Meanwhile, Rockwood’s former residents and the boys of the Youth Control have even more totally disappeared from my radar, either because they’re dead and I don’t know it or because we simply move in such dissimilar circles that there’s no way my informational path will cross with theirs. I have no idea what’s happened to Vista and Trey and Keisha’s crazy people and the barber who climbed out of an Oakland pothole to cut a frightened child’s hair one afternoon. “Time,” Georg Lukács writes, “can become constitutive only when connection with the transcendental home has been lost.” Or, as Copeland himself said, the world that he’s from and that I came to know long enough to know him doesn’t exist anymore. That is true and I feel its death like a ghost flying inside of me.
I have this dream—it recurs whenever I begin to forget it. I’m in my last year in law school. I sit at a coffee shop downtown, textbook in my hands. I am studying for a law and ethics course. And then two shadows appear before me, darkening the text. I look up and I recognize the masked shadows. “Keisha and Ayesha?” I ask, even though Cope’s descriptions of both of them are etched so permanently in my mind that despite their masks the question is unnecessary. “I thought you were dead.” They look at me silently; of course they are not dead. “Is he dead?” I ask in a rush, but of course he is not dead. “He’s here, isn’t he?” I whisper.
They do not answer.
I scan the square that surrounds the shop for his face, or a mask with which he might disguise himself. I see the students who scatter the square, their heads drawn down into their texts. I look to the bootleggers, the can collectors, the panhandlers, the drug merchants. So many marginal people. Cope could be any one of them, man or woman, black or blacker, legally or illegally involved. Boy, I think, boy, boy, boy, you are here.
I turn back to the two women. I want to ask them if America’s changed enough for the rabbit to reveal himself, but as I begin to speak, Keisha raises her hand, signaling for my silence. I hold my question. She and Ayesha turn and walk away, and I can do nothing but watch them go. They move quickly across the square and disappear around a corner or into a crowd, and then I see at my feet a folded piece of paper that I pick up. It is folded incredibly complicatedly. I fumble with it, trying to figure out its design. I pull it apart at its edges and tease it out a little at a time. Unraveling it takes a lifetime and I can never quite get it all the way open, but in the preliminary interior folds, I read like scattered truths the words “love” and “Cope” and “rabbit.”
The dream ends.
What does it mean, Dr. Freud?
Well, I guess it means not a thing since I can never unravel the whole complicated message. Perhaps Copeland Cane V is the rabbit, the African trickster god who came with us to the islands and then to America, showing us how to survive. Or perhaps he’s the rabbit in the track race that leads the pack and dies by preordained decree. Take your pick.
But it’s my dream, so maybe I should be the one to do what I want with it. I’ll refuse to interpret it. I’ll leave it there as is, a statement of the mind, that part of the mind that holds itself against interpretation. That’s all. Cope gave me his story, so I can do whatever I want with it, remember: I can destroy it or ignore it or forget it. But of course I couldn’t do those things even if I wished to. My heart tells me not to forget but to place him upon the public square and to leave him there for the people. That’s what he wanted: to put his words out to the people, even if they refuse to listen, even if all they’ll have him as is a dead man and maybe a murderer.
It’s too painful, all this old shit from years ago, I swear—but I will say this one last little thing about the dream. My thought on it is simple: love. Simple love sent from Copeland Cane to me and to all his people, all the good and bad and suffering people on this rock that spins and spins in darkness carrying us upon it. It is love I reciprocate, however distantly, however difficultly. It was part of my destiny to love and to free that innocent boy, and I confess that that is exactly what I did in my quiet way. When I dream around him to this day, I confess that it is still that boy that I see. It is that boy that I knew. Enter that into my record——.*
*Insurgency Alert Desk, Third Bureau: Copeland Cane V remains a fugitive from justice. It is unfortunate that he has become a symbol of sorts for a new wave of radicals, anti-state anarchists, black identity extremists, etcetera.
PHOTO CREDIT: AKUBUNDU AMAZU-LOTT
Keenan Norris is a novelist, essayist and short story writer. He holds an M.F.A. from Mills College and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. Keenan was a 2017 Marin Headlands Artist-in-Residence and has garnered a Public Voices fellowship (2020), a Callaloo fellowship (2016) and two Yerba Buena Center for the Arts fellowships (2017, 2015). He teaches American Literature and Creative Writing at San Jose State University and serves as a guest editor for the Oxford African-American Studies Center. He is the editor of the seminal Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape. Keenan’s short work has appeared in numerous forums, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, Alta, popmatters.com, BOOM: A Journal of California and several anthologies of California literature.
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The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 34