“I told you,” Francis said. “I live here.”
The officer let go of Francis’s arms and got close to his face and sniffed. “You been drinking, haven’t you?” he said. “What else you been doing? Smokin’ a little reefer? Been shooting dope?”
In his head, Octavian heard what their father told them every time they passed someone getting pulled over, Boys, if you ever find yourself in an encounter with the police, be polite, don’t talk back. Say ‘I’m sorry.’ Say ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Francis turned away from the officer and at that moment, his eyes met Octavian’s.
Francis turned back to the cop and stood up straighter and said, “Yeah. I been drinking, smoking too. But I ain’t been shootin’ dope. At least not today.”
There was a cadence to Francis’s voice that made the hair on the back of Octavian’s neck stand up. The cop must have heard it too because he grabbed ahold of Francis’s arm with one hand and with the other, he wound up and swung long and hard across Francis’s face. Octavian gasped as the spit and blood flew out of his brother’s mouth and splattered across the hood of the cop car.
Octavian whispered, “Cut it out, Frankie. Cut it out right now. Stop being crazy, he’s going to kill you.” But Francis didn’t hear him. He wobbled and swayed. Then he hauled off and smiled, his teeth soaked with blood.
What happened next was as bitter as coal on the tongue, as sand under the fingernails. A black boot struck, a club smashed. Francis’s handsome face twisted as his slender body rolled across the sidewalk under the impact. And Octavian was only able to stand in the haze of the flashing lights and watch. Inside his head the screaming was so loud he wished he could hold his hands over his ears, but outside he was silent until he saw his brother’s golden eyes close and he was sure he was dead. Then Octavian ran, ran right for the cop who had the club up over his head, ready to bring it down hard, again.
“Please, please, Mr. Officer. Sir,” Octavian said as he grabbed hold of the suspended arm. “That’s my brother, please stop. We live right here. Like he said. I promise you. Please stop. I can go inside right now and get my father. Please, my mother is sick, she’s dying. I was supposed to bring him home. Please.”
The cop looked down at Octavian and said, “Who the fuck are you?”
Octavian looked up at him. The skin on his face was thick and marked with angry black stubble. “I’m his brother, sir,” he said. “My name is Octavian. Octavian Munroe. That’s Francis.”
“Where’d you come from?” the cop said, and shook Octavian off his arm.
“I was right there,” Octavian said and pointed to the corner. “I was bringing him home, like I said. My mother is sick. She wants him home with her.”
The cop looked down the empty street before he lowered his body so he could be eye-to-eye with Octavian. “You didn’t see nothing, you understand me?” he said. “Your fucking brother, he fell down and that’s what happened. If I find out that some nigger parents have reported their son got pushed around by a cop, I’m coming for you. Not your brother. You. You understand?”
Octavian nodded.
Francis was laid out on the sidewalk and still. Still and silent. The cop stood up and gave him a shove with the toe of his boot. “Remember,” he said to Octavian, “I know where you live.”
Octavian waited until the car, lights still going, turned the corner before he fell to the ground in a frightened ball. In his chest, he felt his heart seize and then began to slam up against his ribs while his lungs grasped at threads of air. He lay on the sidewalk and wondered if he was going to die, die right there next to his wounded brother with the light from their living room window glowing down on the both of them. He felt nothing but his heart and the squeezing of his lungs until Francis’s fingers, long and scraped, reached over and intertwined with his.
Octavian tried to focus on the soft rhythm with which Frankie’s thumb ran across the back of his hand and willed his heart to match that beat instead. They lay there holding hands until Octavian’s breath came easier and until Francis could push himself to sit up.
Octavian felt as fragile as the lavender tissue paper that lined his grandmother’s drawers. Francis’s lip was split wide and his angled cheeks were swollen, crusted over with dark brown blood. He looked young in a way he rarely did. So young that Octavian hesitated before he said, “What do we do now, Frankie?”
Francis stood up and pulled Octavian to his feet. He hunched a bit to the side where the cop had hit him the hardest and looked up at the second floor. “We wait for Pop to go to sleep,” he said.
“And then?”
“What do you mean and then?” The youth that had been in Francis’s face for that brief, kind moment was gone. “And then you take your ass to sleep and don’t say shit. That’s what.”
“What are you going to tell Pop about those bruises?”
Francis looked away and shrugged. “I don’t know. That I got in a fight or something. He doesn’t pay any attention to anything but Mama now anyway.”
“You’re not going to tell him that it was a cop? You wasn’t doin’ nothing wrong, Frankie, he shouldn’t a done that to you.”
“Don’t be stupid, Tave,” Francis said, looking Octavian in the eye for the first time that night. “What’s Pop going to do anyway? You know he told us we don’t have any rights when it comes to the cops. Plus, you heard the motherfucker, didn’t you? He knows where we live. Believe me, he will come find my ass and yours too. Just like he said he would. So do me a favor and keep your big fucking mouth shut.”
Octavian felt his heart start to beat fast again and he swallowed the breath that tried to catch. “Okay, Frankie,” he said.
“I’m not playing, Tave.”
“I said okay.”
After the night with the cop, Octavian thought of little else other than when his heart would seize up again. During class, as long as he could focus on the concrete, definitive answers of long division, the pattern of diagramming sentences, he was able to keep the attacks away, but the playground was another story. He no longer saw the point of kickball or playing hopscotch with the girls. Instead, he concealed himself inside one of the big cement climbing tunnels on the far end of the playground and listened for his tormented heartbeat.
It reminded him of a time, back before his grandmother Fabiola died, when he and Francis used to spend tortuously long Sunday afternoons after church at her house. One vicious hot day, a bird flew in through the open back door and, unable to understand Francis and Octavian’s desperate movements to get it to fly back out, the bird flung itself again and again towards the blue sky on the other side of the living room window, until finally, it landed in a clump on the floor.
With tender hands, Francis had picked up the bird and cradled it in his palm. The bird’s neck was bent like a wilted flower. The two brothers sat beside each other on the plastic-covered orange couch and Octavian ran his forefinger along the dappled brown breast. The bird’s body began to stiffen and Fabiola came in and told them to “dispose of the damn thing, would you please?”
Inside the climbing tunnel on the playground, Octavian’s heart bashed against the window of his rib cage and he wondered if his heart would also wilt, stiffen into hardened stone. Sometimes he sang songs to himself. One of Frankie’s favorites like “Cool it Now” by New Edition, or one of his mother’s like “Ain’t Nobody” by Chaka Khan. But that also made him sad. So he searched the black expanse of asphalt of the playground and the unsympathetic brown bricks of the school, until he found some point of color—the flash of a pink coat on a girl playing tag, or the red hat on a second-grader crossing the monkey bars hand over hand—and followed it with his eyes until his heart begin to slow. Sometimes afterwards he was so exhausted he fell into a short, deep sleep—only to jerk awake to buoyant children running relays on the other side of the tunnel’s wide cold opening, the boy in the red hat far in the lead.
TRACK 2
Cactus Tree
&n
bsp; MINA ROSE UNDERSTOOD AT an early age that nothing she had, mattered. She didn’t have a father, or own a pair of Jordache jeans, and there was no way her mother would get her jelly sandals. Instead, she had crooked teeth, sprout sandwiches in her lunchbox, and her mother Kanta Rose, who never wore make-up and refused to shave any part of her body. Mina gathered from thinly veiled whispers that this equation left Mina with a lonely fate, and she gave up on anything else making sense.
While Mina would argue otherwise, Kanta couldn’t really be charged with malicious neglect. Kanta was a divorce attorney who refused to represent men. She believed she and her daughter were two women of equal merit. In her mind, her hands-off mothering of Mina was a huge improvement over the extreme, anxiety-ridden devotion of the New Jersey Orthodox Jewish childhood she had endured.
Mina, on the other hand, was fairly certain she had been switched at birth. She believed that somewhere out there, her real mother longed for her. That she was waiting for the day she could make her a Jiffy peanut butter and Welch’s grape jelly sandwich with the crusts cut off. If not, then her father would return someday and rescue her—a dream that, when Mina shared it, made Kanta laugh out loud and say, “That should be interesting, seeing how I was impregnated by the stars. And Joni Mitchell.”
This, of course, was a lie. The real story was one that Kanta would never tell a soul, not even Mina. This was partially because the only thing she would have been able to tell Mina about her father was that he was a man named Rob who sold peyote and lived somewhere in New Mexico. But also, on the night Kanta got pregnant with Mina in the summer of ’73, she heard Joni Mitchell sing for the first time, and lay in a field as meteors rushed towards earth, lighting up the sky with an explosion of shooting stars. And this was a much better story.
Back then Kanta had run from her oppressive, conservative Jewish childhood and wound up on Willow Farm—500 acres of Missouri woods and dry river hollers, with clear creeks and algae-covered rocks that made your feet slip. Willow Farm was owned by Marianne Hendricks, who opened it in 1962, proclaiming any wayward girl, discarded woman or runaway was welcome. The word spread in whispers behind barns and under the stalls of girl’s bathrooms. From the lips of one girl to another they told each other: There’s this place you can go. A place far away from everything, where you don’t have to get married, where you could be in love with another woman, where your dad, your mom, your stepfather with the belt, can’t find you.
If they arrived pregnant, they had choices. For those who didn’t want their babies, Marianne knew how to work the magic of teas and berries. And if they did want their children, they weren’t left to the mercy of bitter doctors with blue plastic gloves and high-forceps. Their babies arrived like Mina did, on soft patches of green moss atop a pile of handmade quilts, lovingly coaxed into the world by Marianne’s soft hands. It never concerned Kanta to inform Rob, and a year after Mina was born, Kanta was long gone from Willow Farm. The story she told herself about her child being created by the stars and Joni’s sweet voice was already the only story she knew.
Mina secretly wished that Kanta was more like her third-grade teacher Ms. Fitzgerald. Ms. Fitzgerald was the most beautiful woman Mina had ever seen. She had deep brown skin and eyelashes that reached up and touched her eyebrows. She wore her hair tied in a bun and had a neck that curved like a swan’s. When Ms. Fitzgerald leaned over to help Mina with a math problem, Mina would inhale long, slow breaths of rosewater and bleach. More than once, Mina invented a bad headache so that she could sit with Ms. Fitzgerald during recess and suck on the round peppermint candies she kept in her purse.
When Kanta showed up for Third Grade Parent Night wearing a threadbare tank top, Mina gasped as she watched her embrace Ms. Fitzgerald in an unexpected hug. Saw Kanta’s thick, black armpit hair cascade across Ms. Fitzgerald’s immaculate silk blouse with the cloth covered buttons like tiny pillows. On the car ride home Mina continued to see the uncomfortable smile Ms. Fitzgerald gave them when they left, and she unleashed on Kanta a fury of tears and sobs.
“Who cares about my hairy armpits?” Kanta wanted to know. She was sure, she told Mina, that Ms. Fitzgerald didn’t shave her armpits. “Have you ever seen her armpits?” Kanta asked.
“Of course I haven’t seen her armpits,” Mina said. “But I’m sure if I did, they would not be overflowing with hair like yours.”
Kanta scoffed. “You think you know everything. Most black women don’t shave their armpits.”
Mina looked out the window at the tall stone lions guarding the entrance to the Loop and felt overwhelmed by the conviction that her mother would never understand her. It was not the first time or the last she would feel this way. A few months later, Kanta announced to her friend Hermine at dinner one night that Mina could speak jive. Hermine, who dressed in unfortunate shades of purple, had thin, mottled skin covered with rusty freckles and bright red hair. She opened her eyes wide.
“You can? That is so cool! I wish I could speak jive. Speak jive, Mina. Go ahead.”
Mina flipped the bland fava beans over on her plate and felt her face grow bitter hot. “No,” she said. That day at recess, her best friend Makeba had told her, “You ain’t never gonna be black, Mina.” It was after she’d tried and failed again to jump Double Dutch without the ropes winding around her neck, her ankle, or catching on her arm. And the turners, Patrice and Sheryl had groaned, “Come on!”
Makeba was nearly a foot taller than everyone else in second grade and rail thin. She had dark brown skin and wore her hair in thin broken cornrows. Makeba was the closest thing Mina had to a best friend. Makeba also didn’t have a father. But, Makeba didn’t have a mother either. Just an angry auntie who’d never let Makeba go over to Mina’s house to play. And sometimes, like that afternoon at recess, Makeba had bruises on her face or scratches on her arms. Like Mina, Makeba’s pants were always too short and she wore threadbare t-shirts in the winter, but even though Mina was often accused of flooding, nobody ever teased Makeba. She’d been known to wait for girls or boys after school who talked about her during the day and give them bruises worse than her own. She was the fastest runner in the whole school and definitely the best Double Dutch jumper in the third grade—and probably the fourth grade, too.
“It’s alright,” Makeba said, handing Mina a green apple Jolly Rancher, “I ain’t never gonna be white.”
Kanta got up and began stacking the plates on top of the pile of dirty dishes that clambered up out of the sink and spilled onto the counter. “Oh come on,” she said. “I heard you talking jive the other day when you were playing with your dolls. And back in February, when you recited that poem by, by—what was the poet’s name?”
“Langston Hughes?”
“Right, Langston Hughes,” Kanta said. “You spoke jive when you read that poem, remember? The one about the crystal stair?”
“I don’t remember how that goes anymore,” Mina said.
“So just speak jive.” Kanta gave Mina a frustrated look.
“I thought you said I should never feel forced to do something I don’t want to do.”
Hermine laughed her rough smoker’s laugh and said, “Told you you were creating a monster.”
Kanta sat back down and changed her tone. “Please, Mina Min,” she said. “I think it’s so cool that you can speak jive. I wish I could.”
“I can’t just speak jive,” Mina said. “I need something to talk about, someone to talk to.”
“I know, you can read a book,” Kanta jumped up again and grabbed the copy of Grimm’s Fairytales that had been left on the counter by the phone years before and never moved. She put it down hard on the table in front of Mina. “Read something from this.” The book was covered in a sticky layer of oil, pollen and dust and Mina saw it held Kanta’s fingerprints from where she’d picked it up. “Read Little Red Riding Hood in jive!” Kanta’s eyes were full of bright anticipation. She was ready to be entertained.
Mina stared long and hard a
t the woman whom she’d never called “Mama” or “Mom” or even “Mother.” She was Kanta. A word that balled up in Mina’s throat as she took her plate to the sink. “Kiss my ass, Kanta,” she said, and walked out of the kitchen.
Behind her she heard Hermine say, “I think that was jive, wasn’t it?” And they burst into laughter.
TRACK 3
Someone to
Watch Over Me
BY THE FIFTH GRADE, Mina had given into her life with Kanta and no longer thought about the mother she wished she had. There were moments, Mina was pretty sure, that Kanta loved her. One was the day, while waiting for Kanta to buy Ivory soap at Williams Pharmacy, Mina absentmindedly picked up a copy of The Mighty Avengers: The Wraiths Walk Among Us off the comic book stand and asked Kanta to buy it for her. In untrue form, Kanta nodded, handed the comic book to the blue-haired lady behind the counter and paid the extra fifty cents.
After that, Mina didn’t need jellies, or jeans that fit. She didn’t dream of her long-lost father. Her powers were endless. She could freeze the world around her and skate over the frozen shapes of children with fingers pointed, mouths open in laughter. She became bigger than the buildings, her muscles stretching out her skin—which turned blue or green, was instantly cloaked in armor, in invisibility. Mina was no longer sad that Makeba had moved away, or as rumor had it, was sent to a foster home, and instead played games where she used her powers to go rescue her and they flew off together to save the world. At home, she played alone on the rusting swing set in the back yard until the chill of darkness overcame her. At school, she spent recess sitting in a climbing tunnel perfect for hiding and reading.
The first time Mina saw Octavian in the tunnel with his eyes closed, she cursed. Her one escape from the terrifying stew that was the playground had been taken and she was left with dismal alternatives. She resolved to take cover in the last stall of the girls’ bathroom, surrounded by angry pink metal walls spotted with the names of classmates and excrement wiped from errant fingers. She didn’t care, really. The stall worked as well as the tunnel, was less distracting even, and she was happy until the day the thick brown shoes of Mrs. Korchoran, the playground monitor, appeared under the stall door and Mina was forced back outside.
There You Are Page 5