What was the point of any of it if nothin’ changed, or if it changed and then changed back, or went some way that was way worse? What was my words gonna do to fix any of our history, or our present, never mind our future? What could I do? Teach whoever ain’t hear or somehow forgot a lesson they shoulda learnt along with they ABCs? If someone wanted to know black people’s elementary problems, they didn’t need me to spell that shit out for them. They needed to take theyself to the Fruitvale BART—not for no history in no movie, but for what’s right there right now: bear witness to the brother posted there. He’s there every day; you cain’t miss him. Old boy is hella yoked. Looks like Michael B. Jordan in Creed. He holds court, this cat. Walks the length of that train platform shirtless, impressive, with an orange Super Soaker water gun cradled to his jet-black chest. “You must smite them,” he proclaims, like he’s performing Shakespeare or some shit. “Y’all must smote them. Every small mammal, every little bird, every offending insect, down to the grasshoppers. If it flinches, if it makes any furtive movements, if it fails to maintain eye contact or to comply with all orders given, take it out! Blast it into oblivion! Wreck shop. Shoot or risk repeating yourself. Kill or be considered a member of your community. It is y’all’s duty, it is y’all’s obligation, it is y’all’s birthright and religion to defend this nation against all enemies foreign, domestic, terrestrial, arboreal, subterranean, mitochondrial, fantastical, chimeric, the whole lick. Oakland shall not be safe until all these forces hath been smited.”
**✦
Writing wouldn’t change the world. At least not for black folks. But I lay low and played my role: I kept writing, hitting all my deadlines. The year spun itself out, one unconquered crisis to the next. I learnt how to live thru the news. The bad headlines and the human problems behind them was endless. I threw myself into every inch of ink.
Copeland Cane lived from one newsletter to the next, Jacq. Yeah, I did all right in my other classes, passed them and kept my scholarship, but journalism was my priority. My only clique was you and the rest of our class of newshounds. I seen stories in my sleep and ate and drank them awake. I missed the Rock even though I lived there, maybe because I only came home to sleep and wake and went weeks at a time without seeing Keisha and Free and them. My eyelid started twitchin’. My whole body was on alert, just like when I was in juvie. I only saw the Rock in the dark when I got home from school and barely spoke to either of the people who had put that roof over my head.
By the time summer arrived, announced by God-level fireworks that rocked the earth beneath Oakland like so many small earthquakes, I was barely surviving. The same could be said of the Rock. Mr. MacDonald announced via email that our apartment buildings (which were really his apartment buildings) would come down one at a time so that construction on the new luxury lofts, the Redwood Homes, could begin a-sap. This was bad news for the Rock, but good news for us. My fam’s building was scheduled to get the dynamite last, which meant we would get extended four, five, maybe even six more months past the new year ’fore our rent jumped. That would give me enough time to finish high school, maybe, hopefully, but not a minute more.
The email displayed a sketch of the renovated Redwood Homes as they would appear after Rockwood was demolished. It would be four gigantic luxury lofts, two that would look like spaceships angled in all kinda unique ways, high rectangles and low squat squares of clear glass, the other two done up like huge log cabins made of redwood, fake redwood. The whole shit felt fake. The center of the courtyard would be converted from a basketball court to tennis courts and a Neiman Marcus, entry to which would be fingerprint-recognition software ensured. The same software would regulate entry into the new buildings, the technology implemented in order of construction. The email listed the construction schedule.
I read the schedule and thought about when Rockwood’s residents, the ones I was close with in particular, would be forced out. Trey’s building would be the first to go. Jacq, you had your bags packed for a college far, far away, where all this broke-ass Oakland lollygaggin’ and scallywaggin’ wouldn’t mean a thing, so I wadn’t worried about you. But your daddy’s building would be the second to fall, which couldn’t be good for him. Vista, rehabbed and rehoused, was the only person I knew who lived in the third building, the one that would be zapped from the map on New Year’s Day. Finally, the rest of the folks I knew happened to live in my same building, which was why I knew them in the first place. It’s like they say about crime, you do it to them that’s closest to you. It’s the same with everything else: the people around you become your people. Y’all don’t choose each other. It’s destiny.
I stared at the email, which was its own kinda destiny. It felt like the whole world was right there, the new world, and it was cold and real and expensive as shit.
*
I tried to read that summer. Searched out the same books that had spoke to me back in the day, but the meanings escaped me into mystery: Baldwin was just words and words and more words, a sermon of impossible complications. But Homer seemed too simple: all his people and gods was this or that symbol with a meaning that manifested like magic in the world. Richard Wright told on hisself too much, opened his heart in the heavy, raw way that Mrs. Greenberg wanted me to open mines. Truth like that was its own death wish. No wonder brother Wright never did see his old age.
You can only speak to the page when the page speaks to you, so when my books stopped talkin’ to me, I stopped talkin’, too, by which I mean I stopped talkin’ to the page. I couldn’t write. I mean, edit that—I could write a text message, I could write an email, maybe I might could even knock out a term paper or two ’bout some shit I couldn’t care less about, but I couldn’t write nothin’ that would move people to do somethin’, to want somethin’, to make somethin’ better. I couldn’t move myself. I couldn’t write for the newsletter no more. Couldn’t stay they spokespade.
As I came to terms with me and the pen and the page no longer being on speaking terms, I had to confront some other realities as well. I did the math on my mediocre grades, my below subprime performance on the track team, and the little issue with Irish Spring and the shoes. I couldn’t just drop the journalism class and the newsletter columns without picking up some other profile. PE would not be enough of a replacement. Pied-montay had accepted my application and waived my tuition for a reason. I was there to make it known that I was there. I couldn’t afford to lose my scholarship. I couldn’t afford the tuition. My $611 and two quarters stashed in a shoebox beneath some clothes underneath my bed would melt away in a minute and my ass would be back studying at the public library in Rockwood. But I couldn’t write no more.
*
Forever. Ain’t put pen to pad or fingertips to keyboard for nothin’ nonessential since. My email to Mrs. Greenberg was simple and plain: “I’ve decided that I’m done writing for the newsletter. I won’t take journalism this coming school year. With my academics and training for indoor track, I won’t have the time. This is the best decision for me.”
Finito negrito—cain’t see myself writing ever again unless it’s fittin’ to change at least this small earthly square where I stand.
*
I knelt at the starting line at my first track meet of the indoor season, straight up and down dreading my fate. Our opponent was another preppy private school. I had heard that private schools, especially the Catholic ones, took sports super serious. Many were athletic powerhouses. De Sales. Blessed Sacrament. Our Lady of Guadalupe. Pied-montay, for whatever reason, was not. Maybe if we had Jesus in our school, our sports teams would be better. Maybe if our campus was planted in hood soil like a lotta the Catholic schools happened to be, we would be better. Keish had run track at a small private school in the Fruitvale the year I was gone, starring and going to the state meet. Free followed her, enrolling and running there despite her religion. The school wadn’t tryna convert them, which was good, or teach them much of anything, which was bad, which was why both girls transferred b
ack to Rockwood at year’s end, switching places with Trey, who cared more about playing basketball in a gymnasium paneled in stained glass than the schoolwork they shorted him on.
Pied-montay Prep’s plushed-out facilities were as state of the art as it could get. Way better’n any school in the hood, public or private. Our track, football field, baseball diamond, and gymnasium were all kitted up cutting edge, high tech, deep-cleaned, updated, interactive, and whatnot. You couldn’t blame no insufficient funding; no, Pied-montay was not shy on spending its shells. Nah, I believe our underperformance across sports was solely the result of poor coaching. Irish Spring would run practice by taking us off campus grounds, pointing down the road, and ordering us to run to the freeway overpass or up into the hills to the horse farm and back. Back on campus, on the track, we never had no system to how we trained. We never did the same workout twice, never built, never sharpened. We just ran random workouts day to day. Nobody cared; nobody went to Pied-montay Prep to play sports.
Even though I had spent my first year at the school telling myself that I was pushing so hard with the journalism jones cuz it was my passion and it was hella demanding and I didn’t have no time to train for track, I realized as I looked at them looping white lines in front of me that part of my reluctance was in not wanting to lose—not just taking the L itself, not losing by a stride or two, but that I was liable to be made a whole fool due to my lack of preparation and Irish Spring’s swaggerless, subprime coaching. It was one thing to feel like I was fast as I ran to the bus stop, clipping past old, obese Fillmore Slim wannabes and grannies and nodding junkies; it was another to set foot on an actual track in a real-deal competition.
In the days leading up to the meet, I had dreamt about being exposed and humiliated. In the dreams, the gun sounded and I lit out into the lead. The other runners stalked my golden-shoed steps. I hit the halfway mark, took the second turn, and began to feel my lungs collapse or contract, and all of a sudden I couldn’t catch my breath. The track stretched on endlessly. Wadn’t no halfway. The race went on forever, and with each step I slowed and the lactic acid sank its fangs into me. Eventually, everyone passed me and I chased after them, no finish line in sight. I chased them off the track and back to the Youth Control, across land and water to Treasure Island, and back across time to that boy I used to be back when the world was new.
I knelt and tried to set my blocks. I fumbled with the equipment. For all the times I had seen other kids set they blocks, I couldn’t do it myself. The boy in the lane next to me tapped me on the shoulder and peered down at me and asked if I needed some help. I turnt to look at him standing over me. It was finna be a very bad race. I got up and let him help me. I remember watching him as he nailed my blocks into the rubber track one whack at a time. His skin was the same color as the beige rubber. He glistened with sweat. I was bone dry. My mouth was a desert. Tension spasms ran along my calf muscles, threatening to turn into full killer cramps at any moment.
After he set the blocks for me, I knelt again and fixed my feet into them like I knew what I was doing. I got so set in them joints that my body set poised dead rigid as I waited for the gun. When the shot rang out and the other runners leapt out they stances, I stood straight up. It was a second where I almost stood still just watching everyone else move. Then I started running, but I was already behind. The boys in the lanes ahead of me increased the stagger and them that was in the lanes behind me breathed down my back. I was neck and neck with the boy one lane below me and losing contact with the lanes ahead. I drew dead even as we came along the first straightaway, yards, not strides, behind. I tasted hot grease in my throat. My feet fell heavy underneath me, the whole sole touching turf each time I took a step. My body was just waking up. I fell farther back. I remembered the day in elementary school when I discovered that I could run—but that was in competition against a bunch of little kids, not nearly grown high school athletes. I remembered other runs for school buses that picked up far from Rockwood—but the only competition then was time, the time of the bus schedule, not Colored People Time, which I had lost somewhere. All my nightmares was coming true when it happened: my muscles woke up. The powers that visited me in the Youth Control came back. The boy who looked back at me in the stainless steel cell mirror came alive inside me. I eyed the boy one lane ahead and shortened my stride, putting power into each step. My legs turnt into levers that hit the ground as hard as they could, then snapped back just as fast, then down into the ground again. I cut into the stagger as we hit the turn and I drove hard along the inside of my lane till I passed one boy then the next and the next. I was in the lead as we headed down the backstretch. I became a superhero as I ran, flying on my feet, fuck physics. My arms caught the wind and I felt godlike. I crossed the tape steps ahead of the others with a forty-nine-second four hundred meters. Ain’t even feel tired either, if you wanna know the truth.
Later that same day, the boy entered me again, and I ran like my life was under threat and I took the half mile by five meters, which idn’t even the same number system, not that that shit matters when you only have to count to one.
*
Mrs. Greenberg sent me one last email:
Dear Cope,
It’s been three weeks since you resigned from your column at our school newspaper. I emailed you immediately asking for a meeting, but you haven’t emailed me back. This email is not an attempt to change your mind. Please suspend judgment of me and my intentions and keep reading.
After taking some time to think about it and reflecting on my overtures toward you, I think I might understand the undue pressure you felt in your role as a writer for the school newsletter. I think that I was overly enthusiastic about the idea of you being some sort of disruptive force, enlightening the Piedmontagne populous about issues related to social justice. I fear that now that I’ve been a teacher here long enough to earn tenure three times over, perhaps I’ve magnified the importance of this school’s politics well beyond what they really are. It is just high school, after all …
It was cool and all that she took the time to write me and explain herself, and I have to admit that she was good people and all, I guess, given everything and whatnot. But I never did write her back.
*
From that day on, wadn’t no static about leaving the newsletter. Sure, Mrs. Greenberg’s last email sat in my inbox gathering dust and distraction. I even remember receiving a text from you, Jacq, writing me all the way from the East Coast. You said somethin’ ’bout politics taking an interest in me if I took them to be interesting. But by then your daddy’s apartment building was being demolished. I thought about you. I had feelings for you that I knew would never go nowhere, because you’re a year ahead of me and academically you’re generations, centuries, and maybe even Ivy Leagues beyond where I stand. But still, maybe I shoulda took things a step further, asked you out, tried to kiss you, connect with you, like I did with other girls at that school who I didn’t share shit with, which made them approachable and forgettable and you the total opposite of all of that—not approachable or attainable, let alone a girl I could get out my mind. Maybe I shoulda tried in some way that I didn’t. I played it safe instead, and now here I was, all messed up in the game, with you texting me from thousands of miles away with some social media caption wisdom, like you was my guru tellin’ me what I should do. I wished we could be on more equal terms, which would allow us to be closer. But it wadn’t to be, not in the way I wanted it to be. We wadn’t even on the same side of the continent anymore. I had to accept these facts. So, for the simple fact of that and since you wanted to text me to teach me things, I treated your text like I did Mrs. Greenberg’s email: let it fall to the bottom of my inbox landfill. And like landfill, it got mushed down with everything else in there and I knew I would never see it again.
Now I don’t even own the phone you texted me on, number gone, the whole lick. When the authorities trace my old phone number, they’a probably find theyselves talkin’ to someone n
amed Teneisha who’s got classes at community college to study for and don’t really have time for this, plus she got an open window or some thin apartment walls and some loud-ass neighbors talkin’ over her, so this call might as well come to an end sooner’n later. It makes it easier not to get caught that way, but now I cain’t read and cain’t remember exactly what I wrote to myself (pretending I was writing to y’all) to explain why I had to leave journalism behind. I was having trouble writing my thoughts by then, so I don’t know that even as I wrote to myself that I ever truly put in high-def clarity what it was that made me quit. But in the end, it was this simple: writing was too dangerous and too meaningless at the same time.
Anyway, I knew the newsletter wadn’t changing the world, so why should it run my life? If I left the news alone, I bet that it would leave me be.
*
I bet right. Don’t nobody check for the indoor track season. The newsletter and the news itself left me alone all fall and all winter. Meanwhile, I got busy on them tight-turning indoor tracks. The boy visited me and I won with him inside of me. He was everything that had made me, he was the island, he was every chemical chain that laced me there and the drugs they dosed me with later on, and every diamond-fingered push-up and doorframe pull-up and all my anger. When the boy didn’t show, I was just another slow Pied-montay nerd. I was just another middle-of-the-pack nobody. But I knew he was somehow there inside me. I just needed to learn to call on him in the right way at the right time.
I decided to stop listening to Irish Spring, whose sometimey workout schedule tested my patience, and to do my own circuit runs and hill repeats and intervals on my own time. If I ran fast enough in the meets in spring, I doubted the old man would object. I suspected that the decision to lean on myself as my best and only coach would bring the boy into me more often. I wanted him with me every time I touched the track. He might be from my past, but he was pushin’ me forward. I knew I had this man-child in me, Jacq, who just needed to be brought out, and come the outdoor season I was liable to take off and embarrass folks.
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 23