The Stars Beneath Our Feet
Page 19
“Ma!” I yelled.
“We right here, sugar,” she said, like she was growing annoyed. “You ain’t got to yell.”
“Everybody goes to Applebee’s,” I said. “Let’s do something different.”
Vega spun around and started walking backward too. We both laughed at each other. I thought about my St. Nick partners, him and Sunny—all they did was argue! I really hoped that mess would stop. They were both my friends and I wanted to laugh with both of them.
Sunny wasn’t so bad.
She had tried to save our coyote, which was something cool.
Earlier, I had made the mistake of telling Vega about that thing Sunny had done right before she had jumped on the elevator. How she had made my skin get hot in the hallway.
When he had heard this, Vega just laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. I was embarrassed, but it was good to hear him laugh again.
Then he started rolling around on my bed, like he was about to throw up.
“I’m regurgitating! I’m regurgitating!” he kept yelling.
Playing around. He always played too much. Something had told me he wouldn’t understand. Finally, he asked me if I had liked her doing what she did.
I remember shrugging at him. “I don’t know,” I told him.
“Something different?” Yvonne finally asked me, back on 125th Street. “What you got in mind, Loll?”
“Walking backwards, you gonna fool around and fall flat on your backside,” Ma warned us.
I said, “Let’s take the four train downtown. I know a really flavory food truck that sells arepas. We can sit in Union Square and eat ’em.”
“Downtown? Arepas?” Yvonne asked. She was suspicious. I could tell.
“Arepas are like little hot sandwiches,” Vega said. “Tasty.”
“They’re cheap and good too,” I added. Ma thought on this for a minute, then cracked an immense grin.
“Okay, Lolly,” she said. “Let’s try something different. And you need to open up to new experiences, Yvonne.” Ma elbowed her. Yvonne sucked her teeth.
“And I don’t wanna be called Lolly no more,” I told my mother. “My name is Wallace Rachpaul.”
“Oh, is it really?” Ma said, acting like I had just asked to be called Prince Stellar.
“I wanna go by my real name from now on,” I said, and spun back around, walking forward.
I thought about Rosamund and wondered what new thing she was building now. I had decided to forgive Mr. Ali for turning her in to Child Services. I believed he thought he was doing the right thing, even if his right thing might be the wrong thing.
A week after I had visited Rose at her day school, I got an email from her. It was short and to the point: she really didn’t like Mount Vernon and missed Gran, though her grandma visited her a lot.
Rose also said she didn’t like the poetry book I had gave her.
I didn’t need her telling me that.
But the coolest thing about Rose’s email was the attachment. She included that photo of me and her standing on the cobblestones in front of the diamond house in the Meatpacking District. She wasn’t smiling in the picture either. She wasn’t that type of girl.
Out of all those pictures of buildings I had took, this was the only one that had survived. My parents still hadn’t bought me a new phone.
I had lost a lot and learned a lot since this time last year. And despite my skinny muscles, I had discovered my own superpower. Building thingamajigs fresh out my head.
You gotta learn to do something new. I wished Jermaine could’a been around now to know that. Walking down 125th Street, I missed him more than anything. I wished he was here with us.
I wasn’t mad at him no more, for trying to get me to join his crew. I’d been deep-thinking a lot about why he actually tried that. After having told me years before to stay away.
It had to do with who he had started to roll with, I thought. The folks you hang out with can raise you up or bring you down low. Over time, they can make you think a certain way—change who you really are.
Jermaine didn’t realize that, I guess.
Or didn’t remember it when he needed to.
Like Mr. Ali had suggested, I had decided to remember everything good about my brother—keep him close to my heart.
I had decided that whenever I felt like I needed to chat with him, tell him what was on my mind, I would go to that overlook at the upper tip of Harlem where Vega and me had tossed the gun. That little spot on the Harlem River that faced the Bronx.
The Boogie Down.
It had all ended there for Jermaine.
And from that overlook, I would talk to my brother. That place would be my exclusive hideaway just to remember him.
I smiled, reminiscing about him now.
And I also remembered a cold, mean time when I was stepping down this same street, and it had been impossible for me to smile about anything….
That was loooong past now.
Since then I had learned the most important thing: the decisions you make can become your life. Your choices are you.
I love language.
In the city where I live, New York, there are millions of people who speak many different languages. Sometimes, as I walk about my city or take the subway or ride the bus, I listen carefully. I listen to what people say and how they say it.
If you want to be a storyteller, it’s important to understand other people’s points of view. We often feel that we must say what we must say. It’s also crucial, however, to listen to other voices. Listening, I think, is the best way to learn about those who differ from you.
Reading is a form of listening.
One of the reasons that I wanted to write The Stars Beneath Our Feet is that there aren’t enough books that speak with the voices of the characters in my story. Though I grew up in suburban Missouri—very different from the Harlem of my central character, Lolly Rachpaul—as an adult, I lived in Harlem for many years and heard voices like his firsthand.
African American Vernacular, or Black English, is as varied as the people who speak it. Indeed, a slang word in one Harlem neighborhood may not even be used in another Harlem neighborhood just a few blocks away. I am certain that many of the young Harlem readers of my book will point this fact out to me, or mention that some of the slang words I use are outdated.
In today’s social media culture, words that are popular now can sometimes become unpopular by next week. My sincere hope is that The Stars Beneath Our Feet will be read and enjoyed for many years to come. In writing it, I tried to use words from African American Vernacular that would paint a timeless picture of one aspect of our Black culture.
But I hope that what I’ve created will have significance universally.
The journey of self-discovery that Lolly follows throughout The Stars Beneath Our Feet is one that many of us undertake. When I lost my brother Brian in 2011, I was struck with grief. Similarly, Lolly is challenged with accepting his own brother’s passing. The emotions that Lolly goes through in my story are, in some ways, a reflection of what I went through.
Loss is something all of us must experience and weather. There’s a little bit of Lolly inside of me, inside of you. There’s a little bit of Lolly inside of all of us.
Thank you for listening to his story.
David Barclay Moore
Brooklyn, 2017
Thanks to God and to my late parents, John N. Sr. & Leanora Moore. Thank you for being the most loving role models, for sacrificing so much and for making me who I am today. Thanks also to my sister and her family, Leanora Moore-Beulah and Mark, Nicole & Ryan Beulah; and to my brother and his family, John N. Jr., Deandra, Braxton, Brandon & Brooke Moore. Thanks to my late grandmother, Leanora Bolton, for the gift of loving books. Additional thanks to all of my other relatives.
Thanks to everyone else who’s shown me love and support over the years—including Asari Beale; “Bealesy” & Octavia; Lloyd Boston; Brooklyn Public Library; Bruce
& Tenzin; Suzette Burgess; Geoffrey Canada; Hassan Daniel; Matt de la Peña; Raymel Garcia; Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (photographer extraordinaire! thanks for making me look better than I really do); Stephen Sean Hewett; Jennifer Hunt; Betina Jean-Louis; R. Kikuo Johnson; John R. Keene (simply the best); Steven A. King; Mariann Lai, MS Ed, SAS, BCBA, LBA, executive director of Autism Early Enrichment Services, NYC; Hannah Mann; Maria T. Middleton; Tracie Morris; the sorely missed Walter Dean Myers (thanks for creating spaces for so many of us and for the lunches and tête-à-têtes you treated me to); New York Public Library; Ndlela Nkobi (always there!); Rosomond Osborne; Milly Perez; Carlos Sirah (can’t stop, won’t stop); Patricia Stewart; The Three Latinas (Connie Polanco, Iris “Mookie” Torres and Erika Rivera); Etefia Umana Sr. (Experience Unlimited! Love you!) and his family—Etefia Jr., Sissy and Zora Umana, mother Joetta Umana & the rest of the Umana clan; Barry White of Barry White Men’s Grooming, NYC; Jaime Wolf (“Mon dieu!”) of Pelosi Wolf Effron & Spates, NYC; Jacqueline Woodson; Yaddo; and the beautiful people of Harlem.
A special thanks to my simpatico super-editor, Nancy Siscoe, and everyone else at Knopf who supported and worked on this book. You showed so much faith in me.
Aside from me, the person most responsible for bringing The Stars Beneath Our Feet into the world is my agent, Steven Malk of Writers House, who is “literally” a throwback to a bygone era of publishing (in a good way). Steve, your intelligence, guidance, savvy and belief in me from the very beginning were and are invaluable.
And an enduring thank-you for my beloved brother Brian Patrick Moore, who is with me in spirit and to whom this book is dedicated.
“Ciao for now!” as Brian would have said.
David Barclay Moore was born and raised in Missouri. After studying creative writing at Iowa State University, film at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and language studies at l’Université de Montpellier in France, David moved to New York City, where he has served as communications coordinator for Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone and communications manager for Quality Services for the Autism Community.
He has received grants from the Ford Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, Yaddo, and the Wellspring Foundation. He was also a semifinalist for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.
David now lives, works, and explores in Brooklyn, N.Y. You can read more about him at DavidBarclayMoore.com or follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @dbarclaymoore.
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