I had other people I could have seen, but I kept forgetting their addresses. I might have passed four or five out on Malcolm X Boulevard. Later, I walked by the mosque, the brothers in their suits and bow ties selling the Final Call; I wanted to buy one, help them out; walked over to a short one in a gold suit, he pushed me a paper like it would save my life. “Only a dollar.”
“And what do I get?” I asked.
“You get the truth. All the news the white media won't show you.”
I leaned close to him, he pulled back some. “You don't know that all this stuff is past tense?” I asked.
Now he looked away, to his boy at the other corner, in green, white shirt, black shoes, talking with two older women; each nodded and smiled, one brought out her glasses to read the headlines. “So you want to buy this or what?” My friend held it out again, the other twenty copies he pulled close to his chest. I could see on his face that his legs were tired.
But for what would I be buying that paper? Or if a Christian was selling Bibles? Name another religion, I had no use for any. I wanted to pull my man close, by the collar (for effect) and tell him I knew of a new god, who was collecting everything he saw around him and stashing it in his apartment on Amsterdam Avenue; who walked home from the 1 train stealing bouts of Spanish being spoken in front of stores and when he came home prodigiously copied them down; who stole the remnants of empty beer bottles that had been shattered into thirty-seven pieces, took the glass and placed it in his living room, in a jar, with the greens and browns of others—in the morning he sat there and watched the fragments, imagined what life had come along and done such destruction.
Instead I walked backward until I got to a corner, hugged myself tight against a phone booth with no phone in it as the people swam around me and ignored everything but the single-minded purposes of their lives. After an hour was up my brain sent signals to my feet: move.
I stood in front of my apartment again, had a paper to hand in. Go upstairs and slide it in an envelope, address it to the woman who led my seminar on black liberation movements. The one who lectured me only when I missed class and never remembered to mark it in her book. The one who had assured me that if I wrote it all down this mind would be soothed, salvaged. One Tuesday (Tues. & Thur. 9:00–10:45 A.M.) she had pulled me aside when lessons were over, confided, “These days, the most revolutionary thing you can be is articulate.”
I had told her honestly, “I'm trying. I'm trying.”
I touched the front door before opening it. I'd been struck by the fear that the building was on fire; a church and a mosque had been burned recently. In the secret hours of night they'd been turned to ash and in the daylight their destruction was like a screaming message to us all. Had the door been hot I would have run farther than I needed to, but it was cold so I walked in.
The elevator was still broken. I had ten stories to climb; my legs felt stiff and proud. I moved effortlessly until I reached the sixth floor and Helena stopped me. She was with her girls, they were coming down the stairs. As pregnant as she was I knew the climb couldn't have been easy, but the look on her face had nothing to do with exertion. It was all for me. “I was coming to talk to you Sammy,” she said. Helena's cousin Zulma stood beside me; she was so big I felt boxed in.
“You should be out looking for your man,” I told Helena.
Zulma looked like she wanted to leave, bored, but was there to get her cousin's back in case it was needed. If Helena had been alone I wouldn't have had any problem kicking her in the gut and running. When she'd rumbled to the bottom of the stairs I would have crawled down beside her and in her ear asked, “Now tell me, what does this feel like? Tell me every detail.”
“Why you causing so much problems?” another of Helena's girls asked, but I didn't answer. Instead I told them one of my philosophies to live by. “I never tell a pretty woman I think she's pretty unless we're already holding hands.”
Helena rubbed her face with frustration. “You need to leave Ramón alone. He's good when he's not around you.” Her watch beeped, not loudly, but it echoed through the stairwell. Its face was glowing. Batteries gave it power.
“Have you been drafted too?” I asked Helena.
“Fuck this,” Zulma muttered, then her elbow was in my chest.
As the five girls got all over different parts of me I swung wild. Caught Zulma in the mouth and the first drops of blood on my face were hers. They were yelling as I kicked out with both legs. Then I was burning everywhere and I knew without looking that the off-silver colors in my eyes were the box cutters finding whole parts of me to separate. Fabric was tearing as they removed swatches of my clothing so they could get nearer to my skin. Zulma and Helena were at my face; neither of them smiled as they did the cutting. They didn't seem angry. Their faces were so still.
I grabbed and reached for something, dipping my fingers in everything spilling out of me. The colors were hard to make out in the bad light, but the stuff was beautiful and thick, it pooled. The girls rose and ran; I listened to five sets of sneakers move quickly down those stairs to the emergency exit; the door swung out and stuck, there was the flood of an empty wind up the staircase.
Clarity
BY DAVID WRIGHT
Because Darryl, at thirteen, was too young to work, his stepfather, Jack Mitchell, found him odd jobs when he could. That way Darryl would have his own pocket money, Jack Mitchell would explain; it would teach him responsibility. One Wednesday in June, Jack Mitchell found work for Darryl and his friend Two pulling weeds outside the new post office.
Jack Mitchell and the postmaster, Wiley Edwards, both held seats on the Fitzgerald Town Council, and as fellow councilmen, they did each other favors. For Jack Mitchell, such amiability was a political move. For Darryl and Two, though, his political jockeying meant twenty dollars, quick cash in their pockets.
The new post office had been built on a dry, dusty lot on Mesquite Street, just down the road from the county courthouse in downtown Fitzgerald, Texas. Darryl and Two were to pull up the weeds and shrubs to prepare the ground for sodding. It was mindless work, but the sun was demanding, and the roots had dug stubbornly into the rock-hard soil. Whether the boys did the job in four hours or six or ten, the work was worth twenty dollars each. After an hour and a half, they had finished more than half the lot.
The boys had taken their T-shirts off, and the sun scorched their already bronzed skins. Walking bent at the waist strained their lower backs, and the mindlessness of the work wore on their minds. So they started singing.
“You know Chuck Berry?” Two asked.
“Yeah, I know Chuck Berry.”
“My daddy's got a lot of Chuck Berry albums.” Two straightened, stretching out his long back, then bent back to work. “He's got this song, ‘School Days.' You know it?”
“How does it go?”
Two's head danced on his neck to the rhythm on the inside. He sang: “Up in the morning and off to schoo-ool . . .”
“Yeah,” Darryl smiled, “I know it.” His head started its own dance, like a camel's in stride, to the beat beating inside.
Two sang as they pulled: “Teacher be teaching the Golden Ru-ule.”
Then Darryl: “Bell rings, time to go home,/ Grab some white boy's change and get 'long on.”
They erupted with laughter as they clapped garden-gloved hands, steadily moving down the row.
Two continued: “Boy hollers, crying in his pla-ate . . . Slap 'im upside his head and don't be la-ate.”
Then Darryl: “Cops, coming, so fast,/ They gonna get your black ass!”
But Darryl's palm-slapping laughter stopped when he didn't hear Two slap-laughing beside him. He glanced over and saw Two staring straight ahead, and then he saw what Two was staring at: a silver-suited pink balloon—Wiley Edwards—sucking a cigar and looming over them.
Wiley Edwards, his red face puckered around the protruding cigar, glared at the boys a long time. His belly surged over his belt and hung there, almost a separate,
threatening entity. Darryl and Two straightened, a clump of pulled weeds in each hand.
“Yes, sir?” Darryl asked.
“You boys can go on home,” Mr. Edwards said.
“Sir?”
Mr. Edwards pulled a wallet from his inner jacket pocket. “We didn't hire you boys to sing,” he said. “We hired you to clear this lot.” He gave each a ten-dollar bill. “Now, if y'all want to come out here and be disrespectful and play, well, y'all can just go on home.” He turned. “You explain to Erskine why I sent you home.” Then he waddled around the building and inside.
Darryl looked at the half-cleared lot, then at Two. “What was that about?” he asked.
“I don't know,” Two said, “but I got me a ten-dollar bill, and I know what that's about. That's about seven dollars an hour.”
“Jack Mitchell's going to kill me.”
“'Cause we got the ax?”
“Yeah.”
“Can't do nothing about it,” said Two. “We was working and white man told us to go on home.”
“Still . . .”
“Can't do nothing about it,” said Two.
Darryl put the bill in his pocket and followed Two onto Mesquite Street. They walked toward the Flats, where Two lived and where Jack Mitchell worked and would be waiting to drive Darryl home to Oakbrook Heights.
Two turned. “Hey, who's Erskine?”
They passed the Dairy Queen and crossed the street toward the bowling alley. “My stepdad,” Darryl said. “Jack Mitchell.”
“Erskine Jack Mitchell?” Two asked.
“Erskine Elie Mitchell,” said Darryl. “They just call him Jack.”
“Huh,” Two said. “Er-skine, Ee-lie.” Then he added, “Y'all Northern niggahs sure is some poetic folks.”
“Must be a black thing then,” said Darryl, “Bernard Ferdinando Lamar Waymans the second. What, couldn't your folks decide on a name?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Two.”
Two crossed the parking lot toward the Nite-Owl Lanes. “Let's go in here and spend some of this hard-earned cash.”
“All right,” said Darryl, but he was still preoccupied with how to explain getting fired to Erskine Elie Mitchell.
After getting change, they pumped quarters into video games. They played each other in a football game with such fury that their palms blistered.
“You see that pass!” Darryl said.
“I saw it.” Two's team regrouped in a huddle on the screen while he selected one of the four defensive options. But his best option, it seemed, was to try to distract Darryl from his tactic. “So, what's your middle name?”
“I told you ten thousand times already,” said Darryl, never looking up. “I don't have one.”
“And I didn't believe you then neither.”
“Well, it's true,” he said. “I don't.”
“You a lie.”
“I don't.”
“You know you a lie.”
Darryl said, “What d'you want my middle name to be?”
Two stopped playing and looked across at Darryl. “Pharmaceuticals.”
“All right. I'm Darryl Pharmaceuticals Young.”
“Poetic,” said Two.
“Just a black thing . . . Touchdown! D'you see that play?”
“Aw, man,” Two said, “I wasn't even watching!”
“Well, quit squawking and play then . . .”
“You cheating Pharmaceuticals chump . . .”
“Go on, man,” Darryl said, “it's your ball.”
In no time they'd whittled their ten-dollar bills down to a dollar fifty (one seventy-five for Two), and they continued toward the Flats. As they walked along sidewalks like hot plates, the soles of their sneakers squooshing like sponges with each step, Darryl rehashed the morning in his head: they got to the post office on time, worked like beasts in that dusty heat, but still got fired. For laughing. They didn't do anything bad; if you can laugh while you work it makes the work go by better, that's all. Jack Mitchell would understand that. Of course, Darryl would leave out the part about the swear word.
“Two, man,” he said, “we got fired for laughing.”
“My daddy says white man don't like to see black folks laughing. Thinks they're laughing at him.”
“Jack Mitchell'll understand that.”
“Maybe so,” said Two, “but you better start figuring how to make him understand your magic trick that made a ten-dollar bill turn into a buck seventy-five in change.”
“Yeah.” Darryl hadn't even considered that. And he only had one fifty left.
They walked on, searching silently for a solution. A Fightin' Pioneers poster taped in a shop window brought them to a halt. It announced the upcoming high-school football season, and on it was a picture of the quarterback, Hoodie Duncan, his arm cocked to throw a pass.
“Hoodie's my man,” Darryl said,
“Hoodie's my main man,” said Two. “Look it the arms on him.” Two sat down suddenly on the curb and scrambled in his pockets. “Hang on a minute.” He pulled out a fistful of rubber bands.
“What you got rubber bands for?” Darryl asked.
“I been wearing them,” said Two. “Make me look strong.”
“Huh?”
Two handed a wad of them to Darryl. “That's how folks can tell you're strong,” he said, double-wrapping two around each wrist, then pumping his hands to inflate his forearms.
Darryl looked and mimicked Two's actions. “How's that?” he said.
“The veins be sticking out your forearms,” Two said, inspecting his, then pumping his hands again. “That's how they know.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You look at Hoodie, or any of them tough brothers. They veins be winding like snakes all down they arms.”
“That's true.” Darryl remembered seeing Hoodie at the 7-Eleven once. Hoodie joked with the black attendant, signifying with his hands and holding his green and gold letter jacket in his first, and the veins of his arms seemed to jump off his skin. Darryl had been with his mom, who didn't see Hoodie or the attendant or even Darryl, it seemed; their playfulness stopped, though, when Darryl and his mom entered, and their eyes followed her around the store as she busily searched one aisle then the next for the saltines she'd forgotten to buy at the A&P.
Darryl and Two resumed their walk, hands periodically pumping the air. Two said, “My daddy was a boxer and . . .”
“Really?”
“Yeah. In the army. A welterweight,” Two explained. “So he could whoop upside some white boys' heads. He told me he used to beat on white boys' ass like there wasn't no tomorrow. Said it was the only way you could get at 'em in them days, with gloves on, in the ring. Otherwise, have the law and all kinds of white folks all after you.”
“Yeah, they say it was like that.” That Two's father, now just a mechanic for the town of Fitzgerald, had once been a recognized athlete put him in very high esteem in Darryl's eyes. He wished Jack Mitchell had been one. But Darryl couldn't imagine primping, bulbous Jack Mitchell in a letter jacket.
Jack Mitchell was the town's first and only black councilman. That meant something. When he married Darryl's mom and moved the family to Fitzgerald, they made up the town's first interracial couple, ever, and the only one still. Theirs was the only black family to live in Oakbrook Heights. But still, it wasn't the same thing.
Two said, “My daddy, when he was boxing, he said he'd walk around squeezing tennis balls. It helped his punch. He's still got all kinds of veins sticking out his arms.”
“He's strong, huh?”
Two stopped and, face askew, stared Darryl down until Darryl stopped walking, too. “Let that niggah get a switch after your ass and ask me that again.” Then he sauntered forward.
They cut through the Texaco onto Third Street. Walking between the pumps, Two stepped deliberately onto the slim rubber hose that ran out from the station. A bell clanged, but nobody stirred, so they continued walking.
Darryl said, “Your dad was a boxer.”
“Yeah,” said Two. “He was good.”
When they arrived at the vacant lot that separated the back of Eastgate Mall from the Flats, Two inspected his forearms, then backpedaled away from Darryl into the shimmering, sun-scorched reeds, his arm cocked to throw a pass. “I'm Hoodie Duncan,” he called, bouncing on the balls of his feet as if in the pocket. “You see him in that game against Dumas?”
“I saw the game with you, Two.”
“Man, I ain't never seen nothing like that.” Two scrambled left. “Hoodie rolled left, and when the dude grabbed his right arm, he shook him”—which Two did, mostly just jiggling his shoulder—“put the ball in his left hand, and fired it downfield.” Two mimed the motion. “Left-handed!”
“Hoodie's tough.”
“Hell yeah, he's tough! You know he's tough. Just six niggahs on the whole damn team? Shit, you know they ain't about to let n'an one of 'em play quarterback unless he's two times as tough as every white boy on the field.” Two caught up to Darryl. “And Hoodie is. Being ambidextrous and all.”
“Ambi-what?”
“Ambidextrous,” said Two. “Hoodie's ambidextrous. My daddy's ambidextrous, too. It means you can use your left hand just as good as your right. Do whatever you want with either one.”
Macadam turned to dirt in the Flats. Darryl and Two walked down the dusty road toward the Three Jacks' Bar, where Jack Mitchell (the third Jack) would be waiting. Darryl figured that Jack Mitchell had probably already talked to Wiley Edwards, so he was in no rush to get there. Dragging along, Darryl mimed a throwing motion with his left hand. It was awkward, had no force.
Two, watching Darryl, cast his own left arm forward. “I'm ambidextrous, too,” he said.
“Sure you are.”
“You know I am.”
“Right.”
“What you boys know?” they heard, and turned toward the porch from where the sound was emitted.
It was Grandpa Thevenet. Two started onto the porch of the pea-green house, and Darryl followed.
“Hey, Grandpa Thevenet,” Two said.
“Hey,” said Darryl.
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