by Pearl Cleage
Ten years?
"Then I just got mad and stayed there. I got in so many fights, brothers were taking bets on how long it would be before somebody put me out of my misery. Then one day this old guy sat down next to me and said, 'You know what your problem is? You ain't slowed down long enough to see the lessons yet, youngblood. Lessons everywhere,' he said, 'flying around like birds, but you ain't even take a minute to check 'em out 'cause you movin' too fast cutting you a path. That's why you in here now/ he said. To slow your ass down.'
"He was starting to get on my nerves, but I was feeling too low to get him out of my face, so he kept talking. 'That's why there are so many geniuses in the joint,' he told me. 'They finally get time to slow down and look for the lesson. Problem is, then they get out and get goin' again and forget everything they learned and they end up right back where they started from.' "
He was holding my ankle, rotating my right foot slowly counterclockwise.
"That's when I started doing the t'ai chi again. Trying to learn my lessons. When I got out, I figured Idlewild was slow enough so I could hold on to what I'd learned longer here than in the city." He smiled at me. "And Mitch and Joyce were here."
He slipped my shoes back on my well-pampered feet and looked at me.
"And did you learn your lesson?" I said, liking the sound of my newly soothed self.
"I'm working on it," he said. "But the part that makes me lucky is that I know that's what I'm supposed to be doing. Trying to figure it out."
"Is that really why you came back?" I said.
I was used to the pause between the question and the mswer, so I just waited.
"In 'Nam, the VC had miles of tunnels. They'd been Building them for years, since way before we even got over there, and they were all over the place. They weren't always those little tunnels you had to crawl through, either. Some of them were big enough to walk around in standing straight up. They moved supplies through them. Hid in them. Lived in them when they had to."
He unfolded himself gracefully from the pillow and sat back down on the couch.
"They beat us for a lot of reasons, but I knew they were going to the first time I saw one of those tunnels. We were only there doing time, but they were in for the long haul. They were home. It made them stronger."
I wasn't sure what he was getting at and he must have seen the confusion on my face.
"If you have to take a stand, home's the best place to do it," he said, and his voice was as soothing as the music.
"Thanks for the tea." It was getting late and the Sewing Circus was probably winding down by now.
He looked right at me. "Are you okay?" "Better now," I said, and meant it. He offered me a ride, but I wanted to walk. The night was clear as a bell and the air around us was soft and sweet when we stepped outside. I could see the candles flickering through the window when I turned to say good night.
"Before you go," he said, "are you ready for your free, introductory t'ai chi lesson, so simple anybody can do it?" "Even me?" I said.
"Especially you," he said. "Relax your arms." He turned me around, stood close without pressing against my behind, thank God, raised my arms up and opened them wide like kids always do when you first set them down in front of the ocean. Then he brought my hands around in front, and with his arms guiding mine, slowly softened my elbows and turned my palms to face me.
We stood there like that for just a moment and then he guided my arms back down to my sides and released them. This was not a moment for secrets and I felt mine burning between us. Death pussy.
"I have to tell you something," I said, and dammit, I quavered.
"Do you want to?"
"Yes," I said, but I felt myself tearing up again, scared that if I told him, he'd pull away. Scared of how much I didn't want that to happen.
"Do you want to tell me now?"
"I thought I did, but ..." I stopped that one prequaver, but barely. What the hell was the problem? We were only going to be friends, right?
"Maybe you've had enough excitement for one day. Tell me another time. I'm not going anywhere." And he smiled that smile. "I'm home, remember?"
I nodded. "I better go."
"I'm glad you came," he said. "Don't be a stranger. My grandmother used to say that, too."
"Too late for me to be a stranger," I said, trying to keep it light as I headed back to Joyce's. "You saw me in my pigtails."
"But that was another life," he said. "All this stuff here is brand-new."
11
The last or the Sewing Circus finally straggled home around midnight, arms full of sleeping toddlers and hearts full of revolution. Joyce was ecstatic. She got no drop-off in membership moving the group to the house, and being under siege brought out the best in them. Aretha, whose sociology class was study-ng the sixties, suggested picketing Sunday morning service, /vhich Joyce thought was too confrontational. Tomika offered :o kick the Reverend Mrs.' ample ass, which Joyce confessed did appeal to her, but which she rejected as inappropriate behavior between black women.
Finally Joyce suggested that each Sewing Circus member express her feelings individually to the Good Reverend after church on Sunday. When they met next week, everybody could report on what they had said and what he had said before determining their next step. They thought that was a great idea, even though they probably didn't suspect that it was Joyce's way of getting them used to the idea of articulating their outrage to the people they allowed to control so much of their lives.
"If they can get in the Rev's face," Joyce said, "pretty soon they'll be able to talk back at the food stamp office and be indignant at the Welfare Department, and from there? Sky's the limit!"
Joyce flopped down on the couch, exhilarated and exhausted, and looked at me to share the excitement, but the truth was, I had hardly heard a word she said. I wanted to know why Eddie had been in jail. I asked Joyce if she knew.
"Of course," she said.
"Why?"
"Ask him."
Typical Joyce. "It isn't anything really terrible, is it?"
"The worst," she said.
"I'm serious."
"Me, too." She looked at me. "He won't mind if you ask him. He probably thinks I've already told you anyway."
"Then why don't you?"
Joyce took a minute before she answered me. "Sometimes I meet people who already know what happened to Mitch because somebody told them about it. They've already had a chance to hear it, and picture it, and have whatever
reaction they're going to have to it. So when we get introduced, they think they know something about me, when all they know is a bunch of details." She shrugged. "It's not the same."
I knew she would warn me if he was really dangerous or anything, so I wasn't scared, but she had said the worst. I figured he must have killed somebody, which isn't necessarily a problem for me. I think I'm capable of it. I knew a lawyer in Atlanta who said everybody can be a murderer under the right circumstances. More likely, under the wrong circumstances. Eddie was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There were a lot of reasons why you might have to kill somebody. Maybe self-defense. I just hoped it wasn't a kid or a woman. I never really understood the reasons men kill each other, but the reasons they kill women and children are almost always about wanting to control things that don't belong to them or some weird sex stuff. Either way, that didn't sound like Eddie. At least, I hoped it didn't.
I'm not going to ask him about it yet, though. I think he'll tell me when he's ready to tell me. Like the Jamaicans always say when you start screaming because your flight home from Montego Bay is twenty-four hours late: Patience, girl, patience. Soon come.
12
The nice thing about Eddie living so close was that we saw him almost every day. The bad thing was, I never knew when he'd appear with a bag of collard greens or a loaf of fresh bread or some news for Joyce and smile for me that would set my mind racing along to its own conclusions. I can't deny that sometimes it was so
rt of exciting but sometimes it was just exhausting. j?an uc uv*
For example, when Eddie walked over this morning to tell Joyce some of the oldsters, mostly holdovers from the glory days who had wanted to end their lives here in peace, were really nervous about the break-ins. I wasn't ready to talk about last night yet, but Joyce wasn't here, so I knew it was only a matter of time.
"You doing okay today?" he said, looking at me while he waited for the tea I'd offered to cool off enough to drink.
"Doing fine," I said. "Thanks for being a port in a storm last night."
"My pleasure," he said.
I changed the subject and asked him who he thought was doing the break-ins. He said Frank and Tyrone without blinking. I told him Frank reminded me of the kid who killed the Koreans in Menace II Society and he had never heard of it. He doesn't have a television, and even though I gave Joyce and Mitch a VCR about five years ago, they never even hooked it up.
I convinced him that if he wanted to understand Frank and Tyrone, he needed to see at least two or three of these angry-young-black-man movies. He hadn't been to the city for a while and things have gotten a lot worse a lot faster than anybody thought they would. It's important to keep up, I told him, so you don't get careless and let your passport lapse or forget to keep a little getaway money stashed somewhere you can get to it without using your ATM card.
Of course, he doesn't have an ATM card, but the principle was the same and he agreed to hook up the VCR if I'd rent the videos. I said that sounded good and we made a date for Friday. Well, not a date date. A friend date. Joyce and Imani will be here to chaperone, and by that time, I hope he will have forgotten about last night.
He got all the way to the end of the driveway before he stopped and came back. I watched him walking and re-~j i, v,oantifvii he looked in the moonlight.
"Can I ask you something?" he said, real serious, propping his foot on the bottom step.
"Ask away," I said.
"Why were you crying last night?"
"Which time?" I said, trying to play it off.
"Outside," he said, serious as hell. "When you were watching me."
I hesitated. Because, I thought, I'm not going to be around long enough for us to fall in love. "I don't know," is what I said.
"Would you tell me?"
I decided to lie. "Yes."
He smiled and nodded like that was the right answer. "Good enough."
And I nodded and said it back to him like it was my idea. "Good enough."
And it was.
13
Tonight? I say.
"She just got the orientation packet from the school and she needs some help deciphering it," Joyce says, guiding a bottle into Imani's wide-open mouth. To be so skinny, that is the eatingest baby I've ever seen.
"You have to go tonight?" I say, and Joyce looked at me.
"You know Aretha. The longer she sits there staring at all that stuff she can't quite figure out, the more likely she is to figure it's a mistake for her to be going up there in the first place." Joyce wiped a little milk dribble off Imani's chin and cooed at the baby. "Isn't that right, sweet girl? Isn't that exactly right? Besides, she can't get over here and back at night by herself."
"But what about Eddie?" I said.
"What about him?"
I took a breath and tried to speak gently. Imani's eyes were already at half-mast, signaling sleep. The child can sleep anywhere. "He's coming over to watch a movie with us tonight, remember?"
"I'm sure you can handle it."
"That's not the point." I sounded petulant even to my own ears.
Joyce laid Imani over her shoulder and began to tap her back, gently encouraging a burp. "What is the point?"
"That we invited him," I said.
"You invited him," she said. "I wouldn't invite anybody to see those movies. They just depress me and I'm already so depressed about angry young brothers I can hardly stand it."
I couldn't argue that. These doomed homeboy movies are pretty intense. Joyce saw my surrender and she couldn't resist a parting shot as she got up to put Imani down for her nap.
"Don't worry," she said. "I think you're old enough to have company without a chaperone on the premises." "It's not like that and you know it," I said. Joyce just nodded, but I heard her chuckling all the way down the hall.
By six o'clock they were headed out and I felt pretty cool about Eddie coming. All we were going to do was watch a movie and talk about it. No big deal. No stress. Eddie and I were just friends. Joyce's chuckling was her problem, not mine. So I kissed them both good-bye, sent regards to Aretha, watched Joyce buckle Imani into her car seat, and waved as they tooted the horn and turned out of sight. Then all of a sudden I got really nervous. It wasn't a date or anything, but standing in the empty house, it damn sure felt like one. I felt really weird and I couldn't figure out how to relax. Before I got here, I hadn't realized how much I was depending on vodka to calm my ass down in moments of stress and weirdness.
But since nobody here is a big drinker, I've cut way back and it's been cool, except right now I keep thinking about Eddie coming over and the more I try not to think about it like a date, the more it feels like a date until I actually dash upstairs at the last possible moment, take a shower, put on perfume and a black linen sundress that always makes me feel like my cool self, and dash back down as Eddie walked up in the yard and waved. He was wearing black drawstring pants and a black T-shirt that showed the muscles in his chest and his arms.
"You look great," he said, handing me a bunch of sweet purple grapes.
I felt that pulse between my legs again, but I ignored it, thanked him for the grapes, and made some tea while he hooked up the VCR. We settled in on the couch with a more than respectable distance between us and I cued up the video, Menace II Society. I hadn't seen the movie for a while and I had completely forgotten the opening scene where the father suddenly pulls out a gun and blows a man away for an insult during a card game. It is a very sudden and scary and violent moment and it happens in front of the young child who grows up to be the hero. Maybe hero is the wrong word. He's the one we get to watch as he careens full speed ahead toward the terrible, inevitable death we know he's going to die at the end of the movie.
When that first murder happened like five minutes into the movie, I felt Eddie's whole vibe change. We were sitting on the couch and it was like a blast of cold air came in the room. I looked over at him and his face looked like it was made of dusty brown rock. He was staring at the screen like he couldn't believe what he was seeing. I knew the double murder scene in the store was coming up, which is even more sudden, more senseless, and more random.
"I told you it was pretty bad," I said.
He just nodded. "You got that right."
I turned back to watch the two young black men change the course of their lives by shooting, and witnessing the shooting of, a frightened Korean grocer and his wife. Eddie's chill had become glacial and this sure didn't feel like a date anymore. It felt like a disaster. When the young killer proudly shows his friends the stolen security camera's videotape of the murders, Eddie got up and turned away. I reached for the remote, clicked off the VCR, and waited.
"They're training people to look at this for fun," he said so quietly it was like he was talking to himself. "They're going to make them love the shit, and once you learn to love it, it doesn't make any difference who it is. You just love it."
This was the first time I'd heard him curse. He heard it, too.
"I'm sorry," he said, looking at me. "I just ... I had years around that kind of death energy. All those months in 'Nam. All those years on the street and in the joint, nothing moving through me but death energy, and I ate it up." He closed his eyes and took a slow breath. "I got good at it, too." He tried to smile at me, but I could feel him making up his mind. "This time I need to tell you something."
"But do you want to?" I said, giving him the same out he had given me the other night.
"Yes,
I do."
"Then tell me."
"I want to tell you why I was in the joint."
"You don't have to," I said quickly, not sure if I was ready to hear it.
"I know," he said. "That's why I want to." It was my turn to take a breath. "Then tell me." He sat down on the couch again, but on the edge of the seat, back straight, at attention. "When I came back from 'Nam, I was crazy. I didn't care about anything or anybody. I had seen too much, done too much. I had learned to kill people with my hands so fast they didn't have a chance to holler. I knew how to make people give up information they never intended to tell a living soul. I was good at that. The best, they told me, because I never got anxious and killed somebody
before they told me what I wanted to know. They thought I should be real proud of that.
"When I got back to Detroit, the union jobs had dried up, but there is always a place for somebody like me in the life. I was young and wild and didn't care about killing people for somebody else's reasons. That's what I was trained to do. I did a lot of coke, so I could stay up for days at a time. The kind of dreams I was having, I never wanted to go to sleep if I could help it."
Eddie stood up again and walked over to the window. "After a while I started working for some of the dealers. Collecting money. Scaring off people who wanted in without paying the dues. Taking care of people who got stupid and tried to steal the money or the drugs or the customers." He took another breath and stood there looking toward the lake, barely visible under the thin new moon.
"Just tell me," I said.
His hands were hanging at his sides like they didn't belong to him. "That's how I met Sela. She was working for a mean pimp and she thought I could help her move up to something better. She had already seen a little bit of everything, so she wasn't scared of me and my bad dreams and she didn't care how I made my money as long as I always had some. I hadn't been with a woman whose name I remembered since before I went to 'Nam and I was lonesome, I guess, so we hooked up and she moved in with me.
"She got tired of it fast, though, and started tricking again, so we broke up, but right after that I started dealing for myself and making a lot of money, so she came back, but it still wasn't right. It wasn't supposed to be right. It was just something we were doing until we could think of something else to do. When she moved in with the guy who was supplying me, I didn't give a damn.