A Kind of Freedom

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  “Nah, overpopulation, nigga,” T.C. said, laughing. “They need to make room for the real menaces to society.” T.C. was lucky—he’d been headed to reup when he was caught and only had a few ounces of weed on him; if it had been a day later, hell, a few hours later, he’d be in jail two years minimum.

  “Aw, nigga, they done made a mistake releasing you then,” Tiger said. They laughed together finally, gave each other dap, then came apart again.

  “You look good though,” Tiger added. “You must be getting ready for the comeback, and we got competition now, boy. Right after you caught your lil’ bid, Spud got out.”

  “What?” T.C. leaned against the car, guessing they’d catch up for a minute, then he’d ask Tiger to drive them the hell out of there.

  “Yep, he been trying to reposition himself. I been spreading the word that you coming back but nobody ain’t hearing it. Half our block been buying from him.”

  “Oh, yeah?” T.C. let out a nervous laugh. “Well, maybe that’s for the best.”

  “What you mean ‘that’s for the best,’ nigga?”

  Tiger looked at him as if he’d been joking, and maybe he was. He didn’t know.

  “What you mean?” Tiger repeated. “We got to eat. What, you plan on going back to Winn-Dixie?”

  “Hell, no,” T.C. said, then laughed suddenly, an awkward burst of sound, but he had been thinking about it, had even calculated how many hours he’d have to work to make enough to get an apartment over in Lakewind East on Bundy. It came out to a lot, but people did it, some he went to school with, and he’d run into them bagging groceries on his late-night munchie runs.

  “Bruh, I ain’t trying to think about that right now,” T.C. said. He opened the passenger door. The truth was it was all he had been thinking about. It was jailhouse policy to declare you weren’t coming back. He didn’t know anybody who hadn’t screamed it across his cell at least once in a fit of rage or desperation, or repeated it to himself like a prayer during meal lineup, and that wasn’t to say he didn’t believe it. He did, but something happened when you walked away from those prison gates: Freedom and its expansive nature convinced you it could last forever. The promises you made to yourself flitted from the front of your consciousness. It was funny, but already, not even in the car that would take him away, he could remember the allure, the fast money, the easy power of his old life. The one thing was, he was really good at it, and there weren’t too many other things he could say that about anymore.

  “Anyway,” T.C. went on. “I need you to ride me Uptown.”

  “What the hell? That’s in the opposite direction of home.”

  “Is it that far?” He smiled his big goofy smile he’d gotten teased for in fifth grade. He didn’t smile for a while after that year, but sometimes he couldn’t help it.

  Tiger started the car. Lil Wayne’s “Right Above It” came on, still getting bumped on Q93 after four months inside. T.C. put his head back and sighed as they pulled out of the prison lot. They passed the St. Louis Cemetery, its white cement tombs like little houses above ground, then the old St. Bernard Projects. The city tore them down after Katrina, gutted the windows, razed the tall bricks. They were almost done building something new in its wake, but T.C. still didn’t know where all the old residents had gone.

  “It’s hot as hell in here,” he said. “You ain’t got no air conditioning?”

  “You see the windows down. It’s broke, nigga.”

  “The windows being down ain’t helping. That’s just hot air comin in here then, nigga.”

  “Well, maybe I need to slow down and let yo’ ass out. Maybe the air is cooler on the sidewalk.”

  T.C. laughed, felt the sweat start to roll down his balls.

  “You not going out by Alicia, then, huh?” Tiger asked.

  At the sound of her name, T.C.’s head shot back up. “Aww, hell no. She beaucoup pregnant, bruh. You can’t fuck a woman when she big like that. I’d push a hole in my lil’ baby’s head.”

  Tiger laughed. “That ain’t true, bruh. I went up in my old lady till the last minute with all my kids.”

  “Ain’t one of your kids slow though?”

  “Nah, bruh, all my kids is straight.”

  “Nah, bruh, you told me one of them niggas tried to fight a teacher and had to be put in the slow class.”

  “Nah, bruh, that teacher tried to sneak up on him one day, ya heard me. My man got them killer instincts like his daddy. He ain’t gon’ stand for that bullshit. Anyway you was in the slow class yourself, my nigga.”

  “Yeah, exactly, that’s why I ain’t trying to fuck no pregnant lady. My kid’s gotta start out smarter than everybody else.”

  Tiger was turning onto Tulane. That was good, he was listening at least. T.C. just had to make sure he didn’t try to stop at Popeyes. That fool couldn’t get enough of their popcorn shrimp with a side of red beans and rice, and he was going to try to get T.C. to pay for them. Any other day that would have sounded like a plan, but four months was too long to be sneaking porn to hit it before the sun came up. He needed to release; the weight of the impulse was drilling a hole in his goddamn brain.

  “Awright,” T.C. said, “the traffic ain’t bad at least.”

  “Aww, bruh, you still talking about that girl. If we gon’ go Uptown, we might as well stop for a bite on Napoleon. Don’t tell me you gon’ make me drive out of my way, and you ain’t even gon’ break bread with me, dawg? That ain’t right. You know that ain’t right.”

  “Man, you ain’t caught a bid in a while, you must not remember what it’s like. I got somewhere I need to be. She waiting on me is the thing.” His words came out frantic and out of order, reminding himself of his mother; it was what he meant about his needs taking over his body right now.

  “Let’s just stop at Popeyes, my man,” Tiger said. “Get a couple orders of those Cajun fries. It’s on the way. We’ll be done in an hour, I’ll carry you over there, you’ll bust a nut by noon.” He laughed, glancing at the dashboard for the time.

  T.C. shook his head. “We could go out there tomorrow. And I got you, I promise. I really appreciate the ride and everything, but not today, bruh. I ain’t gon’ be good company anyway.”

  “Man, dawg,” Tiger sighed.

  T.C. couldn’t tell if he had convinced him. Tiger had turned on South Broad, then left on Napoleon, but that was the way to Bon Bon’s house too.

  “That ain’t even your old lady. She supposed to be your Betsy friend, and you treating her like the queen.” Tiger turned for a second to gauge T.C.’s response, then looked back to traffic. That was T.C.’s weak spot, and Tiger knew it.

  T.C.’s guilt came back on him and strong. Tiger was close with Alicia and thought T.C. should have married her by now. Back in the G when they used to kick it together real strong, T.C. thought he would too. But she went ham on him all the time, and she wasn’t all the way right in the head. They’d be talking, laughing, he’d be feeling like the weight of existence was sliding off his shoulders, he’d shut his eyes, then she’d start screaming about something she found on his phone.

  “Why you even going through my phone?” he’d yell back.

  “I can’t trust you, T.C.,” she’d sigh. “I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  The thing was, the most she ever found was flirtatious messaging with his lil’ boos, and, yeah, they sent him pictures of their titties from time to time, but he hadn’t ever stepped out on her; he hadn’t ever wanted to.

  “Awright, fine, nigga, I’ll ride with you a lil’ bit, get you the shrimp.” It was too late anyway. T.C. felt the car slowing down in front of the restaurant’s red awning. Another mile and they would have been at his lil’ boo’s, but it was all good. Either way he needed to change the subject. “You and this goddamn shrimp. You’d think they was mixing steak and lobster in the batter.”

  “Nah, bruh, I ain’
t got to beg. I got my own money. I just wanted to spend some time with you is all, go over our strategy and shit.”

  T.C. didn’t say anything. He was still thinking about Alicia.

  “How she doing anyway?” he asked.

  “She all right, hanging in there. She stayin’ by her mama and them again, getting the guest room ready for the baby. I think they got everything but the car seat.”

  “I’ll get that.”

  Tiger didn’t say anything.

  “I was already planning to get it,” T.C. insisted.

  “Nobody said you wasn’t.” Tiger paused. “She still cry about you when your name get brought up.”

  “Aw, bruh, don’t believe the hype. She the one kicked me out. I loved Alicia. I still do. But—” he stopped. There wasn’t any use going into this again. He could feel his excitement over Bon Bon diminishing the longer he stayed on the topic, his uncertainty rushing in, his sadness, the fear. He was twenty-five, but he wasn’t ready to be a daddy. He had told Alicia that, but she had gotten careless with her pills, and she wasn’t scandalous by any means, but T.C. still wasn’t sure she hadn’t done that on purpose.

  “Anyway, man, what else you gon’ order?” he interrupted himself. “Them same red beans and rice? I could fuck up some chicken legs, I guess.”

  Tiger didn’t answer him. “I’m not saying you did nothin’ wrong. I know she crazy. All these bitches is. And she probably in the ninety-ninth percentile of crazy, you feel me?”

  T.C. laughed. “You right about that.”

  “Especially now that she pregnant.”

  “I hear you,” T.C. said. “I do hear you,” he repeated. “But Alicia got to see there’s consequences to her actions. She wouldn’t stop. It got to be too much. Every day accusing me, and that kicked me out more than she did. Only so many times you could be told you a cheater before you become one. Even now, she got me thinking I’m doing something wrong and she the one told me to leave. She the one wouldn’t take me back. I went back every day the first month, but she had her mama slam the door in my face. How many times I’m a go back for more of that? What kinda man would I be if I did?”

  They pulled into a spot in the Popeyes lot, got out of the car, walked up. A cop car passed him, and T.C. felt his heart tense before he remembered he wasn’t the same man he was a few months earlier. He didn’t have anything on him for one; even if one of them po-po approached him, the most they would do was throw him up against the car, search his empty pants’ pockets, and slap him up for their lost time. He walked into the restaurant with a new swagger to his step, even turned back and looked one of them dicks in the eye. Inside, there was a line of course. T.C. remembered he couldn’t stand the smell of the place, a combination of stale frying oil and cleaning solution. Then the children running around knocking into his legs. One of them looked up at him as if he were on stilts at a circus. “Mama,” she said “it’s a giant.” She was almost whimpering.

  Tiger doubled over laughing. “It’s good to be home, huh, my nigga?” he asked.

  T.C. nodded, smiling that goofy-ass smile. “Yeah it is.”

  Tiger talked nonstop about the block.

  Spud had swooped in when T.C. left; he was bringing in two thousand a week, even had middlemen riding out to Chalmette for him, and people were saying his weed was good, almost as good as T.C.’s.

  “Almost as good,” Tiger stressed again. “And that’s cause half of them only touched the gas you bought, not the gas you made.”

  T.C. couldn’t even front. He grew the best weed he’d ever smoked. There was something hypnotic about picking out the seeds, testing the levels, trimming the leaves, drying the buds. But he couldn’t afford to grow enough to satisfy his base, so he supplemented, and some people got his creation, and some people got old regular bud.

  “Once you back though,” Tiger was still talking, “and they get the real deal, it’s gon’ be like taking candy from a baby. Thing is,” he paused, “I don’t think you got enough. See Spud, he don’t even touch his own gas no mo. He fronts a lil’ bit to his middleman, then takes the profits off the sales, and gives that lil’ nigga a piece, and it’s not as dangerous that way, cause he not the one out in the streets.” He paused again. “If you did it that way, you’d have more time for your product, more time to be the creative genius you are.”

  T.C. nodded the whole while, dipping his chicken strips in a pool of ketchup and tossing them back, thinking about Bon Bon’s titties.

  “T.C.? Hello, T.C.?”

  “Yeah?” He guessed Tiger had been trying to get his attention for some time.

  “Did you hear what I was saying? When you get back tonight, maybe we could see about doubling up on them plants?”

  T.C. nodded. “That’s cool,” he said, though the truth was Tiger’s plan was stupid. Adding middlemen would take the power out of T.C.’s hands. One of the reasons he’d gotten caught dealing only once was because he sold to old basketball friends, students at Dillard. On the other hand, it wasn’t sustainable. There was only so long you could sell before you got busted, and if he went in again for hustling, it was five years minimum. He didn’t have it in him to serve that kind of time, not with a kid on the way. If he didn’t have to worry about sales, he could grow more plants, put enough aside sooner to start his own business. He’d always thought he was going to be a basketball player, and it didn’t work out, but maybe he could coach other kids like him, see to it they didn’t make the same mistakes he did.

  He wasn’t going to get into it with Tiger though, not right now. He still needed that ride Uptown. And maybe he would be a different man after that encounter. It was possible whatever was waiting between Bon Bon’s legs was going to be the magic he needed to go another way.

  Tiger had always been a big eater, but today he put back two po’boys, not to mention the red beans and the French fries. He kept getting up to refill his Coke and after three trips he leaned his head back and let out a huge belch. Sure enough, when it had been time to pay, he hadn’t lifted a single finger for his wallet.

  “Aww, thanks,” he had said, acting surprised when T.C. put the cash down. “I owe you. I’ll get you back tonight then.”

  T.C. had nodded, though he didn’t know what tonight would bring.

  It was hard making it out of Tiger’s car; even once they pulled up to the house, Tiger was still talking shit.

  “Aww, man, this don’t even seem like the kind of girl you want to be involved with. She stay all the way Uptown, don’t have no car. At least Alicia had her own place. I mean she moved for the baby, but she always did for herself. She ’bout to get a nursing degree. This girl got a job, T.C.?”

  He didn’t answer, he just lifted his plastic bag of belongings and strapped it to his shoulder. He would need to call Tiger for a ride in the morning, but he didn’t want to get into that now. The thing was, as far as Uptown was from New Orleans proper, T.C. enjoyed riding out here. The people in this neighborhood had been touched by Katrina too, but you wouldn’t know it by looking, not like his own block. Sometimes he’d wake up screaming, remembering the flood marks nine feet up his wall, the refrigerator tossed to his bedroom, his baby pictures unrecognizable, and that smell, that God-awful smell of rotten food and mold, as if a skunk had died somewhere in the house underneath all the trash and they didn’t know where to begin to look.

  “I’ll holla at you a little bit later, my nigga,” T.C. called out over his shoulder, walking up to the front gate. He rang the bell, then looked down Freret Street while he waited. There were new kinds of restaurants opening up, pricey ones too, places where he had no business even reading the menus. And he wasn’t saying it wasn’t a good thing—he remembered the neighborhood before Katrina, the vacant storefronts, that his mama locked her car door when she drove through. It was just different, that was all, more to get accustomed to, but maybe one day he could take Bon Bon to one of
these fancy spots, let her order whatever she liked without feeling his chest tense up.

  He had expected Bon Bon to be at the door waiting for him, maybe dressed in something see-through, but no, her fat-ass mama opened the gate in a muumuu even though it was past eleven in the morning.

  “Hey, how you doing? Good afternoon,” he said in his best upstanding-citizen voice. He tried not to deliver that goofy-ass smile, but like he said, it just came out sometimes.

  “I’m here for Bon Bon, I mean Natalia. She told me I could stop by and see her.”

  “Bay Bay,” the mother screamed out to the back of the house. While they waited for the girl, the mama just looked him up and down as though she could smell the prison yard on his dreads, the disgusting lockdown food on his breath. Finally, Bon Bon came to the door. She wasn’t wearing Victoria’s Secret, but good enough. Little-ass jeans and a belly shirt. He thought about Alicia again. Last time he saw her, she had been big as a house, her belly button sticking out like a thumb already. The thing was, it had been beautiful to him, her carrying his seed. Of course he’d wanted to be married with a job, but just because it didn’t go down like that didn’t mean he couldn’t find the joy.

  The mama finally stepped out of the way, made room for her child. Bon Bon opened the door fully, and he pulled her into his arms. They stood like that, embracing for a while. She stepped back after a few minutes, but he didn’t want to stop touching her. He could feel himself filling like a balloon getting ready to pop.

  He followed her down a short hallway, holding her hand, her head barely at his chest, trying to stay far enough behind her that she didn’t feel him pressing into her back.

  Her room smelled like her, shampoo and Tide detergent. There wasn’t much in terms of furniture: a bed, a desk, a dresser, but she had a stereo, speakers strapped to the wall beneath her window, a big-screen TV, two iPads. There were posters of whack-ass Drake all over the wall, the last person T.C. wanted to be looking at when he was inside somebody as fine as Bon Bon, but it’d have to do. He collapsed on her bed; it had been so long since he’d been on a real mattress that actually sank with his weight and then lifted again. He looked up; she was standing on the other side of the room.