by M. K. Asante
Yams and corn bread.
“She started spending money we didn’t have, paying far too much money for things that we either did not use or did not need. She didn’t want me to know that she had been stretching money from one place to pay another, using more than twenty credit cards to handle the juggling. Neither your mother nor I could survive in misery. We struggled to pay your tuition. Each month we got deeper into debt.”
Black-eyed peas and collard greens.
“The day I left I believed that I was making the best decision I could. My commitment to you has never wavered. I have always thought that my responsibility was first to my children. I have never wished your mother any harm or ill. None of us choose our own demons.”
Hush puppies and okra.
I’m listening to his story but it doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t care what he’s saying, only about him … and my mom … and Uzi and where we all go from here. Amir was right—I’m lucky to have a dad who cares, who’s down to fight with me, for me, for us.
“I love you,” I say for the first time in years. He tells me his love for me is unconditional.
Sweet potato pie.
On the way home, he plays a speech from his friend Jeremiah in Chicago: “What makes you so strong, black man? How is it that three hundred and seventy years of slavery, segregation, racism, Jim Crow laws, and second-class citizenship cannot wipe out the memory of Imhotep, Aesop, Akhenaton, and Thutmose II? What makes you so strong, black man?… How is it that after all this country has done to you, you can still produce a Paul Robeson, a Thurgood Marshall, a Malcolm X, a Martin King, and a Ron McNair? What makes you so strong, black man?… This country has tried castration and lynching, miseducation and brainwashing. They have taught you to hate yourself and to look at yourself through the awfully tainted eyeglasses of white Eurocentric lies, and yet you keep breaking out of the prisons they put you in. You break out in a W. E. B. Du Bois and a Booker T. Washington. You break out in a Louis Farrakhan and a Mickey Leland; you break out in a Judge Thurgood Marshall and a Pops Staples; you break out in a Luther Vandross, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Harold Washington, or Doug Wilder. What makes you so strong, black man?”
40
The Most Beautiful Country
The blank page begs me to tell a story—dares me to tell one—one that’s never been told before, and to tell it like it will never be told again.
The blank page lights up a room in my heart that I didn’t know existed.
I’m standing outside of Crefeld, staring into the endless green of Wissahickon Park, when my purpose finds me.
I hear Uncle Howard’s voice in my head as I race through the hallway: Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
This is the come up, writing to the sun come up
I never get enough of the nighttime, so I write lines
That rhyme over linoleum beats, for kids scrolling them streets
Conquer the beast, cock and release*
I find Stacey in her classroom.
I declare it: “I want to be a writer.”
“That’s great, Malo,” she says, moving to the bookshelf. A sign above the bookshelf reads: Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.”
She pulls out a book and says, “Means you have to be a good reader, though.” She hands me On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
That night, sitting on the terrace overlooking G-Town, I enter the world of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as they wander across the highways of America, just like me and Ryan did a few months back, finding adventure and trouble and girls and drugs and themselves all at once.
The next day I ask Stacey for another book.
She chuckles. “How about finishing On the Road first?”
“I did.” She looks at me like she wants to believe me but doesn’t. She squints for me to ’fess up. I pull the words from the back of my eyes: “ ‘The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.’ ”
I tell her I didn’t just read On the Road, but that I understood it, related to Sal and Dean’s journey, what they were feeling, their quest for freedom and dream chasing.
She gives me a stack of books.
I devour them, finishing a book a day. I push myself hard because I feel like I’m behind, like I have to make up for lost time. Before Crefeld, the last book I read was in sixth grade. I starved myself and now I’m hungry for words, phrases, stories, and knowledge. The more I read, the more I want to read.
José Martí, a Cuban writer from back in the day, says literature is the “most beautiful country.” For me, each book is a journey, a voyage into new land.
I finish Stacey’s stack and hit the library. A sign above the entrance says Lys Ce Que Voudra (Read What You Will). And that’s what I do. I walk through the aisles of books, touching spines with my fingertips, rubbing dust jackets with my thumbs, and reading everything with my heart.
WHITMAN: “Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
GINSBERG: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.”
I spend a night at my dad’s apartment in Levittown. It’s small, even smaller than my mom’s spot in G-Town, and barely furnished. I crash on the futon in the living room. He cooks eggs, grits, and toast in the morning. I eat slow, savoring each bite like it’s my last. Over breakfast I tell him that I want to be a writer. He tells me that writing is in my DNA, that my grandfather loved to write.
“He was always a man to speak his mind,” he remembers, leaning back in his chair. “I remember when I realized I had to return to Georgia to see him. It was when he told me on the phone, ‘I can’t hold the pen anymore.’ That was the most frightening thing I had ever heard him utter because he wrote something every day, a tradition that he started after finding himself confined to his bedroom. It was in his blood to speak his mind and to have his say. If he could not speak it vocally to an audience, he would write sermons and poems and songs. And he did so until the day he could not hold the pen, the day he died.”
Before I bounce to go back to Philly, Pops gives me a few books: Assata, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Miseducation of the Negro. The books show the world not just as it is but as it could be, should be. They connect me to everything that has ever happened and to everyone who has ever lived.
WOODSON: “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.”
BALDWIN: “People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”
DU BOIS: “Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can
be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.”
FANON: “Who am I? Am I who I say I am? Am I all I ought to be?… Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
HURSTON: “The present is an egg laid by the past with the future inside its shell.”
WHITMAN: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
DEVLIN: “We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it.”
BALDWIN: “We live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal … for if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
BAKER: “Give light and the people will find their own way.”
Now I see why reading was illegal for black people during slavery. I discover that I think in words. The more words I know, the more things I can think about. My vocab and thoughts grow together like the stem and petals of a flower. Reading was illegal because if you limit someone’s vocab, you limit their thoughts. They can’t even think of freedom because they don’t have the language to. I think about all the nghz I know with limited vocabs, the ones who keep asking, Nahmean? Yahmean? because they don’t have the words to express what they really mean. I don’t want to fall into that trap, so every day I learn new words: ascetic, mizzenmast, aft, estuary, diaphanous, sedentary, trireme, drapetomania.
ASSATA: “People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”
Against all odds, the math’s off
Forcing us into the night
Where we bargain with death for discounts on life
We get half-off†
I read Animal Farm and think about all the crooked cops in Philly.
ORWELL: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
I read Sistah Souljah and think about Nia: “Only a hardworking man, a sharp thinker who doesn’t hesitate to do what he gotta do, to get you what you need to have, deserves you.”
SIDDHARTHA: “Make the effort to obtain information that will allow you to best guide your destiny. Make your voice heard in the world through your life and works and do not be lowered into inaction by status, tradition, race, ethnicity, gender, or affiliation. Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down to many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
I write in between reading. I write everything: poems, rhymes, stories, essays. Sometimes what I want to say is a poem, sometimes it’s a story, a movie, or a song. Each form of writing is like its own language. I want to be fluent in all of them so that I can speak to people in whatever language they understand.
Stacey says being a good writer is about making connections, connecting the dots. I start connecting everything back to writing. Like how in science class today, George, my science teacher and basketball coach, was talking about the difference between a thermostat and a thermometer. The thermostat changes the temperature; the thermometer just reflects it. I want my writing to be like a thermostat.
Writing is just like the streets: don’t hide anything at the beginning, don’t reveal anything until the last possible moment.
* * *
* Me.
† Me.
41
Y2K Hustle
Y2K hangs on the horizon like sunset. The supermarket shelves are empty. Gas station lines look like rush hour traffic. Everybody’s stocking up on everything, panicking, bracing for the last days. It’s like that Prince song: And tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999. Action News 6 says all the world’s computers are going to crash. I think about 10 Gs and how their spaceship, Nibiru, is supposed to come and take them away on Y2K.
Despite all the Y2K chaos, word on the street is that Bone and Damien are still gunning for me. “Dead man walking,” they call me.
Kam tells me this on the phone. His voice cracks with fear. “So what you gonna do?”
I don’t know. Philly’s only so big and I’m bound to run into them eventually. My brain storms on legal ways to get money … not just to pay Bone off, but for myself and to help my mom.
I head back to Olney.
A hustler, an entrepreneur, is about seeing opportunities and seizing them. Like 2Pac said, a real N.I.G.G.A. is Never Ignorant Getting Goals Attained. It’s about looking around and peeping all the possibilities. The entrepreneur sees the world as the writer sees the blank page—as a chance. The game changes but the hustle stays the same.
I walk into Fresh Cutz and find Mike. He tells me that there’s a few people in front of me, waiting for haircuts.
“I’m not here for a cut,” I say.
“What’s up?”
I reach into my pockets and grip all the money I have in the world.
“You still got those vending machines?”
42
Full Circle
I watch my classmates stock up on snacks before class. Juice, soda, water, candy, chips, cookies, crackers, gum, all courtesy of my vending machines. I pitched the vending machine idea to my school—“It’s what the students want,” I told Michael, “supply and demand”—and they green-lighted it. I stock up on product at Sam’s Club for a nice discount, fill my machines up, and voilà!
Wrappers crinkle around the circle of love. The whole class chomping and munching and slurping. In the circle of love, I come out first: “I want to read.”
All eyes on me.
“This is a story I’ve been working on … I’m not done yet …”
This is it.
“The fall in Killadelphia. Outside is the color of corn bread and blood. Change hangs in the air like the sneaks on the live wires behind my crib. Me and my big brother, Uzi, in the kitchen …”
I get home from school, my mom rushes me, pushing a letter into my hand.
“Read it,” she says, antsy.
I unfold it, thinking it’s probably from Uzi.
I read under my breath: “ ‘Dear Amina … demonstrated exceptional capacity for exceptional creative ability in the arts …’ ” I stop reading and smile at her. “You won?”
“I won! I got it.”
My hug tells her how proud I am of her. I think about how strong she is to win something like this in the midst of all the chaos and sickness. She’s like Jordan in the flu game.
Glowing in the dark like a fuzzy star in the black night, the TV says, “The big story on Action News tonight … It’s being called one of the biggest drug and weapons busts in Philadelphia history … three suspected drug and weapons dealers have been arrested in a million-dollar criminal operation …” They show Bone and Damien being hauled into police headquarters in cuffs. Bone has his T-shirt pulled up over his face. They flash his mug shot. It’s surreal. I think about how that could have been me. The TV shows the police behind a table with all of the drugs, money, guns, and ammunition they seized. I think about how Bone and Damien wanted to kill me, tried to kill me, and maybe they even killed Amir? I think about how Nia warned me all of this would happen, how she loved me enough to say something.
I remember what she told me: Love is learning the song in someone’s heart and singing it to them when they forget.
43
The Five Spot
Black Jesus mosaic looking right at m
e. I’m sitting in the pews of Bright Hope Baptist Church waiting for Nia, watching her choir rehearsal.
“That’s the largest stained-glass black Jesus in the world,” one of the church elders whispers to me under “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Go, tell it on the mountain/Over the hills and everywhere … Sun pours through.
Nia sees me when I come in, sees me, and it’s like when we first locked eyes at Broad and Olney.
I’m not the average savage that curse queens
I’m something from his worst dreams*
We watch Y2K fireworks explode, big and bright like electric sunflowers in the night sky, above the Art Museum.
Our hands interlocked, I apologize to her.
“Everybody is going to hurt you in some way,” she says. “You just got to find the ones worth suffering for. And I did.”
“Thank you.” She says that espera, the Spanish word for “waiting,” comes from the word esperanza—“hope.” She asks if I see the connection.
“I feel it.”
She tells me about this concept the Mayans have: in lak esh, meaning “You are my other me and I am your other you.”
“In lak esh,” she says.
I look into her eyes and see all the seasons changing at the same time.
“Malo, do you know what my name means?” Nia asks.
“No.”
“Purpose.”
Time passed, we back in Philly now she up in my spot
Tellin me the things I’m tellin her is makin her hot†
Nia leads me through the darkness of Old City. We walk past a smelly place called Bank Street Hostel, cut across a parking lot, and end up standing in an alley under a colorful flag that says The Five Spot. It feels like a secret place. Outside the entrance is alive with energy. Cyphers, laughter, the click of heels on concrete, and music from inside pours out like warm air.