by Bernie Mac
But my grandma’s not laughin’. She grabs me by the ear and takes me out back and smacks my ass hard. “You making fun of your family, Bernie? In front of all these people!”
“No, ma’am.”
“You think it’s right to tell the family business?”
“No, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. I was just jokin’.”
“Ain’t no joke! You go out there and apologize right now!”
She follows me out, and I can’t help myself. I’m doing it again—in my grandpa’s deep snort: “Who done ate up all the corn bread? How many times I got to tell you, woman—you never make enough corn bread!”
Yank! She’s got me by the ear again. Drags me outside and up the stairs. It hurts like hell, but I don’t care because everybody’s laughin’. They’re laughin’ so hard I can hear them all the way up in my room. Pull on my ear all you want, Grandma—it’s worth it.
“So,” my grandpa asked me later that evening, circling me, “you think I say things four times? I don’t say things four times. Have I ever said anything four times?”
“Never, sir,” I said, bowing my head. “I was just makin’ up stories.”
He told me he was gonna whup my ass—four times he told me—but he didn’t whup my ass. He thought it was funny, too. He didn’t say so, of course, but I heard them talking about it later that night in the kitchen. My grandma’s laughin’ as she tells it again, saying, “That Bern, he too funny! Had ’em rolling in the aisles.”
My mama sayin’, “Boy told me he wanted to be a comedian. He gonna do it, too. Beanie gonna surprise everyone. Big things in store for my son.”
Following Sunday, people still talking about it. Visitin’ deacon takes me aside, says, “You got the power of speech, Bern. Ought to sign up for Young Deacon Night. Lord Almighty’s callin’ you to the pulpit, he be callin’ you, and he be callin’ loud.”
Motherfucker. When I get old, if I say things four times, please shoot me.
I tell the deacon: “I don’t think I got time, sir. Mama wants me to do better in school. I’m near the bottom of my class.”
The deacon thinks on this for a moment. “Maybe she got a point, Bern. Maybe you ain’t smart enough to serve the Lord.”
Black people: They tell it like it is.
School, I was funny, too. I couldn’t help myself. I liked making people laugh. Teachers call my mama to complain. Principal talks to me. Minister. Coach. School janitor, even. Everybody tryin’ to talk sense into Bernard, but Bernard ain’t listenin’.
Miss Ford says, “Why you accept failure, Bernie? Are you afraid to succeed? You’re better than this. You got smarts to spare.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“You want to be funny?” she says.
“I guess,” I say.
“Okay,” she says. “Friday afternoon, you can be funny. You get up in front of the class and be funny.”
I thought she was kidding, but she wasn’t kidding. She wanted to see me fail. She wanted to embarrass me so I’d fly right. “Everybody, put up your books,” she said. “Bernie gonna tell a story.”
And that’s what I did. I got up there and told a story, and everybody listened. It was about a man who had all the water in the world, and it was hotter than hell out, like maybe a thousand degrees, and he wouldn’t give anyone even a little sip. Not all my stories were funny. Some of them were just stories.
When I was done, the teacher couldn’t believe it. “Bernie,” she asked me—and the class was listening, everybody nice and quiet, “where’d that story come from?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Inside.”
“You made that story up?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“By yourself?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I want you to write it down for me.”
I went home that night and tried to write it down, but I couldn’t do it. It didn’t work that way. Stories came out of me when I opened my mouth, not when I was sitting in front of my blue notebook.
I told my teacher how it was.
“Okay,” she said. “Never mind about the writing. If you behave yourself, you can tell stories every Friday.”
And that’s what I did. Every Friday I’d get up in front of the class and tell stories. Kids lived for that. I ain’t lyin’. I’d be up there tellin’ crazy stories, anything that popped into my head. I’d tell them stories I made up, like the one about the man who lived right outside my window, only an inch tall, named Li’l Bit. Or I’d tell them things from real life: the way my grandpa made up words, say, or the way my grandma’s feet spilled out of her shoes like big fat sausages. I told them about all the got-damn beans at our house—seventeen kinda beans—and I said our house was fulla gas.
Got to a point where the teacher’s using me to keep order. “You kids keep making noise, Bernie won’t be telling his Friday story.” That made them toe the line. It was magic. I was just a kid, but I felt the power in stories.
In the schoolyard, big kids comin’ at me now. “You think you funny, spooky juice? I don’t think you funny.”
I’d tell the big kids the story about the visiting deacon: “Lord be callin’ you to the pulpit, Bern!” Voice rolling like thunder. “He be callin’ you loud!”
Hear them laughin’. Feels good. Better than getting beat the hell up. Feels good to be popular. We all want to be loved. And some people, well—they need it more than others. Some people hungry for it. And I might as well admit it here and now: I used to be one of those people. At home, phone would ring, I’d jump to my feet: “That for me?” Mail come, I’d run over to see if anyone’s writin’ little Bern. Someone knockin’ out front, I’d race my big brother to the door.
Grandma says, “Bern, there’s gonna come a day when the phone rings and you won’t want to answer it. The doorbell rings and you’ll look through the peephole and creep off and hide. Mail comes and you’ll let it pile up.
“By the time you die,” she went on, “two million people will have passed through your life. And maybe three or four of them will still be by your side.”
I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. But I do now.
“YOU’LL BE SCARED, SON. BUT THAT’S THE WAY IT IS. YOU HAVE TO MEET ALL THE CHALLENGES, BIG AND SMALL. BECAUSE HOW YOU START IS HOW YOU FINISH.”
02
I MAY WEEP, BUT I’M NOT GOING TO SUFFER
I’m a born fighter. I ain’t lyin’.
Take sports. I loved sports. Every chance I had, I’d be out in the park, tearing up the courts. Like every kid in the neighborhood, I thought sports was my ticket out of the ghetto. But I must’ve been the only one who thought so.
You remember how it is when you’re in the schoolyard and they’re picking sides? Well, I was always about the last to get picked. You’d be lining up, hearing the names. Bobby. Ray. Munson. Pookie.
You’re waitin’ to hear yours and it don’t come. And when it finally do come, some of the guys whine: “Shit. Why we gotta get Bern? That nigger can’t play ball.”
I didn’t whine, though. I never cranked or moaned. I gave it everything I had, even when everything wasn’t enough—especially when it wasn’t enough.
“You keep at it, Bean,” my mama told me. “One day you’ll be getting picked first. Teams’ll be fighting over you.”
So maybe I wasn’t a born fighter. Maybe it helped to have a mama that pushed you along. Whatever, that’s the way I am to this day: a fighter. Never say die.
My brother, Darryl, was the opposite. I never could figure it out. We had the same mother, and she brought us up exactly the same way, but you’d never know it.
Darryl settled for a lot less than he could’ve been. He was good-looking, solid, strong—a fifth-degree black belt in karate—but there was something wrong inside him. He was full of anger; came off him in waves. Any little thing—POW!—set that boy off.
Still, when you’re a little kid, you love your big brother—and I loved Darryl something fierc
e. He was a man; ten years older than me; powerful. I wanted him to love me, too.
Now that I think back on it, though, it’s like he hated me. Every chance he got, he’d beat me up. Beat me so hard I’d wet my pants. Beat me till he drew blood.
“If you tell Mama,” he’d say, “I’m gonna have to kill you.”
“Why you want to hurt me?” I’d say. “Why you so mean to me?”
“Mean? That ain’t nothin’, nigger. I’m just getting started.”
Something evil inside that boy.
Darryl had a dog in those days, name of Bullet, big, handsome, full-blooded, gum-chewin’ German shepherd, so fierce no one could go near him except Darryl. And he was a homosexual. Bullet, I mean. I ain’t lyin’. A gay dog. Everybody in the neighborhood wanted to get that dog mated with their dog, get them a nice fierce litter. But Bullet, you put him near a bitch, he’d try to kill her. Fangs out and foamin’ at the mouth.
He’d see a male dog, though, and nothing could stop him. Knock Darryl down to get to him. Mount that dog right quick, all stuck together, and Darryl would have to throw buckets of water over their sorry asses to cool them down.
Later, at home, Bullet would lie there, his paws all limp, happy, a look in his eye, That was some fine dog. I liked that boy.
Sometimes Darryl would give Bullet a stick of gum. And Bullet would chew on that thing, smack smack smack, openin’ wide when the gum got stuck to his back teeth. I can still see that dog, lying back like a fallen woman, smackin’ away.
Darryl went off to Vietnam when I was still in grade school, and I thought for sure I’d never see him again. Mama said it was wrong they’d even taken him: He had asthma so bad as a kid that it damn near killed him. We all prayed for him to survive, and our prayers were answered, but he came back from the war angrier and more evil than ever. He moved out and got a job at the post office.
I missed him more than ever. Can’t explain it. Man did nothing but hurt me, physically and emotionally, and I still loved him. What did I know? I was a child. I wanted attention. I looked for other ways to get it. I’d go into stores, steal candy bars. I’d ditch school. I’d go down to the projects and break windows. I wanted to get caught. I wanted to be noticed.
Then, one day, twelve years old, I got noticed good. Went into a store and stole some baseballs, and never made it out the door.
“You little sumbitch,” the man said. “I’m going to call your father.”
“Ain’t got one,” I said.
“What’s your name, boy? Give me your home phone number.”
“No,” I said.
“You ain’t gonna give me your number?”
“No, sir.”
“You want I should call the cops instead?”
I didn’t answer. And that’s what he did; he called the cops. They came and took me down to the station and I gave them my name and number right quick. They didn’t torture me or anything, but I’d watched a lot of TV in my young life—and I knew they would if they had to.
My grandmother said, “Keep him.” And she hung up.
Officer told me what she’d done. “You’re lying,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”
But he wasn’t lying. He put me in a cell and left me there to think on it, and it was hours before I saw him again.
“Let’s go, boy.”
He unlocked the cell and took me out front, where I found my mama waiting. And Lord, the look on her face. The pain. The disappointment. I don’t know for sure if that was the moment that changed me, but it was a start. I never wanted to see that look again.
“Hey, Mama,” I said, mumbling.
She didn’t say anything. She looked at me and her eyes watered up and she didn’t blink because she didn’t want the tears to drop.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said.
Still nothin’. She turned and made for the door and I hurried after her and followed her into the street. Went to the corner and waited for the bus in silence and rode all the way home in silence.
When we were a half block from home, she stopped and turned to face me. “I may weep,” she said, “but I’m not going to suffer.”
“Ma’am?”
“If you’re bad, Bean, if you go bad on me, son, I won’t be there for you. Understand? I’m not coming to get you again.”
We never again spoke of that day in my house. There was nothing to say. Sometimes less is more. Worked for me.
In 1972, when I was fourteen, we moved to Ogden Park, a nicer neighborhood. But it’s all relative.
’Bout every day, some kids would sidle over and ask me, “You with a gang?”
“No,” I’d say. I was cool about it. I wasn’t going to mess with that element.
“You too ugly to be with a gang.”
“And too black.”
I’d laugh and slap my thigh and slur my words and mumble like I was stoned or something. They thought that was cool. They’d say, “Bernie fuuuuucked up, man!” And they laughed right along with me.
But one day they stopped laughing. Kid from school came up to me on the bus, said, “Watch your back, Bernie. They’re comin’.”
“Who?” I said.
“Who do you think?”
“Fuck them,” I said. “I’m not joining.”
When the bus came to my stop, everyone went running off in different directions. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, until I turned and saw eight guys coming up the street behind me. As they got closer, they did this crazy signing thing: fists clenched and crossed at the wrists, followed by a smack to the chest.
“What do you want?” I said. I was trying to sound a lot tougher than I felt.
“You,” one of them said. “Try to run and I’m gonna shoot you in the back of the head.”
Two guys grabbed me by the shirt and led me down the block and into the alley. I could see people scurrying into the shadows like scared rabbits, and I heard them saying, “They got Beanie! They got Beanie!”
There was an abandoned building in the next block, and they dragged me into the basement. They had a desk and everything inside, and I was thinking, What? These motherfuckers got an office?
They did that gang thing again, with the clenched fists and the chest beating. And then the one guy asked me, “You want to be a gangster?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, you gonna be,” he said.
“I don’t want to be no gangster,” I said.
“Too bad, motherfucker.”
He turned and looked at the guys behind me, and they came at me, four of them. And I saw how one of them was this kid from school, Edward. He was looking at me like he felt bad, but the others were already drilling me. Fists coming at me hard. And Edward’s saying, “Don’t hit him in the face!”
But it was too late. They’d hit me in the face a half-dozen times already, and everywhere else for good measure. And I’m falling and getting up and getting hit again, so dizzy and disoriented I couldn’t see to run.
Then the lead guy told them to stop, and I got back to my feet and tried to get my bearings. I didn’t feel any pain, but I was furious. I was hot all over. Hot on my face, too. A fire in my chest like a storm was comin’.
“You wanna join now, nigger?”
I turned to look at him. It was the lead guy again, at the desk. “No,” I said.
BANG! One of them sumbitches hit me in the back with a two-by-four. I fell to my knees and got up quick. I was hurting now. Too many of these guys. Didn’t have a chance in hell.
“Represent, motherfucker!” the guy behind the desk said.
And I did it. I’m ashamed to tell you, but I did it. I clenched my fists and crossed my arms at the wrists and smacked my fists against my chest.
“You in, nigger. With us all the way,” he said. And they’re grinning like I’m supposed to be celebrating or something, and I walked toward the exit and they moved aside and let me go.
I went home. I walked through the door and I could hear my mother and grandmoth
er in the kitchen, getting dinner ready. I didn’t go in like I usually did. Instead, I hollered hello and went to the living room and looked out the window. I could see the bangers coming down the street now, crossing into the park, where the playground was. I could see them through the trees, sitting around, horsing around, looking for trouble. I didn’t move for an hour. I just sat there and stared.
Then my mother came into the living room, surprised to find me there. “Beanie! You finished your homework already, son?”
I turned to look at her.
“Good God, boy,” she said. “What happened to your face?”
I didn’t say nothin’.
“I’m going to ask you one more time,” she said.
“I got tackled and my football helmet fell off,” I said. “Got dragged hard along the ground.”
She knew I was lying. “Come to dinner,” she said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“That’s no excuse. In this house, we eat dinner together.”
I followed her into the kitchen, but I was still thinking about those guys. My grandmother looked at my face and jumped and went to say something, but my mother stopped her with a look. My grandfather wasn’t there; must’ve been on the late shift. I didn’t say much at dinner. They talked about regular things in their day, and about the price of groceries.
After dinner, I went upstairs to my room and tried to do my homework. But I couldn’t think about anything except those guys. Then there was a knock at the door, and my mother came inside.
“Beanie,” she said, “let me tell you something. In life, there’s always going to be trials and tribulations. And one day, one of those trials is going to represent such a challenge that you’ll think you can’t possibly meet it. You’ll be scared, son. But that’s the way it is. You have to meet all the challenges, big and small. Because how you start is how you finish.” Then she patted my hand and left the room and closed the door behind her.
I lay in bed that night, tossing and turning. Didn’t get a wink of sleep. In the morning, I got up before everyone else and took a butter knife from the kitchen and went to look for my grandfather’s tools. I took a file and filed it down till it was sharp as a needle, then I found some black electrician’s tape and taped the knife to the inside of my right hand. I went and got my books and used them to cover up the knife in my hand and stepped into the kitchen. My grandmother and mother were there. They turned to look at me.