the ghetto’s government-sponsored dance company is all-black, and roo and me, we rule. roo is the body as light, the essence of motion, beauty in function. women fall at his feet after performances like he drugged em. me, i ain’t bad, if i do say so myself. the company’s name, “furaha,” is a swahili word that means “joy.” my dancing is a prayer for joy, a blessing that my movements produce like sweat, and i’ll share it with anyone who’ll sit still for two seconds. we pack our auditorium here in the ghetto nearly every performance. and when we make our biannual tours of cities outside the unit, audiences eat us up. i wish sometimes i could ask them what it is in our work that moves them, out there. but that kind of contact is no longer allowed—hasn’t been legal since i was in grade school.
in thoughtful silence, i returned to my warm-up. roo stretched out facing me, mirroring my movements, as he had so often before. growing up, he was always determined to be able to do any moves i could do, so he’d be competitive for a space in any dance company i got into. my tag-along brother, who followed me right into the place where he was born to be.
when i heard the footsteps of the rest of the company, i blushed. the red flyer, flat screaming by my foot, was gonna trigger another fight between me and trevette. i snatched it up, folded it, and tucked it into the waistband of my leggings, beneath the oversized t-shirt i wore. luckily for me, she chased in after mari had stepped to the front of the room. mari is the company leader and choreographer, and she don’t take no stuff after her rehearsals start. trevette went straight to her place and took first position. i refused to meet her eyes in the mirror, but i could feel her gaze, hot, on my shoulders.
as soon as mari dismissed us, trevette broke for the locker room. i was thinking, praise god, because i was not ready to talk to her. surprised me that she didn’t try to corner me in the rehearsal studio. i trailed into the locker room after much delay, stopping first to ask a question of mari, to check with roo about his dinner plans, to gossip with a couple of other dancers about a blind date one of them had the night before. i thought i was just being careless, the first two times my lock didn’t open after i punched in the code, but the third time i entered the numbers more carefully. when it still flashed red, i grew concerned. not just my clothes, but my keys and my wallet were locked away. the other women slipped quickly into their street clothes and vanished. when i looked up and saw no one, i made a dash for the door to the men’s changing room, intending to catch roo before he left, so he could give me a ride home. turned the corner at full speed, and ran smack into trevette.
she grabbed my wrists, one in each of her slender, strong hands. “can i help you?”
“girl, you scared me to death!”
“where you headed so fast?”
i looked at my wrists, then met her gaze fully. she peeled her fingers from around my arms. “i need to make sure roosevelt doesn’t leave without me—i’m locked out of my locker and can’t get to my car keys.”
“i’ll drive you home.”
“i—” i didn’t even bother. i couldn’t avoid talking to her forever, even if i wanted to.
“what’s wrong with your locker?” she asked.
“i don’t know! i entered my password three times, but it won’t open.”
“let me try.” she hunched over the lock’s keypad for a second or two and then i heard the high-pitched beep and saw the green light.
“how did you do that?”
“truth?”
“course.”
self-satisfaction rose in her eyes like biscuits in a tin. “i changed your password at the beginning of rehearsal.”
“unh!” i made this inarticulate noise of indignation and reached for the door of my locker. quick like silver, she pressed the lock button. and i still didn’t have the current password. “trevette!”
“sit with me a minute, peaches.” she brushed cool fingers down the side of my arm from shoulder to elbow, so lightly i might have only felt their breeze passing over my skin. i sat.
“you know, i didn’t give you my password for you to lock me out of my own locker.”
“please come with me.” direct, but uncertain, she spoke, like a soldier giving a command to a superior officer. i stared at her knees, unable to speak. “peaches, this is it. you swore that if i ever got to the breaking point, you’d pack up and go with me. now, i know you’ve seen the new decc order. next thing you know, they gonna be archiving our dirty drawers! this is the last straw for me. it’s time to go! maybe you were counting on changing roosevelt’s mind before now, but i can’t help that. i ain’t gonna wait to get up outta here until there’s some law against it!”
“trevette, this is home,” i whispered, almost a moan. “we do important work here. i love this place, this immersion in what’s ours.”
“i know. but we won’t be giving up our work. just doing it for a different audience. we’ll be free to see what black minds and black bodies can do with white music or white choreography. come on—how many times can we perform revelations without becoming robots on stage? our work is getting so sterile, girl. giving it some fresh sights and sounds to work with don’t mean we gotta reject black dance.”
i plunged my face into the pool of indecision in my cupped palms.
“eleanor johnson. how long we been tight?”
“um, how old are we?” the ritual question in answer to ritual question. born two days apart, on the same street, neither of us could remember the time before we were inseparable.
“exactly. and nothing can change the way i feel about you. i love you. i want the best for you. i want you happy and safe.” trevette sighed heavily. “we done had this conversation so many times. the good things about this unit are good. real good. sometimes i feel like i could lie down in the middle of 125th street and roll around like a dog in clover, i’m so full of satisfaction: some gospel song that moves my heart, some dance step calling up mother africa that pops into my mind as i’m walking around watching the rhythms of folk just doing their own day-to-day on the street, some beautiful boy-face peeping up at me over a book and smiling about learning. that stuff feels real good.”
i waited silently for the “but.”
“but i can’t help remembering what granddaddy used to say. you were there, too, you heard him. ‘history is a cycle, y’all,’ he kept saying. ‘this unit is separation today, but it’ll be segregation tomorrow, mark my words. it’s freedom now, but there gonna come a day when it’ll be a trap. it’s the right to love your own we needed so bad, but it’s gonna be a heavy duty to some generation ahead.’ ”
of course i remembered. roo and i spent all kinda time at trevette’s house after our mother died. i could still see the old man, rocking on the parkers’ front porch, sporting a dingy cotton undershirt and loose jeans, speaking about the old days before the ghetto was created. he had only been a teen when the law was passed, and he was old-old when trevette and me was girls. in his last weeks, he used to mumble to himself as he rocked, eyes fixed on some memory in his head, saying over-n-over, “conservation. reservation. conservation. concentration,” like a chant. we knew what he was talking about, long-ago gatherings of american indians and a certain group of asian americans, but we couldn’t figure out why he was connecting those times of deprivation and harassment to our peaceful retreat, our lawful homeland.
“i’m feeling it heavy, peaches. i don’t think you can put a box around a culture. and i don’t like feeling like somebody’s anthropology project.”
“trevette, i—”
“i’m done with it, girlfriend. and, brother or no brother, i want you with me when i go.”
* * *
that evening, i piled into my favorite chair, this big overstuffed thing that i found in a clearance sale near the ghetto border. tucking my bare feet into a corner for warmth, i unfolded the flyer and stared at the words on the page again, trying to tell myself not to be insulted.
decc alert
effective immediately, residents of africa
n american cultural conservation unit #1 should further organize waste disposal by separating waste associated with sexual activity and sexual health from other categories of waste. waste items covered under this category include, but are not limited to:
feminine hygiene products (internal and external)
male and female condoms,
packaging for reproductive and anti-reproductive medical technologies,
discarded sexual pleasure implements, etc.
pink containers will be provided to each household for collection purposes, and should be placed with the household’s other color-coded receptacles for pick-up.
—executive order #46,877, pursuant to the ethnic and cultural conservation act.
no use. i was pissed. i remembered, vaguely, that i had heard rumors of decc interest in the so-called “reproductive patterns” of american racial and ethnic groups, but i hadn’t counted on more micromanagement of our lives to get the details. hell, this was for real an invasion of privacy! they already tracked our food consumption, monitored our reading, recorded our entertainment choices. they had so many categories for separating our waste for disposal, the street looked like a rainbow on trash day, lined with row after row of different color bins. all in the name of history and cultural conservation. anytime someone complained—and trevette had done her share of complaining—the decc issued its standard response. that we owe it to our grandchildren and their grandchildren to preserve a record of what african american culture was like in the twenty-second century. remember the middle passage era! they always added. “unknowable” history. few first-person accounts of what the kidnapped africans thought about their tragedy, how they coped, what they did, day-to-day, to survive the holds of the slavers.
when roosevelt dropped by, as he always did if he was anywhere near my street, i interrupted his flow on his latest romantic conquest to see if i could get him to change his mind about leaving. “i’ve been thinking that trevette’s right,” i started. “you know? this new order is over the top. maybe it’s time to get, while the getting’s good.”
“chick, you gotta do what you gotta do.” he stood up, went to the window, turning his back to me.
“i’m talking bout you doing it, too!”
“ain’t gonna happen.”
“come on, man! everything we do is data these days! i feel like this society has regressed to the days of animal testing, and this time it’s us, instead of rabbits and mice, that get studied.”
“if you hadda studied, yourself, a little harder in your history classes, you’d know that black folks got studied even back then. remember that tuskegee thing?” he glanced my way, and i nodded. “that shit happened then, it’s probably still going on, and it ain’t gonna stop no time soon.”
i thought that over. “well, at least, if it’s happening now, it’s probably limited to the ghetto and the other units. if we went out into the open territory, they couldn’t single us out. we’d get the same treatment as the whites.” my eyes narrowed. “and we deserve that, too! i know you noticed how our studio’s starting to decline, repairs not getting made like they oughta, salaries not keeping up with costs like they used to. i got my eyes open when we tour out there. they may rush us from hotel to stage to hotel, trying to keep us from accidentally breathing white culture—”
“yeah, i see their dope, next-generation equipment, their fancy facilities. but are you dancing for the money or what?” roo challenged me.
“hell, no!” i swallowed and brought my voice back down. “i’m dancing to see where my body and mind can take me, wherever beauty is. and i don’t like seeing ‘road closed’ signs in my path.”
he shook his head, his short, locked hair a spiky mane, dark against the twilight filling the window. “see, how you gonna act? like i don’t hear you when trevette be all on your case to leave the ghetto? you say all the things i feel, when you talk to her. it is large, what we do up in here. we dance the dances that our ancestors of the twentieth century created from pain and pork chops, you know what i’m saying? and those dances have the trace of all prior african-american dances in them. we keep it real for our young people, so that they grow up with their history living all around them.”
“i’m getting a little tired of that old shit.” i said this so quietly, i wasn’t sure if it had left the realm of thought.
“don’t say that.”
“i’m serious, roo. there are times when this emphasis on the past like to drown me. all these authenticity rules! gotta have eighty percent historical content in each program. can’t change not a step in performing some nineteenth or twentieth century dance. it’s like we’re fossils, walking around. i need to see if maybe black dance got a future.” i got up, went to stand beside him at the window. “i do love the ghetto. but I’m not sure it’s enough.”
he looked into my face, his expression queer, his eyes muted. “you should go, peaches,” he said, finally.
“not without you.”
“without me. go with trevette. she’s as much your family as i am.”
“yeah, but i can’t be choosing between family members. we all go, or we all stay.”
“no. trevette is out the door, and you know it.”
i could feel the waters rising inside me, frustration that would flood my eyes in a minute. “she won’t leave without me!” trevette just couldn’t do me like that. she of all people knew how much roo and me needed each other. parents and grandparents gone, our uncles way over in the west coast unit, our only aunt with her latino husband and their kids living somewhere out there, out of reach, virtually out of contact, because of the government’s worries bout introducing “foreign elements” into ghetto culture. my little brother was my support, my responsibility. i could still see him, six years old and already growing like a vine, ashy ankles hanging out below the hem of his jeans, begging our parents for dance lessons “like peaches.”
roo put his arm around me, pulling me against his lean frame. sighing. “when i look at the streets of this unit, when i scan the audience at the end of a performance, when i shop, when i play, the people i come in contact with look like me. the vibe they send out is on my wavelength. not like they just got one groove—they got a million—but wherever they’re at, is someplace i can reach, or at least see. they all colors, but they all colored, if you know what i mean.”
we laughed. i did know.
“what moves me as a person, as a dancer, is the giving and getting, getting and giving, that goes on between me and them. my art is more interactive than individual. and i can’t get what i need, to dance like i mean it, if my audience is never black.”
“there are black folks out there,” i interrupted.
“yeah, barely. it’s not the same.” he took my hand, studying my fingers, the nails clipped to the pink. “but that’s me. you’re a different person, girl. you got to go for what you know. your art thing is about expressin—like a glass that keeps filling up from the bottom and flowing over the top like crazy. something comes from deep inside you, and gotta come out. period. now, whatever you need to keep that flow flowing, that’s what i want you to have. if it’s love, then stay close to love. if it’s change, then you gotta follow the tracks that lead on away from here.”
brother. brother. osun’s favorite son, sending me off like an unwilling esu to the crossroads. not without you. i pulled the mudcloth drapes across my window. “love, then,” i said, and hugged him close.
the next day was sunday. i was glad, as they say, to go into the house of the lord, get me some good old gospel music from a choir of voices as large and pretty as the sky. blue, but sunny. trevette and i sat together in our usual pew, rocking side by side to the music, amening through the sermon. i liked watching trevette out of the corner of my eye, enjoying the ways she enjoyed service, fascinated by the way her mahogany skin seemed to glow with a special fire. i kept expecting roosevelt to drag in late, like most other sundays, but he never showed.
in the parking lot, me and
trevette discussed our plans for the rest of the day, in a conversation salted with “praise the lords” and peppered with handshakes exchanged with members of the congregation passing around us. “i wonder where roo is,” i mentioned.
“um-hm,” trevette murmured. “i was thinking, let’s go out for dinner instead of cooking. we can talk without worrying about what’s gonna burn.”
“you think he went creeping so late last night that he couldn’t even make it to church?”
“i think if he was as worried about being with you as you are about being with him, he’da been here by now, for sure.” trevette grinned, and i had to laugh. “now, are you down with going to sylvia’s, or what?”
“let’s do it!”
we had a long wait, since we weren’t the only folks who thought about eating at sylvia’s after church. but it was worth it. collards and fried chicken, steaming and salty, and cornbread like sweetless cake dipped in butter. green beans and macaroni-n-cheese. when we leaned back, forty-five minutes later, we both wished we had on the loose-fitting robes we wore at home. trevette unbuttoned the skirt of her fuchsia suit, relieved that her jacket was long enough to hide her shamelessness.
“we gonna need a workout and a half in the morning, girlfriend,” i moaned.
“word.” trevette was concentrating on breathing. “nobody would believe that dancers could eat with so little health consciousness and still do the things we do with our bodies.”
“why you talking that health consciousness shit? that’s white people madness! black folks’ bodies can survive anything, so long as we get a steady diet of greens—don’t you know your history?” i hooted, pulling out the old joke.
“well, that may be true, but i got to get used to thinking about the kind of lifestyle i’m gonna have out there,” trevette replied seriously, and brought me all the way down. i didn’t speak, just frowned and stared into my empty plate. when the silence began to hurt, she continued, the words leaking out, low and slow, like they were rubbing her throat raw. “i put in my application with the decc yesterday.”
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