked to the woman in the head wrap, who knew what she wanted to say, but it wadn’t OK, the evening wadn’t too rich, it wadn’t too much for me to process. It troubled me somethin’ bad that I didn’t know my brother’s name.
Deadrich started parlaying again, answering the question posed by the lady in the headwrap, but I stopped listening. The only action I could take that would mean anything was to get up outta there. I needed to bounce. It didn’t matter if I disrespected Deadrich. He wouldn’t remember me no kinda way. I knew it was only one person I had to listen to in order to write my story and he wadn’t in that church.
*
As I rode the BART home, I decided I would ask Mrs. Greenberg for time off from the next day’s class to visit Mr. America at Highland Hospital. And for the money to take myself there.
I remembered how empty the trains was back in the day when the ghetto flu was really hunting. How folks was afraid to get in these tin cans and catch they death of recirculated air. Now the trains is packed all day, plus plenty more come rush hour. Round midnight it gets thick with fiends nodding laid out across the seats or in the aisles and crazy people talking to theyselves, threatening the air, certifiable insane with no psych ward to go to. I made sure to keep my back to the wall and to socially distance from everyone.
At Coliseum station, I de-boarded and ran home. Fireworks sparked above me and pulsed like heartbeats beneath my feet as I went. When I seen the homeless encampments like a little village up ahead, I knew I could slow down. I walked past the homeless and into Rockwood with my eyes on alert. You never know with these cats; one day this man who lives on the street is A-OK, polite as you please, just minding his own business in his little tent and not bothering nobody, the next day he’s liable to be off his drugs and decide you’re the devil. Might scream on you; might try to kill you. It’s why I’m no fan of these homeless camps, Jacq. I wish they would disappear. But idn’t that what people wanna do with us? Would it be better if the po-lice came and cleared the homeless out? If they decided to do that, wouldn’t we be next on they list for forced removal? What if they brutalized folk in the process? What if a good dude like Mr. America got caught up and beat down in the mix?
I worked the old lock on our front door till it gave way. I was pretty sure my parents passed on the WD-40 just so they would know whenever people, meaning me, was coming and going. Sure nuff, Daddy sat in the shadows lookin’ straight at me. He was set up in one of our folding chairs behind a tray table. A deck of cards was spread like turkey plumes across its surface. I never knew my old man to play cards. He was always too busy with his ideas. But somethin’ about the man had turnt.
“Hey,” I said.
“They keep y’all out late with this reporting mess, don’t they?”
“It ain’t mess.”
“You know what I mean. You got a article to write?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You got a deadline?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, you just make sure you don’t miss no deadlines. Always make sure you deliver on an obligation.”
“Ain’t think you cared.”
“Boy, I don’t want you at that school, you know that. But now that you are there, I want you to do yo’ very best, represent, show them folks the knowledge you got up in that big brain.”
“It was a panel discussion on po-lice, excessive force, things like that.”
“Like I done told you, Cope, you got more to teach them folks than they can teach you.”
I nodded again even though I couldn’t cosign that. It was whole colleges of knowledge I knew nothin’ about. Now that I was attending a high-ranked prep school, it seemed like the only thing I knew was how little I knew. I just had my experiences, my opinions. I didn’t even know what I would write about that night. But I couldn’t tell him what troubled me, not in the way that I wanted to. I couldn’t imagine just up and speakin’ my mind to the man, not in this lifetime. I started to speak on the journalism class, on my story, on the school, and I think maybe I got caught up in it and said too much, or I was tryna justify in ways I didn’t know how the value of the prep school, but I went on about it too long cuz after a minute, or a while, I heard a gentle rumble coming from the shadows where he sat. I put myself on pause and listened to the rumble as it rolled like a radio signal from a far-off frequency. I walked over to him. Up close I could see that he lay back in relaxation that his wakeful form never knew. His head was tilted up like a man in the last moments of prayer, and I remembered him falling to his knees in prayerful fear as the cops pointed they guns at me, and for a second, Jacq, I wanted to weep. Then his jaw fell open, drawing the low rumble of his breath in and out deeper and lower and rougher. I had never known him to fall asleep just like that, the way old folks do. That was the night I realized my old man was really an old man.
*
At six in the A.M. I woke and emailed Mrs. Greenberg: “I need to know more to write this story. I need an excused absence to visit the victim. And I need some funds for the trip.”
A reply email hit my inbox almost immediately. Like, when did this lady sleep? “Don’t worry about class today,” it read. “Go to Western Union at nine A.M.”
After scoopin’ the centimos, I paid for a taxi to the hospital. During the ride, I scanned article after article about the incident in search of Mr. America’s government name. I finally came upon it as we came upon the hospital: DeVonte Baltimore. I remembered the protestor that screamed that name: DeVonte. Baltimore. The blackest name in history. I should really be calling cousin Mr. Black America, but you know how first impressions work: I’ma always have his all-Americanness in my mind no matter how black his name is, no matter how many times the cops wail on him, even if it turns out his middle name is somethin’ blacker’n DeVonte Baltimore. And peep this: What if being hella black is the same as being all-American? What if being second class, treated like trash, is the American way, it’s just don’t nobody wanna call it what it is?
*
DeVonte Baltimore was hooked up to hella tubes, oxygen, machines, EKG, this and that. His big frame was covered loosely by one of those hospital smocks with the little floral patterns. Li
ke he was someone’s grandma. Like they was sho nuff tryna finish off my man’s humiliation up in that hospital ward.
“You’re the first person who’s found me,” he said when he seen me.
His breath wheezed outta his throat like someone near death, and I remembered what it was like seeing elderly hauled out into the courtyard on stretchers as they coughed out they lungs. I remembered how they jerked around tryna find air they couldn’t get. I remembered they eyes staring darkly into Oakland’s perfect sun, clean air, blue sky, as they breathed they last.
“How’d you find me, blood?”
“I read the news, boss. It’s all there, your name and everything.”
“Really?”
“You’re big news, homie. Or, I mean, what them mofos did to you is news.”
“Nah,” he drawled out, his voice rattling outta his chest. “Niggas get they asses kicked by cops every day. Ain’t nothin’ special ’bout me. Maybe if they had killt me.”
“How you doin’, big bruh? You recovering?”
“Yeah. I feel better every day. Might not look like it, but the doctors say I’m young and my shit fittin’ to heal with a quickness. Just gotta be patient. A patient must be patient.” He cracked a smile, and his oxygen tube fell out his nose. I leapt toward him to re-situate it, but when I got to his bedside he held his left forearm out like a guard rail. “Chill, my nigga. Chill. It’s just precautionary all this shit they got me hooked to. I promise you, a nigga ain’t one nostril tube from death. It looks way worse’n it is.”
I fell back and observed, remembering I was there to tell Mr. America’s story, not save his life. For real, though, dude looked terrible. The left half of his face had a blue undertone to it like underwater jaundice. His whole face was puffy from the painkillers they had him on. He had hella stitches along the middle of his lower lip and he breathed deep and heavy, like an old house making noises. The morphine drip on the opposite side of the bed made a tick-tick sound every time his pain surged and he had to hit it to subside the shit. His left arm sat in a sling, the sign of a separated shoulder.
“You sure about that?”
“It looks terrible so yeah, Cope, I’m sure. If they want me to stop dancing on the trains, they best come with a shotgun next time. These is just a few bruises and things.”
Mr. America might be banged up, but if he was emotional about it, he wadn’t about to show it to me. The first thing he had said was that no one had found him. I wondered who was lookin’. If he had family, why hadn’t they looked? Why wadn’t any of them at his bedside? I saw how alone a boy is when he turns eighteen and he idn’t a child no more. That would be me soon. Super alone with no one to call on but myself.
“Why’d you find me?” he asked.
“You have a story to tell,” I answered. Then I realized that I did, too. “Look, I transferred schools,” I said, and proceeded to catch him up on a life he knew only so much about just like I knew damn near nothin’ about his life. “So that’s what’s brought me here,” I finished.
“After all that, why not just tell your own story? Why search me out?”
“You’re more interesting.”
“A nigga who dresses up like Uncle Sam and moonwalks for white people’s money, then gets beat up by cops over some nonsense. How you figure that’s interesting?”
“Sounds interesting as fuck to me.”
“I’m a living, breathing stereotype, blood. You’re unique.”
“How do you figure? I got locked up. A million black people is locked up. Ain’t nothin’ new there.”
“Ain’t nothin’ new ’bout gettin’ beat up by some cops neither!”
“But people don’t hold town halls and rallies and shit for kids who do a crime and get sent to juvie. Incarceration is just a statistic; they literally make you a number. You sittin’ here all broken up, tubes in you and shit, that’s not a number. It’s, like, the apotheosis of all the injustices.”
“Apotha-what?”
“Never mind.”
“Boy, I wish I could go back to school and learn some of this shit you know. Maybe I should become a journalist.”
“Maybe you should. Can I take a picture of you?”
“Oh, helllll nah, blood! I look too good to look like this for eternity.”
“Fair nuff. Bump that. How ’bout I write a description of the way you look? For the story.”
“Freedom of speech, blood. This is America. You write whatever you feel you should write.”
“Cool then. You wanna tell me what happened, or should I just go with what the po-lice reported?”
*
That’s how I got the homie to speak. And I did describe as best I could how he looked without making it too ugly or disrespectful of his dignity. Them cops tried to take my brother’s dignity, I wadn’t fittin’ to do him dirty in print. Never that.
At least that’s what I like to tell myself. At least that’s what I told Mrs. Greenberg when I submitted the story, and it’s what I told you when we discussed it back then, and it’s what I woulda said if Mr. America had ever questioned me on it. I don’t know how he truly felt, though, cuz he never said A or B ’bout it, least not to yours truly. I have no idea what it feels like to have someone write about you in your weakest state. Even now, with Soclear wanting to define me as some kinda monster, one thing they ain’t said is a brother’s weak, na’mean? But Mr. America had no choice in the matter. They beat him like a runaway slave and laid him up in the hospital for the fun of it. I tried to tell myself I had repped him right in my article and, real talk, anyone can look it up: I think I did a good job with it. You thought I did a good job with it. Mrs. Greenberg thought I was gotdamn James Baldwin out that bitch. It was hella people who read it and found that they sided and sympathized with big bruh in the hospital, not with the local celebrities who did all the talkin’, let alone the cops who put him there. I was proud and thankful that the story did its little part to shift the local dialogue away from the nonsense at the church to somethin’ that truly mattered.
But maybe where I went with the story mattered too much. I couldn’t get the thought, the image, the memory of Mr. America, DeVonte black than Nigeria Baltimore, laid up like he was, with his underwater jaundice and his morphine drip and the whole helpless scene in that hospital, on the page without feelin’ some type of way about it. Puttin’ my brother in print like that felt like a violation even though I had had his consent, even though I had my First Amendment rights, even though I had y’all’s approval. It felt like he was too much on display. And I knew that I, too, was too much on display. I was just as out front every time that I penned somethin’ for publication. Aye’body white and they white mommas was staring at us in our devastation in the hospital, in the street, in the scholarship application process. I felt like I was lettin’ these people who wadn’t even my people, seeing as my people didn’t need the lessons my stories was teaching and half of them only wanted an escape that would name-check Kamala and Barack back in the day and Black Excellence all the time—I don’t even know where this sentence started, Jacq, let alone where it’s gonna go. But you hear me now? You understand me? It wadn’t somethin’ I could sit easy with, this completely neked birth of words into a watching world.
It was then that Daddy’s dislike of literature made sense to me. The old man was not insane after all. I realized what was wrong with writing, especially writing like Mrs. Greenberg wanted me to write. From writing for the newsletter I came to see what it was to be a writer and it fucked with me bad. A writer goes inside theyself and shovels out what’s in there, they fears, they sins and confusion. They take all that they find and put it on the page. It’s a struggle, like a lotta things is. But what’s it for? For who, for what? Books change your mind but they cain’t change shit in the world. Like the train dancers spilling out all they soul for a few dollars, or some scattered clapping, or a cold-ass shoulder. These writers wrote they lives away, took theyselves apart and put it on the page for people th
ey would never know who would read it when they felt bored, or shallow in theyself, or so they would have somethin’ smart to say to they friends at some function someday, but never for the only thing that really mattered, which was to know someone and love them anyway. The only love I knew was the unconditional love of my mother and the conditional love of the old man, the exact terms of which I wouldn’t be surprised is probably bullet-pointed in a pamphlet somewhere.
So many people had spoke and wrote about black people gettin’ fucked with by po-lice. They spoke after Tulsa in 1921. They spoke after Harlem in ’43. They spoke after Watts in ’65. They spoke after Rodney King. They spoke after Sean Bell and Oscar Grant and all them folks who was killed ’fore I was born. And then *8:46 happened. I’m old enough to remember it happening and things changing and how it had aye’body and they momma thinkin’ this at last would be when the po-lice would get defunded and killer cops would be sent to jail and this, that, and the third, fourth, and fifth was ’bout to change for once, for all, and forever. And I bet it was all kinda Yale- and Vanderbilt-accepted black people writing speeches and essays and whatnot. But what actually happened? How many— apologies to my daddy—n**** hunters been locked up? How many of these out and out Ku Klux Klan members been stripped of they badges, fired from they jobs, and had the cuffs clapped on them? What’s actually changed when it comes to the po-lice that ain’t get flipped back around and made even worse? Mrs. Greenberg said it herself: the cops went and switched clothes, done traded in one set of laundry and one kinda badge for another, meanwhile leaving they body cams behind. And now in the private sector they ain’t have to worry about background checks or gettin’ caught out with some tat that revealed what they was really all about. It was almost like you couldn’t have a damn inch of progress in America without a half-circle reversal.
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 22