Jacq, I realized the man wadn’t about to expel me. A brother took his first easy breath in I don’t know how long. Then I considered his offer just like I considered going with Guzzo. I hated the idea of not running the championship meet. It was my only chance at a full-ride college scholarship, but if Kennedy was telling the truth, then I would only need to wait on my come up for a year and then he would hook it up somethin’ lovely. I wouldn’t have to worry about expulsion, which would kill any chance at a college scholarship. I could graduate. I could go to college. And all I would need to do was help the school out some. I nodded as much to myself as at him. “All right,” I said.
“Good, Cope. Great. Good,” he replied quickly. “Piedmontagne is an exceptional institution. Its diploma, its stamp of approval, is unique. Its benefits follow our graduates their entire lives. Which is simply an elaborate way to say that you won’t regret your choice. The robotics whiz Sherrod St. James has decided to join us in the fall term. He says your visit had a profound impact on him and he’d like to continue your legacy here.”
I remembered my “visit” with young sahab St. James. I remembered Deadrich congratulating me on the article that I wrote, which was about Ravenscourt really, not the boy, and I remembered Deadrich asking about Sherrod and how I took that opportunity to drop the auntie’s request on him. Ravenscourt would be razed in a matter of days. Sherrod and them needed the money. That was the story. And, of course, Pied-montay paid up. I would have no such luck. I was damn near graduated. They wouldn’t be chippin’ me off nada but a promise. But that promise was my best bet.
I shook Principal Kennedy’s hand, which he locked on me dead stiff, like when you shake hands with one of them AI robots in a downtown display and you realize being human is hella vulnerable and soft. I felt a whole mess of humanity just under the surface of what me and him was sayin’ to each other with our hands clasped, and like usual I didn’t know what to do with life when it got complicated, so I slipped out of it, bounced, turned around and left out his office quicker’n a hiccup. I walked over to the bookstore and spent my shoe money on that rose-gold bomber that you used to sport, Jacq. Cut the tags right there in the store: no going back.
*
I bussed and walked home and went and sat up on my dumpsters till the sun started to set in sheets of itself, colors that fell off like melting crayons from yellow and bronze to liquid red. A church choir of clouds rose over top of the color show like transparent foam. If I stood up on my cans, I could see out to the bay. With my en-tire weight pressing on the dumpster lid, I felt it about to give way. There was a gang of shit in my life ’bout to give way, from Rockwood’s last building (my building) about to be razed along with Ravenscourt, to Momma and the old man gettin’ ghost.
I looked around the Rock and the Redwoods. Across the high gates of the tennis courts and the clear glass siding of the Neiman Marcus, a gang of junky old cars sat jam-packed out front of Rockwood. Hella folk gathered amongst the cars in the shadow of the fancy shit that was off-limits to us. I remember thinkin’ that this was the most complected people congregated on the Rock since the rebuild began. If the cops had it in them to harass Miguel for hawkin’ shoes, what would they do if someone from the Redwood Homes or Neiman Marcus or the tennis courts called 911 on the whole black population of Oakland, which was now crowding around Rockwood? It wadn’t actually a whole city full of folks there, but based on my studies of Staying Outta Trouble When All It Takes Is One Wild Muhfucka, it was enough for it to become a problem.
“Aiiiyo, Cope!” Keisha called from the crowd. I couldn’t see her in the swamp of cars and people, but I recognized her voice, big as East Oakland. “Come over,” she shouted.
I leapt down from the dumpsters and made my way over. “What’s there to celebrate?” I asked as I waded thru weed smoke and the cars stacked like rusted old dominoes.
Keisha leaned against a bucket-lookin’ Datsun. She didn’t even pretend to answer my question. “You know I love you, Cope,” she said. “So, since I love you, bring your ass in here and eat and drink and enjoy your damn self.”
Being as strong as most teenage boys, Keish took me by the hand, almost tore my arm out the socket, and hauled me behind her into an apartment that was so thick with people, we had to do the robot just to get past the front door.
To Pimp a Butterfly pumped from behind a wall of bodies and a veil of weed smoke. King Kunta / Black man, taking no losses. A raft of balloons floated across the ceiling—someone had shaped them into the words ROCKWOOD GRADUATION.
“It’s a graduation party,” Keisha yelled back over her shoulder at me. “We walk in a week.”
“How come y’all’s school year is so short?”
She raised her hands palms up and shrugged her shoulders like that old “who knows?” iPhone emoji. “Rockwood does its own thing,” she called back. “A diploma’s a diploma, right?”
Not really, I wanted to say, it’s a reason Rockwood gets out so soon and matriculates its graduates to McDonald’s. But until I see another group of people celebrate a demolition and a graduation at the same time, you won’t catch me badmouthing anything outta Rockwood. Those was, is, and always will be my peoples.
We slid deeper into the party, where it was finally some space to breathe and talk like normal. A banner that read CONFERENCE CHAMPIONS! fell from the ceiling, or somewhere, and landed across my face.
“Slash a celebration of our team’s conference championship in track,” Keisha added. “I was the only girl on our team to qualify for state, but our team still did good. I’m proud of my girls.” Keish pointed me toward a table full of fried chicken, potato salad, mac and cheese, and several sweet potato pies.
*
I told jokes I cain’t remember and made people laugh whose names I cain’t recall. I found myself wondering if I’d made a mistake in going to Pied-montay Prep when I coulda stayed my ass right on the Rock with my people. After all, I was now a bona fide prep school problem child, barely allowed to graduate with my class, replaced before my departure by a better black kid, while Keisha was a public school star, a bright shining black girl, somethin’ I would never be. Come fall term, she would be on scholarship at a university, somethin’ else I wouldn’t be. “I’ma major in religious studies,” she confided. “My family thinks that that means I’ma learn the Bible backward and forward and come back to Oakland to run a church or some shit like that, but what it really means is I get to study the way people all around the world see God.”
Free would be there, too, just on academic instead of athletic scholarship.
“It’s ironic: you got the high school scholarship while we was going to school in the ghetto, but now the tables done flipped and it’s me and my bitch who get the free money. It’s funny. You should come with us, Cope. I don’t want you scrimpin’ and scrappin’ out here.”
“The fam’s movin’ to Antioch.”
“The Ock?” Free questioned. “Say less.”
A big dude with a lilting accent off some island walked between us. “Sistren, bredren, if you need to speak and you’re far away, then you need a cell phone.”
“Hella presumptuous with your bad self,” Keish cautioned him.
“Maybe so, maybe so, sistren. But lemme show you something, nah?”
“Only if you promise to be nice about it.”
He smiled at her and produced a shoebox full of cell phones. I had to respect the hustle.
“Hold up,” Keisha cried. “Is that a prepaid flip phone? Is you runnin’ hoes in the nineties, bruh? You cain’t get these joints nowhere.”
“Not in America,” the man informed. “It’s the cell phone of the Caribbean.”
“OK, Trinidad James,” Keisha said. And if you were to see this hella random brother and then google an image of Trinidad James from back in the day when we was knee-high to a Nike shoe, then you would know how funny what Keisha said was.
I started laughing.
Dude snapped back like a skull cap, s
omethin’ about a well-seasoned jerk chicken sandwich any day over the unhealthy shyte we eat in Black America, which I have to admit is true. Not that I know much about jerk chicken, but I’m guessing anything’s healthier’n the straight-up radiation we eat in America.
A little crowd formed around us, which reminded me of the swap meets I used to visit with Momma back when we was a family, back when we loved and trusted each other.
Trinidad flipped open one of his old phones, which, I realized, was actually new, just vintage. He showed off its beautiful basicness for all to see. “The jerk chicken of cell phones, don’tcha know,” he boasted. “Twenty dollars.”
Vintage prices, too, I thought. And you might think that that price is indicative of its quality, and you might be right, Jacq, cuz this mug is the Bermuda Triangle of phones when it comes to losing numbers off your SIM card and dropping outta service whenever it feels like it, with no rhyme or reason whatsoever.
Still and all, a gang of folks, Copeland included, bought phones off of our visitor. Seeing how quick the crowd cleaned him out, throwing Jacksons at him like we wadn’t about to be evicted due to insufficient funds, I started to understand why people had bought them old Jordan shoes off of me. Wadn’t shit to do with my salesmanship. It was the past that they wanted. You don’t love what you have till you lose it, and then you look back at what’s lost and what’s left of what’s lost and it stirs somethin’ deep inside you. You might spend the rest of your life lookin’ in nooks and crannies for any remnant reminder of your past.
“I can put some of our best Caribbean apps on here,” Trinidad offered.
“Nah, it’s all good,” Free said, looking closely at her purchase. “I’m not trying to pay your cousin $9.99 a month for his personal reggae channel. Pass.”
“That’s hella prejudiced,” Keisha said, “but I’m with you, bitch. Pass.”
But unlike the rest of them jokers wasting they money on a vintage phone they would never actually use, my phone was swimming with the rest of the radiation in the bay so I actually needed that thing, apps and all. And so it came to pass that your boy was the only one in the party who didn’t pass on the Cayman Islands of applications, this untrackable, prehistoric Pre-sage shit, which is why I’m freely contacting you while the rest of them fools got tracked by the new technology (the up-to-date phones they already owned) and is in custody now. Funny how things work, or don’t work, or whatever.
*
Motown mixed with Sugar Hill disco and hyphee tracks took us back in time, and trap music that swerved sideways into some next shit vibrated our souls even though none of us had a name for it. I felt Colored People Time revisiting me, sitting down in my soul. If you can talk, you can sing. If you can walk, you can dance.
The hustlers from off the corner, Miguel and DeMichael, came thru, partook of the liquor, danced and dozened and mourned the last days of the Rock. The party pushed into eternity. Darkness descended over the skyline and over our emotions.
One of Keisha’s momma’s people got too drunk and hella disorderly. The O.G. just up and started yellin’, “COLONIZER! COLONIZER!” Then he walked over to Miguel and waved both his hands in his face. He got right up in my man’s grille and hollered, “COLONIZER.” Then he grabbed Miguel by his ponytail braids. “COLONIZER.” Ain’t every day you see someone, let alone your close fam, get yanked by his ponytails. I was about to jump in and fight dude, but then Miguel put his hands up the way the cops tell you to do, palms out, level with his head. He kept his quiet at first, then he said, “I’m respectin’ homegirl’s apartment. You need to pump them breaks, unc.”
“COLONIZER. COLONIZER. COLONIZER.”
That was all the time it took for DeMichael to get behind the old man and put him in one of them jiujitsu-type choke holds that po-lice use. Old dude gasped for air and let go of Miguel’s braids. DeMichael let his neck go and controlled his arms. He walked the old man outside into the shadow of the Neiman Marcus. Standing there on the strip of green space that held the new construction separate from Rockwood, the two of them looked like lovers talkin’ out an issue after a real bad argument.
The party fell away, and me and Keish and Free and Miguel took the last six-pack of beer up to the rooftop.
We drank and laid down and looked up at the stars, our heads the four corners of the box that we was all stuck inside, our little universe. A cherry bomb rolled the earth beneath our building and we shook along with it.
“Y’all Negroes fittin’ to say somethin’, or are we just gonna sit up here pretending to be shy and shit?” Keisha called on us. “When did I become a Negro?” Miguel asked. “When the cops started hatin’ your ass,” Free said. “For real, my nigga.” Keish laughed.
“I cain’t believe y’all ain’t bring no smoke,” Miguel said. “Why do people even like beer?”
“Why do you like marijuana?” Free rejoindered. “Maybe if you’re trying to fall asleep, OK, but not if you want to dream.”
“Or see God,” Keisha added.
I imagined one last firework blast which would finally, after all these years, bring down the building, taking us all to God. I wouldn’t be against it.
“Public service announcement for that ass,” Free announced. “Don’t do drugs, pretty boy.”
“Teetotalin’-ass females,” Miguel roasted back, which idn’t the kinda thing I’d expect him to say, since he hadn’t been in school in who knows how long, but people will surprise you if you let yourself care about them.
I watched as he leaned back and tossed his empty beer can with a flick of his wrist. I got up and walked to the rooftop’s edge just as the can slid off the side. It fell into the emptiness below. I heard it go clang against somethin’ that wadn’t empty, and I listened to the echo of it vibrate from our building, past the tennis courts and the Neiman Marcus, to the luxury lofts that surrounded us, towering over us on three sides: the Redwoods. We were history, the kind that’s never recorded. That reality sat down in our circle and spoke to us in the silences between what we was sayin’: the Rock was all but broken apart beneath us.
*
I moved to the Ock, which was dusty like a brother who’s still rockin’ his FUBU fitted from the twentieth century. Dusty like a wardrobe full of clothes two sizes too small. Dusty like the dust that gathers as sure as mold in a rainy, wet place if you don’t keep everything clean and dry.
The Ock ain’t rainy and it ain’t wet. It’s located inland somewhere, which means it’s hot as your attic in summer and dry as our shoreline in drought. It’s also ghetto as hell. I’d bet all of Ravenscourt and the Rock and North Richmond done moved there. The home Momma and Daddy decided to move to was way bigger than our little apartment back in Rockwood, which was definitely a good thing, but I was gettin’ all the familiar ghetto vibes every time I walked outside and peeped the abandoned warehouse just up the way, not to mention the two, three, four liquor stores hemming us in north, south, east, and west, not to mention the homeless encampment only one block over. Then there was the issue of how stripped out our own home happened to be—I’m talkin’ no blinds, no running water, no heating, no air-conditioning. Them jokers straight-up sold us (check that: rented us) a skeleton!
By the time we had rattled our cage enough for the landlord to unstrip the place and put all that shit back where it needed to be, a week had passed and I had had time to see that our new neighborhood was crammed full of these skeleton houses. Apparently, trifling landlords exist everywhere, not just in Oakland. Squatters had set up in some of the stripped-out homes. In others, families would move in one day and then jump out the next as soon as they realized they had rented only the outline of a house. Only those who couldn’t afford nothin’ better accepted the situation and lived where we lived.
We wanted a better life, but from what I could see, the Ock was just a way station between where we was from and wherever it was we was meant to be. Back in the day in the Youth Control, if they had told the COs to let half of us walk out into the
empty countryside to set up shop solo dolo for ourselves, the society that we woulda built woulda looked a lot like the Ock: free, yessir, but without the basics that makes freedom matter.
*
Meanwhile, I was hardheadedly splitting the difference between finishing things out at Pied-montay and doing Daddy’s plan out in Antioch. The prep school had an online virtual campus run via its website. I decided to try and do my schoolwork on my new phone.
It was a prayer that, like the old folks said, ain’t get above my head. Half the apps and portals and mandatory interactive elements that made up Pied-montay’s virtual education was incompatible with my Caribbean technology. The phone had problems with the Bay Area in general. It and Antioch ain’t get along either. The wind was always blowing way too hard out there. It’s hot and dry, and not a tree in sight sometimes, depending on what dusty spot you find yourself. Which meant that my phone was always struggling, its connection a constant sometimeyness. I got the feeling that the phone just wadn’t meant for America—and that I might flunk out my senior year due to it. I remembered doin’ school from home back in the days when the virus shut down the whole state, how the kids who lacked the proper technology or who couldn’t stare at a screen all day basically just fell so far behind it was like they missed a whole grade level and never got it back: I was turning into one of those kids. My Hierakonplishments were well in my rearview, almost like some other, smarter kid had Hierakonplished all that.
I called Keisha up ’fore I fell too far behind. I begged her and then I begged her momma to let me stay with them till graduation. Keisha did some convincing and a door opened for my return to Oakland. I told Momma and Daddy the deal, not asking for permission, just puttin’ it to them straight up: I was fittin’ to flunk if I didn’t rehouse where I could attend school in person.
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 27