“Do you feel ninety-nine, old man?” I knelt next to him, in the respectful way that I had seen some of the grown men—my cousins and half-uncles—do, with my forearm resting against the side of his wheelchair. The metal frame felt like ice against my skin.
“Every bit of it, caterpillar. Every one of those years was a different problem. And now those problems done piled up on top of me. Hurts to move. Hurts to breathe. They shove a hose up my Johnson so’s I can pee. I’m just about done with all this. This world been too many for me. I had dreams when I was an up-and-comer—”
He stared out at the reunion. We were on a park knoll in the state next door, where he lived. From the knoll, it was easy to watch the family, the many dozens of us, on the field below gathered around grill pits, playing bid whist at picnic tables, boys tackling each other with a contraband football, old ladies praying hand in hand. My parents had walked to the small promontory by the lake and were making their way back, two shadows beneath the evergreens.
On the opposite end of the green, a trio of state troopers, in their black armbands and Stetson hats, observed our gathering. The white lights on their interceptors blinked slowly and out of sequence.
“I’ll tell you something, lil shorty.” He put his hand on my forearm. His skin was wrinkled, but not as much as I would have expected. And his fingernails were as large and clear as if each were a window into his body. “I tell you this because you special even iffen you too young to feel me.” He leaned toward me. “You listening?” I nodded. “Peep this. I spent my whole existence working for white folk, and I did good for myself and all of you. I was a chef for forty-five years at the Wallace National Golf Club. I worked odd jobs to make ends meet. I been an under-the-table butcher ’cause I ain’t have no certification papers. I worked nights at Loafer’s making French bread for fancy restaurants all over the South. I been a chandler, too. I tell you to watch out for them though.” He squeezed my wrist. His eyes popped. “White people ain’t no more evil than the next man, and don’t let nobody tell you they are. But white folk radioactive, too. Because they got the top card and always will. ’Cause they glow in the dark, they can’t help but hurt you like what make cancer. You get me?”
I didn’t nod, but I didn’t shake my head either. I froze. Clearly, my grandfather’s brain was infected by devils.
He turned me to face him and gestured with his hands. “We like snails at a parade, and they tossing salt from the floats. Onliest thing you can do to shut it off is to use guilt for your umbrella. Guilt them into respecting you. When I die, tell ’em a Klan man killed your old grandpa. Tell ’em whatever you want to keep them off your back. Make them feel like they owe you something. Shame ’em to death. It’s the only way you’ll make it with them in this world, believe me, I tried. Self-respect will be your end.”
“Time to go,” Sir said.
My grandfather seemed to suddenly deflate, as though Sir’s presence sapped his strength. Grandpa stuttered when he spoke, and his hand shook. “Y’all raising this boy right,” he said. “He going to be a real gentleman.”
I stood and went to Sir’s side.
“You would know.” Sir rubbed his elbow patch. We had driven straight over from the college where he taught, so he was still in his sweater vest and blazer. Not that he would have changed clothes. That was his standard look.
Mama rubbed Sir’s shoulder. Her flowy orange and brown top fluttered in the breeze. “Thank you, Mr. Ben. You look hip with your Kings hat.”
“You so sweet, honey,” Grandpa said. “I wish y’all would bring this boy around more.”
Mama said something affirmative. But Sir muttered, “Not a chance.”
“What was Mr. Ben talking about?” Mama asked when we were a distance away.
“Nothing,” I said.
“I didn’t have to overhear to know,” Sir said. “He was trying to turn his head into a landfill. But the facility was closed, right, son?” I nodded absentmindedly.
As we walked, Sir placed a hand on the back of my neck. “You understand the importance of personal pride, and you certainly understand that life’s rewards come from knowing you’re as good as anyone else, as important.”
My grandfather was still seated in his chair on the knoll. Some family girls brought him a second helping of sweet potato cake, his favorite.
“You listening, son?” Mama asked.
“Yes, Sir,” I said. “I mean, yes.”
18
It turned out that Jan Galton–van Riebeeck, the white guy in the dashiki, was BEG’s director of strategic initiatives, one of the few paid positions in the organization. This meant he was linked into all things BEG. If I could impress him with my dedication to the group, then he would explain things that a peon like Supercargo wouldn’t know. Organizational structure, current methods, future plans. He would roll out the carpet so I’d know exactly where to walk.
Several days following my induction, I left the office early and met up with Jan and Riley at the organization’s downtown satellite office, an old book depository. The office was tiny—only two small rooms and a closet full of crabbing buckets—but it was to be used at my leisure once Jan cleaned the cobwebs out of the space—and my mind. We were going over BEG’s core tenets, which had been developed and deployed by our forebears, most of whom were lost to history.
On the table before me lay a half-dozen pastel pamphlets with cartoony figures of many skin tones—including jaundice yellow and fabulous magenta—holding hands, hugging, or ululating. One sloppily drawn figure probably should have been pointing his finger at his heart. However, the errant digit angled toward his head. “We’re All the Same Where It Counts,” the thought bubble read.
Jan chewed a plastic straw and paced. Riley stood over me with his arms folded over his olive suit vest.
“Okay,” Jan said. “Now, what does it mean?”
“It means that regardless of a person’s skin—”
“No, wait.” Jan stopped walking. He took off his round glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“We just went over this.” Riley turned from me to Jan. “I don’t think you even understand what we’re all about.”
“Give him a chance,” Jan said. He sat on the edge of the desk across from me.
“It’s simple. You’ve got to stop thinking of America in racialized terms.” Jan wiggled his fingers. “Race is nothing more than an idea, like city-states or heaven. Whenever you call me white and yourself black, you’re falling into a trap laid by bigots. We’ve got to ignore race to transcend it!”
“He won’t get it,” Riley said.
“Hey, take it easy,” I said. Ever since that day at the Musée, Riley had been brusque with me. I couldn’t tell whether it was because of envy that I’d outlasted him at the firm or anger that I’d moved in on his territory within BEG.
“Let’s take a break.” Jan grabbed his page boy cap and took a smoke break. Riley took a phone call—“I’ll have that shocker good to go in a couple days, hun,” he said. I took a spot at the window. HI! HOW ARE YOU? a billboard said. These New Truth advertisers and their gimmicks. This whole situation took me by surprise. A drizzle fell, silver sheening the streets of the business district. A green and white banner flapped.
Of course, I knew the theory that race was a figment. Who didn’t? Sir himself had explained it to me when I was about nine, while mocking his department head at the university.
We were in our living room–den–kitchen in the Tiko. Sir paced back and forth by the open window. Mama sat at the table with me, eating lemon petits fours while I gorged on a slice of homemade chocolate cake and milk.
“…and she had the nerve to get upset with me.” Sir gestured at his chest. “Called me a Cro-Magnon. I may be an iconoclast scofflaw, but I’m a thoroughly modern iconoclast scofflaw.” Sir sipped his to-go coffee, which had been sitting on t
he open windowsill. “And another thing—”
Mama stopped him by raising her pinky. “You ever stop to think she might have a point?” She bit another petit four, her dangly earring swaying as she chewed. Her right ear was bare. Her earrings were perpetually escaping and turning up in unexpected places.
“Not you too, Sadie.”
I laughed.
“Oh, you think I’m funny, young man?” Sir held his coffee cup toward me. “Thy tongue outvenoms all the worms of Nile.”
“Thou art a villain,” I said. I wasn’t as versed in Shakespearean insults as he was. I hadn’t taught a class on it. I was only nine.
Mama waved him off. “I’m saying some people think too much about it. It gets like weeds choking off the good growth.”
He rubbed his hand across the side of his prematurely graying hair. “Listen, Magee won’t have a point when I hammer a stake into her heartless heart.”
I snorted milk out of my nose.
“You like that one, huh?” Sir wiggled his eyebrows.
“See that?” Mama slapped the table. “Knew I was right.”
“What?” Sir asked.
“You only think about violence when you losing the argument.”
“I do n—” Sir shook his head and smiled, his signature grin, sheepish and glowing at the same time. Sir and Mama had been high school sweethearts. They knew each other’s ticks and tells. “Yeah. Well. Just because I’m losing doesn’t mean I’m wrong. I could lose all day and still win.” Sir folded his arms. Just when his hands came to rest under his armpits, a muted thud came from across the common outside the window. “Get down!”
Mama grabbed my arm and pulled me under the table. We lay on the spotless floor, which Sir mopped every night before he bedded down. Sir was on his belly ten feet away, his eyes locked on us, commanding that we not move until the coast was clear. The wake of Mama’s breath hit my ear, and out of the silence came the sound of distant firecrackers—gunshots, a flurry of them so fast that had the police been aiming at a paper target, the target would have instantly vaporized.
“Not yet,” Sir said. Pock pock. The sound of a small gun at close range. His shoulders loosened.
Mama got up.
“Wait,” Sir said. “We don’t know if—”
But Mama was already on her feet and headed to the window. Her socks whiffed across the tile. Sir wasn’t about to let her look on without him. I went over. At windows all over the Tiko, people, their faces terrifyingly angelic from the amber ground lights, glanced down on the entrance to Building Seven where a group of Anti-Violence Task Force police—heavily armed and armored—streamed out of the doorway like a long muscular centipede.
I was used to hearing the voices of women screaming after these incidents. But there was no screaming. Whoever had been in that apartment, whatever their gender or age or employment, was dead now.
“That ain’t right,” a woman’s voice said. It was Ms. Wendy Woods, in her hotel maid’s uniform, bulling her way through a collapsible barricade. “That ain’t even much right!” A man, Bowman, the street sweeper driver who had been courting Ms. Wendy Woods for decades, followed and begged her to come back. One of the police officers’ helmet lights swept across the cement and landed on her face, which I couldn’t see from my angle at the window.
“Wendy!” Mama said, and Ms. Wendy Woods looked back. The helmet light turned red. Something pierced my bare foot, Mama’s missing earring, a golden scythe.
* * *
—
I jumped in place when Riley grabbed my shoulder. A fire truck passed below the window. The truck cast light—red-white-red—against the rain-soaked nearby offices. No siren.
“Maybe you can get it,” Riley said. “Who knows? But you think I don’t know what you’re up to? I know all the plays, baby. You feel like being here is good résumé padding, but you need to step off that right away. BEG is all about the UNITY. You’re part of the problem we’re trying to fix.” He spoke under his breath while gesturing toward the world beneath the window. The marble plaza steps of the Sky Tower, like the terraced pages of an open book, were just in view.
“I didn’t hear you complaining when you thought you were about to be promoted,” I said.
Riley sneered. “And since when do you care about human rights anyway? This whole thing seems like a put-on.” He crossed his arms. “I changed, okay? Some things are more important than a bigger paycheck.”
“Would you feel better if he did his trial by ordeal today?” Jan asked.
“My what?”
“In this slop?” A slow smile spread across Riley’s snout. “That’s the best idea you’ve had all year, Janbo.”
Apparently, trial by ordeal was a requirement of membership in BEG instituted after Suhla’s failed reign as mayor and BEG leader, after the Teleprompter Massacre where a school full of black children and teachers were gunned down by a half-dozen white nationalist crazies, two of whom were black. The City went nuts about then. Suhla was jailed for the protests she had led in the past, which were characterized as riots, riots that led to the police leveling several city blocks where activists had holed up. I’d seen the photos. It astounded me how much damage a barrel bomb from a drone could do.
The organization was nearly disbanded by decree, but instead a placeholder leader was installed. One of the jobs of the caretaker was to lower the temperature of discourse among the City’s people. One way to do that was to encourage members to get out into a community that was increasingly dismissive and fearful. If a potential member could go out into the City streets and spread BEG’s message without getting beaten, arrested, or shot, then they were BEG material. Trial by ordeal.
Riley had stuck a BEG sticker—block-printed white letters on a black background—to my chest. My job was easy enough, on its face: hand out one hundred pamphlets in one hour. I stood at the corner of Avenue and Planter Street, an umbrella vibrating in one hand, a sheaf of pamphlets tucked under my other arm. Drizzle swirled.
“Excuse me,” I said to a group of well-dressed white women walking toward the river where that Myrtles mall was. If I could convince the seven women to take a pamphlet, I’d be almost 10 percent to goal. BEG had a handful of approved introductory statements. One for every occasion, including women who looked like they were returning to the salon after only twenty-four hours away. “Ladies, have you considered that your children and my children were created equal under the Constitution?”
I was greeted by dismissive hand waves. A man in a business suit—similar to my own—didn’t respond to my line that equality was good for the bottom line. A group of tourists in cowboy hats crossed to the other side of the street. One of the men kept his hand near his six-shooter.
And that was how it went for the better part of an hour. Meanwhile BEG’s office windows were in view a hundred yards away. Blond Jan stood in one, dark Riley in the other. Like a pair of mismatched irises.
I noted a red smudge on the ground that I would come to learn was all that remained of a homeless black who had illegally camped at the corner of the Sky Tower for some time. A black eventually identified as a former employee of a local firm. It was unknown whether he worked in facilities management or cleaning services.
“What are you doing?” a man asked. He was blond and skinny, like he could have been one of Jan or Jo Jo’s cousins. He wore City maintenance overalls.
“Sir,” I said. “What is your name?”
“No, thanks.”
“Have you considered that the best way to fix our future is to come together as one American people?”
He glanced at my sticker. “Oh. You’re one of those guys.” He turned away.
“Don’t let me scare you off.”
“I’m not scared. I’m just not interested.” He walked. I fell into step next to him.
“Please take one of these.
” I flapped a pamphlet at him.
“I don’t want one.”
“What’s your name?” As it turned out, we shared the same surname. I jogged around in front of him. “Please please please please please take one.”
“What’s it to you?”
“Do I have to get down on one knee?” I asked.
The man raised an eyebrow.
He was halfway down the street to the shuttle that ferried workers to the suburbs. A pamphlet jutted out of his back pocket. My pant leg was wet, and my knee somewhat bruised, but I had found an effective technique. After ten minutes of groveling, I was empty-handed.
19
Another day. I cut out of the firm early to visit the Nzinga Clinic because Jan and even Riley were pleased with my results from the trial by ordeal. After I’d given out all the brochures, one insistent couple even followed me back to the BEG satellite office to get their own. Jan said I could consider the satellite office my domain. I’d receive further instructions soon. That’s why I was at Nzinga’s. I’d just jumped from the backroads to the highway. It was time to map the final route to Nigel’s future.
The clinic was in the medical annex adjacent to Personal Hill Hospital. Sitting in Dr. Nzinga’s waiting room, the short medical tower where Penny worked was clearly visible. Fourth floor, northeast corner. I could feel her in there. Her heartbeat. Her breath. I was sure the hairs on the back of her neck stood up just then.
In the foyer was a maquette of a proposed massive new clinic large enough to service the City for generations to come. I imagined Dr. Nzinga, that tall, noble dark-skinned—but not too dark-skinned—man, somehow still practicing at the age of 101, holding the hand of my future granddaughter and telling her that life would eventually improve.
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