“You walkin’ around with that in your pocket?” the C’ster queries, slyly.
“Say, mayne. Check,” C-Boy caps back. “Don’t try me. I ’on’t be finger fuckin’ myself like dat. Them niggas crazy!”
Lil Chris laughs.
C-Boy finishes rolling the two squares. He fires one up and passes the other one to Lil Chris. “There. That’s you, to da head.”
They smoke in silence for a spell. The smell of the potent herb wafts up and around them, enveloping and stimulating.
“It feel like …”
“You feel that?”
“Hell yeah,” Lil Chris says. “I’m sayin’ … it feel like … this shit cleaning my mind.”
C-Boy cracks up. They both snicker.
“I know you high,” C-Boy says. “Nigga tah’m ’bout the weed cleanin’ his mind.”
“For real, mayne,” Lil Chris assures him.
“Just airin’ ya shit out,” C-Boy says. A deep throated giggle. “Cleaning yo’ constitution,” he whispers.
They burst out laughing.
A few weeks later, Lil Chris and C-Boy meet up at the gym to get a workout in. As they begin their routine, they peep No Love walking in with someone Lil Chris hasn’t seen in some time.
“Man, that’s Mansa! Look out! Over here! Come holla!” Lil Chris is instantly amped. Mansa looks up and walks over with No Love.
“What’s happening, young man?”
“Mansa Musa! You named yourself after a African king from Mali.”
“That’s good. You been doin’ your research. In the future, you want to refer to his state as the Empire of Mali, respectfully.”
“The old Mansa was Muslim. What, you a Muslim?”
“Don’t worry about that. That’s the way we’ve been conditioned. To classify everything. It’s that Americanized file-and-rank tendency. Control that.”
“A’ight, you got that,” Lil Chris says, irritated at being corrected twice.
“Kid, I remember a time when you would’ve been ready to bump if somebody checked you like that,” No Love observes.
“He didn’t check me, homie. He corrected me. It’s a difference. Besides, I ain’t trippin’ like that no more,” Lil Chris says.
“Them books done civilized him. Don’t let the information kill your beast, young man,” Mansa warns.
“No, never that. But I do know how to control my beast. No one provokes me. I determine when and when not to move. C-Boy, I’m finna go over here by the bleachers with the homie ’n ’em right quick.”
“Say, say, man! We just got started. You go’n break up the routine. You can always talk to dem,” C-Boy protests.
“Balance, lil brother. It ain’t good to be one-sided. Okay, you working on your body. What about your mind? Ya spirit? Mind, body, and soul, young brave. You need to come over for a minute, too.”
“Man, who is you s’posed to—”
“Come on, C-Beasley,” Lil Chris interjects, tryin’ to get C-Boy to chill. “C-Beesalini. Come mob wit’ me. It ain’t go’n set us back but—”
“A’ight, a’ight, man. But, say, say, look … Man, I’m sayin’—”
“You got that, yo,” Lil Chris finishes before he can start. Mansa and No Love look at each other like, What the hell? The four of them walk over to the bleachers flanking the ball court.
“Spit somethin’,” No Love urges.
“Hold up, Love. Nawl, Mansa. I wanted to tell you I appreciate you. You pointed me in the right direction when you gave me that book. I hate you ended up gettin’ caught up on the—what it was? Twelve sugar bag play?” Lil Chris says.
“Don’t sweat it. That’s the joint. One minute I’m in this spot, the next minute I’m over there.”
“Say, say, say, Lil Chris. Won’t you g’on ’head spit somethin’. Hold up.” C-Boy pauses to lean on the bleachers and beat out a rough drumline. “Check this out,” he says. Then he starts humming the bass part to that old-school Mase, “Why You Over There Lookin’ At Me.”
“Man, this kid stay amped up,” Lil Chris says, exasperated.
“Go’n head, lil homie. Bless ya people,” No Love puts in as the O.G. homies Charlie Brown, Don Smiley Loc, and El Wil come over to see what the deal is. Next come Flick, B-Geezlehop, Wacc, and the A-town homie, Poison.
The C’ster looks over his audience. Mostly for-real hoodfellas. Gotta hit them wit somethin’ deep. Something gangsta, too, though … Okay, I got somethin’ sufficient.
“Ah yo, ah yo, peep
Mumblin’ incantations
Whispered in foreign tongues
Mass prostration
Tribal migration
Children sweep the camp and come on
Know that
The oracle sees
The comin’ of cannibal nomads
They search for pasture
At arms
Young warriors, mind you, listen
Un-sta-ble situation
Unstable tactics
Hang back
We mashin’
Reactionary strike
Guerilla war fashion
We outnumbered
The government is playin’ politics
Desert fox in Baghdad to bomb
Combat brief, had that
Iraq was holdin’ back
On weapons inspections
But was it
Really necessary that we bomb
Saddam
A million second-guessers
Ask that question
Wow
They kicked our sisters off welfare
Say that they lazy
First they
Sentence us to life
Now, they starvin’ our babies
Really, this livin’ done done it to me, mayne
These shackles is real
See me livin’ behind bars
I struggle to chill
See me stressin’
Oh! The scandal
Too hectic to handle
Jealousy!
They lied on me
When they came to dismantle me,
Why!
Barbed wires
And cell bars
God!
Where I’m from, it was hard
But, I’m numb in these jail yards
Survival! Is all I’m thinkin’
Live homie
Get out in one piece and make a meal
Homie!
Keep it real!
Ob … a … man! I fell off…”
Lil Chris trails off.
“Man, come on!”
“Ah, man!”
“Yo! I don’t wanna hear no more. He da coldest on the river.”
“Yeah, man. Kid nice, for real.”
The crowd starts to slowly disperse. That’s how most of the real hoodlums are. They ain’t go’n sweat any one person. They give Lil Chris his props, drop pounds, and move out.
C-Boy is straight now. He leans back and chills. Lil Chris is secretly twisted ’cause he fell off. But it was still a nice showing. No Love is silent. Entranced in his own thoughts.
Mansa turns to speak to Lil Chris. “That was some nice work. No, you ain’t just been studyin’. You’ve been researchin’. There’s a difference. A major difference. The question is, how deep you dug?”
“At first, I was just into history. Really ancient history is still my thang. The Egyptian—excuse me—Kemetans. The Assyrians, the Babylonians. The Greeks. The Romans. You know, your progression of world powers. But then my reading took me deeper into Africa. Besides what you gave me, most of the stuff I was reading was out of high school text books. I didn’t feel like I was getting enough on the Motherland. So, I started going to get it. West African Empires. Mali. Songhay. Hausaland. Ashanti. Yorubaland. It was real hard to come across that deep history on the interior and sub-Saharan regions. Then, too, most of the deep stuff I got on that Northern shore was about the Roman provinces—”
“—Yeah,” No Love says. “We been g
ettin’ used up for a long time.”
“But, you see, the good material I ran across was about the leaders.” Lil Chris’s eyes gloss over at the thought. “Man, I read this book of letters. Personal letters. Written and received by Kwame Nkrumah from his six years in exile. This cat, man! This book … it literally changed me. I mean, the dude, he was like the first true president of Ghana before he got overthrown in, I think, 1966 by a military coup. And, picture, he’s taken in by his homeboy who is the president of the country of Mali. He sheltered him there until he takes sick. Anyway. He stays there for about six years, until 1972, and this book …
“Man, this book, it gives you his personal letters. I’m tah’m ’bout uncut. Straight butter.
“Most of the good stuff was either to or from this chick June Milan, or something like that. I would be sitting there reading those letters and it seemed so real. The man, this great man, seemed so human. It made me realize that beyond all this media mumbo-jumbo, most of these major figures are just like us! They deal in doubt. And hope. And cope with the breaks. Man!” Lil Chris shakes his head. He’s on one. “I even got C-Boy to read about some o’ dem cats.”
“Yeah, yo,” C-Boy jumps at the chance to put his two cents in. “I read, ah, Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela. Then, too, I read all kinda stuff, like about Du Bois and Garvey and of course, you know I had to holla at my people. Martin Luther, the King.” C-Boy being C-Boy.
“What do you think about MLK?” Mansa asks Lil Chris.
“I think he was a great man,” Lil Chris says.
“Yeah, these people got a lot o’ y’all trippin’ like that, too,” Mansa says with disturbing arrogance.
“Check … wha—what you mean, trippin’? I know you ain’t go’n say Martin Luther King—I’m tah’m ’bout da Doctor! I know you ain’t sayin’ he was sour. I can’t respect that,” C-Boy declares.
“Look, lil man, I don’t expect you to feel me. ’Cause I ain’t go’n tell you what’s in the books. Some time you gotta read between the lines.”
“Ah! Man, g’on head,” C-Boy fights. “You tryna give me your opinion—”
“—Hold up, lil homie,” No Love sets in. “Just check him out. He might just put you on something.”
“The thing is this; right now, he fighting ’cause there is a slim chance that I might say something to undo that trash they been feedin’ us. All of us,” Mansa emphasizes. “That’s these demons of ignorance they done implanted in us. Agents of darkness will always fight the light. Try to control ’em, young man. You might learn something. You see, what a lot of people won’t admit is the Civil Rights Movement was a middle-class movement. They didn’t carry the ghuttah. Believe that. Your precious Dr. King wasn’t poor. He came from money. His people had money. The Civil Rights Movement was a protest by the Black middle class to be accepted by white middle America. King didn’t care about the Blacks that were strugglin’ in the ghetto. He didn’t even understand our pain. He was never there. Matter fact, when he brought that nonsense about nonviolence to the Chicago slums, they turned him around. Ain’t nobody in the hood growed up slangin’ and throwin’ them thangs wanna hear nothin’ he was sayin’. No! What King did was get a lot of people bruised, beat up, molested, and killed. So we could take our money and patronize white establishments. That’s why the white folks love him. That’s why they constantly push him in our face. He showed them where they was slippin’. ‘You know what, Bob? That there boy’s right. Let’s let them coons in here and take they money.’ Yeah, that’s what the deal was. King and his people wanted to buy into White America. Better the living conditions of those few who were allowed to be able to afford it.”
“Man, this fool crazy!” C-Boy says as he hops up and storms off toward the weight pile to finish his workout.
Mansa and No Love turn to look at Lil Chris. Lil Chris is off into his own thoughts.
They begin to speak with him about joining Da One.
“Say, mayne, check,” C-Boy throws 195 pounds on the rack and sits up from the flat bench. “Don’t be no fool. You know that shit dude spittin’ ain’t right.”
“How I know that? How do you?” Lil Chris says with more calm then he actually feels. “How you so sure?”
“’Cause anybody wit’ sense know that Martin Luther King was one o’ the realest niggas ever did it!”
Someone behind Lil Chris starts laughing. A deep, rhythmic rumble. It’s infectious. Before long the majority of the men under the weight pile are either laughing, snickering, or smiling. Lil Chris isn’t one of them.
“He just come from over there talkin’ to Mansa,” Monster, the smooth grit of his voice like sandpaper on good wood, observes. He does find it funny.
“Nah,” says the guy who started it. “I was just laughin’ at how this dude called Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., a real nigga.”
Another round of laughter.
Lil Chris doesn’t think the shit is funny at all. C-Boy does, though.
“Say, mayne, check,” C-Boy addresses the guy, an angular red-skinned dude with chiseled features. “Ah … What’s yo’ name, brah?”
“I ain’t nobody to be knowing like that,” the guy says.
The statement catches Lil Chris’s attention.
“Never mind all that. Check, do you think the Civil Rights Movement was a Black middle class movement?”
The guy looks at C-Boy, as if he’s considering his response. “Well, I’ve never known Mansa to hold such a belief,” he finally says.
“Well, he do,” C-Boy says. “He tryna make it like MLK used up po’ black folks so rich black folks would kick it with—”
“That ain’t what he was sayin’,” Lil Chris puts in. “Not all of it.”
“Well, I think he right,” says Monster. “I mean—”
“Mayne, y’all Black-ass niggas!” C-Boy exclaims.
Another round of laughter.
“Y’all ain’t seeing the whole picture,” C-Boy continues. “Mayne, we was doin’ bad back then. They was handlin’ us bad as a muthafucka back then. Ah, MLK ain’t have to march with poor folks to get them fucked over. That was happenin’ anyway. Martin did what he did so it would stop happenin! Y’all got that man bad.”
“That’s just what you was taught to believe,” Monster rebuts. “You must not be hip to Selma.”
“Mayne, please,” C-Boy bickers.
“Well, then you know that it all was game then. Martin used them people to get ahead,” Monster reasons. He looks genuinely thoughtful. His mom’s name tatted on his forehead to honor her memory. One tear tatted beneath his right eye. “It was all politics, and that mayne was just playin’ the game.”
“Say, brah,” Lil Chris addresses the red-skinned dude.
“His name is Joseph,” Monster says.
“Joseph,” Lil Chris says, as if trying to remember if he’s heard that name before.
“I think both of y’all are right,” Joseph responds. “Or, at least, I don’t think neither one of y’all are wrong.”
“It’s all a matter of opinion, then,” C-Boy says. “And his opinion can be wrong. That jus’ go back to what I was sayin’ at first.”
“That man gave his life for what he believed in,” Joseph stresses, as if life and death is something he finds familiar, is comfortable with. “You can’t just gloss over that part.”
That got their attention.
“I think it comes down to your personal constitution,” Joseph adds with a smile.
C-Boy and Lil Chris share a look. “You mean each of our own understanding … of the facts,” Lil Chris reasons.
“No, you gotta—” Joseph stops. Considers. “Not necessarily just understanding. I mean your personal values. Everybody knows what happened. You never hear them arguing the facts. Them don’t change. It is all based on values when you pick it apart, though. If you value life over death, then you’ll see it one way. Probably blame Martin for the lives lost. But if you think a few lives lost for a higher purpose, the
greater good, is worth it, if you value progress that much … Well, that’s your personal constitution,” Joseph concludes matter-of-factly.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
She bore the features
Of a true woman
I’m feelin’ somethin’
The vision cut through my heart
Like a knife
My first impulse
Was to make her my wife
I recognized her from another life.
From a little bit past the jungles
Off the West African coast
I’m short o’ my rib, y’all
LIL CHRIS MADE IT TO the Education Building early that morning and posted up to wait on Rise to come through. He is more than a little anxious. He feels good about being a part of today’s events. It’s an accomplishment.
The C-ster is looking penitentiary sharp. He has some Sean Jean jeans on he got from Lil Ron. Some wheat and cornflower suede Gucci loafers he got from the homie Hip City. A sky blue t-shirt Rise gave him and a button-down, blue jean shirt. And blue-tinted sunglasses he gaffled for a while back—he’s still tryna remember who he got them from. He’s got his hair in two underhanded braids going to the back, the plait tucked under. He even got the N.O. homie Project to shape up his peach fuzz for him. When he made it to the building, Rise peeped out the C’ster and just shook his head. The lil youngster is definitely on some “other” stuff, but he fly.
Rise, on the other hand, had walked up looking so every-damn-day-ish, Lil Chris thought. State-issue blue jeans. A white t-shirt. Blue and white Adidas shelltoes. Of course, his hair is shampooed, oiled, and air dried. The nappy look. The two of them hooked up and walked the rest of the way to the A Building together.
Lil Chris watches as Rise hits one of them square cats he runs with. They do that characteristic embrace and whisper. Rise ignores his question about what he “Be doin’ with those marks,” which leaves the C’ster feeling a little twisted. He makes a skullnote to step to Rise a little later and press him on what he and them dudes be whispering about all the time.
Time enough for that later on. Indeed. At that point, wasn’t but one thing on Lil Chris’s mind: the annual A.S.C.P. College Seminar.
He and Rise wait in the A Building for about 45 minutes. But just as he starts spoiling over the big homie’s nonchalance, in comes the students from S.U.N.O., followed by the ones from Tulane. Then Grambling comes through the door. The biggest group of all were the pre-law students from Texas Southern.
This Life Page 16