by Kim Reid
Ma hugged Bridgette and me, and called me a smart girl for taking care of my sister.
“You didn’t count. No fair.”
Ma looked at Bridgette, confused, then at me. Then she gave us another hug, which was when I could feel the tears coming but I wiped them away before she could see them. I was no baby like Bridgette, and Bridgette wasn’t crying. Ma’s friend turned the man over to some uniform cops who took him away, but it was a few days before I could get to sleep without being in her bed.
We never learned why the man was stalking her, but soon after that happened, we moved into another complex, and just two years after the Atlanta Police Department had hired its first black female officer, Ma enrolled in the police academy. She said the first thing she wanted to do was learn how to shoot a gun.
Chapter Five
School wasn’t so bad after the first few days. Ma gave me money to get some new saddle oxfords, even though she fussed about having to spend more money when she told me the first pair were wrong the day we bought them. She kept telling me what they looked like in her day, so I was certain those were not the shoes I wanted to wear. It turned out she was right.
Black kids made up a whopping 1 percent of the school’s population. I figured it would be an easy thing to make friends with those kids since we naturally had something in common. It’s the thing you can always count on—black folks finding each other wherever we are few. As with every other thing I was learning about the school, it turned out this wasn’t the case. The kids had been attending since seventh grade, and had already established their groups, and most surprising, not all together. They were friendly enough, but I knew they’d likely never be my friends. Not like those in my neighborhood, or the kids I went to middle school with in the West End. Those kids talked like me, listened to the same music, could see the style in a pair of straight-leg jeans cuffed over a new pair of white Converse high-tops.
Not the black kids at my new school. They were about as unlike me as the rich white kids, and they seemed bland and assimilated. They’d heard of the bands that were unknown to me—bands with names like Lynyrd Skynyrd and AC/DC. They could use the word crap without it sounding foreign on their tongues (in my neighborhood, we called it what it was—shit). Somehow, they could actually dance to the song “My Sharona.” I decided that trying to make friends with them would be no less difficult than making friends with the white kids. At least with the kids whose differences showed readily in their skin, in the intonation of their words, in their shiny Trans Ams and Corvettes that blasted “Sweet Home Alabama” from the radio, there would be no guessing where I stood, wondering where our similarities ended. So I did something I never would have expected I’d do a month earlier—I began making friends with some of the rich white kids.
They asked me stupid questions, and our initial conversations often involved discussions I’d never imagined I’d be part of.
“Does your hair get wet?” What, did you expect water would slide off as if my hair were a duck’s feathers?
“Can I touch your hair?” This I allowed only once. That one instance made me feel too much like a rabbit in a petting zoo, or a misunderstood circus freak, to allow it again. Each time someone asked to touch my hair after that, I had to fight an urge to hurt them. I wondered how they’d react if black people were all the time asking to touch their hair. But I didn’t really care to know, and besides, I already knew. In books, hair was always described as flaxen or being like corn silk, and I’d shucked enough ears of corn to know what that felt like. Smooth, shiny hair came on all the Barbie dolls, even the black ones. White people were hardly a mystery to me by the time I’d reached high school, because even though I didn’t know many personally—my teachers at the old school, a girlfriend of one of my aunts—their presence in my world was felt everywhere.
“Oh, you just have to come to the first school dance. You can show us all the new moves.” The most I could muster in response was a serious roll of the eyes. Being my first real experience with “overcoming stereotypes,” I wasn’t adept at doing so. No one asked me about a love of fried chicken or watermelon, but they wondered whether I’d be going out for the basketball team. I found it difficult to say, “Yes, I play basketball. I love playing basketball.”
I hated some of the things that I felt I had to do to make them comfortable with me, like talking differently when I was around them. It took nearly a year to let go of using “to be” as a present tense verb, as in “I be tripping when he tells a joke,” or “She be wearing a cute outfit to school every day.” It wasn’t as if I didn’t know how to conjugate verbs, not as though the nuns at my old school didn’t try to pound this particular verb usage out of our heads. It was just the way we talked around friends who wouldn’t suspect our intelligence because we talked that way. I realized early that people at the new school expected me to be less from the start, in a Catholic missionary “save the savages” kind of way, so I learned to speak the “right way” around kids when it used to be a requirement only around teachers.
It was like another chore outside of just attending school—learning to live this second life. I pretended to like the Eagles (until one day I realized I really did). When my classmates discussed ski vacations, I nodded as though I knew where Breadloaf was and tried to see the logic in wearing a down jacket with no sleeves during the winter. I wanted to ask, Aren’t your arms cold, too? Going five class periods without seeing a face like mine is not that big a deal, I told myself. I tried to call someone a “spaz” without it sounding ridiculous, but it always did. At first, it wore me out, made me grateful when I got off the bus downtown in a world that didn’t expect anything more of me than what I was. Eventually it got easier. Sometimes it was the fact that it did get easier that bothered me most.
*
New differences between the kids and me showed up daily. In the spirit of getting us more involved in PE instead of seeing it as a drudgery that caused our curling-ironed flips to fall before midday, the teacher suggested everyone bring an album or two that could be played during the PE hour. It was still early in the school year, before I’d really figured out just how foreign a place it was. I knew I’d never pass around the latest frosted blue eye shadows and pale pink lipsticks in the locker room the way my classmates did (I’d look like a clown in those colors). On the one Friday a month when we didn’t have to wear our uniforms, I knew I’d never be able to ask if anyone had a spare package of L’eggs pantyhose because I’d put a run in mine. (Nude didn’t apply to bare brown skin and Suntan didn’t refer to the shade of mocha I turned after a day in the sun.) But my music was something I could share with them. I was excited about getting home and going through my album collection, which was impressive because one of my aunts was dating a DJ who spun records in a nightclub and he gave her his duplicates, which she always gave to me.
After much consideration, and recognizing that a PE class demanded something upbeat, I chose two songs that were hot in 1979, at least in my world: Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” and Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell.” True, all I’d heard around school so far was a sound I didn’t know much about, southern rock from groups like .38 Special and Molly Hatchet, but I was sure my music would inspire the girls in class to move through whatever lame activity the teacher would inflict on us. This certainty made me get changed quickly and out to the gym floor before anyone else, where I handed my albums to the teacher so they’d get the first play. She took the albums from me without asking anything about them, and was lowering the arm on the school-issued record player just as all of the girls arrived in the gym.
The first few notes of “Ring My Bell” came out of the player’s speakers, sounding small and tinny compared to my stereo at home, and something like the special effects sound that always accompanied the firing of laser guns in seventies sci-fi movies. I looked around the gym floor at the girls to see if the music would have the effect I’d hoped for. Instead, there were small snickers, which grew into giggles
, until finally all of them were laughing out loud.
“What is this?”
“Disco. Someone brought disco.” It was as if I’d introduced the plague into the gym. “God, I can’t believe it. Who brought disco?”
It didn’t take more than a quick glance around for them to conclude it must have been me, the one who least fit in and who looked most likely to spread the dreaded disco among them. The teacher tried to ignore the girls, I suppose out of kindness toward me, and let the record play, tapping her foot to the beat until a funny look passed over her face and she lifted the arm of the record player abruptly.
That’s when it dawned on me that I hadn’t considered the lyrics when I made my selection, so involved was I in making sure the music would get the class fired up. About the same time I thought of this, the teacher must have figured out that “Ring My Bell” didn’t have a thing to do with alerting Anita to her man’s presence at the front door. She put the record back in the sleeve and handed both albums to me, not even willing to give old Gloria Gaynor a try. On top of that, every girl in the place now knew for sure who had brought the records.
“I’ll take these back to my locker,” I told her. It was a good ten minutes before I showed up on the gym floor again, and hoped that by then I’d pushed my anger and embarrassment down enough to get through the class without cussing out the next girl to say disco. The teacher must have said something while I was gone, because the laughs and comments had been reduced to knowing glances, the kind that only high-school girls can give, the kind that can decide and relay to the rest of the pack a girl’s social standing in an instant. I just acted like it didn’t faze me, but I decided that would be the last time I’d try to bring some of my world into theirs.
*
On a Saturday in October that still had the makings of a summer day—warm and sticky, the air feeling almost too heavy to breath—we kids were taking a break from playing basketball on the driveway of the boys with the hoop. Our hosts were three brothers—one a year younger than I, one a year older than Bridgette, and a third who was too young to hang with any of us. His parents made his brothers look out for him anyway, which meant he tagged along behind the older kids like an afterthought, and always seemed to have skinned knees from falling while trying to keep up. All the kids from the Beautiful Family were there, a good thing because the boys were the best players on the street, and the best-looking.
Marie and I were the only girls the boys would take when choosing teams. We were the only girls willing to go hard to the basket and scrap for the ball without fussing about getting scratched, or worrying about our hair coming loose from our ponytails. Plus, we could shoot from the outside, a skill learned to avoid some of those under-the-basket skirmishes. Cassandra and her younger sister Latrice were there. Bridgette and Latrice were friends, and we gave them the job of chasing down a runaway ball or holding on to valuables that might get damaged in a game—eyeglasses (mine), a bracelet, loose change, a pack of Bubble Yum that would be returned to the owner soft from sitting in the sun or a pocket, and usually missing a piece. In return, they got to hang out with us older kids. Cassandra would never join a game, even if she knew how to play, because it required bumping up against sweaty boys, one of the reasons I enjoyed the game.
Playing basketball was one of the few occasions I wasn’t nervous around boys. I loved their awe when I hit two points from the outside while being defended by a boy six inches taller. The moment my feet left the ground in the jump shot, when I felt the ball leave my fingertips, watched it arc through the air and fall into the basket, heard the whisper of leather moving through net without touching rim or backboard, I was all confidence. By the time a boy from the other team had grabbed the ball and run up the driveway to take it out again, my shot was forgotten. But in the seconds between the shot and the next play, hearing a player from my team say “nothing but net,” or taunting the boy who’d been playing me with “in your face” or “you let a girl play you like that?” was the sweetest thing. Cassandra would never know that feeling (and probably wouldn’t care, anyway) because she always sat on the porch steps watching the game, along with the second daughter from the Beautiful Family, who was another prissy girl.
We had just finished a game of Twenty-One, my side victorious, and were resting up so we could start another. I sat on the porch steps and could smell the pine needles someone had raked from the lawn and spread under the holly bushes that grew in front of the porch. It was barely a smell, the pine oil long since faded, just enough to remind me of something warm and pleasant.
“We play Fulton High tonight. Who’s going to the game?” asked one Beautiful boy, who was the oldest of us and in the eleventh grade. Along with his brother and Marie, he went to George High like everyone else in our neighborhood. He tried to spin the ball on his middle finger like Meadowlark Lemon, but managed no more than a few rotations before the ball fell and he had to try again.
No one outside the Beautiful Family planned to go to the game.
“Why not Cassandra? You go to George, show some school spirit,” Marie said.
“I don’t like sports.”
“No one goes for the sports. People go for the cheering and socializing, and to hear the band and watch the steppers at halftime.”
I didn’t say anything, only thought how different it was at my school, where the football game was everything, where the team ran the show because they had a tradition of going to the state finals every year since dirt was created. The band had no soul and I was certain no one at the school had ever seen a step show, much less knew what one was. In my head, I kept hearing, Who brought disco?
Everyone was quiet for a while, and then Cassandra asked, “What about these kids turning up missing?” It was an attempt to keep the conversation from returning to her not going to the game. Or she may have asked because she was like an old person that way, bringing up the news or talking about the weather the way old people do when there’s nothing else to say.
“Not just missing. Dead. Two dead and one missing,” Marie said. “You think it’s just a coincidence?” She said it in a way to make the you addressed to anyone, but we all knew she was directing it to me. I was the one most likely to know.
“We don’t think so, but it’s too soon to tell.” I was good at giving just enough information to titillate, but not enough to get into any trouble. It was a politician’s skill I’d learned listening to Ma answer similar questions. I liked the way I could let we slide off my tongue as though I had anything to do with it, and the way none of the kids ever questioned my knowledge. “Just too soon to tell.”
One of the boys who lived in the house went inside for a few minutes and returned with a stack of Dixie cups and a plastic pitcher of Kool-Aid full of ice. The drink was so sweet, we knew he’d made it, not his mother, and we were glad. The cups were tiny, with riddles and cartoons on them, made for preschoolers instead of sun-weary, half-grown kids, so we drank the first cup greedily, then settled into a resting spot to savor the second cup. We all had red mustaches as Kool-Aid dried on our upper lips in a breeze that briefly hinted at fall.
Someone had brought a boom box, and now Sugarhill Gang’s new song was playing, “Rapper’s Delight.”
“That’s my song,” I said.
“That’s my song,” said a Beautiful brother, and the challenge was on.
After the music intro, I started singing along with Wonder Mike, hitting every word on beat, as if I’d written the lyrics. When Wonder Mike passed it over to Hank, the Beautiful brother picked up the lyrics, and everyone waited to see if he’d stumble on a word, making me winner of the battle. We sat on porch steps, lawn chairs, and grass, and took turns singing the parts we knew, laughing when somebody didn’t the know the rhyme and tried to make up words. We weren’t thinking of dead kids anymore. I wasn’t thinking of mean white girls who couldn’t see the beauty in a dance beat so tight you couldn’t resist moving to it.
*
After I finishe
d my homework, Bridgette and I were watching the news and heard that another boy was missing. They still hadn’t found Milton Harvey, the boy who was last seen at the bank, but it had been over six weeks and I’d already stopped making up reasons why he went missing. I didn’t bother to imagine what this fourth boy was doing, where he might be. I knew he was dead, just like lots of people in Atlanta knew, just like his mother must have known while she cried in the film that the news people were running, praying publicly for his return. I turned to Channel 17, which had no news hour or crying mothers, and played a constant loop of sixties sitcoms and Braves games during baseball season.
Ma walked into the den and told me to turn the TV back to the news. She wanted to hear it. This I didn’t understand because whatever information she had must have been better than the story they told on the news. But Ma was a news junkie. No matter what was on, boring human-interest stories or the most terrible murder, she had to see it. Even after the crazy stuff she saw all day, she could come home and watch more.
This time the boy, Yusef Bell, was only nine years old.
“That’s the same age I am,” Bridgette said.
I asked Ma to tell me what she knew about him, because even to a thirteen-year-old, nine seemed too young.
“Why do you want to know?”
“So I can be safer,” I lied. I guess that could be true, but now I just wanted to know. Was this boy more like me than not? Did our paths ever cross?
“Don’t go sharing this with your friends.”
“Do I ever?”
I never did, even when I was younger and first understood that Ma being a cop gave me the kind of attention I’d never attract under other circumstances. She helped me earn my grade school friends’ respect when she’d turn on the blue lights of her patrol car, and my high school friends’ envy when I hinted that I could have a traffic ticket fixed if I ever got one, but I never betrayed her trust.