We Cast a Shadow

by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

  “You’re a good man, Jo Jo Baker,” I said, glancing at him in the passenger seat.

  “Why am I doing this again?” Jo Jo motioned at the camera around his neck.

  “Because I need a wingman.” Dinah was right. I felt better now that I was back on offense. All I needed to get into the good graces of the organization that ran the museum was a positive attitude and a few handshakes. Once I insinuated myself, I would present proof to Octavia that I was hard at work making Seasons look good. She would be able to parlay my efforts into something useful.

  “I thought I was promoted out of that spot when you got married.” He snapped a shot of me.

  “Once a wingman, always a wingman.” Pulling into the parking lot, I remembered the bombed-out storefronts and drugged-out bums who populated the neighborhood during my childhood. The Musée was now flanked by a lovely patisserie and a classical mime college.

  The organization that owned the museum, the Blind Equality Group, nearly lost the franchise due to a tax debt. The BEG, as it was sometimes called, believed in creating a completely color-blind world. Their ongoing fight was against those who would divide the citizenry by race, even if that meant ignoring history, statistics, policy, and rhetoric. They just wanted us all to get along. But hopes and dreams don’t pay the bills. To raise funds, they converted the property into a tourist attraction. As I recalled from school trips to the establishment when I was a boy, it was more of a gift shop than anything, trading in the iconography of blackness throughout the decades, from baggy jeans and head wraps to big red wax lips and combs shaped like clouds. (Someone—maybe Sir—had told me that the combs were originally fist-shaped but the fists were outlawed by City ordinance. The idea of a comb shaped like a folded hand sounded like one of my father’s typically dubious ideas. He had been a frequent purveyor of the big fish tale, a veritable fishmonger.)

  The Musée was one of about a half-dozen places where Supercargo worked part time. Most of my cousin’s jobs were like that. Fifteen hours here. Eight hours there. A graveyard shift when he could swing it.

  Supercargo greeted us with a flurry of daps and hugs as soon as we entered. “Cuzzie,” he said. “I never thought I’d see you up in here, but I’m glad you came. And you brought my man Jo Jo. Give me a second, y’all.” He went behind the checkout counter and righted a discount sign. A group of tourists in hockey jerseys clustered around a turning rack. A brunette woman clutched a familiar-looking plush doll to her chest. I purchased a vanilla-crème-filled chocolate eclair from the patisserie. A dollop of that delicious, wholesome goop dropped onto my shoe. As I reached into my blazer for a handkerchief, I was suddenly taken over by nostalgia. I picked up a doll that was identical to the one the brunette had held.

  “What is that thing?” Jo Jo finished his baklava and wiped his hands on his pants. I gave him the doll. It was a representation of the civil rights leader—that former mayor I mentioned—Jacquelle Suhla, herself. It was clad in a gray pantsuit and brown bow tie. Of course, the doll’s humanity was substituted for something more salable. An adorable monkey.

  Some people thought the Suhla Monkeys were racist. But others believed they were a preemptive strike against bigoted minds. If we could transform our best leader into a marmoset, then what did it matter if certain people wondered if we blacks had tails that we tucked into our underwear? As for me, I found the monkeys cute. I’d had one when I was in grade school. It occupied a prime position in my childhood bedroom: hanging from a strap over my dresser mirror. Whatever happened to my monkey?

  “How much?” the woman asked me. “This is the cutest thing. My niece will just love her.”

  “Well, I—”

  “He doesn’t work here,” Jo Jo said.

  “Everything is twenty percent off today, miss,” Supercargo interrupted, pointing to a sign hanging from the rafters.

  “You work here?” the woman asked. Supercargo said yes. “You have amazing hair.” The woman’s eyes widened. “May I?”

  Supercargo offered a length of his dreads, which she stroked as a child in a petting zoo might.

  “Such an earthy, soulful texture,” the woman said, and wandered off to gather more swag.

  Supercargo smiled at me. “It’s better to meet her type in here than in a darkened alley. I’d never make it out alive.” He flipped up the counter and stepped from behind it. “Come check out the hall. I’m glad you came, cuz. You too, Jo Jo.” I palmed a tube of skin toning cream from a stack on the counter with the intent to purchase it later. Supercargo parted a beaded curtain.

  “What, no secret handshake?” I asked.

  “Would you know it if I asked, brother?” Supercargo asked.

  “He’s got a point.” Jo Jo took a picture of Supercargo and me.

  “So he does.”

  The hall was a simple, wood-paneled affair with metal folding chairs arranged in rows. At the front of the room, a microphone jutted from a podium. Affixed to the front of the podium, a placard said, BLIND! EQUALITY! NOW! A few people were already seated. I was no stranger to such rooms. When I was a boy, Sir had brought me to this lecture or that sermon. To protests and strategy sessions. To the inner sanctums of community, resistance, and struggle. Such events fit Sir like a well-worn pair of slippers. Regardless of the audience or location, he was always ready with a word of support for the cause, even when it wasn’t clear what the cause was. After all, what was equality other than a typographical error in the Constitution?

  Yes, the Founders had meant that all men were created equal, but they failed to include an index of defined terms. Ever since they drafted that screed, no one wanted to admit that Washington, Jefferson, and the rest of those guys meant only to protect the rights of white, landowning men. Through sloppy copyediting, our illustrious forefathers set off the human rights skirmishes that would beset the nation all the way to the present. If any of the seventy-plus delegates at the Constitutional Convention could have bothered to bring along a gray-wigged man of letters or even a lowly print shop owner, the document would have been clearer, so generations of people wouldn’t have spent their lives dreaming of rights they were never meant to have, wrongheadedly attending protests, getting beaten or killed.

  Had Sir tried to make me more like him, in visiting so many of these struggle spaces? He must have realized somewhere along the way that he’d failed. And how would he have felt about me bringing Jo Jo? Sir wasn’t a racist. The oppressed can’t oppress, boy. That’s like blaming the lobster for the temperature of the pot. But he never met a white person he didn’t have a problem with. Bringing Jo Jo into a historic inner sanctum such as the back room of the MdNA would have been like inviting the Sons of the Confederacy into a planning session of the original Million Man March all those decades ago. Every time I wondered what he would have made of Penny, I short-circuited the thought by trying to recall the name of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s black great-grandfather.

  “Tyson?” I mumbled. “Jenson? Or was it great-great-grandfather?”

  “What?” Jo Jo asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I’m thinking of taking a trip up to Brooklyn—”

  “To see Casey? That’s not a great idea.”

  “She can’t keep my kids away from me.” I reminded Jo Jo that his ex-wife could indeed keep the boys away from him until his attorney, another law school classmate, managed to garner visitation rights for him. Against my advice, Jo Jo hadn’t had representation during the divorce or custody hearings. Now it was up to his new lawyer to wrench him out of the hole he’d dug for himself. I sometimes questioned the plausibility of two people so deeply in love ending up as mortal enemies. Maybe love was just the larval stage of hate, the comely caterpillar in advance of the hideous butterfly.

  I had come to the Musée with a simple plan: Join up with BEG. Maybe get Seasons to sponsor the organization’s Christmas party. Then use Season
s’s support of the race community’s activities as one more arrow in the quiver next time Octavia and I made a run at the hospital.

  I was surprised to see that at least a third of the room was white. After all, Supercargo, like Sir, was not above throwing up an occasional black power fist. I expected a room full of sixth-wave Black Panthers, but the gathering was a mix of people from various races and classes. Supercargo introduced us to a few people. A brother with surgically recolored blue eyes—it was easy to tell, the blue was too blue, the perfect, beautiful blue of a Midwestern sky—who drove streetcars. A woman who worked on the janitorial staff of the School Without Walls; she seemed perhaps Afro-Latina by her accent and medium-light brown skin, but her nose had a papery aspect to it, a telltale sign of early-process demelanistic reconstruction. A youngish white couple in dashikis. The Galton–van Riebeecks, Jan and Marie, I would later learn. Supercargo and Jo Jo fell into conversation with some of the others.

  Near the back of the room, a man in a seersucker suit bent over a cardboard box and fiddled with the contents. That bald head. That almond skin tone. My mind served up an image of the same man bent over at Octavia’s mansion, rubbing Armbruster’s gnarly, waxen feet. He recognized me as soon I recognized him.

  “Riley,” I said.

  He placed one fist on a hip, a standard Riley pose. “Well, if it isn’t the boy who lived,” he said, his weight shifting from foot to foot. He was a beast in doubles. “Give me some!” He threw both arms around me and gave me a lingering, almost tender hug. “How are things on the Great White Way?” He covered his mouth and glanced around with exaggerated sheepishness like someone from one of those historical Wayans Bros. clips. “I shouldn’t say things like that, especially around here, but I’ve had it rough since they fired me, and I’m dying to know if the place has burned to the ground yet. Least they deserve.” Riley told me he had gotten his pink slip as soon as he came in the morning after Elevation Night. He’d made a few calls and snatched a teaching job at Nigel’s school. “School pay is godawful, but there’s a little less intrigue, as you can imagine.”

  A clot of schadenfreude rose up the back of my throat. Riley had always been a social climber with an air of superiority about himself. It was funny to see him humbled to a profession that society deemed hardly as important as street sweeper, given the pay scale. But I felt a twinge of shame. I couldn’t deny that I missed him at the firm. He usually knew what was going to happen before the rest of us associates did, and he shared information freely. Beyond that, he could be a good guy, even selfless. Like the time he took me to lunch and explained all of Octavia’s expectations and pet peeves.

  “You always did land on your feet,” I said.

  “That’s me,” he said, “part pussy cat.”

  “How’s my kid doing?”

  “Oh. We get along eminently, but he’s on a different schedule, so I don’t see him much.” Riley cupped my elbow. “Listen. You really shouldn’t be here.”

  “That’s no way to welcome an old buddy.”

  Riley’s face suddenly darkened, and he punched my shoulder hard. “I’m serious.” His face went back to normal as a couple walked over. “Have you met Marie and Jan? They’re two of BEG’s biggest benefactors.”

  “No.” I rubbed my shoulder.

  “That was before our diamond stocks plummeted,” Marie said. She grabbed my forearm. “I thought he’d be blacker.”

  “Yeah,” Jan held out a pale hand next to my dark one. “We’re more African than you.”

  How much shock registered on my face? Did my eyes bug? Did my tongue loll in my open mouth? Supercargo pointed at me. Jo Jo chuckled. So did the Galton–van Riebeecks.

  “They’re from Namibia,” Riley said.

  A short sister in a pantsuit entered. I’d seen her on television. She was the granddaughter of Suhla, the former mayor.

  “Oh, baby,” Riley said. “Zora doesn’t look happy.” I shrugged my shoulders interrogatively.

  “Funding issues,” Marie said. “The City keeps futzing around with the grant allocations. They keep the organization on a tight leash so we don’t escape from the yard.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Riley said. “My contacts in the City Finance Department don’t return my calls now that I don’t have that Seasons Ustis Malveaux shine.”

  Supercargo gave Riley a nasty look, then showed me to a seat near the front of the room. The Galton–van Riebeecks sat behind me. Supercargo played MC and called Zora to the podium. She said a prayer, her wide, open face turned up to the fluorescent lights. I found a meeting agenda on the seat next to me. I scanned it. There were slots for old business. Marie oversaw BEG’s fundraising. Intake was up. Supercargo was the recruiting coordinator. New member enrollment was down, but hopefully my presence was a sign of change. Then the testimonials started. The streetcar driver spoke in stilted terms about the value of everyone coming together and “rolling along the same track.” The janitorial woman said we shouldn’t fear “sweeping changes” because sometimes you have to “clean the mess out and start from fresh.” It was Supercargo’s turn up.

  “Y’all know we been working a long time for the dream. We trying to bring our community together in a new way, a permanent way.” Some people nodded. “It’s been a long time coming, but I can feel that we turning a corner. Our protests at the hospital have been making a difference. People are paying attention and hear our message.”

  A few in the room clapped. But not everyone. For instance, the janitor wrung her hands, while the streetcar driver stared straight ahead. The Galton–van Riebeecks, though, clapped vigorously. “And now ain’t the time to back down or let up. I don’t know about y’all, but I ain’t about to back down. I don’t even know how.” Another smattering of appreciation. “But I ain’t going to run on because I want y’all to hear a word from my best cousin. He a good dude. He really is.” Light applause.

  I didn’t move. They couldn’t make me move. If I just sat, eventually they would move on to other business. It was a familiar fear, always present the moment just before I spoke in court. In that moment, I considered the possibility of failure, of humiliation. Jan tapped my shoulder, and I popped up like a piece of burned toast.

  Supercargo took the seat I had vacated. More light applause. Jo Jo snapped shots of me in rapid succession. I tried to clear my throat, but there seemed to be a gigantic ball of wet, warm cat hair lodged in my esophagus. Somehow the audience took this as cause to clap harder. I didn’t want to argue in favor of the protests at PHH. I liked the work PHH did. After all, I would be sending Nigel there soon enough. And how could the BEG be anti-demelanization when at least three people other than the streetcar driver and janitor had obviously undergone procedures?

  But then I remembered why I was there. I needed to build a foundation that Octavia could relaunch her PHH campaign from. If I could convince the group to accept me as one of their own, I would quickly move up the ranks. They would vouch for me when the time came. Along the way, I would make sure there were plenty of photos documenting my place—Seasons’s place—in the movement. Eckstein wouldn’t be able to say we had no commitment to the black community. We would be the community.

  I employed a technique I learned back in law school. I placed my hands on either side of the podium, firmly gripping the edges. I spaced my feet shoulder-width apart. I took three deep breaths. This trick was given to me by my mentor at the University of Alabama Law School, a beautiful sister called Mimi LaVon of Chicago, who was two years ahead of me. Mimi’s technique grounded me in times when it seemed like the whole planet was vibrating on an untenable frequency.

  “Brothers and sisters,” I said, “there is a black cloud over our city. A wave of darkness that threatens to wipe away our identity. We’ve all seen the nefarious work being carried out at the shadowy clinic. The thinning of lips. The whittling down of noses. The whitening of skin.”


  “You tell it,” Marie said. Several people leaned forward in their seats. Jo Jo clapped a little too loud—I didn’t know he cared. I wasn’t quite sure what to say next, so I used Penny—that is, a word salad of things she had said at one time or another—to make the point.

  “And for what purpose? To divide us. Now is the time for us to prove to our fellow citizens the value of self-love. The value of accepting one another as we are.” I pulled my monogrammed handkerchief from the inside of my jacket and wiped my forehead, then my cheek, as I had seen my pastor do in the church my parents brought me to before it was condemned. An eclair crumb lodged in the corner of my lip. I ate it. Chocolate. “My dear brothers and sisters. Countless people have climbed this mountain before us. Countless have suffered indignity and even death to open this path. But today we have reached the other side and find a valley filled to the brim with the briars of iniquity. It’s up to us to chop down those briars, to clean out the vestiges of a caste system based on the color of our skin!”

  At the last line, I pounded the podium. The room rose to its feet in response, as if I’d just brought down the hammer at a state fair, and they were the puck. Everyone clapped, even Mr. Streetcar and Janitoria. Except for Riley, who remained seated with his arms folded. But never mind him. There was an electric vibration inside me as they chanted my name. Supercargo led me from behind the podium. People grabbed my hands, hugged me, kissed my cheeks.

  “I guess this means you in,” Supercargo said.

  “You reckon?” I asked.

  16

  Nigel had too many birthmarks to count. If this fact surprises you, it’s because I’ve done a poor job of describing the true wingspan of the albatross hanging around my dear boy’s neck.

  I knew the blot on his face greeted him in the display cases of the School Without Walls. I knew he saw his defect in the black mirrors of electronic devices. I knew his stain was apparent in the barely disguised reactions of strangers who had been smiling the moment before they recognized his defect.