I frowned.
“Be open,” he said.
I’d rather keep closed. Nobody got me. Nobody cared.
I felt sick and hot.
My head was freezing.
A big wind whooshed down 125th Street. Made my head feel even frostier. I decided to speed up. My eyes were darting all around me, prepared to be ambushed.
Ever since Christmas Eve, I had felt like people were on the lookout for me.
I had only come out tonight because I was feeling really restless. Like I just had to get up and get out and move!
Even if I did get pounced on tonight, I still needed to walk.
I knew nobody else cared. And I was starting not to care too. I had hoped the weather out here would cool me down.
I stopped at Tuma’s tiny shop on 125th. Tuma was my African hookup. His shop sold all kinds of stuff, from hair-care products to body oils to bootleg clothes to African statues.
Every time I asked the old dude what was his home country, he dodged around. Like he was hiding the truth. Tuma had kids back in Africa, and he probably saw them more than my own father saw me. My brother had been more of a father to me than Benny Rachpaul.
I had felt safe around Jermaine. Just walking down the block with him, I knew couldn’t nobody touch me. If Jermaine had still been alive, I wouldn’t have felt so nervous stepping down 1-2-5, like I had been feeling.
No way.
Tuma’s little shop didn’t have no door. You just slid in off the street, and all the items he sold were sitting right there, out in the open. No AC in the summer. No real heat in the winter.
I couldn’t sit out here in the cold all day like he did.
I stood there on the icy sidewalk waiting for Tuma to finish selling some hats to these white people. There were lots of white people that lived in Harlem. But at the same time, it was like they didn’t really live here.
They had their own special places in Harlem that they went to that not many Black folks went to. At least none of the Black folks I knew. I mean, you never even saw them at any of our barbershops.
Not really.
I mean, if these white people lived in Harlem, why didn’t they get their hair cut at our barbershops?
Maybe they thought Black barbers wouldn’t know how to cut white heads. Or maybe the white people thought we wouldn’t like them in there.
It was weird. I guess they liked staying invisible. And they liked to hide. Like Tuma. And Daddy.
Tuma sold this grinning couple two African hats for thirty bucks apiece. I knew I wasn’t paying that!
“Lolly!” Tuma said. “Come inside, closer to the heat! How have you been, my boy? You remind me so much of my own son back home. How are you?”
He patted me on my back and pulled me near the space heater he had sitting there.
“Fiiine,” I kinda sang like a kid. I didn’t know why I did that. Sometimes I forgot how old I really was. “I need a hat, Tuma. A black-and-white African hat like the one you sold them.”
Tuma scratched his beard and pulled the old quilt he had wrapped around him tighter. “I think I can help you. Yes, yes. I hope I still have one here for you.”
He started searching through his bins. I turned around and peeked out at the sidewalk. I didn’t see nobody lurking. I stepped closer to his electric heater to warm up my toes.
“Here you are, Lolly!” Tuma said. “My last!” He handed me one of the knit hats that was shaped like a big hockey puck. It had tassels coming out the top.
“This one’s white and blue,” I said. “How much?”
“For you—ten dollars.”
I bulged my eyeballs.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Since you are my old friend—I will give it to you for seven.”
I threw back my head and stared at him. We stood like that for a while. Then I acted like I had to go and handed his hat back to him. I started to step off. He sold me the hat for three dollars.
I snapped it on my head right then.
As I left, I saw Tuma unpack a whole nother box of them same hats and stack them on a shelf in his shop.
The wind was really whipping around here, fourteen stories up. I was glad I’d bought this hat. In the dark, I tore another sheet of paper out of my notebook and started to fold again.
The door to get up here was broke and so was the door alarm. You just needed to jiggle the lock to get it open.
I stopped to look out over St. Nick Houses, all lit up in the night. Being up here made me feel better. From where I now sat, on the roof of my own building, you could gaze out across all of Central Harlem.
At night like this, Harlem was a big glowing crossword puzzle. You could see how the streetlights lined the avenues, crisscrossing each other. It was all a big grid.
To my left, the glowing grid got all dark. St. Nicholas Park. It was mostly trees and hardly any lampposts.
I leaned over the edge of my building’s roof and peeked down. Some girl was walking along one of the footpaths. She was nervous, the way her head kept darting around her. Probably coming home from work.
I tossed my plane out. The wind caught it and jerked it downward. My plane whirled around a bit before getting sucked between the buildings.
It was too windy tonight to fly my paper planes, really.
They were all just getting crumpled up.
Destruction.
I peeked down again at the footpaths fourteen stories below. That girl had disappeared. The wind blew up again and the chills itched straight down my back.
It was a long way down to the ground from up here. A few times, people who lived at St. Nick had jumped. Couldn’t take the lives they were living, I guess.
If Jermaine was here, I wouldn’t be scared of nothing. He was my protector. It hurt, thinking back on how he had stopped talking to me before Halloween.
I wished I hadn’t done what I did.
Tonight I was so high up. A big blast could take me right over this edge. I wondered what it would feel like to fall.
Bad thoughts.
Bad memories.
“Flip it gentle, Lolly,” Jermaine said. “Look, it’s breaking up.”
My brother stood tall behind me. He stepped forward and grabbed my wrist. My hand was still holding real tight on to the plastic spatula. Moving my own hand with his, we lifted the pancake together. It flipped over gently onto the dark, hot skillet.
Grease popped like firecrackers.
I jumped backward, bumping into Jermaine and landing on his sneakers.
Then he flipped like a pancake.
“Why you gotta step all over my clean new sneaks with your grimy house slippers!” Jermaine yelled at me, pushing me off his shoes.
I tried to shove him, but his hand palmed my forehead, keeping me away. Laughing, I kept snatching at Jermaine. He grinned at me, teasing, holding on to my head.
“Yo, Loll!” Jermaine said. “Loll! Stop playing. You play too much.”
“You play too much!” I said. I had been breathing hard, straining, trying to get at him. I stopped trying and stood there in our apartment’s kitchen, glaring at him, crossing my arms over my chest.
Jermaine stared back at me, shook his head and laughed. “That’s better. Oh snap! See what you did? Your pancake’s burning!”
All this I’m talking about? It had happened a looooong time ago.
Like maybe three long years ago, when I was, like, nine years old and just a kid. Jermaine had just finished high school. At first, he had worked at that jacked-up grocery store on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 127th, but he soon left that and started working at this barbershop that used to be on St. Nick Av’.
Rockit had told me that him and Jermaine had started there around the same time. Jermaine had really liked working at that barbershop. The first month they had him sweeping up all the cut curls from off the floor. After he had done that awhile, he told me, they had started him doing other stuff that paid more.
He had liked making that money.
Jermaine examined the brown pancake and said, “It ain’t too bad,” relieved. “Now we put this one on the plate. And start over. Pour a little batter into the middle of the skillet. Wait. Watch it. That’s good. And when you start to see them bubbles bubble up in the middle of the pancake, then you know it’s good to go: you can flip it then. But gentle, Loll. Gentle.”
Jermaine plopped down at the kitchen table and started reading his newspaper. The business section. He would always bring it home with him from the barbershop, where they got the paper delivered every day.
I stood in front of our stove and watched the pancake cook in the pan.
“It’s nice having light again, right?” Jermaine said, eyes on his paper. “You can’t read at night in the dark.” He shook his head.
We both glanced at the bright lamp he had just plugged into the end of a big, thick orange extension cord. The cord snaked in through our window, which was cracked just enough to let it pass under.
Jermaine had got tired of trying to read his papers by candlelight for the past week after all the power in our apartment went out.
Back then was when Daddy had lived with us too. Before him and Ma broke up. Daddy used to have a hard time working steady, so that meant that my parents’ cash was never steady.
But that wasn’t why our lights was shut off.
In public housing, electricity was included in your rent. They would evict you onto the streets first before they’d ever switch off your power.
The reason why we didn’t have no juice—along with half of our floor—was because of a short circuit in the walls.
Blowout.
We had waited a whole week for the managers to fix the electricity, but they still hadn’t. Like I said, the city didn’t fix nothing!
Jermaine solved the problem by asking our next-door neighbor Mrs. Jenkins to let us pass that big, thick orange electric cord between our apartments. Her half of the floor still had power. That electric cord looped out our window, seven stories above the sidewalks, and right into the window of the Jenkinses’ apartment next door. Jermaine had handed her some money to smooth things over, so everybody was happy.
I remember wondering what was gonna happen when my father and mother found out that night.
“What in the devil?” Daddy Rachpaul said later when he walked into the kitchen. He had spent the whole day hanging around construction sites in the city, looking for work. That whole week, we had all got used to coming home to darkness and candlelight.
So when Daddy walked in and saw me and Jermaine frying pancakes next to a lightbulb lit up, he was surprised.
And happy.
“My little Fox!” Daddy said to Jermaine. Daddy laughed and cupped the top of Jermaine’s head. “We have at least one other genius in the house, eh? But what’ll we do if the janitor sees?” Daddy peeked out the window. “Tomorrow the management’ll spot that orange cord hanging about and they might say it’s not safe.”
“Well, I figure we only need lights at night,” Jermaine said, still reading. He glanced up from his paper. “When the sun comes up, we haul in the extension cord until the next night. The building won’t see nothing.”
“You are a sly genius,” Daddy said. “Come here, boy!” He grabbed Jermaine up from his chair and pinned him against the refrigerator. Jermaine’s newspaper pages floated down to the linoleum.
“Hey!” Jermaine yelled. “Daddy! Ow!”
Daddy Rachpaul grinned at him and told him to fight back. Jermaine just kept yelling at him. Daddy was holding him up by his arm, Jermaine’s back against the fridge, my brother’s feet on tippy-toes.
“My arm! My arm!” Jermaine kept yelling.
I watched them with one eye, but kept my second eye on my third pancake like Jermaine had told me. It had started to bubble at the center, which was interesting. My brother getting jacked against the fridge like that happened all the time.
It was boring.
I flipped my pancake.
“You can be a sly fox in the head,” Daddy told Jermaine, “but you can man up too. You not gonna man up and free yourself from me?”
Jermaine finally whacked Daddy’s chest and that made Daddy feel better, so he let him slide down off the fridge. Jermaine bent over and rubbed his arm.
Daddy turned to look at the electrical cord again. “I guess I’m gonna have to break off some cheddar for that Mrs. Jenkins next door.” He rubbed his smooth chin. “I wonder how much cash that nosy bat’ll want for all this messy-mess?”
“I took care of it.”
Daddy turned to Jermaine, who was still massaging his sore arm. “What?” Daddy asked him, surprised. “You paid her? How much? With what?”
Jermaine stood up straight. “Not much,” he said. “I got us some groceries too: bread, soda, lots of canned stuff. Lolly wanted pancakes.”
Daddy stared at Jermaine for a minute and was about to open his mouth again when we all turned our heads toward the sound of the front door. It was Ma coming home.
Ma looked exhausted, and didn’t seem to like the electrical-cord arrangement that Jermaine had set up. But she was happy too.
She had just got hired at a new job doing store security downtown. Daddy Rachpaul got so happy after hearing that. Though Ma tried to dodge him, he kissed her and dragged her away, back into their room, and shut the door.
Jermaine and me went back to our pancake-flipping.
A new job meant money for stuff.
I thought about my brother giving that money to Mrs. Jenkins next door and him buying groceries and I wished I had a job to help out around the house. I remember asking Jermaine if I could start sweeping floors at the barbershop after school.
It didn’t seem like that hard of a thing to do. I was only nine, but how old did you have to be to sweep up old hair?
When I asked him if I could work at the barbershop, Jermaine, who had just finished flipping a pancake, flung on me all of a sudden. He whipped the spatula in front of my face and little bits of hot oil flicked at me, burning my eyeball.
I cried out.
He carried me over to the sink and washed the oil out of my eye.
My eyes still shut, I heard Ma yell out from the bedroom, “What’s going on out there? Lolly? You okay?”
“Open your eye,” I heard Jermaine say. “Open your eye, Lolly.”
I opened both of them slowly. All I could see were my brother’s big brown eyes staring right into mine, a few inches away. He was frowning.
“Can you see?” he asked me.
I nodded.
He sucked his teeth as loud as Ma did. “You okay,” he said then, yelling, “We okay, Ma!”
Ma: “What happened!”
Jermaine grabbed his jacket off the back of the kitchen chair. “Nothing! It ain’t nothing! We okay!”
“You boys play too much!” Daddy yelled back.
Jermaine turned to me and this time stuck his finger in my face. I shrank.
“I don’t want you coming around the barbershop,” he told me. He waited a minute and seemed to be thinking about something. “I see your skinny little butt around here too much as it is.” He snapped on his jacket. “I get sick of seeing you every day, man. We sleep in the same tiny room, eat in the same tiny kitchen, same tiny apartment….I get tired of having you all up on me, all the time, Lolly.”
My eyes got wet.
“I don’t want you around,” Jermaine said. “Especially not down at the barbershop. Promise me you won’t go down there. No matter who tries to send you down there, promise me you won’t do it.”
A tear fell down my cheek, but I didn’t say nothing. Angry, Jermaine lurched toward me.
“I promise,” I said quick. “I won’t go to the barbershop. I’ll stay away from you.”
My brother looked at me then real sad, but with a weird half smile. He started to reach out to me, but stopped when he saw me move away.
“I’m going out,” he said, and was gone.
I remember crying and running to
our bedroom and spending the next hour building a pirate Lego set. After that, I felt better.
That was probably the first time I remember getting relief from diving into my Lego world.
They sucked me into another place when my real place was too much. And now it wasn’t just getting taken to a new place. It was about going to an old place too, someplace familiar that I’d been to before.
My daddy maybe was in that place.
And Jermaine maybe.
Mr. Ali thought me getting to know my father better would help with whatever I’d been feeling lately. But in the back of my head, I didn’t really know how much Daddy wanted me around.
“My cousin Frito was the kid that got capped in front of that bodega yesterday,” Vega whispered over my ear. I just stared at him. “He’s okay, though,” he said. “Mami found out they tagged him in the shoulder. She’s coming to get me now. Don’t want me going back home alone.”
Vega eased down beside me. His seat creaked. We both glanced toward Ms. Jen. I didn’t know why. I guess to see if she was watching. She was lost in her earphones.
I whispered at Vega, “Frito was the one that slapped Shark James’s fiancée?”
He nodded.
“Stupid,” I whispered.
I hadn’t never met the street gangsta known around here as Shark James, but I had heard enough grubbiness about him to know that you don’t be going around slapping his baby ma.
“Look,” Vega said, showing me the screen on his phone. He was holding it low, underneath the table, so Ms. Jenna couldn’t see.
“What?” I said, squinting at his screen.
“I got this message from Frito yesterday before he got shot. Them two boys that was following us, Harp and Gully, they told Frito again yesterday that they want him to join they crew.”
His finger dragged over his screen so I could read the message. I just shook my head after reading it. Harp and Gully had been recruiting hard for their crew. I took out my phone and Vega and me scrolled through some of the threads online.
All these different crews had been posting threats toward one another. Telling each other that their crew was the best and that they were going to stomp out the rest. I didn’t understand why they posted all this online, where anybody could read it. Harp and Gully’s crew had even made a stupid music video, rapping about how they were going to shoot up folks they had beef with.
The Stars Beneath Our Feet Page 5