WordUp - kalamu’s words

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

MORNING CALM

(For the women of Vietnam, patiently threading together their

share, and more, of Third World struggle & solidarity) 

 

the eerie bright light

that shatters morning

dawn is the illumination

of bombs

 

death dropping like

acid rain from unseen

obscene clouds,

a deadly dew

dispensed by invisible

high flying arms

 

and so began the days

when Nguyen was new,

barely born between naplam runs,

anti-personnel explosives spewing

sinister silverous spikes

with thorny barbs which savagely

struck and cut, searing

into innocent flesh

embedding shrapnel into pliant

pre-pubescent sides, into

soft kidneys and slender

bamboo colored thighs like

gleaming iron fish hooks

piercing a jaw, lancing a gill

or slicing an eye

 

but who cares now

that the war was lost so

long ago

the high-tech cameras

no longer transmit onto tv sets

into our living rooms

the pain, the unsmelt

stench of flaming bodies or

the barely believable screech

of street side summary executions

as bullets shattered the skulls

of black haired suspected cong

so who cares now

the killers are back home

here in america

where we do not see nor feel

the innumerable silent shells

waiting to explode

upward maiming a peasant's crouch

as ox drawn plow contacts

nor do we cross

oranged wastelands where

nothing green can grow

who cares, now that

the dear johns and joes

are gone, to the victors

have gone the spoilt

 

who remembers those naked little girls

running down the highway their mouths

silently stretched open in pain

those little girls who are

no longer girls but women now

women whose wombs may never conceive

women who can not dance without pain

women whose scars will not heal

women who can not give birth without surgery

women whose ears can not hear subtle string music

women who can not remember ever having rest

         filled sleep during long quiet summer

         nights nor sense the tenderness of a lover's

         cautious touch caressing what's left of a breast

 

who cares?

 

as you struggle in your homeland

a place bombed almost back

"into the stone age"

patiently reconstructing human beings

out of the survivors of war

a prostitute becomes a nurse

an orphan a teacher

a cripple becomes an administrator

and a blind woman an interpreter

 

Nguyen, it is the work of you

and people like you

which gives soft/strong certainty

to worldwide efforts at

social reconstruction

 

Nguyen, knowing you helps us

know that we are more

than our past,

less than our future,

neither animals nor gods

but oppressed people who can grasp

tomorrow's dawns and create new days

from bomb cratered yesterdays

 

in the face of pessimism

your graceful smile

thaws our war hardened hearts

 

i salute

you who continue, all of you

who inspire hope, whose recovery

encourages all of us victims

to rise and fly like phoenix

ascending out of occidental ashes

 

i salute

you who move as in a morning sun

rising side by side, always rising,

never stopping, always rising, softly,

always, certainly, softly,

as in a morning

calm

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

____________________________

i do not usually explain my poetry but this post is special. the context of the poem is important to me. 'morning calm' was written in the late seventies/early eighties and originally conceived as part of a collection of poetry to complement the essays i wrote and published under the title of 'our women keep our skies from falling.' 

 

the plan was to publish a small book with both the poetry and the essays together but, as with so much in life, that never came to pass.

 

i served in the u.s. army 1965 - 1968, the viet nam years but i did electronic nuclear missle repair in korea. korea was a major awakening for me about the international aspects of our struggle. i learned a lot from the women in korea, most of whom were prostitutes who lived in a small village just outside the gates of our mountain top base. 

 

i came out of the army fired up and ready to rumble, seeking far more than civil rights. by 1974 i was a delegate to the sixth pan-african conference in dar es salaam, tanzania. the chinese were already working in tanzania. does anyone remember the tan-zam railroad and the effort to break apartheid's economic strangle hold on central and southern africa?

 

three or so years later, i led a delegation to the people's republic of china. twenty educators and activists from around the united states spent over two weeks traveling throughout china and engaging in serious ideological sessions with chinese comrades. again, my consciousness was raised.

 

the more i learned about the world and the more people i met who were struggling for self-determination, self-defense, and self-respect, the more i understood that our struggle was truly a global struggle and not simply a racial struggle, or even mainly a pan-african struggle. eventually, i moved away from advocating nationalism as a solution to the issues our people faced. i also became very, very clear that sexism and attendant ills (such as homophobia and heterosexism) was a serious issue that had to be fought both internally and externally.

 

'morning calm' is then a reflection of my global consciousness and of my anti-sexism advocacy. in 2010, far, far removed from when i wrote this poem i teach vietnamese students in high school. a few of our students were born in viet nam, most of them deal in various ways with the issues of assimilation and retaining their culture, especially their language. this poem was written for the women who are today the grandparents, aunts, and perhaps a few mothers of our students... 

 

one other thing, as i have said numerous times, i use music as my literary model. the rhythms and internal structure of this poem are based on john coltrane's version of 'softly, as in a morning sunrise.'

 

a luta continua (the struggle continues)...

 

—kys

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

Beneath the bridge

(A eulogy for North Claiborne Avenue

from Canal Street down to Elysian Fields)

 

beneath the bridge on claiborne avenue, there,

 

where once tall oaks grew spreading magnificent branches that embraced whole families of revelers joyfully enjoying a home-cooked holiday brunch, iron horseshoes clanging as poppa p threw a dead ringer and junior dug a serving spoon into aunt juanita’s mustard-colored potato salad while ambrose sat with his latest girl friend snuggling in his lap, lying through his gold-capped teeth about how much money he won betting on the ponies late last week and how he was paying for this whole shebang out of just a small portion of the purse he achieved when he selected a horse whose number was the same as this girlfriend’s birth date or was it the thirty-something double digit that was the measurement tape of both her bust and her butt?;

 

where the concrete construction of a federal expressway created a sound-box that high school bands rolled through inter-threading the ebony thighs of teenage girls with aural ribbons of raucous marching music played with a buck-jump beat the song’s composer never intended nor imagined, shouted out with an upful, youthful swagger whose chocolate sweetness was so deep that all you could do was smile, and smile as the parade provided a sonic prescription for whatever ailed you;

 

where the mardi gras indians used to go and offer up their colorful vows to never bow down as they trodded around mean streets, freely treating our eyeballs to the most prettiest, feathered, multi-hued suits that any man could ever hope to sew and wear in any given lifetime, they hollered the chants of saints, their eyes burning with the fire of the guardians of the flame sounding out sacred syllables in a language without name, words whose meanings we could not specify but whose dynamic intentions none of us could deny;

 

where along either side of the street used to thrive haberdasheries (which offered everything worth wearing, from congressional sky pieces and  cobalt blue prom tuxedos to tailored peg-legged pants dyed a diversity of tints and shades selected from a rainbow of pigments that made technicolor seem dull, not to mention stacy adams shoes whose shine was so gleaming you did not need a mirror);

 

where doctor’s offices and pharmacies, grocery stores and mortuaries, flower shoppes and butcher stalls testified to the urban industry of  a neighborhood community still shaking country dust off its boots, run right up next to passé-blanc dynasties that had been resident in these homes since the slavery time placages that produced their pale-skinned lineages;

 

where houston’s school of music was on one side and the negro musicians’ union was on the other, and barbershops and hair salons hosted weekly informal town hall gatherings at which every manner of contemporary problem was advised and analyzed in betwixt the salacious shoo-shoo of who did what to whom and why;

 

where a veritable smorgasbord of eateries such as levatas seafood which specialized in chilled half-shelf oysters deftly shucked as you stood at the rail exchanging mirthful curses with a man whose one good eye could unerringly spy the seam in a tightly sealed oyster’s shell, and the lemon juice squeezed and rubbed onto working hands to eradicate the smell of sucking on and chewing warm crawfish meat washed down with quarts of cold beer, or the two huge italians that had a grill called pennies where the sizzling hot sausage was so good, so hot the cap never had to come off the tobasco bottle, and the french bread was fresh and the lettuce crisp and the tomatoes so sweet you lifted a slice and slid it into your mouth grinning in delight at the wonderfully tart taste bursting forth, alerting your salivary glands to the poboy treat shortly to follow;

 

where music factories called nightclubs and music emporiums better known as joints like the fabled club 77 at which the sunday night sets lasted til monday morning where from some patrons would head straight to work without seeing their homes which they had left on saturday not to return until late after-work on monday where upon one fell out totally oblivious to anything until daybreak tuesday, hang-outs and haunts in which a young man feeling himself saw a fine woman from the rear, figuring that was all he needed to know, rushed over to her, tapped her on the shoulder and was semi-shocked to see, when she turned around, that this fox was his twelfth grade teacher, and though clearly a bit embarrassed, neither of them was really surprised that the other was there;

 

where protest marches and marcus garvey celebrations, spring festival carriage and limousine processions featuring little freckled-faced future creole queens shyly waving a gloved hand at ruffians with holes in their pants as their manhood throbbed at the thought of a chance at knocking the little man out of those young girl’s boats;

 

where tambourines fanned us, sudan regaled us, and the avenue steppers showed us how our feet would not fail us as long as we stuck one to the other high stepping and kicking, all up and down this boulevard of dreams with everyone on the one and yet at the very same time each and all of us, the young, old, short and tall of us, exactly and precisely doin’ our thing which was whatever we wanted and only what we wanted in this a here space and time;

 

where fleets of second-liners have carried so many of us off to the great beyond in ceremonies during which coffins were sat on bars and shots of scotch were poured atop the casket, a libational commemoration of another man who done gone to glory or how the unforgettably gorgeous sight of a mother dancing atop the box that held the remains of her son was a socially sanctioned and totally acceptable way to both memorialize a life as well as say her last goodbyes accompanied by the bravado of some young dimple-cheeked trumpeter dueling with an elegant grey-bearded cornetist, each of the both of them trying to out blow the other, one could have been named joshua and the elder might have been called gabriel, as their brass notes rang out the strains of one bright morning when this day is over i’ll fly away, oh lordy, i’ll fly…;

 

there, where a once proud avenue is now nothing nice, a site of brown sadness, a cemetery for the rusted corpses of flooded cars covered only in the flimsiest scrim of katrina dust caked on like filthy rings in the toilet bowl of a superdome bathroom;

 

there, beneath the bridge, on north claiborne avenue didn’t we ramble, didn’t we ramble, til the waters cut us down…

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

TRANCE

(Based on an idea by Lynn Pitts)

 

Juno listened intently, his lean body hunched forward and tightly coiled as though he was preparing to leap into the screen. Bashe paced back and forth across the back wall of the control center, her head down but obviously attentive; she would pause every time a salient point was made. The debate was winding down and it was almost time for the vote of the extraordinary session. We all knew the decision could go either way.

 

"Don't be so stupid as to think that only tomorrow counts," Juno snapped as one anti-project elder spoke, citing the meagerness of our resources and a need for more defense development. "What better defense than completely knowing our history?"

 

A decision to discontinue the time travel, history-recovery project had never been this close before, but then again, we had never before been so besieged. Most people on the planet had either been overwhelmed by or had voluntarily accepted merger into the OnePlanet scheme, and only a few pockets of Diversity proponents were still active.

 

For me it was simple, no matter how mixed my history, I wanted Blackness to always exist. Everybody turning beige just didn’t appeal to me. But then, Juno always said, the only color that counts in OnePlanet is the color of money. Social values and a way of life is where the real difference is and that’s what we are fighting to preserve and develop.

 

I couldn't take it anymore, I got up and started to walk back to quarters. Sometimes I just get so frustrated. Why couldn’t we just be left alone. We were already reduced to tiny outposts, strategically located across the southern zones of the Americas, Africa and the Pacific Isles. We were barely twenty million strong. We just wanted to be ourselves, we…

 

"Sheba, don't leave," Bashe didn't even look up as she said that while continuing her slow strides. Her intonation told me her injunction wasn't a request.

 

"This is so stupid," I muttered to no one in particular as I sat back down.

 

Just then Muta entered control. "Have they voted yet?" he asked flopping down into the console seat next to me.

 

"I think they will as soon as this asshole…"

 

"Sheba," Bashe got on my case again.

 

"Sorry, but this is getting on my last nerve. And all we can do is sit here and wait while these guys decide our fate. And you know half of them are…"

 

"Quiet. They are about to vote." I looked over at Juno who held up his left hand, palm out, as he gave his full attention to the screen. Muta and I moved over to Juno's console to look over his shoulder.

 

The tally was almost instantaneous: 19 green, 10 red, 1 yellow. "Oh, shit. What do they do now. How do you count a yellow?" I asked, turning around to stare at Bashe. We needed at least 20 votes.

 

She looked up unsmiling. "If it's a vote to maintain an existing policy, yellow is counted as a green and if it's a vote to initiate a new policy, yellow is counted as a red."

 

I looked around, neither Juno nor Muta seemed pleased. "So why is everybody looking so glum?"

 

"Because the yellow vote came from my father," Bashe said as she moved to the center of our module.

 

I knew his enthusiasm had cooled on our project after we lost Celine on that last jump, but I thought Bashe would be able to persuade him to continue his support.

 

"Listen up." All eyes fastened on Bashe as she started running down the game plan, "We just got a reprieve, but it's only temporary. My father is going to vote to cancel our program in the next session if we don't retrieve Celine."

 

"That means we're through."

 

"Juno, don't say that. We've got two more months before the next council session, and…" Juno never even looked up as I babbled on trying to paint the most positive picture I could, "…once the new scanner is calibrated, we should be able to find her."

"Sheba, I'm not so sure of that. It takes two of us to safely operate the scanner and the transport system." As much as I would be glad when the project was over, I didn't want it to end unsuccessfully. As Bashe spoke, my mind started to drift. "And the council won't authorize us to accept any more jumpers this cycle. Which means we have at the most a total of three more jump opps."

 

"Bashe, technically, I could do two more jump operations." I finally spoke up, but not very loudly and not very confidently.

 

Muta shook his head and delivered the bad news in a slow monotone as though he had no emotional investment, even though we all knew how much he wanted to retrieve Celine. "The real problem is if we go searching for Celine we won't be able to gather critical history to complete this phase of the project and…"

 

"If we don't find Celine, there won't be support to continue our project."

 

"You're exactly right, Sheba. But—and you know I want to find Celine—we do have a chance to finish the project without finding Celine. If we go searching for Celine, we won't have enough jumps left to finish the project, especially if we loose another jumper."

 

Muta's assessment hung heavily in the artificial air of the module. When we started almost ten moons ago we were a team of twelve plus Bashe as commander. We were now down to four.

 

"I'm not feeling searching for Celine." Juno looked over at Muta, then slowly swiveled his head to take in each one of us. "Look, realistically, the technicalities don't matter. We only have two jump opps left and what's been our return ratio? The average is only one of every three jumpers makes it back. Celine had the best record out of all of us. We've got jumpers out there who never made it back from their first jump."

 

It got awfully quiet. Finally, Bashe attempted to bring closure, "Ok, ok. If Juno’s assessment is correct, then it's either finish the project or try to find Celine—we don't have the resources to do both."

 

"I vote we finish the project," Muta spoke up.

 

I could tell Muta wasn't speaking his heart, but instead was just saying what he thought a good trooper was supposed to say. "Well, I vote we search for Celine."

 

"Who the hell said this was a democracy," Juno hissed as though Muta and I had no right to speak. "We knew this was a goddamn suicide mission when we signed up. But we all thought salvaging our history was worth all the risks. Besides, what's so special about Celine. We've got eight other jumpers out there. I don't hear anybody talking about searching for them to bring them in." Juno stood up slowly. "The fact of the matter is, we've got two jumps left, maybe three…"

 

"What do you mean, maybe three. You just said…"

 

Juno cut me off before I could finish, "I know what I said. Two jumps to finish the mission and one jump to find Celine. Bashe you've got to stay. Sheba and Muta, in that order, should jump to complete the mission and, after the mission is complete, I'll take the third jump to try and find Celine." I looked over at Bashe to see what her reactions were. As the team leader she was going to have the last word.

 

"Juno, we can't afford to loose you. You're the only one of us left who really understands the technology."

 

"Yeah, but I wouldn't jump until the project was complete and then… well, if I didn't make it back, we still would have a completed project."

 

"That's true, but there are other considerations. Eventually…" Bashe looked up at the module ceiling. We knew everything we did was recorded. "Look, there is some classified info I can't say, but Juno you're going to be needed. I'll take the last jump."

 

"Permission to enter space." At the sound of Elder Hodari's voice code, all of us except Juno jumped to switch our console screens on.

 

"Screen on," Bashe gave an immediate command.

 

Elder Hodari's handsome image flickered and quickly stabilized into a sparkling picture. He looked stressed. "I assume you all saw the vote."

 

Bashe answered for all of us, "we did."

 

"Commander Bashe, I'm sorry. I know how much this project means to you, but it's basically over. I was able to negotiate a stall period, but there are other pressing priorities." He let that hang for a moment. We looked at each other but said nothing. "Bashe, did you mention the FutureBlack project to your crew?"

 

"No. It's classified and not everyone here is cleared for that level."

 

Muta stood up and moved away from the line of vision of his console screen, looked over to me and silently mouthed, “What's FutureBlack?” I hunched my shoulders in response and looked over to Juno. Juno just shook his head no. Meanwhile, Elder Hodari continued talking. "Bashe, hit me back on a secure line."

 

"Forty." Our screens blanked out as Bashe started pushing code. The lights dimmed, we were switching power and frequencies. "Everybody go to helmets," Bashe ordered and we each plugged into the black box console. We had direct contact with each other in the module and encrypted, relay-delayed contact with the outside.

 

"Standby." Bashe punched in some more code. An old identity shot of Elder Hodari filled the patches on our goggles as he came online. I hated these things. Every time someone talked they just showed an image of who was talking, an old ID shot. "Elder, the team is online."

 

"I'll make this brief. FutureBlack is a classified project. The official clearances will come down shortly, but commander Bashe your whole crew is going to be switched off the history project and on to FutureBlack. The Creoles knocked out another module early this morning. We have had to make the decision to accelerate our escape program. Our immediate future depends on finding a future. Some of us are betting on you guys to find that future for us.”

 

Nobody said anything. We were trained to listen when a ranking officer was speaking. Whatever questions we had would be discussed later.

 

“We're bringing you guys in. The gang over at R-D have constructed working, time-forward transports and we have to do some quick forward probes to find a suitable space where we can community. We have no idea how far future we will have to go, nor do we have any idea of what we will find. They've been sending out box probes but…" he hesitated.

 

Juno spoke up. "They come back empty."

 

"How did you know that, officer Juno?"

 

"The same thing happened when we first started our jumps. I thought those guys in R-D would understand that by now. Time warps can't transport unprocessed matter. That's why the jumps are so hard. When we get there all we can bring back is what we remember… if we can get back at all."

 

"The R-D guys told us they could design a transport to jump as many as twenty people at a time."

 

"Yes, elder. We can transport any number of people, we just can't guarantee retrieval nor can we bring anything concrete back. Plus, there's the problem of pinpointing where we send people. Our calibrations are just not that good. About ten minutes is max before we lose reference signals. What you need are jumpers to act as scouts. The problem is ten minutes is not enough time to reconnoiter whether a spot is safe. But then again, I imagine the new scanner might give us a bit more time."

 

"Between 24 and 30 hours, officer Juno."

 

Juno let out a long, low whistle. "How did they do that?"

 

"I really don't understand all the technical stuff like you do, officer Juno. Anyway, commander Bashe, your crew has the most experience with time jumps and we have had to accelerate our escape plan. The new scanner calibration will be complete on this end within a couple of hours. It works exactly like the previous model except it has a finer calibration. The council has decided that the FutureBlack project is critical to our survival and for the time being we will put on hold all history retrieval probes except for one more ju…"

 

"You want us to find Celine?"

 

"Officer Juno, I want you to test the new scanner. Now if you happen to find Celine during the test run, then so be it. After the test run, we will start immediately on the FutureBlack project. Copy?"

 

We all answered "forty" near simultaneously.

 

"Commander Bashe, download your new assignment. Oh, and one more thing. You're running silent from here on in. There will be no further direct contact until you file a mission report. Good luck, brothers and sisters. Commander Bashe?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Daughter, I love you."

 

"Love Black back at 'cha."

 

"A luta continua."

 

We all answered the salute and then the screen went blank. As I pulled off my helmet, I saw a faint smile on Muta's face. Maybe he and Celine would be reunited after all.

 

***

 

Jump center is eerie—we've got nine bodies laid out on slabs, surrounded by translucent tubes. Each of them looks like they are sleeping… or dead, and they are neither. They are suspended, their minds are gone. No, not their minds. Juno always tells me, it's not the mind we send out but the spirit, the life force. Their minds are still functioning, er functionable. If they had the lifeforce they could get up and move and think and respond. I don't understand all of it, no matter how often Juno tries to explain.

 

Muta is, of course, looking at Celine, I mean, looking at Celine's body.

 

"Muta, I've got a good feeling that Juno is going to find Celine."

 

Muta doesn't respond to me. He touches the pyrex shell with the tips of his fingers on his right hand. "Sheba, I appreciate your gesture, but…"

 

"No buts, Muta." I move pass Ishmael's tube, stand beside Muta, and place my palm next to his hand. "If any of us can make it back, Celine will. She was… is our best jumper. She knows what she's doing. And Juno… you know Juno can work that scanner. He's going to find her and they'll make it back."

 

"We couldn't retrieve any of the others." He steps away from me and slowly looks around at our comatose comrades. I look directly in front of me to the unnerving sight of Harriett with her huge, unblinking, dark brown eyes popped wide open like she's playing a game of holding her breath, except her body metabolism is slowed so much she is technically alive but practically a vegetable.

 

Unfortunately, Muta was right. It really didn't look too good for Celine. Even though we had gotten pretty good at retrieval and we had had four successful jumps before we loss Celine—and it couldn't have come at a worse time. We loss her one day before yesterday's council meeting. Buzzard luck.

 

"Muta, I know how you feel."

 

"No, you don't. You know how you feel. You only think you know how I feel." An undercurrent of bitterness thickened the quiet wisp of Muta's normally massive voice. He stares at me and then looks away. After a short moment that seemed like an eternity, Muta returns to his post at the head of Celine's pod.

 

This was why command was always discouraging intimate relations among team members, but here we were. Living in close quarters with each other for over a year at a time in this spherical module that was only about 4500 meters in diameter; no human contact except among ourselves. Buried deep into the side of a mountain in what used to be Suriname. What else were we going to do but grow closer or get on each other’s last little nerve, or both?

 

Muta leaned over and kissed the shield right above Celine's face. And then he embraced the tube like he was going to physically lift it, but instead lay the side of his face on the coolness of the covering. I went to him and bent to hug him. I couldn't think of anything to say, so I didn't say anything, I just hummed an improvised song hoping the vibrations would make Muta feel better, and, more than that, would make me feel better.

 

The intercom crackled with the unmistakable double whistle calling us to the control center.

 

I reluctantly peeled myself from Muta and started slowly out of the jump center. While the computer read my palm print before disengaging the automatic lock on the door, I turned to look at Muta, who was still looking at Celine. Even though my eyes and grown accustomed to the blue dimness of the jump center, at the distance of only 10 meters or so, the whole scene was like I was in the audience watching a science fiction movie. It was hard to believe that nine comrades in suspension and one comrade near immobilized by grief was real.

 

***

 

"We've got a problem, yall?" Juno was talking into his fist, which he was bouncing back and forth against his lips.

 

"The scanner’s not ready?"

 

"No, Sheba, it's up and running fine. All systems go."

 

"So what's the problem?" I asked as I looked back and forth between Bashe and Juno. I could tell they had been talking before Muta and I arrived. Bashe had her arms folded and was peering at me like she was trying to look through me. I know she doesn't like me, and I know why she doesn't like me. I turned away from the nearly palpable distaste of her unblinking gaze. I flopped down to my console and as I looked around at the twelve empty consoles, I suddenly felt very, very weary. When I looked up Bashe was still staring at me. I glanced briefly at Muta who appeared to be deep in thought, then I peeped at Juno, who had his head down—as though the answer to whatever the shitty problem was was down between his boots—and then I closed my eyes.

 

"The new scanner only goes forward."

 

My head snapped up as I processed in shocked disbelief the meaning of what Juno had just calmly uttered. Juno avoided my eyes and turned towards Bashe. I followed his lead and clearly saw her nod an almost imperceptible but unmistakable signal to Juno. It was like everything had already been decided and nobody had told me or Muta any goddamn thing.

 

"So, we're just going to abandon Celine?" I blurted out louder and with more of an accusatory edge to my voice than I actually meant.

 

"So, so what's the problem?" Muta folded his arms across his chest and locked stares with Juno. For almost a full minute nobody said anything.

 

"Fuck! Why doesn't somebody say something?"

 

"Take it easy, Sheba."

 

Before I could spit my disagreement at Juno for even suggesting that I should be cool about the problem, Bashe interrupted our exchange, just like she had interrupted us when I was in Juno's pad.

 

Bashe gave me that same damn look, that same timbre in her voice. "Oh" was all she had said. Just "oh." Like as if one little silly syllable could explain everything. Could explain what I was doing sitting on Juno's bunk, and explain what she was doing visiting Juno's pad when her quarters were on the other side of the module. Oh!

 

"That's not the real problem."

 

I glared at her. What wasn't the real problem? The scanner? The fact that both of us were trying to get next to Juno? What?

 

"Not being able to go back and search for Celine seems like a real problem to me," I icily responded.

 

Juno got up and walked towards me. "We've got a solution for that, Sheba. The problem is the new scanner only goes forward and network central is only going to bring us topside for one more launch before they retool our module."

 

I knew we had to be on the surface to make a jump and being exposed to satellite surveillance was a big risk that our position might be discovered or our security compromised, but Juno seemed to be suggesting something else. "So, I don't understand."

 

Bashe cut in quietly, "If we're going to search for Celine we have to do it on this next jump."

 

"But I thought he said the damn thing only went forward." I waved my hand with my thumb extended in Juno's direction without taking my eyes of off Bashe. "We can't find Celine by going forward."

 

"We're going to do a double jump."

 

"A what?" I blurted out incredulously.

 

"A double jump, Sheba." Juno said quietly as though he was talking about running a routine module check.

 

"The problem is I don't know how to use the scanner. I mean, theoretically I know, but I don't have any experience at it and neither do you." Bashe actually  gave me warm body language as she spoke. First she pointed to herself and then as she said "neither do you" she placed her hand lightly on my shoulder.

 

It took me a minute to figure out what was going on. "Wait a minute, if we do a double jump and we use the old scanner and the new scanner, we're going to need an operator at each one, who’s going to operate the transports?"

 

"I can handle the transport but I…" Muta stopped and we all silently filled in the rest, each of us remembering the day before yesterday when Muta had fumbled with the codes on what was supposed to be a routine jump. I was working the transport. Juno had been standing next to Muta assuring him that he could handle the scanner when something went terribly wrong and within the short space of a few seconds we lost contact with Celine and by the time Juno took corrective measures her signal was fading fast.

 

Bashe walked over to Muta and stood directly in front of him. "Trooper Muta, you and officer Juno will operate the scanners and the transports while officer Sheba and I make the jumps. You can do this. You have to do this."

 

Muta visibly flinched as Bashe issued her instructions.

 

"But the old scanner. Is. In a different area. From the new. Scanner," the words leaked out of Muta's mouth in awkward clumps. "Suppose. Something. Goes wrong?"

 

"Nothing is going to go wrong." Bashe firmly grasped Muta by the shoulders, "And if something does go wrong, you will just have to deal with it. We will all have to deal with it." Starting with Juno, Bashe slowly surveyed our tiny crew.

 

"Muta is going to operate the old scanner and Juno is going to operate the new scanner." Bashe paused as the full impact of her words penetrated each of us. She turned to face me, "I will inject you and then I will inject myself. We will preset the transports and hope for the best."

 

"But you know that sometimes you have to adjust the levels on the transport. The risk is…"

 

Bashe cut off Muta's objections, "We have one shot, and one shot only at retrieving Celine. We have lost nine other jumpers. We can't afford to loose Celine."

 

"I don't understand." Everybody looked at me like I was suggesting a mutiny or something. "You know I want to find Celine, but I don't understand taking the risk that we will loose Commander Bashe—I mean I'm not even worried about me." I hesitated to say what I was really thinking because I didn't want Muta to think I was being callous, but like Juno had said, what was so special about Celine other than that she had made eight successful jumps before we lost her? Of course, that was amazing, considering that nobody else had done more than three successful jumps.

 

"I don't believe we lost the other eight."

 

"Juno, what did you say?" This was tripping me out. Juno slumped down further in his console.

 

"I said I don't believe we lost the other eight. I believe something happened, I don't know what, but I know it wasn't pilot error…"

 

"So you're saying I lost Celine but all those other eight people just disappeared?" Muta took a few steps in Juno's direction. I could see that Muta was really roiled. "You were at the controls for six of those other eight. What happened if it wasn't pilot error?"

 

"I don't know what happened, trooper, but I do know it wasn't pilot error." Juno had such a fierce expression on his face when he looked up at Muta that Muta actually backed up two steps.

 

"Muta, we reviewed the logs. I personally inspected each entry, looked at the video of the procedures, poured over all the printouts, there was no indication of pilot error and…"

 

"Except for when I lost Celine."

 

"Except for when we lost Celine." Bashe moved next to Juno. "We lost Celine on Juno's watch, Muta. I have never held you responsible. Besides, the question now is how to carry out our mission."

 

"That's simple," I replied, "We do a forward jump. Gather the required information, file it with control central and that's all she wrote as far as fulfilling our mission."

 

Bashe shook her head from side to side. "Officer Sheba, we have multiple missions. One is to do a forward jump and the other is to retrieve trooper Celine. And I intend for us to accomplish both. Understood?"

 

Bashe took turns silently assessing each of us. No one moved or said anything, finally, I broke the silence. "So, when is jump time?"

 

"07:00 hours."

 

I checked my console. It was 22:48 hours. "Well, I guess I ought to go get some sleep. Or is there another problem we need to solve before jump time?"

 

"You and I just have to decide who’s jumping forward and who’s jumping backwards," Bashe said just as I was about to shove off.

 

"Tell you what. Why don't you just surprise me in the morning," I said sarcastically and started walking toward quarters.

 

Bashe reached out and touched me gently, not to stop me but to physically share her feelings, "Sheba, you know me. You know I hate surprises and bes…"

 

"Oh," I interrupted Bashe's comments. "Well, surprises don't bother me. I'm a jumper. I've been there and back three times before. Since this will be your first time…" I looked Bashe dead in the eyes and as I brushed past her, I cavalierly tossed my decision over my shoulder without breaking stride, "…you make the call. Make it easy on yourself."

 

I kept expecting Bashe to order me to stop but the only sound I heard was the slap of my sandals thudding against the double-thick synthetic, hard rubber flooring.

 

***

 

 

I don't handle rejection well and that's why I'm careful about what I ask for. I don't even know why I am sitting here. I know Juno doesn't have any deep feelings for me and...

 

"Unless I'm really misreading the situation, you're going to have to search for Celine and Muta is going to have to be your operator. He's not comfortable enough at the scanner controls to work the new scanner and the old scanner doesn't go forward, and..."

 

He just stopped talking. I looked up at him as I leaned back against the wall. All of the compartments were the same tiny size: a six foot bunk, a small desk with a hutch, a cabinet and that was it. Everything looked just like my compartment. Juno was staring at me. He sat down on the bunk on the opposite end from where I was hunched into the corner.

 

"What?" I gathered myself for whatever Juno was about to say.

 

"Sheba, I know you didn't come over here to talk about the jump tomorrow."

 

I hate it when people want to make you beg for what you want. One part of me was pissed. Pissed that I was here. Pissed that I even thought about coming here. And another part of me was so damn needy. I knew, tomorrow I could be dead or worse—who knows what happens to your spirit when you get lost out there. Your body vegetates here in jump control and your spirit... fuck it. I start to get up but don't. When I look up, Juno is not even looking at me.

 

"Why do you think I came?"

 

“Sheba, I’m not going to play that game.”

 

“I’m not playing.”

 

He looked away, silently took a deep breath and then looked at me. Without sounding like I was some kind of freak, how could I explain to him that I didn’t want to die horny. Sacrifice is one thing, but if liberation doesn’t include love-making than how liberated are we? Was it my fault that there were only four of us left? Muta is thinking about Celine. And Bashe is our leader.

 

The intercom buzzed interrupting my scheming on how to make a move on Juno without looking like I was just throwing myself at him. I knew it was Bashe, maybe I had conjured her up by thinking about her at that moment.

 

Juno responded, "Yes."

 

"Juno, can we talk?" It was like she knew I was there and was choosing her words carefully.

 

"Affirmative. I'll be over in five."

 

"Ok."

 

Juno looked at me as he stood up. "This shouldn't take long."

 

"Does that mean you want me to wait here for you to come back?"

 

Juno hesitated. "Sheba..."

 

"Tell you what. I'll be in my compartment if you want to stop by when you finish talking with Bashe."

 

"No, Sheba, let's not play those games. I'm not going to stop by and I..."

 

"And you don't want me to wait here."

 

Juno didn't say anything. I put my head down on my knees. When I looked up he was still standing in the doorway. "Sheba, I'll see you tomorrow morning, 06:30."

 

I got up and started toward the doorway, squeezing between the desk and the bunk. Juno stepped into the corridor. He grabbed my arm as I brushed past him. "It would be worse if I let you stay."

 

I looked him full in the eyes. He let go of my arm and then turned away. "Don't forget to secure your quarters," I said. Juno kept walking away, not even acknowledging what I had just said. Then I heard his door automatically slide shut and lock. I headed in the opposite direction back to my compartment.

 

After I rounded the first corner I stopped and sat down on the floor. I didn’t want to go back to my little lonely space. I didn’t want to be alone… I know it sounded so undisciplined not to be able to face the severity of our situation. But sometimes you get tired of being strong, alone. Sometimes it would be nice to be held by someone before you made a leap into the unknown.

 

Suddenly all I heard was the hum of our module; all the equipment doing whatever it did: the computers, the air supply, the power generators. I put my hand down on the floor and could feel vibrations. I knew I was just going stir crazy. Except for the jumps, I had not been topside in the natural world for almost a year. And the last time I had made love was with Harriett and that was over six months ago. And… I threw my head back and intentionally bumped it on the wall. Two, three, four times. I never saw people get horny in none of the space movies—there might be a romance, but… I jumped up. I must have been sitting there feeling pitiful for at least ten minutes. Although I tried not to think about it, I knew I was going to do what I usually did when I felt this way: masturbate, fall asleep, and forget about it.

 

When I turned the last corner and saw Bashe, her bald head bowed, eyes closed, sitting in a lotus position, meditating beside my compartment door I was shocked. I thought she and Juno would be going at it by now. I stopped but she must have sensed my presence because she calmly looked up at me and smiled. I saluted her as she stood up. She returned the salute and then opened her arms to embrace me. I just stood still. Bashe stepped forward and hugged the rigidity of my body to her.

 

"Sheba, I'm not your enemy. In about seven or so hours we are going to face a very tough situation." Bashe relaxed her arms and stepped back. "I came here to talk with you because... well, because I need, no, because I want our team to be a team. We are down to four people and after tomorrow... well, who knows. This situation has been very tough on all of us. I admire the way you have held up. I wish I had your spunk."

 

Bashe was trying to use textbook psych on me. I looked her in the eyes briefly. What I saw there frightened me. She was totally in control of herself. I was shaking inside. I turned to face my door.

 

"Sheba, I am 37 years old. Juno is 34. You are 26. I know..."

 

"Don't forget about Muta."

 

"Muta is not part of this triangle."

 

I refused to look at her. I started to say, what triangle, but I knew I wasn't prepared for whatever might be Bashe's response.

 

"I have prepared myself for years to be able to do whatever needed to be done and to control my emotions. I believe I can face anything. Right now, I have questions. Make no mistake, I am going to go forward with our mission, but at the same time I am questioning. Questioning everything."

 

"I don't understand."

 

"There is something happening out there and we don't know what it is. We don't know what happened to our crew. There is a great unknown, but I am prepared to face it and I think you are too. But the unknowns outside are not my major concern at this moment. What concerns me is our inability to face the problems we know about."

 

She paused. I looked over at her briefly. Bashe's unblinking stare was fixed on me. "I don't understand," I pretended.

 

"You want to be with Juno and I want to be with Juno. Neither one of us is going to get our wish. We don't need to carry this baggage with us when we do our jumps tomorrow. Juno is committed to celibacy during the course of this mission. I know because we've talked about it. And because he practices..." Bashe paused. She was still staring at me. She was still not blinking. "It is my responsibility to monitor everything that happens on this unit."

 

I can not return Bashe's unblinking focus so instead I look at a spot in the middle of her forehead just above her eyes, the place where the mystics say the third eye is located, the place where Hindu women wear a red dot. I hate it when I loose a battle of wills but Bashe is by far the most intense person I have ever encountered. I have never been able to stare her down. Never. At the same time I am trying not to succumb to her hypnotic force, I reactively wonder how much was “everything”. Did she really mean everything—bathroom, bed? Did she mean there is never a time when someone isn't watching us?

 

Bashe firmly but softly repeated herself, "Everything."

 

"That's a lot." Did they lie to us about not having cameras in our compartments, about allowing us that small bit of privacy? Had Bashe watched me touching myself?

 

"Sheba, I came here to thank you for not attacking me and to let you know that I do not stand between you and Juno." Then she reached out and embraced me again.

 

I actually shuddered. I couldn't help myself. Bashe scared the shit out of me.

 

"Good luck on your jump tomorrow."

 

I mumbled something in reply, but I don't know what. Probably, yeah, and good luck to you too. Her hug was both a shelter and a trap. As she stepped back after holding me all I could think to do was snap off a salute.

 

"Comrade sister Sheba, every little thing is going to be alright." Bashe didn't return my salute, instead she kissed my right cheek, smiled at me, turned slowly and seemed to float down the corridor back toward her quarters. I found out just how much I was shaking when I pressed my trembling palm to the cool screen to i-d open my door.

 

***

 

There is no time. Time is an illusion. Everything is now. The past. The future. It’s all now. All going on at the same time. And no matter how random or chaotic. It’s always the same. Changing but the same. And I have no fear because I don’t need to be me. In order to exist. I could ride the wind as a leaf, hug the earth as a tree.

 

Juno is so clever. He tried to explain to me that every death is a birth because to die is to be born on another plane since we can neither add to nor subtract from existence only transform in terms of what plane we exist on.

 

I guess if I could have children I might feel differently. I jump so well because it really doesn’t matter if I come back. I have no fear. No anxiety.

 

I am trying to describe the color I see when I close my eyes. To myself. I’m trying to explain me to me. Inhale nostrils. Exhale mouth. Suppose I am not coming back but going to. Suppose. Suppose. Suppose.

 

I tried to talk to Celine about jumping. But her experience was so different from mine. I think she wanted to be conscious. I just let myself be. And become. We searched by vibrations. I was confident that people who struggled gave off a certain vibe and tried to tune in to that vibe of struggle, and let my own self-awareness merge into my host. In a sense, I guess, I became one with my host.

 

I remember, once, when I was in this guy who living in the swamps, I don't know. It was so comfortable. He was so sure of himself. All alone out there. It wasn't even a thought process. It was a certainty of spirit. He was going to die out there rather than return. And I had to struggle with myself not to stay with him. Maybe that's what happened to the other jumpers. Maybe once we got inside a host who was really committed to our people, maybe we decided to stay. Just add our spirits to them. Make them that much stronger.

 

Something like Bashe. Maybe she has a jumper from some other place inside her. Juno says that a lot of the traditional ceremonies with the potions that people drank, and all the dancing and drumming, was just another way of time traveling and that people actually plugged into other times and other places and other people when they went into those trances.

 

I don't know. All I know is that we don't really know as much as we think we know. Who really knows what life is and how life works? Our job was to find the ones who didn't give up, regardless of what odds they faced. Find them. And learn their stories. Because those were the ones who were lost to us. And at the same time those were the ones who made it possible for us to be us.

 

I found myself thinking about being in that brother in the swamp and the time he slipped back to the plantation one night to be with this woman. She didn't hardly know him. But she knew what he was. She gave him some food. And she gave him herself. And I was with him when he lay down with her. And when he came I came. Damn. What an orgasm that was.

 

Did she get pregnant? Is any of this passed on in the dna? Juno says that there is never just one explanation for anything. Everything has a multiplicity of factors and for sure every new birth is a result of the mating of at least two separate forces… I'm not a thinker. Juno likes to deal with these kinds of questions. But I know how to make stuff happen. That's why I'm jumping right now.

 

Bashe was who I last saw. She had injected me. And was leaning over me. And squeezed my hand gently. And I felt loved.

 

Now it’s that pulsing dark, that warm brown that you get when you hold your face toward the sun with your eyes tightly closed.

 

I always go to sleep, just totally relax and drift. Usually I think about colors. Yellow-cream. The feel of warm water. The sound of my own breath: in through my nostrils, out through my mouth, in, out, nostrils, mouth. Butter. I’ve only tasted it once. It was soft, soft. Had been laying in a shallow dish on a counter all morning. Soft to the touch. I tasted it on my finger tip. Looked over the ridge and there was the soft sun rising, yellow. Yellow as the butter.

 

I have the feeling that I have been someone else before and am becoming someone else now. I lock in on the vibrations. I feel like I am getting close to Celine but I'm not there yet, and yet, somehow, I'm getting these vibes that feel good, feel right, feel Black like the Black we're trying to save. I will go with this and see where it leads...

 

This is strange. Because I know this neighborhood. I know these sidewalks. The houses. What goes on behind closed doors. The people. I recognize almost everyone I see. Foots is standing on the corner. I lower the driver’s side window and stick my fist up in the air.

 

“Hey, Kalamu.”

 

“Give thanks, Foots. How you be?” He crosses the street toward me, I ease my foot down on the clutch and ease the shift into first but keep the clutch to the floor.

 

“Man, I’m just getting ready for Jazzfest. I got some designs to lay on them.”

 

Foots, sibling of Billy Paul, he’s got some heavy new jewelry to sell. He pushes his hand into my open window and shakes. The car is rocking, I have Incognito turned up so loud. I like to ride with the windows up and the music up higher than the windows, which are all the way up. Foots smiles at me, bopping his head to that beat. I ease up on the clutch and swing on round the corner.

 

I’m 54 years old and sometimes I feel weary, but then I get a spurt of energy. I don’t know where from. Actually, I believe all my extra energy comes from either one, or maybe both of the major life forces other than the one I was born with. They are: one, the here and now; two, the been here and gone; and three, the soon come to be. The been here and the soon come, offer a reason to keep going, cause if it were left to me in the present, I could just check out at this point. My work is relatively complete. I have done my do. Fought the good fight. Reared—actually, to be honest and correct about it, helped to rear some slamming young people, those biologically from me as well as a number of others whom I have touched. And, well, what else is left, but a little bit more of the same.

 

I think about my parents. My mother dead of cancer at 57, and my father dying suddenly some years later. There are days when I dream about one or the other of them, usually my father—and when they were both alive, I always thought I was closer to my mother, but life is it’s own reality, not what we think, or wish, or hope for, but what it is and the truth, the real is sometimes something other than we are ready to admit.

 

There is something in me that will not let me stop and yet, I don’t believe in god. I don’t disbelieve. I just have no opinion on that issue. Once I left the church as a teenager, no organized form of religion has ever appealed to me. Spirituality, well, I studied stuff but anything organize around a specific system was just, well, was beyond where I was willing to go, or maybe not as far out as where I am. So when I say I believe in the ancestors and the unborn, I don’t mean it in any concrete way except to say that there is something inside me I can’t explain. Except I know it’s there.

 

It’s almost noon and I have not eaten anything at all yet today. But the music has me feeling upful. After unfolding myself from the driver’s seat, I stand beside the car a moment. The weather is warm. Sun in March.

 

When I get inside I call Lynn and we talk about workshop next week. I will be out of town and she will lead workshop and choose the study piece. Immediately I jump online and spend the next couple of hours doing email. Fortunately, I don’t have to teach school today and then as is always happening in Treme, I hear a brass band in the distance, sounding like it is coming this way. I jump up.

 

Sometimes I ignore the bands, but other times I go see what’s going on. As I step down to the sidewalk, the procession is rounding the corner and there is this little girl, maybe six or seven years old, prancing beside the lead trumpet. At times she looks up at the horn player, at other times she is dancing so intently her eyes get that far away stare like you see when people catch the spirit. Her little limbs jerk lithly, but not like a puppet on a string, rather like there is something inside her bucking to get out. Her knobby little knees wobble from side to side. She can’t weight no more than a matchstick but she’s flowing like a willow tree rocking in the breeze. I am transfixed by her; there is something about the way she dances that is older than she is. Something familiar. But I don’t know her, have not seen her in the neighborhood before. I feel like I should know her. She has that Dionne Warwick kind of face, triangular with almond-shaped eyes that sit at a slight upward angle on her dark face. She is not smiling. She is so serious about this dancing. I just look at her. When she jumps, turns around, squats, hands on knees and backs it up, I fall out. A whole procession of people passes, but all I see is this young girl. Dancing. Dancing. Dancing down the street.

 

 

***

 

“We’re locked on. We got her!”

 

At first I didn’t know what Muta was talking about. I’m leaning against the transport table for support. I always feel weak after a jump, like I want to sleep.

 

I look around the launch area for something yellow. There is nothing. Why am I looking for something yellow? And then I look up and directly above me is a yellow light on the ceiling connected to the transport control. I smile. I knew I wasn’t crazy…

 

“Sheba, did you hear me? Power up Celine’s transport. We got her.”

 

Celine? Transport? Power up…?

 

“Sheba, hurry. We’re going to loose her if the transport is not functioning.”

 

I try to move quickly, but I stumble. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It takes so much effort to take one step. What am I doing? I have that lost feeling, like someone waking me in the middle of a deep sleep and asking me to solve calculus problems.

 

“Fifty-eight ticks and counting.”

 

Celine looks so perfect. It’s funny, she could be dead… damn, what am I saying. She is dead. For all practical purposes. She is dead. But she doesn’t really look dead, or is it that I don’t want her to be dead, or to look dead. Her skin is healthy looking, there is blood circulating through her although at a very, very slow rate, sort of intermittent rather than continuous.

 

I remember us playing around once. Wrestling. She had me around the waist trying to flip me and I was holding her neck for leverage; she couldn’t flip me without me falling on top of her. And our heads were close together. I remember the wonderful sweetness of her breath. Not an artificial sweetness, but real sweetness. Deep inside of her she is sweet. And I know she shits like everybody else does, but her intestines, or at least her stomach, has got to be the healthiest in the world. Soft and cool. That was the thing. We were wrestling but her breath was still coming out soft and cool. And sweet. But her body was tough. I mean mostly muscle and bone, no fat, no padding. She must have had muscles all up in her breasts. Her neck was like a steel cord. And I could feel her fingers gripping me in a dead man’s grip…

 

“SHEBA! Code Black. Fourteen clicks and counting. Set the switches, Sheba.”

 

Eight-zero-niner. Enter. The switches run through the colors. Starting at red, burn through to amber. And then one by one. Green. Green. Green. Power up.

 

I look over at Muta. “Power up.”

 

Muta is lost in the gyrations of multitasking. Keeping the beat, easying back on the transport accelerator. Tapping in code with his right hand. Holding the frequency attenuator with his left hand and bumping it up at appropriate moments. His left foot tapping a beat for the vibration resonator. And his right foot dropping harmonics—Juno always said, the harmonics is the key to making everything work. Watching Muta from the rear he looks just like a jazz drummer playing keyboards and drums at the same time.

 

This was Juno’s innovation. Instead of using a gyroscope to set and lock the rhythm, the operator had to establish the flow. Juno said, flow allowed for maximum variation. The jumper could go wherever, experience whatever, change, flip in and out of time zones, in and out of hosts and it was no problem, except if the operator couldn’t keep up. The old way with the fixed rhythm never yielded great results because we would so seldom find somebody functioning at whatever vibrational frequency we were locked on, but this way, we could change to fit the conditions…

 

“Celine!” Muta pushed me aside, like I was a fly buzzing his face. He was lifting the cover on Celine’s transport before I fully understood what was happening.

 

I looked down at Celine’s body. It wasn’t moving. But the gauges on the transport control panel indicated that she was alive. She was back.

 

“Celine.” Muta was almost crying. Celine was not moving. He started checking for her pulse, and then he shook her gently. “Come on, baby. Wake up. Wake up.”

 

There was no sense in telling him to stop. He felt for her pulse by the big vein in the side of the neck. And he smiled his huge smile, the one that made him so attractive.

 

“Her heart is beating.”

 

I leaned over to put my ear next to her nose and I smelled her breath. “She’s back,” I whispered. “Celine is back.”

 

Muta broke down at that point. Sort of like made a choking sound and let his head keel over onto Celine’s chest. He was crying, softly at first. Then loudly enough that I knew he was not embarrassed about it and was just letting it go. Happy crying. He was hugging her, his face buried into her bosom. Hugging her and crying. And calling her name, between sobs. Over and over.

 

Then Celine’s hand rose up, the gesture was so slow and so graceful it looked like something you see in a dream. Her hand moved. Up and then out like she was reaching for something, and then her fingers spread apart, wide apart. And just as slowly she brought her hand to rest on Muta’s head and stroked his head over and over, like what I imagine a mother does to a baby suckling her breast.

 

Now I had to turn away. This was too intimate for me to witness. Muta was still crying when I heard Celine’s voice drawl like she had been drugged: “Muuuu-taaaaa. Whyyyy. Youuuuu. Cryingggggg?”

 

***

 

None of our palm prints would open the module. We had not been coded in, but we could see through the glass. Juno was thrashing away, his fingers flying, rocking back and forth, his knees pumping furiously—I had never seen him so animated at the controls. Something must have gone wrong.

 

“Dag, I didn’t know we had two scanners,” Celine says out loud although not directly to either Muta or myself.

 

“It’s brand new. This is the first tim…” I said.

 

“Whose jumping—not Bashe?”

 

Muta answered quietly, “there’s no one else left to jump.”

 

“How far back are they going?”

 

“Celine,” I reach out and touch her elbow, “it’s a future jump.”

 

“A future jump?” her eyes grow wide as though she dare not believe me. “When did all this happen?”

 

“You’ve been gone a long time…”

 

“Sheba, I thought you said it was only three days, some hours.”

 

“Yeah, well three days is a long, long time around here.”

 

“Damn, something is wrong.” We both turned and stared at Muta as he quietly sized up the situation and confirmed my suspicion.

 

“How can you tell?” I asked.

 

“Because look at the rhythm he’s using with his left foot and see how rapidly he’s stopping and going with his right foot, that’s not normal, that’s an extremely high level of activity. Plus he keeps swinging the antenuator to extremes in both directions. Damn.”

 

“What?”

 

“It’s beautiful. Beautiful the way he’s working those scanner controls. How can he move that fast and not loose it, but look, he hasn’t dropped a beat.” Muta had his hands up beside his face like he was cutting off glare, or like a kid staring into a movie-scope. “But I still think something is wrong.”

 

Now all three of us had our faces pressed to the transparent wall separating us from the control module.

 

“This is weird. I feel like we should be in there.”

 

“Doing what, Celine?”

 

“Muta, you know there is always something we can do. Didn’t you just say it looks like something is wrong?”

 

I suck my teeth. “If they wanted us in there, they would have included our palm prints in the access codes.”

 

“Maybe they didn’t think about it. But on the other hand, even if they don’t want us, maybe they need us.”

 

“Celine, you’re always so positive.”

 

“Thanks, Sheba.”

 

“That wasn’t a complement,” I half joke.

 

“No, you were just telling the truth and it’s good to know that I am appreciated,” Celine chuckled. It was good to hear her laughter again.

 

For a couple of long minutes no one says anything. Juno has been working like a man possessed. Suddenly I notice that Juno is wearing a helmet—Muta only wore earphones. “Muta, why is Juno on helmet.”

 

“Cause he’s flying blind.”

 

“Flying blind? What does that mean?”

 

“It means he’s blocking out everything around him and only seeing the scanner codes and getting aural feedback through the ear phones,” Celine answered me matter-of-factly.

 

“Yeah, but the helmet does funny things to your hand and foot coordination, you can’t hear yourself operating the controls and there’s almost no tactile feedback.”

 

“Yeah, you get more control of the input but you get less feedback in terms of what you’re doing. Juno tried to show me how to use the helmet but I preferred the earphones.”

 

I glanced over at Celine, not only was she our best jumper, she also was pretty good at operating the scanner controls. 

 

“Look, you see how fast he’s doing code with his right hand and how smooth he’s manuvering with his left hand at the same time. I believe he’s bringing Bashe back now.”

 

I couldn’t see any difference in what Juno was doing.

 

“Damn, when I grow up, I want to be able to control a scanner like Juno,” Muta muttered softly, shaking his head in admiration.

 

“If you put the time in, you can do it. But even if you don’t get any better, you can transport me anytime.” Celine said, and then those two fools smiled at each other like they were both the first and the last people on earth to fall in love.

 

“Oh, no. Bashe!” Muta pounded on the window trying to get Juno’s attention. Bashe was back alright, but her body was thrashing from the waist down, her head spastically jumping like she was convulsing. Juno finally looked up, tore his helmet off and tossed it aside in one quick motion while bounding over to Bashe still strapped in the transport, her arms flailing frantically.

 

Juno threw himself atop Bashe’s body and locked restraints on her wrists and then he gripped her head with both hands.

 

Celine figured it out immediately, “she’s epileptic. That jump could have killed her. Secure her tongue, Juno, so she doesn’t choke on it. Give her an injection and then hope she pulls through ok.”

 

Juno moved as though he heard everything Celine said, right down to an injection. That went too smoothly. It was like Juno was prepared for the seizure to happen. And then it hit me. “I bet you that’s why they locked us out; they knew.”

 

“No,” Celine said, “it’s not that simple. They know I’ve got the most medical training, they would want me in there.”

 

“Yeah, but you just got back, and nobody knew where you were or if you wanted to come back” I joked, even though it wasn’t funny.

 

“I hear that, Sheba. But damn, Juno looked like he was prepared…”

 

“Celine, that’s just what I was thinking.”

 

Bashe was completely still now. Juno finally stopped to look around and noticed us standing there. He went to the console and opened the door.

 

We rushed in, nobody saying anything, everybody looking at Bashe. Juno eventually came over and hugged Celine, “Welcome home, trooper Celine.” And then Juno dapped up Muta, “Good job, trooper Muta.”

 

We all smiled briefly.

 

“Celine, please run a check on commander Bashe. Officer Sheba, have you done a full debriefing yet?”

 

“No. We came straight over here to see if you all needed some help.”

 

“Trooper Muta, do a full debriefing with officer Sheba. After you and officer Sheba have recorded the debrief, return to this module. Celine and I will see to commander Bashe.”

 

Both Muta and I snapped off salutes. Juno was not hesitating in taking charge. He was clear and direct in his orders and unhesitating about what had to be done, but I could see the concern swimming in his eyes, which were glazed over with moisture that I assume was tears or stress, or both.

 

As we were leaving, I heard Juno said something about Bashe predicted this might happen. How do you get up the nerve to volunteer for a jump if you know you’re an epileptic?

 

* * *

 

After everything was over, we all received promotions, except for Bashe who was already a commander. The ceremony, as such, was scheduled to take place within another two weeks when our small crew was to be brought topside. Meanwhile, here we are receiving final orders from Bashe.

 

Bashe looked at each one of us before saying a word, and then she looked down before finally raising her head proudly.

 

“Please stop me if I go too fast. I’m going to skip the official rigmarole. The deal is a truce has been declared and we are all being disbanded. Of course, it is not going to be announced like that, but the end result will be, the war is over.”

 

“Bashe, wait, you said, disbanded?”

 

“Yes, Muta. Disbanded. CC is being absorbed into…”

 

“I don’t want to hear it,” I blurted out my immediate reaction. “The jumps, the units…”

 

“Sheba, we were the only unit to survive. All the others either failed to complete their assignments or they were captured or destroyed. The elders decided the cost was too high and…”

 

“What about ‘no surrender, no compromise’?” I asked.

 

“Sheba, the truth is I don’t know.” There was a long silence while we waited for Bashe to continue. “I don’t think any of us know. This movement has been our lives. I grew up this way. My father was in this movement before I was born.” Bashe fell silent. Her head was angled slightly upward and to the side. If you watched her eyes you saw them shifting back and forth like she was reading something.

 

“This can’t be it. Not like this!”

 

“Sheba, calm down.”

 

“Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

 

I looked over at Juno. Leave it to him to suddenly quote poetry at a moment like this. “Who said that?”

 

Bashe didn’t even look in my direction when she answered my question, “T.S. Eliot.”

 

“Damn, Juno, at least you could quote a Black poet.” I retorted quietly.

 

“Is there some kind of amnesty program or something? You know some of us…”

 

“I know, Muta. Some of us are wanted. From what I understand there is some kind of table of responsibilities and consequences, and depending on what you’re wanted for, they’ve worked out… Look, all of you are cool. Any of you who wants to go back can do so without prejudice. I’ve checked on your cases.”

 

“Bashe, what are the options? I mean suppose we don’t want to go back. Where else can we go?”

 

“Celine, as far as I know there is no other place to go. OnePlanet is everywhere.”

 

“Well, I’m not going back. I’ll stay here, if I have to,” I looked at Bashe who was listening to me and sending out support-vibes. “When I said, no surrender, no compromise. I meant it. I meant every word of it.”

 

Juno spoke up suddenly, “Bashe, what about you? Can you go back?”

 

“No.”

 

“No, you can’t or no, you won’t?”

 

“Sheba, I can’t and I won’t.”

 

“So, what are you going to do?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“Well, I tell you what, wherever you decide to go, count me in, cause I don’t want to go back.”

 

“I’m with Juno on that,” I said.

 

Before Bashe could respond, Celine spoke up. “Muta and I really, really have to talk this over. You know…” Celine paused. “My first inclination is to stay here with Bashe…”

 

“Yall, there is no here to stay at. Don’t you understand? This is the last module and tomorrow it will be turned over…”

 

“I mean, Bashe, I understand. But what I was saying is that my first inclination is to go wherever you go and…”

 

“I thank all of you for your support and for the confidence you have in me, but right now you are being confronted with a reality you probably never imagined. You don’t need to make any rash decisions. You need to think about your future. You understand? Think about what it is you want for the rest of your life. Sheba you are still very young, you could literally start over. Celine and Muta, you two have each other. Go start a family. If you register you can have a child.” Bashe looked deep into my eyes and then deep into Celine’s eyes and Muta’s eyes. Her look was saying much more than her words.

 

“What about Juno?” I asked even though I knew the answer already, or at least I thought I knew the answer. Juno wasn’t going back.

 

“What about, Juno?” Bashe never even glanced his way, but instead bore into me with those searching eyes.

 

“No, I was just saying, you gave advice to me and to Muta and Celine, but you didn’t say anything to Juno.”

 

Bashe smiled. “Are you asking me if Juno and I are getting together?”

 

It got quiet. Real quiet. I looked away. It was still quiet. I peeked over at Juno. He never even looked up.

 

“Well, Sheba, is that what you want to know?”

 

“Ah, I was just, ah, I mean Juno did say he was going to go wherever you go.”

 

“I repeat, are you asking me if Juno and I are getting together?”

 

“What the fuck, it doesn’t make any difference, does it? Just like that, it’s over. The Community Council has cut some kind of deal and some people will get taken care of and the majority of us will become some little cog in some urban center. And shit. Who cares, fuck it. I guess it was nice while it lasted but the fun is over and it’s back to the goddamn real world.”

 

“Sheba, you’re hurt and confused at the moment. Don’t say anymore… but then again, maybe you should. Maybe you should get all of that out of your system.” Bashe walked over to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “The truth is CC negotiated a deal for the whole community. Most of you will be acquired as normal citizens, and all of us, rank commander and above, will be sent to a restricted zone for an indefinite time.”

 

Her touch felt so light and yet so strong.

 

“Sheba, do you want to be exiled on a restricted zone with me?” Of course I did not answer her. I could not lie and say I was ready for a life that was closer to death. Those zones were everything we were fighting against.

 

“I didn’t think so. I don’t think any of you wants to go through that. Right?” Bashe looked at each of us in turn. None of us spoke up to say we wanted to join her in such a harsh and pitiful place. “CC offered us the option of remaining underground, but we would probably never get back to the world again. I wouldn’t even bring that up to you all, confused as you are right now, we might have elected to do something irreversible that we would surely come to regret.”

 

Bashe was right. I really couldn’t see myself living the rest of my life on this module. I could easily see myself dying in battle, but living like this, I just never foresaw anything like this as being our future.

 

“Our movement ebbs and flows. There are no guarantees except that we must struggle. Sometimes we will have to withdraw and lie dormant, other times we must throw ourselves against impossible odds. Muta, Celine, Sheba, Juno, I love each of you. Fiercely. I do. I know your hearts are strong. I know your minds are clear. Your beliefs are with our people. I know this like my blood knows my body.”

 

Bashe looked at me last. I didn’t realize I was crying until Bashe stepped to me and wiped a tear off my cheek with her bare hand. Bashe hugged me and then drew back.

 

“You know how in our studies we found out that different groups of our ancestors had different ways of dealing with slavery? Some of us adapted and some us committed suicide. Some of us resisted and most of us just kind of did whatever we had to do to survive.”

 

At first nobody answered Bashe. We all just waited for her to continue. And then Juno spoke up, “Bashe, we know the story. You’re going to walk into the sea, aren’t you?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Bashe stepped away from me and continued talking to all of us, “I guess I just don’t have it. I don’t have that something inside that enables a person to put up with bullshit. You know I used to wonder what did our ancestors do when a slave revolt failed. The ones who were still alive but who had been part of the rebellion. What did they do? Well, we’re about to find out, aren’t we?”

 

“Bashe, you are the bravest person I know,” Celine was speaking very, very softly. “You took that jump knowing that it could have killed you… and you did it so that there would be a chance, just a chance that I could be brought back. I owe you my life, I know that.”

 

“Celine, you know what you owe me?” Bashe walked over to Celine and embraced her and then embraced Muta. “You owe me the two of yall having a child together. I chose not to have a child. Maybe if I…” Bashe didn’t finish her thought.

 

“I tell you what crew, this is a lot to think about. Let’s reassemble in the morning. Why don’t we all just sleep on what we want to do. Juno, Sheba, Celine and Muta, each of you have the option of going anywhere in the world you want to go. You will receive full global citizenship, a grade-omega passport, and a choice of service or research jobs. The details of the deal are being finalize as we… I’m terrible at giving speeches. Meet back here 09:00. That’s all. Dismissed. Oh, there is one more thing: CC is bringing us topside in the morning. Tonight will be our last night aboard this module. That’s all. Dismissed.”

 

We started to snap off a salute, but the words wouldn’t come. “We can’t even say ‘a luta continua’ anymore,” I said to no one in particular.

 

“Sheba, we can still say it,” Bashe looks at me with a tenderness I hadn’t recognized before. “It’s just that the struggle will now have to take a different form.”

 

* * *

 

The jerk of the module docking topside woke me up early, a little after six. Our compartments are soundproof, someone could have been shouting outside our door and we would not be able to hear them, but we could feel the motion of the module, which was always moving this way and that through a maze of tunnels. To evade detection, our module was never still for more than five or six hours except when we docked topside for a jump and that usually took no longer than two hours.

 

Before I even realized what I was doing I had finished packing and placed the bundle on my bunk. When I got tired of standing up looking down at my gear, I flopped on the bed and kicked at the backpack. The kick felt so good, I let go with a second and stronger kick. The pack thudded against the wall at the foot of my bunk. I kicked it again. And then another kick.

 

All my possessions were in that pack and I doubt if it weighed fifty pounds. None of us really owned anything much, we didn’t need much, not even clothes in this controlled environment.

 

I wondered what Juno was doing; what Bashe was doing; whether they were doing whatever they were doing together? I looked over at the computer screen. It was just a little after seven. I couldn’t just sit anymore.

 

Out in the hall, I just started walking. I didn’t have any particular destination. I was avoiding Juno’s compartment, that’s one place I wasn’t going.

 

Where was I going to go?

 

I decided to go say goodbye to all the jumpers who never made it back. When I got to the jump room, the room was completely dark, not even the usual night lights were on. And the door was open. We never left this door open. Even before I keyed up the lights, I knew something was wrong, but I had no idea how wrong. An involuntary gasp jumped out of my mouth when I saw that the room was empty. For almost a minute, I couldn’t believe it. All the pods were empty. Empty!

 

Things were moving too fast. How could all this have happened so quickly? I had no choice. I had to go see Bashe.

 

Her compartment was empty. The door was open. I ran to the control center. Sprinted. No one was there. Everybody couldn’t have left me. At control center I turned on the security monitors and started searching for Bashe, Juno, Muta and Celine. Anybody. Everybo… and there was Juno operating the new scanner. But who was jumping? I ran down the hall.

 

When I got to the new scanner room, Juno was standing in the open doorway, just like he was waiting for me. He started talking without looking up at me, “She’s gone. Jumped somewhere into the future and she’s not coming back.”

 

I looked into the room and there Bashe’s body was, laid out, perfectly still and unplugged. I glanced over at the scanner, it was off. None of the transport lights were on.

 

I kept trying to get a grip on my mind, but I couldn’t think a straight thought.

 

She left us. I looked over at Juno and when he finally looked up at me, I was stunned. His eyes were troubled, reddish. He wearily rubbed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.

 

“Bashe woke me up early this morning and asked me to send her on a jump and to disconnect her after she was out there.”

 

“You could have said no.”

 

Juno just sadly shook his head in response. “If you had asked me, I wouldn’t have told you no. Why should I tell Bashe no?”

 

I didn’t know what to say. This was all too much for me to process. I just sort of shut down. Turned away from Juno and looked at Bashe’s body.

 

“I used to believe in karma,” Juno said, “at the same time that I believe in evolution. I mean all the scientific evidence supports some form of evolution. But then I could never get with white people ruling the world, being the dominant branch of the species. Dominance and karma just don’t go together. In fact, dominance seems to be what evolution is about and… well, there are so many people who didn’t survive, who are now extinct. That was evolution, but was there any justice in that?”

 

I only half heard what Juno said. It was like he was babbling, more talking to himself than talking to me.

 

“Juno, I don’t understand. Everything is breaking down and you’re talking about karma and evolution, and… and, well, this doesn’t make sense. None of this, I mean all of this… it’s like chaos, just plain chaos.”

 

“Exactly. Like I said, I used to believe in karma and evolution.”

 

“And so what do you believe now?”

 

“Sheba, I believe shit happens. It just happens. Some of it be sweet, some of it be bitter. We endure the bitter and enjoy the sweet. I mean some of us. Some of us endure, some of us enjoy. But there’s no rhyme, no reason.”

 

I must have been looking at him like he was crazy, because he laughed, a hard and almost cynical laugh.

 

“You think I’ve lost it, don’t you?”

 

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. What do I know?”

 

I turned to look at Bashe for the last time. Her face was calm. Her eyes were closed. At least she was at peace with her decision. Impulsively I bent over and kissed her. Her lips were already cool.

 

“Sheba?”

 

“What?”

 

“I said, do you want to jump too? If you do, we have to do it now, we’re almost out of time?”

 

“What…?” I was totally disoriented. “Juno, I don’t know. What are you going to do?”

 

“I’m going to be one of the ones who stay on the shore.”

 

“What? Juno, what are you talking about?”

 

“I’m talking about how some of us walked into the sea and most of us stayed on the shore.”

 

“Oh.”

 

A chill went through me. I knew I was going to stay on the shore too, even though I had made four back-jumps, right now I just wanted to… to what? What did I really want? Before I realized what was happening, words were tumbling out of my mouth, “Juno, can we… I mean since I don’t know and you don’t know, can we kind of don’t know together?”

 

Juno smiled a half smile.

 

“Can I take that smile as a yes?”

 

“Yes, you can take it as a yes, but that’s not why I was smiling.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“Come on,” Juno grabbed my hand. “I was smiling because the last thing Bashe said was if you stay, stay together. Don’t try to face down OnePlanet by yourself.”

 

Suddenly the main lights went out. The module automatically switched to backup power. Juno, hardly reacted except to murmur, “They’re here.” He was still holding my hand.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

Recrudescence

 

After the last time Shawn stopped talking to me, I told myself I never wanted to see her again. I put all 78 of her pictures in a plastic grocery bag and threw the memories in Thursday’s trash. I avoided hanging out by the Moonwalk. And it was ok, until me and my brother was at a Hornets game. Kenneth, who had forgotten more girls than I will ever know, laughed, punched me on my tattooed bicep, “ah, man look at Shawn. She looking some good!”

 

When I reluctantly peeped up at the monitor, I spied Shawn’s smile, the same smile that first attracted me to her.  Shawn’s eyes—the size, shape and color of unshelled pecans—were sparkling. She sported her favorite shade of shiny, watermelon-red lipstick that made her luscious lips seem even more luscious. Her teeth were never perfect but I used to like sticking the tip of my tongue into her small gap. That was her sister, Monique, sitting on one side and Derrick, who I believe was her cousin, jumping up and down next to her as people cheered #24-Mashburn’s dunk. I didn’t have to guess why they zoomed in for a full-frame close up of Shawn’s coffee-without-cream complexioned face—she’s beautiful.

 

And then the camera focused on the new coach shouting at the team to hustle back on defense. With a mouth full of half-chewed hot dog, Kenneth hunched me and impishly prodded, “Man, why you don’t holla back at Shawn? From what I hear she ain’t even much still talking to old dude from St. Aug.”

 

“Man, shit, they got too many fish in the sea, besides I wasn’t really liking her all that much no ways. You know what I’m saying? She ain’t the only chick that got lips like that.”

 

“Boy, you a fool. Fine as Shawn is, who wouldn’t miss that?”

 

At first I didn’t say anything, but then the truth popped out. “She quit me, I didn’t quit her.”

 

“Man, if you a man, you don’t let no girl quit you.”

 

I didn’t now what to say, so I didn’t say nothing. I don’t make 21 until next month and since I couldn’t hold on to Shawn, was I really a man?

 

Later that night, after I had dropped Kenneth off and was headed back home, it took me four stoplights and two stop signs to screw up my courage and call Shawn.

 

“You need to stop calling me. I told you, I don’t even like you no more.”

 

“Shawn…”

 

“What?”

 

“I…”

 

“What?”

 

“Nothing.”

 

“Dang, why you call me then?”

 

She was right, but how do you tell a girl: I called you because I saw you at the game and you was looking good and I started thinking about when we was together, and I was missing you, and… and well, you know, I think I kind of… Plus, I don’t know what to do with my hands, I mean, with my fingers, specifically my pointing finger, the one she sucked one time when we were just sitting around kissing and I was touching her face and she drew my finger into her mouth and made like it was hard candy. That sounds nasty but it felt so nice.

 

Sometimes, especially when I’m eating crayfish and lick my fingers, I find myself missing Shawn, or is it my fingers missing Shawn, specifically the finger she had so tenderly sucked into her mouth?

 

Shawn hung up before I could finish thinking of what I wanted to tell her; but I wasn’t going to punk out this time. So I speed-dialed her back.

 

“Look boy, don’t call me no more if you ain’t got nothing to say. What’s wrong with you? I’m not even much going to answer your calls no more. I used to really care about you.”

 

“Shawn.”

 

“What?”

 

I almost lied to her and said something crazy like, I love you, or some b.s. like that. But I didn’t let the truth make me tell a lie.

 

“What? Just say it. What?”

 

“I want you back. Can we get back together?”

 

“Why you want me back?”

 

I was home now, sitting in the driveway with the phone to my ear and my tongue tied in knots like that time at a party six years ago when I was just starting high school. I’ll never forget the embarrassment. I was bent over trying to peep through a keyhole at the girls in the bathroom and Shawn’s uncle, who was supposed to sort of be watching over us caught me and asked me, “boy, what the fuck you doing? You ain’t never seen no pussy before?” And everybody laughed at me and I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say nothing. I was only doing it cause a couple of the other dudes had done it before me and I was just the one who got caught.

 

I hated what Shawn was doing to me, the way she’s so patient like when we studied Trig together or when she would ask me what I wanted to be after telling me she was going to be a registered nurse like her aunt. She would always just quietly wait, and wait, and wait for me to say something even though she knew I didn’t know what to say. Damn, this shit was harder than Algebra 2, which I never would have passed without Shawn’s help.

 

I guess I was supposed to say: because I need you in my life, or because of how much I lo… but I couldn’t make my mouth move. I couldn’t lie. Besides, it wouldn’t sound cool to say: because you’re a burning in my chest that I can’t stop.

 

“Since you ain’t going to say nothing, I’m going to say something. Good night. Good bye. Don’t call me no more.”

 

And that was the night I stopped believing in science because my tears couldn’t put the fire out.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

CRY, CRY, CRY

GO HERE FOR PART ONE: A MAN AIN'T SUPPOSE TO CRY

GO HERE FOR PART TWO: I WON'T CRY

 

PART THREE: ALL I COULD DO WAS CRY 

Even though her mouth was empty, Rita savored the crunchy flavor of animal cookies, old time animal cookies made with real vanilla. Her son laid out in a casket and here she was thinking about snacks. But that was because animal cookies were Sammy's favorite.

            When he was small, Rita would gallop the shapes up Sammy's little round stomach moving the crisply baked dough in bounding leaps. Usually the miniature animals ended up between Sammy's laughing lips.

            His fat cheeks dimpled with a grin, Sammy would squirm in Rita's lap, turn and clap his small hands in glee as he chomped down on the golden tan figures. Sometimes he'd cry out in mock pain when a bear would take a really hard jump and end up bounding over Sammy's head into Rita's mouth. Animal crackers and funerals.

            Now little Gloria, twenty-three and a half months old, sat in Rita's lap. Tyronne sat silently next to her. Gloria squirmed briefly. Without really hearing a word he said, Rita patiently endured Pastor White droning on and on. Out of the corner of her eye, Rita stole a glance at Sammy's corpse laying in the coffin. Taking in that awful stillness, Rita's instinct took over: she protectively hugged Gloria, bowed her dark face into the well oiled coiffure of her daughter's carefully cornrowed hair and planted a silent kiss deep between the black, thick, kinky rows of hair on the top of Gloria's head.

            Rita was beginning to doubt life was worth living, worth sacrificing and saving... for what, for to have children who get shot down. What sense did it make to be a mother and outlive your children?

            Two deacons moved forward and flanked the coffin. Like passing through a room where the television was on but no one was watching and the sound off, Rita was aware the men were there to lower the coffin lid but she really paid no attention to the dark suited sentinels. Rita had long ago said good-bye and there was no need to drag this out. The elder of the church appointed guardians efficiently closed the blue velvet trimmed coffin lid. Someone two rows to the rear of Rita uttered a soft but audible "Oh, my Lord." The lamentation cut clearly through the reverent silence that had settled on the small congregation. This was the end of the wake but only the beginning of a very long and sleepless night.

            Friends and acquaintances shuffled slowly, very slowly, out of the sanctuary into the small vestibule where people lined up to script their condolences in one of Sammy's school notebooks that had been set out on a podium. There was a pencil sitting in the middle of the book. A few people had signed in ball-point pen, but most signatures (some were written in large block letters, others in an indecipherable cursive script) were scripted with the pencil's soft lead and seemed to fade immediately upon writing.

            Rita looked up. "No, that couldn't be," she thought to herself. That couldn't be Paul "Snowflake" Moore darkening the sanctity of her sorrow. Rita instantly shifted the sleeping weight of Gloria from her shoulder. Wordlessly Rita handed Gloria to Tyronne. Tyronne had already seen Snowflake and knew a confrontation was in the making. In one seamless motion, as soon as Tyronne received Gloria into his large hands, he spun on his heels and handed Gloria to the first older woman he saw. By the time Tyronne turned back to Rita, Rita was already in Snowflake's face.

            "Get out of here!" Rita hissed between tightly clenched teeth. "You the..."

            "I just come to pay my respects. I ain't come to cause no trouble."

            "You don't respect nobody."

            By now the packed anteroom crackled with dread. The woman who had taken Gloria scurried back into the sanctuary, just a few months ago she had witnessed a fight break out at a funeral. Tyronne rushed behind Rita who was oblivious to her back up towering above her. With the arrogance of power, Snowflake stoically stood his ground and impassively peered at Rita and Tyronne. Suddenly the tension increased.

            "Get out," Rita screamed and pushed Snowflake hard in his chest. Snowflake glowered. She was fortunate that this was a wake, that Sammy was her son and might even be related to him, fortunate that a lot of people were standing there watching, but most all, fortunate that none of Snowflake's usual retinue was surrounding him because then Snowflake would have been bound, at the very least, to slap her down. As it was, Snowflake's hand instinctively went to his .38 derringer snug but ready  in the waist-pocket of his vest.

            The confrontation escalated so fast the onlookers barely had time to breath in and out, in fact, a few of the younger men were holding their breath. Surely Snowflake wasn't going to accept being pushed around without doing something in retaliation. Tyronne quickly stepped between the antagonists.

            "She's upset, you understand. Please, leave her be. We appreciate your concern but it would be better, man, if you would leave." Tyronne stared unflinchingly into the depths of Snowflake's emotionless eyes. Snowflake stared back and pulled an empty hand out of his vest pocket.

            Everybody, except Tyronne, Snowflake and Rita, prematurely relaxed and let out a relieved breath.

            "I said get out!" Rita screamed a second time. The deacon who had closed the coffin lid ran to the phone to dial 911. Half the people who had been standing around now quickly moved out, some exiting the front door, others retreating back into the sanctuary. Rita reached around Tyronne in another attempt to shove Snowflake toward the door.

            The rest happened so quickly only Tyronne and Snowflake saw it all. Tyronne took a swift half-step to his right to cut off Rita charging around him. He leaned backward briefly, pushing against Rita with his shoulders.

            Snowflake's left hand leapt with lizard rapidity to knock away Rita's outstretched right arm and in the process was detained by Tyronne's right hand that gripped with a viselike strength and was surprisingly unyielding. An onlooker moaned, "Oh, Lordy, no!"

            "Get out!" Rita's vehement command overpowered the onlooker's exclamation.

            Snowflake's right hand had already come up with his gun at the ready. Tyronne stepped in so close to Snowflake, if Snowflake pulled the trigger there's no telling what direction the slug would travel: upward into the ceiling, upward into Tyronne's chest, or upward into Snowflake's jaw.

            "He got a gun," some young male voice blurted at the same time Rita was reaching to get around Tyronne so she could sink her nails into Snowflake's smoothly groomed face. Snowflake pushed his right forearm against Tyronne's chest attempting to back Tyronne up and simultaneously free his left arm, which Tyronne held secure at the wrist. Not unlike is often the case in impromptu street fights, the peacemaker in the middle was the person in the most danger.

            "Young man, please. Has there not been enough shooting and death," the pastor said in a calm but insistent voice as he rushed through trying to get to where Rita, Tyronne and Snowflake were locked in an emotional tug of war.

            Rita spit at Snowflake. She missed his face but a glob stuck to the top of Snowflake's left shoulder. Some older lady fainted but no one paid her any mind because she was too far away from the focal point of the fight. The minister smothered Rita in his protective arms.

            "Can't you see this woman is grieving over her son."

            When Reverend White grabbed Rita, Tyronne bear hugged Snowflake and spoke slowly and carefully into Snowflake's ear. "I'm begging you man. Please don't shoot my wife. She's so upset she ain't got no idea what she's doing. You can understand her only son is dead and she thinks you had something to do with it. You got the gun. If you got to shoot somebody, shoot me. But please don't shoot my wife."

            Snowflake's gun was pinned between the two men.

            "Will everyone please either leave out the front door or join me in the sanctuary where we will pray for sister Rita." Reverend White physically picked up Rita in his embrace and carried her out of immediate danger. Supporting her with firm grips under her arms, two ushers grabbed the woman who had briefly fainted and spirited her out into the welcomed chill of the night air.

            The whole scene had been acted out so quickly, it seemed like a blur of simultaneous motion. Within ninety-five seconds, Snowflake and Tyronne were alone in the forlorn vestibule.

            "Thank you," Tyronne said as he stepped back half a step, reached into his lapel pocket, pulled out the white handkerchief and gently dabbed Rita's spittle off of Snowflake's cashmere jacket. "Thank you."

            It sounded so, so insane, but that was all Tyronne could think to say to the man standing in the receiving area of the church and holding a loaded gun gleaming beneath the chandelier lights. From inside the sanctuary the 23rd Psalm seeped through the swinging doors. Reverend White lead and the assembled congregation responded with a tremulous sincerity. "...Yeh, though I walk through..."

 

***

 

            "Yeah, what up?"

            Rita almost dropped the phone. It was Snowflake. She quietly hung up. So, it was just like she thought. Snowflake was behind it all.

            Here it was two weeks after the funeral and only now had Rita finally been able to summon the strength to clean out Sammy's closet.

            When Rita pulled the closet door open, Sammy's scent assaulted her. She buckled at the knees and had to grab the door sill with one hand and push hard against the door knob with the other hand just to keep from falling. It was like Sammy was hiding in the closet and came charging out when she opened it.

            Rita started to close the closet door. She couldn't stand anymore. Her intruding into Sammy's life had already gotten him killed. Rita blanked out momentarily.

            When she recovered consciousness, Rita was kneeling on one knee inside the closet door. This was as close to a breakdown as she had allowed herself to come.

            What was really fueling Rita's weakness at this moment was the indescribable mantle of guilt which refused to lift. She had taken the money out of Sammy's backpack because she wanted to talk him into stopping. He did. His death stopped everything. And the money, well, four thousand dollars barely paid for the funeral.

            Rita heard some sound behind her, turned to look over her shoulder and saw Tyronne standing in the doorway, his brow deeply furrowed in pain.

            "I'm all right. I was just going to clean out his closet and..." How do you explain to a man that a mother knows how her child smells, that you could identify his clothes blindfolded, that opening this closet door was like finding the secret place your child's death had not yet visited, the place where the child was still overpoweringly present? How does a mother tell a stepfather that the smell of dirty clothes piled on a closet floor knocked you to your knees?

            "If you want me to help, I'll be in the front room," Tyronne said quietly. Then, after waiting a few moments and hearing no response to his offer, Tyronne turned and left the room even more quietly than he had entered.

            Tyronne was trying so hard to be helpful, and patient, and considerate. But, Rita knew, the details and the ultimate impact of all of this was way beyond Tyronne's understanding. So much of this reality was based on events Rita would never reveal to Tyronne, such as the fact that Sammy's father was Silas Moore, Snowflake's oldest brother, and that Rita and Snowflake knew each other in ways hard to explain outside of the situation within which the particulars arose.

            "Stand up baby, show this boy what a woman look like."

            "Silas, I don't have any cloth... Silas, I'm naked."

            "I know you naked. This my little brother. He ain't nothing but ten years old and he ain't never even seen no pussy."

            "I done seen it before."

            "Yeah, when?"

            "Joanne showed me her thing."

            "Who you talking bout?"

            "Joanne, dat live cross the hall."

            And Silas had laughed at Paul. "Bo-Bo, that ain't no pussy. Bet she ain't even got no hair on it good yet. How old that girl is?"

            "She eight and it's still pussy, it just girl pussy."

            "Yeah, well I'm talking about real pussy. I'm talking about a woman's pussy. Rita stand up and show this boy what a woman's pussy look like."

            "Sil, I don't want to."

            "Do it for me, baby."

            "She ain't got to show me nuthin', I done seen pussy befo'."

            "Rita, I said stand up."

            As Rita remembers standing up, she turns around to see if Tyronne is still standing there looking at her, but Tyronne is gone. Rita lowers herself into a sitting position in the closet doorway and another wave of memories flood over her.

            When she was seventeen the fact that twenty-two year old Silas "Silky Sil" Moore considered her a woman filled Rita with pride. Sil was the biggest player in the courtyard. He always had money—had a big car and could have any woman he wanted, and he wanted Rita.

            "Why you like me?"

            "Look here Rita, let me give you some good advice. When you hit a streak a good luck, don't question why. Just ride it long as it last, and when the luck leave you, get up off it and be thankful you got what you did."

            "You saying you gon leave me?"

            "Naw, baby, I'm saying life is like the weather, it's always changing. Sooner or later, everything gon change."

            "I ain't gon never stop loving you."

            "Now nah, girl, you can't say that. Don't be judging tomorrow by what's happening today. Suppose, I take to liking another girl? Would you still love me?"

            "As long as it was liking and not loving, what I care. My love for you ain't got nothing to do with you liking or not liking somebody else."

            "You don't sound like no seventeen year old. That's one of the reasons I likes you."

            "Yeah, and what's another reason?"

            "Come here, I can show you better than I can tell you."          

            Rita could see her silly little seventeen year old self trying to act so womanish, and really doing nothing but being a stone fool for a man who was just using her.

            No matter how hard she tried, Rita could never forget that day. Sil pulled her close and kissed her. As her tongue flickered into his mouth, he sucked it hard almost to the point of hurting her and then released her.

            Sil unbuckled his pants and let them drop at his feet. He slid his shorts down and sat on the side of his bed. "You want a mouthful of this," he said while guiding her hand to his erect penis?

            Rita knelt quickly and started to give him head—she knew he like the way she did it. She practiced doing it, sucking on a banana sometimes for five minutes straight without stopping, strengthening her jaw muscles and other times she would chew five sticks of gum at a time, over and over, and over and over, and over, building up her stamina.

            Some of the girls said they didn't like it but they had to do it to keep a man, but Rita liked it. She liked feeling him in her mouth and liked the soft, slightly salty taste of his sperm. Like most of the girls she grew up around, Rita knew there were only two ways out for most women, one was to hitch your wagon to a man on the move and the other was to luck up and get a good job if somebody put in a good word for you, or somebody who was related to you got you on somewhere. There generally wasn't no other way out and usually finding a good job, when all you had was, at best, a public high school diploma, was harder than finding a good man. At least, every young girl had a body and most of them could attract a man for a good six to seven years after they made eighteen. There wasn't nothing they taught you in high school that lasted that long.

            "Wait a minute baby. Go close the door, this is something for just me and you."

            When Rita turned away from Sil's dick and made her first move toward the door, she saw little Paul standing there wide-eyed. She never said a word to him and just closed the door in his face.

            How could she tell Tyronne about all of that?

            By the time Rita had discovered she was pregnant, she and Sil had already broken up. Her turn was over and it was time for another high school cutie to hang on Sil. By the time Samuel was born, Sil was in prison. Rita didn't even bother trying to contact him. You ride it til it's through and when it's over you let it go.

            Rita snapped completely back to the present and began pulling clothes, boxes and whatnot out of the closet, setting them on the floor beside her in three distinct piles. One pile was clothes she would give away. One pile was stuff she would throw away, sneakers, two old pair of underwear, stuff like that, and a third pile—well, not really a pile, just a couple of things—a third stack was memorabilia she would keep. Sammy's drawing notebooks mainly and a neat stack of comic books he liked to read. Rita didn't know why she felt it important to keep the short stack of comic books but somehow these things reminded her of Sammy more than even his picture on the bedroom dresser.

            Rita lovingly looked through Sammy's notebooks. He had two that were full and one only partially complete. The partially complete one had the best drawings and also had a phone number written on the inside cover.

            She had noticed the number immediately, because, unlike everything else in the notebook, the number was written in ink and underlined.

            Maybe this number held the key to who killed Sammy? Rita believed it was Snowflake but she had no proof.

 

***

 

            "Girl, he like you. Look how he looking at you."

            "LaToya, I got a baby already. Less he ready to be a daddy and a lover, I don't even want to hear nothing."

            "Girl, he kinda cute. I wish he would look at me like that."

            "Yeah. Whatever."

            "What you mean, 'whatever.' That man got a job. He a security guard."

            "Yeah, and since he got a job, he probably got a woman."

            Rita and LaToya went up to the window together to cash their Shoney's pay checks. LaToya kept eyeing Tyronne. He was kind of build too. LaToya cashed her check first and stepped away while Rita cashed hers.

            When they got outside, LaToya burst out laughing.

            "Girl, what's so funny?"

            "You gon see."

            "No, tell me now. What up?"

            "You gon see, when he call you."

            "When who call me?"

            "Tyronne."

            "Tyronne who? What you talking about?"

            "I'm talking about that security guard in the bank who had them juicy lips."

            "Call me...what you talking about? He don't even know me."

            "Well he got your number."

            "How he got my number?"

            "Cause while you was cashing your check, I told him that you liked-ded him but you was shy and that you told me to give him your number."

            "No, you didn't."

            "586-8540. Rita Deslonde."

            "Oh, you wrong for that," Rita said and chased LaToya a quarter of the way down the block.

            Holding Tyronne's revolver in her hand, Rita had to smile as she thought back to how they had gotten together. He had called. He had asked for a date, and Rita decided he was all right when he didn't hesitate about taking her and her eleven year old son, Samuel, to the Audubon Zoo for their first date.

            What she liked most about Tyronne is he wasn't afraid to talk to her about his life—how he felt about his experiences, and not only what his dreams were but also what his fears were.

            "So, Tyronne, I can't believe you don't have a girlfriend already."

            "Believe it or not, it's true."

            "How come?"

            "I guess cause a lot of girls think I'm kind of square or something."

            "Well, after what all I done seen, square seems kind of nice to me."

            "We'll see."

            Rita smiled thinking about just how square Tyronne actually was. He wasn't much of a lover. He would roll on top of her and be through almost as soon as they got started. But that was ok, she could teach him how to take his time.

            She also had to teach him how to get high. He said he never like smoking "that stuff" all that much. With him around, a nickel bag lasted a long time. They might smoke once a week or so. Gradually, Rita just gave it up, unless they were under a lot of stress.

            The only thing they ever fought about was keeping a gun in the house. Rita knew keeping a gun went hand in hand with being a security guard but she just didn't like the idea of a gun in the house with children who were always snooping into everything. Finally, Tyronne hit on the idea of keeping the gun in a lock box. She had a key and Tyronne had a key. Rita could live with that.

            Rita slid Tyronne's gun into her purse, closed the box, covered it back up with clothing and slid the second dresser drawer fully close. Then Rita turned around in the dim bedroom. It would soon be dusk. She had no words to tell Tyronne about Sammy, about Sammy's father—well she had told Tyronne that Sammy was the result of a brief fling when she was seventeen years old and that she had never told the man that he was Sammy's father. That was true. However, Rita hadn't told Tyronne that Silas Moore was Sammy's father or that Silas was in prison. Nor, of course, had she told Tyronne that Snowflake was Silas' baby brother and that Snowflake and Rita knew each other. New Orleans was such a small town, all the poor people knew each other, or knew somebody who knew some...

            Her past wasn't pretty and there was no way she wanted to share the foolishness of her youth with Tyronne. He wouldn't be able to deal with it. It would haunt him. He was a good man but... well, it would hurt him too much to hear the details of her life. Plus, he had no way of understanding some things. Rita remembered a conversation about a news show on Channel 4.

            "Well, Goddamn, look at that. That girl can't be no more than sixteen or seventeen and she caught up in a drug ring."

            "Tee, when it's all around you..."

            "It was all around me when I grew up. But I mean she's a girl."

            "Well the drug dealer is probably her man."

            "You mean her pimp."

            "Well sometimes it ain't about being no prostitute or nothing. Those girls just be starved for affection and those guys give them dresses and jewelry and stuff and they think they're in love."

            "Yeah, and after they get pre..."

            "You mean like I got pregnant with Sammy?"

            The question hung in the air for a long time.

            After about a minute of silence, Tyronne spoke up, "So, I guess you're telling me, you're like that girl."

            "No, I'm telling you I understand what that girl is going through and I don't think you do. I think you see the condition she's in only from the outside and me, I feel the condition she's in on the inside."

            "I guess I'm thinking of how we used to mess over them young girls in Vietnam and it's hard for me to imagine them growing up and coming out ok after all that stuff..."

            "Well, if you live, you grow up. You got no choice about that. As for it being ok, who's to say what's ok?"

            After another long pause, Tyronne looked at Rita. "Baby there's a whole lot I don't know, but I know you're ok and I love you."

            Tyronne's love was disarming and sometimes uncomfortable. He was so honest about his own shortcomings and so accepting of hers. Rita used to wish she could start her life over with Tyronne, wish she had met him when she was fourteen instead of meeting Roger, wish she had gone with him in high school instead of Sherman and Bekay, wish she had waited for Tyronne to father Sammy. But what was the use of wishing. Life was what it was, not what you wished it to be. She should just count her blessings and feel lucky she and Tyronne did eventually hook up.

            The whole time they were discussing the girl on Channel 4, Rita had been standing next to the chair where Tyronne liked to sit while watching television. She bent and kissed him lovingly. "I love you back, Tee, with everything I got. I love you too."

            Everything I got, Rita thought to herself. The rub was there were things she no longer had because they had been taken from her. Rita wished she had those missing things so she could love Tyronne with everything just like he loved her. But that was only a wish, the reality was both more complex and much more repulsive.

            Clearly Tyronne had never been molested as a child, so, he still had some innocence in his loving. Rita had no innocence left. To Rita, the fierce reality of her childhood was unsparing and unforgiving. Rita was certain if Tyronne knew all the sad and sordid things that had happened to Rita and all the silly and stupid things that she had done to herself, no matter how much he loved her, he probably would leave her. Everything in Rita's life told her, no matter what they said or how much they loved you, men didn't tolerate their women making too many mistakes and indiscretions, especially if sex was involved. Tyronne was a man and, deep down, probably was no different.

            Plus Tyronne was nice and good-hearted, the very kind of man who always has a hard time dealing with people who fuck up over and over again. Tyronne got upset if she threw a coke cup out the car window, Rita could imagine what would happen if he knew about some of the other things she had thrown out the windows of her life.

            Tyronne believed that most people were basically good and a few  people were evil minded. Rita knew that everybody could go either way, it just depended on the circumstances and what they felt their chances were of getting what they wanted versus getting caught.

            Rita paused briefly in the doorway and hoped everything would be all right for Tyronne. He deserved good things. He was a good man.

            Even though Tyronne had killed as a soldier, Rita could tell, from the way Tee talked about his Nam experiences, Tyronne could never kill anyone in cold blood nor would he be able to understand being a cold-bloodied killer, and that's why right now she couldn't share with Tyronne that she had decided she was going to kill Snowflake.

            She wasn't going to talk about it and she wasn't going to think about it. She wasn't even going to cook up no scheme about how she was going to do it. She was just going to do it.

            Some things are best never said, Rita thought to herself as she passed through the front room. It's bad enough we act on some of the evil thoughts and fucked up desires we have, we don't have to talk about them; or, at least, that's how Rita rationalized walking out the door past Tyronne without telling him anything other than, "Tee, I got to get some air. Walk around some. I'll be back."

            Tyronne looked at her. He ached to comfort her but knew her well enough to know there were areas of her life she refused to allow him to touch. All he could do was wait, helplessly wait, until she was ready to open to him. "Rita, be careful."

            "I'm just going for a little walk." If Rita stopped to say anymore to Tyronne she might not do it. She had to do it now, while the smell of Sammy was still in her nose and the fuck-ups of the past were lingering in her consciousness.

            Twelve blocks later, Rita stood in the gloaming looking at Snowflake's house across the street. Lights were on. A jeep was in the driveway and a fancy car out front. She knew he was home. He had answered the phone. Then again, maybe he left right after she called. Maybe somebody else was up in there.

            Should she go knock on the door? Should she just stand and wait? Was it safe just to stand on the sidewalk waiting? Maybe he was checking her out right now.

            Sheltered by the darkening dusk, Rita simply waited for something to happen. A light shower began. Rita had had the presence of mind to bring an umbrella and raised it above her head. She stood in the rain for twenty-eight minutes, her eyes fastened to Snowflake's house. Then she saw the door open. He was standing on the porch locking the door.

            Rita quickly dashed across the street, holding the umbrella in her left hand and reaching into her dangling purse to pull out the revolver with her right hand. She had no plan. She was just going to flat out and out kill him.

            They almost bumped into each other as Snowflake ran toward his BMW. Snowflake had seen the woman running across the street in the rain but had paid her no mine until she was right on top of him.

            "Paul Moore this is for Samuel Deslonde." Bam. The first shot caught him square in the chest. He had no time to react. The force of the bullet hurled him over the hood of his car. Bam. Bam. Rita stood over Snowflake and shot him twice more. Once in his right side and the other into the back of his right shoulder. He slid off the car, a bleeding heap of inert flesh in the street.

            The rain was steady falling. Rita froze momentarily. Not sure what to do now. She looked around. A few people near the corner were standing under a sweetshop store awning and looking at her. She put the warm pistol back into her purse and swiftly walked away. No one said anything to her as she passed.

            Rita took the long way home and did not stop until she was standing, wet and distraught but dry-eyed, in their living room. When she came in Tyronne rose slowly. He had Gloria in his arms, she was sleeping. He gently set her down in the chair and silently rushed over to Rita.

            He quickly surveyed her from head to toe, wiped her damp hair back from her face and gathered her up in a huge embrace.

            "Tee, I..."

            "Shhhh, shhhhh. Don't say nothing, baby. Whatever it is we'll deal with it. I don't care. We'll deal with it."

            "I shot Snowflake."

            There were so many questions he wanted to ask her. Had anyone seen her? Did anyone follow her? Had it been on the street or in a bar or where? She probably had used his gun, which meant he could probably take the rap if it came down to that. Say he did it. Gloria needed a mama more than a daddy. Besides, probably wasn't nothing going to happen. The cops never spent too much time looking for who shot a known drug dealer. No matter what happened, they would deal with it.

            Tyronne just hugged her tighter. "I don't care. All I care about is you back here with me. Whatever happens, we'll deal with it. Together."

            Rita buried her face into Tyronne's shoulder and did something she had not done since she was fifteen and had a train pulled on her at a party—what was worse than the physical pain was how worthless the gang rape made her feel: she cried. She cried and she cried. And she cried.

            It felt good. She cried for twelve long minutes, tears rolling out of her eyes big as Cuff. When Rita finished, Tyronne was still holding her and still whispering into her ear, "no matter what happens, we gon deal with it. We gon deal with it."

            What started out as tears of pain, were now tears of gratitude. Nobody had ever loved her like this before. Nobody. In the face of such unconditional love, all Rita could do was cry.

 

 

THE END

—kalamu ya salaam

 

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

CRY, CRY, CRY

GO HERE FOR PART ONE: A MAN AIN'T SUPPOSE TO CRY

 

PART TWO: I WON'T CRY

 

"No matter what happens, I won't cry,"  Sammy-Sam resolved.

 

 

            Just turned fourteen, wearing a Michael Jackson T-shirt, well chewed bubble gum in his mouth, and the heavy black rubber coverings on his purple bike's handlebars slippery with the sweat oozing uncontrollably out of his palm, Sammy-Sam, stammering to himself, repeated his vow, "I won't cry."

            Swerving only slightly to avoid a dead pigeon, Sammy-Sam skillfully negotiated around the feathered carcass without going too far towards the middle of the street.

            He didn't need to look over his shoulder. He knew a car was just behind him. He could hear with the finely tuned ear experienced bicycle riders develop.

            Although conscious of where he was and what he was doing, Sammy-Sam's main attention was focused inside himself. The approaching car's noise was mere background to what Sammy-Sam was hearing in his head: Snowflake screaming at him.

            Screaming like he screamed on Jay when Jay had threw away six rocks cause he thought the police was going to bust him.

            "Stoopid moth-ther FUCK-er, you fuckin' went and threw away six motherfuckin' rocks just cause some doofus ass cops happen to look yo motherfuckin' way. Is you motherfuckin' crazy. You OWE ME. You owe me. And yo fuckin' ass is going to pay today. One Goddamn way or another within the next twenty-four hours. By the time the sun set and rise on yo triflin' ass you best be done put fifty motherfuckin' dollars in my hand and a whole bunch of 'I'm sorries' in yo mouth beggin' my motherfuckin' pardon. I don't play no shit like dis. Fifty motherfuckin' dollars by sunrise tomorrow or else tomorrow will be the last time the sun shine on yo stoopid ass, stoopid moth-ther fucker."

            Jay had just stood there in his multicolored, knee length shorts with matching shirt, an outfit he had proudly bought for himself with his earnings. His bottom lip trembling uncontrollably, Jay instinctively licked at the semicircular scab that covered a small gash blighting the left side of his mouth. Jay was fifteen and bewildered.

            The danger had appeared imminently real to him. Ditching those rocks had seemed the most prudent action. Afterwards, even Ronnie had told him it was better to eat the cost of some rocks than to get busted. Besides he intended to pay Snowflake back out of what he sold next time round.

            Although Jay felt wronged by Snowflake's refusal to appreciate Jay's predicament, he didn't feel angry at Snowflake. Jay was confused. He just did not know how to handle dilemmas. Spinning like a rear tire mired in a mud hole, Jay's mind was working furiously but going nowhere.

            "And til you pay me my fifty, you ain't gettin' shit mo from me to deal wit. You got that?"

            Jay nodded in muddled agony. What was he going to do?

            Their insides churning worse than the time they had eaten a desert concoction of pickles and hog lips right after wolfing down milkshakes and Big Macs at Rudy's birthday party two years ago, Jay and Sammy-Sam began to feel nauseous as Snowflake curtly left the room.

             Snowflake's melodramatic display of anger had achieved his desired effect. The two youth stood straight and silent, not unlike the never used, expensive burnished brass reading lamps in Snowflake's front room, which languished beside a matching pair of seldom sat in, blue leather easy chairs. The two teenagers were scared of what was going to happen if Jay couldn't pay Snowflake the fifty dollars.

            Sammy-Sam hesitantly tugged the checkered back of Jay's loose shirt tail. "Come on, man," Sammy-Sam suggested, "let's go."  But they stood there until Snowflake came back in the room and literally kicked Jay out.

            Outside Sammy-Sam silently motioned for Jay to climb on his bike's gleaming handlebars. Jay wordlessly obeyed. As they pushed off, Sammy-Sam decided to give Jay the thirty dollars he had set aside to buy his little sister Gloria a birthday present for when she made two in a few weeks. That would leave them with twenty to get. Sammy-Sam felt as equally involved in this mess as was his good friend Jay.

            They rode the twelve blocks to Sammy-Sam's house in embarrassed silence.

            With the casualness that comes from frequent repetition, Jay hopped off before Sammy-Sam came to a full stop by Sammy-Sam's back door.

            After hurriedly tossing directions to Jay, "Watch my bike. Be right back,"  Sammy-Sam rushed up the steps.

            Jay studied Sammy-Sam's bike for what seemed like six hours before the idea struck him to wonder how much the bike was worth and to whom he could sell it. Busting through the back door, two and a half minutes after he had run inside, Sammy-Sam interrupted Jay's self-wrestling about whether to ask or just take the bike and pay Sammy-Sam back later.

            "Here man, it's all I got right now."  Sammy-Sam shoved thirty dollars—two tens and two fives carefully folded over twice—into Jay's right palm. If Sammy-Sam hadn't given the 650 dollars to his mother just last week, giving fifty dollars to Jay would have been a snap.

            Jay incredulously looked down at the money in his hand.

            "It's thirty. Now all we got to do is figure out how to get the other twenty right quick."

            Jay hadn't figured out anything. He wasn't sure what was happening. Stymied by this unexpected display of unusual generosity, Jay wondered what the deal was; was Sammy-Sam giving him the money?  Naw, couldn't be. Didn't nobody give nobody no money for nothing. Jay knew that.

            "How much I got to pay you back?"  Jay was almost afraid to ask. He knew the interest rate was often tied to need, the more a lendee needed the money, the more the lender charged.

            "Man, you got to pay Snowflake fifty dollars fo sundown tomorrow. You can pay me back whenever you get it. I'm yo homey. Snowflake, shit, ..." Sammy-Sam was at a lost for words to explain Snowflake's strangeness.

            Although he never said "thanks," and instead kept staring at the money, Jay was truly grateful.

            "Hey, man I just don't want to see nuthin' happen to you like what Snowflake did to Ronnie," confided Sammy-Sam putting a hand on Jay's shoulder.

            Both Jay and Sammy-Sam's memory reeled backward recalling the menacing scene of Snowflake pistol whipping Ronnie the time Ronnie tried to hold back on Snowflake.

            WHOP. Dead upside the head. The pistol seemed to appear like magic. One minute Snowflake had his hands in his pocket not saying nothing, next second a gun was arcing through the air. Look like a gash instantly opened up cross the left side of Ronnie's head. Blood came shooting out like squirts of sticky juice when you whack a super cold watermelon with a butcher knife.

            WHOP. Snowflake hit Ronnie again while he was down on one knee trying to recover from the first blow. When the second blow hit, Ronnie fell like a fighter collapsing on his ass after taking the full force of a looping right hand from a 225 pound, well conditioned heavyweight.

            Crumpling to the floor in slow motion, Ronnie moaned with a hurt that sounded like some kind of badly wounded animal. Crying and bleeding all over the place, the lanky youngster rolled over on the floor and curled up. Scared Snowflake was gon hit him again, Ronnie was trying to protect his head with his little adolescent hands.

            Snowflake's eyes pierced into the cringing form occupying the middle of the floor, desperately clinging to the short, burgundy colored carpet fibers for lack of any other hiding place.

            Snowflake squatted down beside Ronnie. He put the gun barrel in Ronnie's nose.

            Jay looked at Ronnie's nose with the gun sticking in it. Then Jay looked at Snowflake's hand; it wasn't trembling or nothing. Then Jay looked at Sammy-Sam's face. Sammy-Sam was looking without blinking. Then Jay felt his own hand twitching involuntarily.

            "Don't nobody double cross me."  Snowflake was almost whispering but each word he said was clearly heard by all present. "Boy, I could shoot yo ass right now and wouldn't nobody blame me or do nothin about it. You know that?"

            Ronnie didn't answer. He was cowering and trembling and whimpering. It sounded more like small squeals than like crying.

            Jay was also silently crying. Jay didn't know he was crying, nevertheless tears freely flowed down Jay's cheeks. Ronnie and Jay used to be best friends before Sammy-Sam and Jay hooked up.

            "What make you think you can cheat me?  What make you think you smart enough to cheat me or anybody else?  What make you think you can even think?  ANSWER ME, NIGGAH?"

            Ronnie just sniveled louder.

            The entire room was holding its breath, praying Snowflake would decide to spare Ronnie's life. Even Snowflake's pet goldfish was looking at the scene in pop-eyed amazement. The fish wasn't smart enough to understand English, but it had enough sense to sense danger.

            "Nah you wants to be puttin' on some kinda baby act. You steal from a man, you best be prepared to deal with gettin' caught. Ronnie, son, and I calls you son cause I likes you, son, please don't never steal from me no mo."

            Snowflake turned his head toward Sammy-Sam and Jay, but he didn't take the pistol out of Ronnie's nose. "Ordinarily I would kill somebody who stole from me."

            Sammy-Sam nodded his head yes. He didn't mean for Snowflake to kill Ronnie. He meant, yes, I understand you would kill somebody if you was mad enough or if you thought they done you wrong. And clearly Ronnie was wrong.

            Snowflake, returned his attention to Ronnie. Using the leverage of the gun in Ronnie's left nostril, Snowflake forced Ronnie's head to turn until Ronnie was looking at Snowflake through eyes blurry with tears. Without saying a word, Ronnie begged Snowflake to spare his life.

            Ronnie knew he was wrong. His passive acceptance of the pistol whipping said 'I know I'm guilty.'  The quietness and absence of anything resembling anger acknowledged Ronnie knew that by the laws of the game, Snowflake had the right to take Ronnie's head.

            Now Ronnie's head, held in place by the cold steel rod in his nose, was completely off the floor, suspended two inches above the carpet.

            "Ordinarily I'd whip yo ass til I was tired and then I would pay one of them boys standin' there to whip you somemo'. But, Ronnie, I like you."

            Snowflake slowly eased the gun out of Ronnie's nose.

            "I like you. So, I'm gon give you another chance."

            Snowflake stood up. Snowflake put the gun back in his pocket. It was just a little snub nose thirty-eight, but it looked so big. Snowflake straightened the crease on his trousers.

            "Yaknow, crime pays but stealin' is a sin," Snowflake said to the ceiling. "Ronnie, get up and go wash yo face and then come back here. I got somethin' I want to tell you."

 

***

 

            "And get me two pounds a pickle meat for the beans. And boy hurry up!"  Myrtle's hollering out the second story window at her son, Pete, who was dallying cross the courtyard, broke the silence of Sammy-Sam and Jay remembering how Snowflake had treated Ronnie.

            Sammy-Sam was thinking about how Snowflake didn't play. He remembered Snowflake's opening lecture given to everybody who worked for him. Snowflake always ended with "if you play crooked with me, I'ma straighten yo ass out."

            Jay was thinking about jacking Pete. He needed twenty dollars. Although he doubted Pete had that much, maybe he had five or even a ten dollar bill; that would be a start. Jay tried to assess the odds: Pete didn't really know Jay cause Pete was only seven and went to a different school and Jay lived a good ways off, and, maybe it would work.

            "I'ma see you later, man," Jay half said. When Jay was concentrating, he characteristically lowered his voice. Naw, Myrtle might of seen him and Sammy-Sam standing there, so if he jacked Pete, then Pete would tell Myrtle. Naw. Not Pete. But somebody. Somebody else. Not Pete. Jay shoved it into his pocket. But who else?  Standing around the store waiting for somebody was too dangerous. Too easy to get caught.

            "Yeah. Later, man." Sammy-Sam responded with a clasp of Jay's right hand and a brief embrace. "Call me later, Jay. Let me know what's happenin'."

            "Yeah," Jay walked away deep in thought.

            Jay never told Sammy-Sam how he got the rest of the money and Sammy-Sam never asked. He knew Jay had probably stolen it from some unfortunate person who just happened to cross Jay's path when Jay was in desperate need.

            Sammy-Sam started off thinking about Jay's predicament and then began to think about how all of them were like Jay. Everybody had to have money and you got it the best way you could. If you weren't smart, you had to be strong or sneaky.

            Everybody Sammy-Sam knew never had enough money, not even Snowflake. Everybody was just trying to make it. Sammy-Sam wished there was something else his friend Jay could do to make money. But all the things Jay was able to do well was stuff some authority figure said you wasn't suppose to do.

            Damn, why even think about it. When there was a need, like what Jay had, what could you do?

            While Sammy-Sam was sitting silently on the steps thinking and using a weed stalk to play with a string of ants, Pete passed by in a playful mood. He tossed a pebble at Sammy-Sam and quickly ducked into the next dooor stairwell.

            Sammy-Sam looked up, "Hey, Pickle."  All the kids called Pete "Pickle," which was short for "Pickle-Head," on account of Pete's elongated skull.

            The giggling child peeked around the open door to see if Sammy-Sam was going to pitch something back at him. Sammy-Sam wasn't thinking about Pete. he was engrossed in studying the ants. No matter how many times Sammy-Sam disrupted their line, the ants reformed. Sammy-Sam thought about that. He thought about how all the ants did the same thing. That was all right for ants but he didn't want to do the same thing all his life.

            Sammy-Sam stood up, threw the weed to the ground, dusted off his butt and went inside to his comic books. When he read those comic books he was in a different world.

            That had been two months ago, now he had a more pressing problem. As he rode down the street, toward his rendezvous with Snowflake, Sammy-Sam's memory strayed far afield to avoid thinking about his problem. Sammy-Sam rode pass Ronnie's house. Ronnie.

            Sammy-Sam remembered it clearly.

            After they had left Snowflake and Ronnie, Sammy-Sam pedaled five blocks with Jay perched on the handlebars before pulling into the park so he and Jay could talk about what they had just seen.

            They plopped down beside the new swimming pool, the same pool that hadn't been full since the last time it rained all day.

            Although the pool was less than three years old, nobody who lived around there could accurately recall the last time the pool was open. It was 458 days ago, and that was right after they had a big rally in the park for the mayor's reelection.

            Sammy-Sam had leaned his bike against the concrete side of the pool, the same side on which Jay had sprayed "RONNIE & TINY IS TIGHT LIKE THAT."

            Neither one of them said anything.

            Jay was thinking about how Ronnie had took the pistol whipping like a man. He never once broke down and begged for his life.

            Sammy-Sam was thinking about how scared Ronnie was and wondering who Snowflake was trying to scare more, Ronnie or Jay and himself.

            "I though Snowflake was gon blow Ronnie away, man," Jay stated, still shook up from witnessing the drama.

            "Yeah," Sammy-Sam was uncomfortable about the whole way the deal went down. "Except, maybe he meant it to teach us a lesson."

            "What chu mean?"

            Sammy-Sam was sitting on the ground pulling at the grass between his legs. "I mean, maybe Snowflake wanted to make sure that the rest of us didn't ever try to steal nuthin' from him."

            "Man, I wouldn't never try to steal nuthin' from Snowflake."

            "That's the point."

            "What's the point?"

            "That you wouldn't never try to steal nuthin'."

            "Oh..."

            They fell silent.

            "Sammy-Sam, you think Ronnie is all right."

            "Yeah."

            "Why?"

            "Cause the nigger got a hard head."  They both laughed. Jay knew what Sammy-Sam meant. Who could forget the time Rudy had hit Ronnie in the head with a stick and the stick broke. Everybody had laughed so hard, both Rudy and Ronnie had forgot about the fight they were having.

            "Ronnie, knew better'n to try to hold back that money on Snowflake in the first place. What he think, Snowflake was just goin' to let him go?"

            "Maybe Ronnie did lose it."

            "Man, don't nobody be losin' no two hundred dollars like that. Here he come with fo fifty when he suppose to have six fifty, talkin' bout he don't know what happen to the other two hundred. You believe that shit?"  Sammy-Sam continued without waiting for Jay to answer, "You know Ronnie better'n than anybody. You know good and well, Ronnie ain't lost no two hundred dollars."

            "What cha think he did wit it then?"

            "I don't know. Gave it to his momma. I don't know."

            "You think he gon give it back?"

            "He can't."

            "Why he can't?"

            "First, cause he got to live out his lie. He done told Snowflake he lost it. He done took the ass whippin' Snowflake put on him for losin' it. Now if he go back and give Snowflake the money, then Snowflake gon know he stole it, then Ronnie gon have to take another ass whippin' or maybe even a killin' behind stealin' from Snowflake. He know like I know, his best out is to go straight from here on in."

            "We some lucky, huh?"

            "Lucky how?"

            "Lucky we workin' for Snowflake. He pay us good. If you fuck up, he give you a break. Where else we gon do this good?"

            Sammy-Sam remembered how Jay had felt behind Snowflake literally kickin' Jay in the ass when Jay threw them rocks away.

            "Get outta my face. Go get my fuckin' fifty dollars."  While Jay was slowly retreating from the room, his head hangin' in shame, before anybody knew what was happening, Snowflake spun around and put a karate kick up Jay's rectum.

            Everybody knew Snowflake knew karate. Most of the time he didn't demonstrate his martial prowress but this was one of the times when he put on a show.

            Snowflake's pointed alligator-skin loafer moved with such swift accuracy that by the time Jay felt the sharp pain, Snowflake was standin' unsmiling on two feet. "Fifty fuckin' dollars, moth-her FUCKER!"

            "You really think we lucky, Jay?"

            "Yeah. Yeah, man. We lucky."

            "Man, this ain't lucky. This is bullshit. We ain't lucky. We just ain't got much of a choice. Thas all man. We just ain't got much a choice."

            After that pistol whipping, Jay had thought Ronnie was going to quit. But Sammy-Sam knew better. "Quit for what?  Ronnie used to getting a whippin'. His crazy ass old man be beatin' on that boy even when he right sometimes."

            Sammy-Sam was saying that but he shuddered just to think about how much pain Ronnie must have felt. Well, at least the money was good. "Besides, Jay, who else you think Ronnie could work for?"

 

***

 

            "Hey Sammy-Sam!"  Darlene's cheerful greeting snapped Sammy-Sam's attention back to the street. He didn't have time to stop and entertain no long conversation with Darlene but Darlene was sweet on him and he liked Darlene a little, so it made sense to at least stop.

            "Hey," Sammy-Sam responded as he pulled up to the curb. Sammy-Sam stayed on his bike, twirling the pedal backwards with his left foot while bracing himself with his right foot on the curb. "I'm in a hurry right now. Got some business, but later Darlene, me and you."

            "Yeah. Later like when Sammy-Sam?"

            "Later like when I call you round five."

            Darlene grinned, hunched her shoulders, and grinned some more.

            Damn, that girl got some deep dimples, Sammy-Sam thought to himself admiring her smile as a slight smile flickered briefly across his own face. Darlene, for her part, enjoyed the little gap between Sammy-Sam's two front teeth.

            "I gotta blow."  Sammy-Sam pushed off. Looking back over his shoulder he hollered, "I'ma call, hear?  Five o'clock. Hear?"

            Darlene just laughed while watching the up and down, piston like motion of Sammy-Sam's lithe buttocks. Darlene liked Sammy-Sam's butt.

            Sammy-Sam hoped Snowflake would give him a second chance the way he did for Ronnie. Ronnie was proof somebody could straighten up after making a mistake. Shit, Ronnie was even driving for Snowflake now.

            "Now you see, Ronnie here. Ronnie is an example of achievement. I hope that the rest of you lil youngsters will learn from Ronnie. I believe in rewardin' achievement. Don't I Ronnie."

            "Yes sir, Mr. Moore."

            "Ronnie, what did I do when you made a mistake."

            "You gave me a second chance."

            "And what did you do?"

            "I learned from my mistake and took advantage of the second chance."

            There were about five or six of them in the room for Ronnie's promotion. At the end of his speech, Snowflake threw a set of keys to Ronnie. "Ronnie, these are the keys to our car. You are in charge of the car. You drive the car. You wash the car. You keep the car serviced."

            When everybody else left that day, they rode away on their bikes or else they walked back home. Sixteen year old Ronnie and twenty-four year old Snowflake left in the brown BMW with genuine leather interior. Ronnie was driving (and grinning) and Snowflake was on the phone. Ronnie didn't even look at Sammy-Sam as they drove by. Snowflake waved with a barely perceptible flick of his fingers while he held the car phone receiver to his ear.

            Maybe. Maybe not. Sammy-Sam stopped thinking about a pardon as he passed the park and watched Rudy chase down a short fly ball. Rudy was some fast. No sooner Rudy caught the ball, he had fired off a pitch to second trying to catch who ever that was what was diving back to the bag. He looked like he was safe but Sammy-Sam wasn't sure. Sammy-Sam didn't see the call and wasn't interested enough to circle back or even to stop to look back.

            Rudy sure loved to play center field but Sammy-Sam couldn't see the challenge in playing baseball. Basketball. That was the game. Except Sammy-Sam wasn't all that tall, wasn't all that fast, and wasn't no great shooter. I'm good, Sammy-Sam thought to himself, but a whole lots of people is better.

            Still, Sammy-Sam knew he would go out for the team, just like most of his buddies was going to try out too. Some of them didn't really care about winning as much as they cared about getting one of them gold shiny jackets Snowflake had bought for the baseball team and had said he was going to buy for the basketball team and the karate team.

            Snowflake.

            Sammy-Sam started pumping harder. Let's get it over with.

            To everybody that saw him whizzing by, Sammy-Sam looked normal enough, but Sammy-Sam's hands were sweating heavily as he got closer to Snowflake's house.

            Sammy-Sam's hands weren't sweating because it was hot and humid, although the temperature in New Orleans was in the low 90s and the humidity was running neck and neck with the temperature, like two sprinters trying to nose out each other at the tape.

            Sammy-Sam's hands were sweating because he was missing four thousand dollars in brand new hundred dollar bills wrapped in a big white envelope with a red rubber band around the envelope, all inside a plastic A&P grocery bag, stuffed into the bottom of his school bag he kept under his bed. The bag was a blue canvas knapsack with light blue trim that Tyronne had bought for Sammy-Sam.

            The bag had been under the bed where Sammy-Sam had stashed it. The money was missing and it was time to go meet Snowflake.

            Sammy-Sam looked under the bed twice, just in case the money had fallen out. But he knew the money hadn't fallen out cause he had zipped the bag tightly and checked it last night when he went to sleep, and checked it in the morning when he woke up. He had only gone to the corner store and when he got back he had lay on his bed and read two comic books. And then it was almost time to go meet Snowflake and he had reached under his bed and pulled his bag out. And, because he was systematic in the way he did everything, Sammy-Sam opened his bag to count his money to make sure everything was still in order. And that's when Sammy-Sam had discovered the money was gone.

            Maybe Tyronne took it. No. Tyronne never so much as even went in his room without asking. Maybe Gloria had got to it. No, she couldn't have opened it. Maybe... It had to have been his momma. She must have taken the money.

            Sammy-Sam had immediately run into the living room and looked at the clock. He was supposed to meet Snowflake at twelve noon. It was then ten fifty-eight.

            Nobody was home.

            Sammy-Sam looked under the bed for a third time.

            He looked in the refrigerator.

            He looked behind the sofa.

            He looked in the closet.

            He looked under the sink.

            He looked in the bathroom closet by the towels.

            He looked underneath his mama's bed. He looked under the mattress. He looked in all the drawers in the chest of drawers. He looked everywhere he could think to look in his momma's room.

            He looked through a lot of her personal items he had never ever touched before. He looked in every purse he could find. He looked in a pink cloth bag that had his momma's diaphragm. He even looked inside the big box of Tampax.

            No money.

            It was ten minutes to twelve. Still, nobody was home.

            He had to go.

            Sammy-Sam never thought about not going.

            He had to go. That was his responsibility. A man stands up and takes his medicine. He was a man. He would take the medicine.

            "I guess he gon kill me,"  Sammy-Sam whispered to himself. Am I ready to die, Sammy-Sam wondered.

            It didn't have to be all of this. Sammy-Sam was angry with himself for not figuring out a way to bring the money to Snowflake on Friday evening like he was suppose to.

            Suddenly it hit him. "Momma," Sammy-Sam was talking out loud to himself. He hit his brakes, pulled up to a complete stop, leaned back, twisted around and looked back toward home, "momma knew somethin', that's why she made me go make groceries with her. It wasn't about watching no Gloria."

 

***

 

            "Sammy. Sammy."  Rita opened the door and looked at her son laying on his back reading a comic book. He had a stack of comic books resting beside him. Rita liked to see her son reading even though she wished he would read his school books more. "Sammy why don't you read your school books like that."

            "Huh?  What?"  Sammy-Sam put the book down and gave his mother his full attention.

            "Ain't you got some homework?"

            "It's Friday."

            "So, it's Friday."

            "They don't give us no homework on Fridays."

            "Since when?  When I was in school we used to have plenty homework on Friday, more'n on the other days."

            Sammy-Sam had heard that speech many, many times before. He had already returned to reading his comic book.

            "Where your school books?"

            "Huh?"  With his mouth gapping open, Sammy-Sam looked away from the monster scientist who was threatening to blow up galaxy five. He had developed a habit of reading with his mouth open, not mouthing the words or moving his lips, he just read with his mouth hanging open. "What momma?"

            "Where your school books?"

            "In my bag."

            He went back to reading.

            "Where your bag?"

            "Under my bed."

            "Why you slinging that good bag up under that dirty bed?"

            "Cause."

            "Cause what, Sammy?"

            "Cause."

            "Sammy, me and Tee bought you a desk with a draw in it so you would have some place to keep you school books and stuff. Tee bought you that bag to carry yo books in. You carry yo books in yo bag. You keep yo books in yo desk."

            "Ok."

            "Well?"

            "Well, what?"

            "Nothing."  And before he could react, Rita had stooped to one knee, reached under the bed and was pulling the bag out. "Look, let me show you how easy it is."

            "How easy what is?"

            "How easy it is to put yo books away."

            When Sammy-Sam heard the zipper shriek as Rita opened the bag, he jumped up and grabbed the bag so fast, he almost knocked Rita over. The money was in the bag.

            "Boy, what is wrong with you?  You near bout knocked me down."  At that moment Rita realized something was wrong. Sammy was hiding something. Had Sammy-Sam been looking into his mother's eyes, he would have seen it, but instead he had turned his back and was pulling the books out, quickly throwing them on the bed and then firmly rezipping the bag. He held the bag in his hands.

            "I can put my own books away."

            "I know you can, but you didn't," Rita replied.

            Sammy-Sam had felt her glaring at his back, but he remained silent.

            "Excuse me."

            "What?"

            "Excuse me. Say, 'excuse me.'  You nearly knocked me down."

            "Excuse me."

            Rita walked out of the room. This was not like Sammy.

            Ten minutes later when Sammy-Sam had come bouncing out of the bedroom, his blue bag on his back, Rita immediately noticed it.

            "Sammy, where you going?"

            "Round to Jay. Me and him gon watch Eddie Murphy on the video. He said his daddy was gon rent a Eddie Murphy movie."

            Rita hadn't asked him why he was taking his bag and she didn't believe he was going to watch Eddie Murphy. Something was wrong and, until he would tell her what was going on, all she could think to do was keep him close to her.

            "Sammy, you call Jay and tell him you can't come. I need you to go to the store with me. I need you to watch Gloria."

            Sammy-Sam should have realized his momma was suspicious, instead he misread her concern and thought she was just punishing him for almost knocking her down.

            "And, Sammy, you can leave your bag here."

            He hadn't really heard that last remark. His mind was already figuring out how to let Snowflake know he had the money but he couldn't bring it at the time he was supposed to.

            Sammy-Sam turned around, went straight to the phone, called Jay. "Tell Snowflake, I'ma call him when I get back and I'll come by later."

 

***

 

            One block from Snowflake's house, reviewing the scene in his mind, the mystery was beginning to clear up. Yeah. She knew something.

            As he stood there, astride his purple bike, Sammy-Sam was sure his mother had taken the money out of his bag. Now the question was should he go back and wait for her or should he meet Snowflake at twelve like he had called Snowflake earlier that morning and told Snowflake he would.

            Sammy-Sam weighted the pros and cons of his options and decided it was best to go to Snowflake first since he was only a block away. Besides, ain't no telling who Snowflake had checking him out and it wouldn't look good for Sammy-Sam to be seen riding up to Snowflake's house and then turning around. As for his momma, Sammy-Sam figured he could tell her the truth. She knew something anyway. He wasn't street dealing and he wasn't using. All he was doing was carrying dope and money back and forth. He had kept his promise to her. Maybe she would understand. Maybe not.

            "I shouldda knowed something was wrong. Maybe I shouldda left a note for momma."  As he pushed off, Sammy-Sam looked around to see if anybody had heard him talking to himself. He continued his conversation with himself inside his head: But then again, maybe not. He didn't want her blaming herself if something happened. If something happened. Shit. Something definitely was gon happen.

            Maybe Snowflake would let him bring the money back later. Naw, that didn't even make no sense. On top all that, suppose his momma didn't have the money.

            This was the hardest thing Sammy-Sam ever remembered having to do. It never occurred to him to go to the police, besides they were dealing too. He could have stayed home and waited for his momma and then if she had the money he might have been able to talk her into giving it back to him so he could bring it round to Snowflake. It also never occurred to Sammy-Sam to tell Tyronne and ask him for help, besides he hadn't even seen Tyronne except for a few minutes late Friday night.

            This was Sammy-Sam's responsibility and he would take care of it himself. Sammy-Sam's fourteen-year-old ghetto logic didn't allow him to even think about running away. Besides Snowflake liked Sammy-Sam.

            "Where you get two first names from boy?"

            "Well my momma named me Samuel and sometimes she call me Sammy and sometimes she call me..."

            "Sam."

            "No, uh-uh. She either call me Samuel or Sammy. The kids at school would all the time be callin' me Sam. And so I would tell them to call me Sammy like my momma call me. And one day, Jay caps on me, Jay hollers, 'hey, yall this nigger sho is some kind a confused. Boy what's yo name, Sammy or Sam.'  I said, 'my name is Sammy.'  Jay said, 'kiss my ass, yo name Sam.'  I said, 'Nigger, I'll kick yo ass, my name Sammy.'  And so we started to fight."

            "Who won?"

            "Nobody. It was a tie. On account of that they started calling me Sammy-Sam."  Snowflake had laughed loudly, his mouth wide open, his eyes closed, his head thrown back.

            "Thas all right. Thas all right. I likes that."

            Then there was the time Snowflake made that woman suck Sammy-Sam's dick. Sammy-Sam couldn't believe it at first.

            "Sammy-Sam I likes you. You the first cat I don hired that ain't never fucked up. When I moved you up to carryin' my shit, we ain't never had a problem. You ain't never lost nothin' and you ain't never tried to take nothin'. You just do damn good work. I likes that. I  likes that. I'ma do somethin' for you to show you my appreciation for the fine job you doin'. Come here."

            Snowflake had put his arm around Sammy-Sam's shoulders. Snowflake hollered at Jay and Ronnie, "what the fuck yall lookin' at. Beat it. Yall been paid. Make like a tree and leave."

            Snowflake had winked at Sammy-Sam. It was a conspiratorial wink between men. A shared joke at the expense of the boys.

            "Sammy-Sam you ever had a blow job?  Hmmm?"

            Sammy-Sam remembered how he hadn't been able to believe Snowflake's offer and had just shook his head from side to side. Snowflake had winked again. "Well I got a bitch in the back room who gon fix you up."

            Maybe, Snowflake would spare Sammy-Sam's life.

            Sammy-Sam pulled his bike up on the porch.

            Naw.

            Sammy-Sam put the kick stand down. He stooped to open the combination lock on the chain that was...

            "Hey, man. Come on in."  Snowflake was looking for Sammy-Sam's blue booksack. It wasn't on his back like it usually was. Something was wrong, radically wrong. Sammy-Sam looked nervous. "Bring your bike inside, don't leave it out here. Somethin' might happen."

            Something was wrong, mighty wrong, Sammy-Sam thought. Wouldn't nobody around here take nothing off of Snowflake porch and Snowflake had never before invited him to bring his bike inside. Damn, how was he gon say this to Snowflake.

            Sometimes you just say stuff. Cause the more you think about it, the more confused you get. It was at that moment Sammy-Sam truly understood, "study long, you study wrong."  Sammy-Sam smiled as he comprehended the futility of explaining what had happened. Sammy-Sam couldn't explain it because he didn't know what had happened.

            Snowflake saw Sammy-Sam smile. Something was wrong don't nobody grin like that less you catch them wrong.

            Snowflake had a steel mind. He was used to people trying to beat him out of his shit. He was used to people plotting on catching him wrong. He was used to the police sending stoolies, spies and plants trying to bust his ass. He was used to bitches trying to figure out how to get money out of him. He was used to being shot at and shot. Snowflake was nobody's fool and though he sometimes made mistakes, he never made the same mistake twice.

            You could punch the silence with your fist it was so solid.

            The only thing Snowflake couldn't figure was why Sammy-Sam was fucking up. Sammy-Sam was the last one Snowflake would a figured would fuck up. Snowflake was disappointed.

            Softly, and with a sound that was almost hiss like, Snowflake expelled air through his nose, then gently cleared his throat.

            Snowflake scratched his chin.

            Snowflake stood in a slight crouch with his legs shoulder length apart, assuming a martial arts, modified horse stance, which was Snowflake's most comfortable position when he had to confront a problem.

            Snowflake folded his hands low over his groin, the right hand on top of the left hand, the left hand on top his joint.

            "You got my money, man?" he asked even though he was already certain Sammy-Sam didn't have the money. Still, Snowflake couldn't figure out why Sammy-Sam was holding out on him.

            While waiting for Sammy-Sam's reply, Snowflake gave up trying to figure it out any further. He learned long ago not to ask people to lie to him by asking them for explanations of why they were doing wrong when Snowflake caught them doing something wrong to him.

            Whys and wherefores was for philosophers to figure out. Snowflake was not a philosopher. Snowflake was a dealer, and a dealer always got his money. One way or another, always get your money.

            Snowflake had an iron law: never suffer a wrong without giving out a punishment.

            Snowflake was not sadistic. He never punished for the pleasure of punishing, but he never let a wrong go unpunished. That was Snowflake's law and this was Snowflake's turf. And anybody broke Snowflake's law, don't care what the reason was—they mama coulda had a heart attack and they needed the money for surgery—fuck with Snowflake and you will suffer. Snowflake's law was like gravity; it applied to everybody.

            Snowflake was tired waiting for Sammy-Sam's answer.

            At that moment, while Snowflake was looking through him with murderously cold but calm eyes, Sammy-Sam remembered his vow. He looked up at Snowflake.

            "I ain't got it."

            “So where my money at?”

            “I.. I don’t know.” Sammy-Sam steeled himself. All he could do was tell the truth and suffer the consequences. Snowflake was more disappointed than upset.

            Sammy-Sam couldn't think of anything else to do so he kinda folded his arms. He wasn't being defiant or anything. He was scared, but he was a man and he wasn't going to cry.

            Snowflake raised his hand, extended his index finger and pushed against the bridge of his glasses. Then covering his mouth with his hand, Snowflake curled his index finger beneath his nose and across his mustache. Snowflake was calculating.

            Snowflake's eyes betrayed nothing. Sammy-Sam could not tell what Snowflake was thinking.

            Sammy-Sam started to look away, to look down, but then he held his head up and looked into Snowflake's eyes.

            Snowflake might as well have been wearing a Mardi Gras mask. Not one muscle in his smooth, deep ebony face had moved. Snowflake stood still as a statue.

            Sammy-Sam shifted his weight back and forth from foot to foot, waiting for Snowflake to ask him "why, what happened?". Sammy-Sam wasn't going to lie, he was going to tell the truth. He didn't know what had happened.

            As he finished thinking through the situation, the only unanswered question Snowflake had was what to do with Sammy-Sam's purple bike.

            Snowflake didn't want Ronnie or any of the others to touch it, and certainly he couldn't be seen carrying the boy's bike. Snowflake tapped the bridge of his glasses again. Suddenly it came to him: get Brenda to take care of the bike. Call her on the way back from the dump. She could even go get it while he wasn't there.

            Satisfied he had found the solution, Snowflake thought it through to make sure there were no holes: I'll go in my other car. Then maybe I'll drive up to Baton Rouge, be seen up there, buy some shit on my credit card. Establish an alibi. Brenda'll take care the bike. Yeah.

            Snowflake touched his back pocket to make sure he had his wallet, which contained his Mastercard with his name embossed on it: Paul Moore.

            "Sammy-Sam, we got to talk. Come on."

            Sammy-Sam went for his bike.

            "That's ok, leave it. Ride with me."

            Snowflake decisively strode to his front door, opened it and motioned with his hand for Sammy-Sam to exit.

            Sammy-Sam had dreaded the confrontation with Snowflake. The focus of Sammy-Sam's fear had been Snowflake's house, that front room where punishment was meted out with a swiftness and certainty that made the courts downtown seem just like the inefficient and ineffective anachronisms they actually were.

            Sammy-Sam remembered Jay and Ronnie, as well as numerous stories of other unfortunates who had, in one way or another, messed up, and who resultantly got kicked in the ass, pistol whipped or otherwise corporeally disciplined by Snowflake.

            Now that Sammy-Sam had survived his meeting in the front room, this room seemed like a haven. Sammy-Sam knew what a pistol whipping in the front room was about but Sammy-Sam could not even imagine what type of punishment Snowflake had in mind to take place outside, unless it was Sammy-Sam's execution.

            Sammy-Sam's legs felt tight like after a hard basketball game early in the season. The first tremors of a muscle spasm were bothering Sammy-Sam's left hamstring. Nervously Sammy-Sam wanted to take a leak but could not summon up the courage to ask Snowflake for any favor at that moment, so he walked through the door and stood motionless on the front porch.

            Sammy-Sam was mentally bewildered and emotionally overwhelmed. When Sammy-Sam heard the door slam behind him and heard Snowflake's keys jingle as he took them out of his pocket, Sammy-Sam flinched. It had sounded like a shot to Sammy-Sam but he was both relieved and further frightened when he realized he was not shot. He was still alive. For now, but what next?

            Reacting to the door's slam much, much slower than a runner springing from the blocks at the sound of the starter's pistol, Sammy-Sam just started walking: off the porch down the steps. Through the gate onto the sidewalk. Sammy-Sam didn't know where he was going, and every step was hard.

            Sammy-Sam was afraid to look around. He was also afraid to ask Snowflake any questions. Willing his legs not to tremble, Sammy-Sam decided his best bet was to go up to Snowflake's BMW parked at the curb in front of Snowflake's house. Without looking around, Sammy-Sam stood waiting for Snowflake to unlock the door.

            Snowflake had walked past the BMW, unlocked and slid into the metallic red Datsun Z, closed the door softly, locked on his seat belt and impatiently honked the horn. Sammy-Sam looked up with a start, confused. He was disoriented. The horn sounded again. Sammy-Sam couldn't figure out who was blowing or whether they were blowing at him. Where was Snowflake? Impatiently, the horn sounded a third time.

            Snowflake reached over and pushed the passenger's door open. Sammy-Sam trotted over to the Z. From the outside, all Sammy-Sam could see was dark tinted windows mutely blank, but the front door was open so Sammy-Sam leaned over and looked inside to make sure it was Snowflake.

            Snowflake turned the key to start the engine before Sammy-Sam got in the car.

            Snowflake looked straight ahead.

            As Sammy-Sam was closing the door behind him, Snowflake's right hand flicked to the dash, hit a button and the soothing sounds of Anita Baker leapt from the rear speakers.

            Snowflake pulled smoothly into the traffic.

            Snowflake had put on a pair of Kool Moe Dee type, wrap-around sunglasses he kept in his Z.

            Sammy-Sam couldn't see Snowflake's eyes. The music was so loud Sammy-Sam could barely hear his own thoughts. Outside of the car, barely perceived sights took on the aura of a silent movie.

            The muscles in Sammy-Sam's face started minute movements and eventually coagulated into a mask of anguish. Even though buffeted by the blast of cool air from the car's air conditioning system, small beads of perspiration began to form on Sammy-Sam's young crinkled brow.

            Sammy-Sam heard this pounding. It seemed so close to him. At first he thought it was something in the car, but then Sammy-Sam understood he was listening to his own heart beat. Without warning, Sammy-Sam suddenly felt nauseous. He stifled the urge and swallowed hard twice even though his mouth was dry. Sammy-Sam was trying to think of something intelligent to say.

            "You gon kill me, huh?"

            Snowflake looked over at the young boy and briefly hallucinated that the young boy sitting beside him was Paul Moore at thirteen being driven to the park by his Uncle Henry, the same Uncle who pulled his pants down, the same Uncle who... How could Snowflake answer the question?

            Snowflake remembered his own questioning: "Uncle Henry what you doing to me?  Uncle Henry why?"  Snowflake remembered he had known, even without ever being told by anyone, he had known what his Uncle Henry did to him was wrong. Snowflake also remembered how his uncle's cigar fouled breath had repeated slowly over and over, "Paul, I wouldn't hurt you. I love you boy. I wouldn't hurt you. I wouldn't hurt you."

            But it had hurt when Uncle Henry had stuck his stiff penis up Paul Moore's rectum. Snowflake shifted uncomfortably in the seat thinking about it. Gradually, Snowflake realized Sammy-Sam reminded Snowflake of himself.

            Uncomfortably, Snowflake also realized this car ride reminded him of the car ride to the park he and Uncle Henry had taken years ago.

            Sammy-Sam's question reverberated inside of Snowflake's skull. After that car ride, Snowflake had cried and between the tears promised himself he would never be used like that again and his Uncle Henry would never catch him alone again in this life time, never.

            Actually, Snowflake had not cried; Paul Moore had cried. The transmutation from Paul Moore to Snowflake at that time had not yet taken place.

            No one now alive (not even his older brother Silas whom he idolized), no one except Snowflake knew this story—and Snowflake intended to keep it that way.

            That's what it was, the way Sammy-Sam was sitting all hunched up, his small hands shoved between his knees, that's exactly how Snowflake had sat on the way back from the park, his butt aching, shame and humiliation dripping from every pore of his body.

            I can't kill this boy, he reminds me of me too much, Snowflake involuntarily thought to himself.

            Sammy-Sam saw Snowflake squirm in his seat and took it as confirmation that Snowflake did indeed intend to kill him.

            "No, I'm not going to kill you."  Snowflake cursed himself. He couldn't believe he was being sentimental.

            The atmosphere was tainted by the stilted silence of Sammy-Sam waiting to find out what Snowflake was going to do to him and Snowflake trying to figure out how to handle a simple situation that had unexpectedly turned into emotional quicksand. Clearly Snowflake could not afford to let a fourteen year old boy beat him out of four thousand dollars. If he did he would have niggers challenging him left and right, no, it didn't make sense not to punish Sammy-Sam.

            "Buckle your seat belt."

            "Huh?"

            Snowflake repeated himself, "buckle your seat belt."

            Snowflake was remembering the ride back home. All the way back home he had wanted to scream at his uncle, "why, why, why you did this to me?  Why?"  But at the time there didn't seem to be any reason other than his uncle wanted to and his uncle was strong, and he was weak.

            The only difference Snowflake could see between Sammy-Sam and himself when he had been forced on that awful journey was that Sammy-Sam wasn't crying. All during the deed, Paul Moore had cried, and afterwards, pulling his pants back up, and afterwards climbing back into the car—he had had to get back in the car, they were so far away from home—one hand on the door handle. Snowflake remembered how he had been ready to jump out in case his uncle tried to touch him again.

            Snowflake looked over at Sammy-Sam. Snowflake reached down with his left hand and hit the door lock buttons. The click of the automatic locks seemed to Snowflake to sound louder than they had ever sounded before.

            Sammy-Sam looked at Snowflake. Snowflake avoided eye contact and return his visual attention to the traffic.

            No, Snowflake could not afford to let Sammy-Sam go. Snowflake knew what had to be done and the only question was who was actually going to pull the trigger. Regardless of whom he got, if he was going to drive to Baton Rouge, Snowflake reasoned he needed gas. Riley's Shell station was nearby.

            Snowflake always bought Shell. Even when Carl and the others tried to start a boycott against Shell on the apartheid issue, Snowflake had not stopped buying Shell. He never drove cross a picket line but he was always able to find a Shell where there was no line. Besides, Snowflake reasoned, none of the other brands had a Black owned station nearby and there was one Shell station that was Black owned so that's where he would go.

            When they pulled into the gas station, a young, light-skinned girl with blue short shorts on was walking down the sidewalk. The girl's skin color reminded Snowflake of Sheila. Snowflake knew Sheila would do it.

            "Here," said Snowflake holding out a ten dollar bill to Sammy-Sam, "go get me a fill-up."

            Glad for the opportunity to get out of the car, Sammy-Sam quickly took the money, unbuckled the seat belt, and pulled on the door handle. The door was still locked. Snowflake didn't realize Sammy-Sam was waiting on him to unlock the door and Sammy-Sam didn't feel brave enough to ask Snowflake to unlock the door. After a few seconds Snowflake looked over at Sammy-Sam, he saw Sammy-Sam's hand on the door handle. Sammy-Sam pulled at the handle again. Only then did Snowflake understand that Sammy-Sam was locked in the car.

            Snowflake hit the master lock lever, "Hurry back, I ain't got all day."  Snowflake turned the engine off.

            Sammy-Sam jumped out of the car into the afternoon heat. After the tomb like cold of the car, both the high humidity as well as the high temperature of the outside air felt invitingly good.

            Sammy-Sam went to the window, paid for the gas, jiggling back and forth as he felt the pressure on his bladder.

            "Yall got a bathroom?"

            "Toilets on the other side, kid."

            Sammy-Sam ran quickly around the building almost unable to hold his urine. The door knob was broken and just a slight push sent the door flying open. Sammy-Sam fumbled with his zipper and barely got the zipper down and his penis in his hand before a long stream poured from him.

            After two minutes had passed and Sammy-Sam hadn't returned to the car, Snowflake turned his head to see what was happening. Snowflake knew Sammy-Sam hadn't decided to run. If he was going to run, he never would have come to Snowflake's house in the first place, but then again, Snowflake thought, you never can be sure what somebody will do under pressure.

            Pressing the power window switch, Snowflake eased the passenger window half way down. Snowflake didn't see Sammy-Sam anywhere. "This boy better not make me run after his ass."

            Snowflake lightly scratched the back of his neck. Looked up and thought about whether he should go looking for Sammy-Sam now or send somebody to get him later on. No, it wouldn't do for him to be seen running after Sammy-Sam. Snowflake looked out the window again and while he was looking began easing the window up. "I'll get him. Ain't no where he can run to that I won't find him."

            Snowflake turned the key. The engine started, but before he could put the car in gear, Sammy-Sam came running up to the car. Sammy-Sam tapped on the driver's window. Snowflake eased the window down.

            "I need the key to..." Sammy-Sam pointed to the gas pump, "to put the gas in."

            Snowflake stared at Sammy-Sam. The boy looked terrified. Without saying a word, Snowflake pulled the lever that opened the small door, which accessed the gas line. Then he eased the window up.

            Sammy-Sam heard the gas door pop open. Sammy-Sam ran to the pump and began pumping gas.

            "Bitch, you better be home," Snowflake said to himself as he dialed Sheila's number on his car phone.

            "What?"  Sheila answered the phone without any display of emotion or expectation, just a flat acknowledgment she was there. She might have been a tenth grader absent mindedly answering a teacher's roll call.

            "That's a funny ass way to be answering the phone."

            "What?"

            "This me."

            "What?"

            "I got some light work for you."

            "What?"

            "It don't matter. What ever I tell you to do, that's what you'll do."

            "When?"

            "In five minutes, bitch!  And hey, put some clothes on."  Snowflake hung up.

            Sammy-Sam saw Snowflake use the phone but he couldn't hear the conversation. The car only took $7.58 of gas. Sammy-Sam replaced the pump handle and ran over to the window to collect Snowflake's change. Sammy-Sam ran back to the car, stood at the door for three brief seconds trying to decide whether to knock on the glass or just get in. Sammy-Sam decided to get in without knocking.

            "What took you so long?"

            Sammy-Sam pathetically held out his hand with the $2.42 of change. Snowflake peeped at Sammy-Sam with a quick dart of his eyes and no motion of his head.

            "Keep it."

            Snowflake pulled out into the traffic. On the way over to where Sheila was staying, Anita Baker did all the talking.

            Snowflake parked.

            "You stay here. I'ma leave the keys in the ignition so the phone'll work. When the phone ring, you answer it. You know how to use it?"

            "Huh?"

            "You know how to use the phone?"

            "Uh-huh," Sammy-Sam mumbled affirmatively.

            Snowflake took off the sunglasses, put them in the glove compartment, exchanged them for his clear lens glasses and then climbed casually out of the car. Snowflake's eyes were good. He didn't really need corrective lens, however, he wore the glasses because he thought the expensive designer frames looked good on him—sort of gave him a distinguished, intelligent appearance.

            Anita Baker was still singing.

            A minute passed. Sammy-Sam was a jumble of emotions.

            "I won't cry."

            Another minute passed.

            Anita Baker was still singing. When the cassette had come to the end of one side, the machine automatically began playing the other side.

            Another minute passed.

            Sammy-Sam sat dutifully waiting for the phone to ring.

            Another minute passed.

            Another minute.

            The phone rang. Sammy-Sam pounced on it.

            "Hello."

            "Look like I'm gon be here awhile, Sammy-Sam. I want you to come on round. Climb over to the driver's side, turn the switch all the way off, take the keys out, open the door, hit the door lock, get out, close the door and come round here to the green house around the corner in back of you on your right as you walk to the corner. Hey, baby what's the address here. What?  Twenty-three what?  Twenty-three forty. Come to twenty-three forty General Pershing Street. Got that?"

            "Yes sir."

            "Good. Come on. And Sammy-Sam, make sure my car is locked."

            Sammy-Sam followed the instructions. He wouldn't allow himself to think about what would happen next. Snowflake had had the chance to kill him and didn't. Snowflake didn't even get mad with him. Sammy-Sam began to delude himself: maybe I'll get another chance after all.

            Sammy-Sam walked to the front door. Knocked.

            "What?"  It was a woman's voice.

            "It's me. Uh, Sammy-Sam."

 

            The door opened and Sammy-Sam relaxed. For only the second time that day, a slight smiled creased his young face. This was the woman who had sucked him off.

 

—kalamu ya salaam 

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

CRY, CRY, CRY

 

PART ONE: A MAN AIN'T SUPPOSE TO CRY

 

            For only the second time in his adult life, thirty-four year old Tyronne Cornelius Johnston cried.  Damaged by heretofore unimaginable hurts, Tyronne surrendered and let the tears flow, not because he wanted to but because he no longer had the strength to hold back the crying. So he wept. Silently, quietly, and openly, he wept. 

            A portion of the weeds surrounding the twisted lump on the ground was stained a dull scarlet.  A sharp foulness stung Tyronne's nostrils.  Overhead several sparrows dirtied the air with ugly, high pitched, chirping sounds.

            Tyronne's blue, two-door Toyota Tercel stood forlorn; its right front and rear wheels hiked up on the curb, the driver's door hanging open, the engine off but the lights on.  The car looked like it was in pain.

            Tyronne stared up into the underside of the sky.  The sun was stealing away quickly, fleeing in shame after witnessing the deed.  Tyronne faced but did not see the bloated gray clouds, lingering like pus filled sacs on an infected wound.

            Face upturned, Tyronne waited to see if God was looking.  "Sonnabitch," Tyronne wanted to scream.  He felt an urge to spit up at whatever God there was who would allow this murder to occur.  But then Tyronne asked himself why was he angry with God for what people were doing to each other.

            God gave life.  It was not God's fault if the gift was squandered or even if one gift decided to snuff out another gift.

 

            Tyronne stood up and surveyed the scene.  Death neither frightened nor repulsed him.  He had seen a lot of death. 

            Fully regaining his composure, Tyronne went through the motions of lighting a cigarette. He reached into his left jacket pocket.  Moved his keys aside.  Pulled out the Marlboro box.  Flipped it open.  Took a cigarette out.  Using his right hand, he firmly knocked the filter tip against the face of the box he held securely in his left palm.  Tap, tap, tap, three times.  Replaced the box into his left pocket.  Put the cigarette between the fingers of his left hand.  Pushed the cigarette between his lips.  Dug into his right trouser pocket for his yellow plastic, disposable, generic brand lighter with the red tab that he pressed once.  Then twice.  The gas flame leapt out.  Half way up toward the cigarette's tip, Tyronne released the tab.  The lighter's flame died out quickly.

            "Shit."

            He put the lighter back into his pocket.

            He knelt slowly beside the wretched form now wrapped in the softness of dusk's last light. Not since Nam had he confronted the fossilized agony of violently murdered flesh. Is life grotesquely mimicking history, are we still at war with ourselves, Tyronne wondered as he reluctantly admitted that America had left Nam but Nam had not left America. The sight of bleeding children was becoming as commonplace here as it had been back there.

            The unlit cigarette dangled useless from his lips.

            Tyronne looked away from the dirtied ground. He looked around.

            Even though Tyronne looked at each of his friends standing there: Pauline, Justin, Shorty, and Diane, Tyronne really didn't see any of them. All he saw was an ambushed future left dead and dirt moist with life's blood oozing into it.

            Tyronne didn't hear anyone either, not Pauline who was wailing loudly, nor Justin who kept saying over and over, "man, this fucked up, this fucked up, fucked up," nor Shorty, who was holding Diane's shoulder, and who repeatedly sucked up mucus, rubbed his now reddish eyes with his shirt sleeve, harked and spat on the ground.

            Diane was the only one silent. The evening insects displayed a rare sympathy and joined Diane in respectful silence. There was an airplane in the distance, some cars passing occasionally, and even a far off police siren, but as keen as Tyronne's hearing was, he heard none of this.

            What Tyronne heard he could not believe. He knew that sound could not be real, so even though he heard it, he rejected what he heard. Look like he could clearly hear Sammy-Sam laughing, laughing like Sammy-Sam used to laugh when the food was good, or a comic book was funny, or some dance he did was well done.

            Tyronne knew the laughter he heard was just an illusion. He remembered how when his buddies were shot in Nam and would lie dying in his arms, right after those young men expired, the first sound Tyronne would consciously register inside his head would be the voices of the dead saying a phrase or two characteristic of them, and usually the voices were laughing their unique laugh. Death certainly was not funny but somehow Tyronne always associated violent death with a welcomed release. Maybe the dead were happy to escape the horrors of living in this world as man had made it.

            Tyronne looked back at the quiet, unmoving hump.

            Without realizing it, during the whole time he had been trying to light a cigarette, then kneeling, then looking at the others standing there, then looking at the space where the laughter sprung out of the ground watered by life fluids draining out of a once warm body, during all of that, without realizing it, Tyronne had been crying.

            Glistening trails of tear tracks were etched on Tyronne's sad profile like the flimsy pieces of silver tinsel Tyronne had meticulously hung across the Christmas tree what seemed like only a couple of months ago.

            The liquid tinsel trickling from Tyronne's eyes shone on his brown cheeks like silver veins running across the rock surface of a big brown mountain. Suddenly Tyronne hungered for another taste of the liquor he had drunk earlier, hungered for the burning that engulfed the back of his mouth and all down his throat, the burning that helped cool his raging insides.

 

***

 

            Earlier that day, much earlier, Tyronne Johnston ("Tyronne with two N's and Johns-TON not John-son") had stood in the food commodities line waiting to get a box of handouts to feed his family.

            Tyronne Cornelius Johnston. High school basketball captain. Three times decorated, four times wounded Vietnam vet. Thirteen year veteran security guard recently laid-off.

            Never asked nobody for nothing in his life. Not even Grandma Mary for that second piece of chocolate cake he desperately wanted when he was eight years-old, nor Lisa Andrews for them drawers he also desperately wanted when he was fifteen and one half years old, which drawers he probably would have gotten, if he had begged for them or had bogarted, but he never needed no pussy that badly, no matter how badly he might have wanted it.

            That Tyronne Johnston. The same. He never begged. Never. Not even cried to God for mercy the time he was all shot up in Nam, laying in the bush all night, firing his piece until he was out of bullets and then laying for dead inside a trench, hunched up next to two fellows who were dead. That long, long night. Too shot up to move or even holler for help—who could have heard him with all the foulness of ritualized murder blanketing the area—that long night, hours and hours in that hole, with only two corpses to keep him and his thoughts company. He had not begged then.

            Never.

            Not even for the security guard job that seemed to be his last option after applying in person to fifty-eight different places.

            Naw. Tyronne Johnston never asked nobody to give him anything.

            So why was he standing on this line, sweating in the cold sunshine on this chilly hot April day?

            Why had he gone down to the community center and sat for six hours to register so somebody could give him dry milk ("Baby, this is some bullshit. I ain't never knowed no such thing like dry milk in a box.") and powdered eggs which you added water to  ("This shit ain't food, we had better chow than this in the Nam," he had thought to himself fighting back the urge to spit the shit out as he almost gagged on his first commodities meal.")?

            That girl in the registration office what told him he had spelt Benefit Street wrong ("It's E-N-E-FIT not E-N-I-FIT.") could not have been more than 22.

            "Yeah. I guess I'm a lil nervous."

            "Ain't nuthin' to be nervous about long as you telling the truth."

            "Why you think I'm here going through this shit if'n I wasn't in need for my family?"

            The girl had looked at Tyronne without answering his question.

            Tyronne searched his left jacket pocket for his cigarettes, waiting for the line to move, thinking about how that girl had looked at him like he was so pitiful or something.

            He had started to walk out.

            She didn't know him like that.

            Tyronne hadn't ever done anything shameful in his life. Always dressed clean. Never took anything that wasn't his. Never cheated on Rita. Once he was married, he was married.

            When he waited tables at the hotel he wouldn't even steal any food or a bottle of liquor. When he was a security guard he wouldn't take anything and wouldn't allow any one else to take anything on his shift.

            "Man, you trying to be too good. For what?"

            "Ain't no wrong in being right."

            Damn, this line sho moves some slow, Tyronne thought to himself as his mind snapped back to the sidewalk where he stood, embarrassed and angry with himself because he had to be there. The Marlboro box in his left hand was empty. He crumpled it in his fist and put the crushed box back in his left jacket pocket. He would throw the trash away later.

            Throwing trash in a trash can and not on the ground was a habit with him now, so much so, he didn't even recall how it had been drilled into him by his mother who had worked a second job for many years cleaning up office buildings after hours.

            "Tyronne don't you know somebody got to pick it up if you throw it on the ground. Honey don't do that. Put it in the trash. And if you can't understand it no other way then think about me having to pick it up, cause that's what I do, I pick up trash behind grown people who too lazy and triflin' to put trash where it belong."

            Nor did he think about the time he and his mother had gone on Canal Street and she had bought him a candy bar. He wanted to get at that candy so bad he just tore the wrapper off and let it drop to the floor. She had slapped him. Hard. In front of everybody. "Boy, pick that trash up."  That was the day he learned candy wetted with tears didn't taste too good. He cried, but he remembered, and since that day, though he never thought about it much, just like he wasn't thinking about it now, since that day he didn't litter.

            Tyronne needed something to do with his hands. He wished he had brought the morning paper with him so he could read it while waiting like some of the others on the line were doing. Some people obviously were regulars and knew each other because they chatted and talked family talk, but because Tyronne didn't want to talk to anybody, he simply folded his hands one on top of the other in front of him, took an "at ease" stance and waited.

            Standing in a slow moving line like this commodities line gave Tyronne a lot of time to think even though he didn't want to think about anything. He just wanted to get food for his family and be gone. Nevertheless, welcomed or not, the thoughts poured over him in waves, like the drenching, wind driven rain of a thunderstorm in hurricane season.

            Tyronne thought about the day he had been laid off, he and about four other men. How the company told them they had two weeks pay, and annual leave coming, and how they could go apply for unemployment, and all of them would get good recommendations for other jobs. Or at least that's what the letter, which was in their last pay envelope, said.

            Tyronne's supervisor had given him a number to call on Monday and he promised somebody would help Tyronne and answer any questions. When Tyronne called the number he got a recording that basically told him to file for unemployment and gave him another telephone number prospective employers could call for references.

            Tyronne did as he was instructed to do, but he really didn't like getting unemployment because it reminded him he wasn't working. Ever since Tyronne wore long pants he had worked. He had always worked. This not working was driving him crazy.

            Though he was deeply disturbed and sometimes discouraged, Tyronne never stopped looking. He knew he would be back on his feet again soon. People were always looking for a good, trustworthy security guard, especially with the way niggers was stealing shit nowadays; was just a matter of finding the right people who were looking for a good, trustworthy, experienced security guard. Tyronne believed that. He just had to keep looking.

            Two weeks before his unemployment ran out Rita was sure she was pregnant.

            Tyronne remembered how he couldn't believe that shit. Seem like it was some kind of television shit. Old man loses his job. Old lady gets pregnant.

            Tyronne looked down. The line inched ahead a few feet.

            "Baby, this the wrong time to be having a baby."

            "Tee, don't you think I know that?"

            "You sho?  I mean. Yaknow. I mean you sho you knocked up?"

            "No. I ain't sho, but I'm pretty sho."

            "I guess ain't never gon be no good times for us to..."

            "Tee, it's gon work out."

            "I ain't working. You pregnant. Told you not to quit no pill."

            "My body tolt me to quit."

            "What yo body tellin' you nah?"

            "Tellin' me we should'a been mo careful."

            "Rita, how careful a man gotta be with his woman?"

            "Tee, I ain't blaming you."

            "It was me what did it."

            "We did it. Me and you. Wasn't no just you."

            "I know that but if I had a been using a rubber, it would'a been cool."

            "Tee, it's cool nah."

            "Naw, shit no. Ain't nothin' cool 'bout me not workin' and you pregnant."

            Tyronne hadn't known Sammy-Sam was sitting on the back steps playing like he was reading a comic book but was really listening to every word Tyronne was saying to his mama.

            Sammy-Sam knew he had to do something now. Tyronne wasn't working. His mama was pregnant. And his lil sister Gloria was only a year-and-something old. Besides Tyronne wasn't his real daddy so if they had to get rid of somebody it might be Sammy-Sam.

            Sammy-Sam stayed on the same page for seven minutes. When Shorty had moved in with Diane, Shorty had made Eddie run away until Eddie ended up in Youth Study Center cause he kept getting picked up for shoplifting.

            Course Tyronne didn't beat Sammy-Sam like Shorty used to beat Eddie. But, shit, now that Tyronne didn't have a job, if somebody had to suffer Sammy-Sam knew it was going to be himself.

            Sammy-Sam knew Tyronne liked Gloria cause he was her father. And Tyronne liked Rita, his mama, cause they was sleeping together. But Tyronne didn't have no reason to like Sammy-Sam all that much.

            Tyronne was cool and all but if there was too many mouths and not enough food, Tyronne might make Sammy-Sam go away. That's just the way it was. Sammy-Sam knew how it was.

            Sammy-Sam jumped up, leaped off the steps, hopped on his purple bike Tyronne had bought him when Tyronne had a job. That was it. Sammy-Sam had to get a job. He rode off and went looking for Snowflake.

            Snowflake liked Sammy-Sam. Maybe Snowflake would help him.

            Sammy-Sam decided he would work for Snowflake but he wouldn't take none of that shit cause that shit made you act stupid like the time Myrtle was walking down the courtyard buck naked singing "You Are My Sunshine" at the top of her lungs and wouldn't stop for nothing, not even when Justin had run out there and tried to wrap her in a blanket and carry her inside. It finally took Shorty, Justin and Tyronne to get her back inside.

            Sammy-Sam was thinking so hard he didn't even wave at his boy Brian who was standing on the corner, leaning on the mailbox, savoring the last seconds of a marijuana buzz.

            Brian saw the plastic streamer threaded wheels on Sammy-Sam's purple bike blurring into a multicolored circle. Brian saw Sammy-Sam's red Michael Jackson T-shirt. But Brian didn't see Sammy-Sam.

            Sammy-Sam was standing up, pumping hard and remembering hearing Tyronne say how he ought to kick Snowflake ass behind selling Myrtle that shit but Justin had said if anybody ass ought'a be kicked then it should'a ought'a been Myrtle's black ass for taking that crazy shit.

            When he was standing there watching the shit go down, Sammy-Sam agreed with Justin on account of Snowflake ain't made Myrtle take that shit. In fact Myrtle had asked Snowflake for the shit and was fucking Snowflake behind getting a steady supply. Course, Sammy-Sam didn't find out 'bout Myrtle fucking Snowflake til after he started working for Snowflake, but anyway, Sammy-Sam knew Justin was right. If a person voluntary smoked some shit that made them act stupid, it was they own fault.

            By the time Sammy-Sam pulled into the courtyard on Snowflake's turf, he had vowed seven times he wouldn't never take no shit that made him act stupid.

            Tyronne had not been aware of Sammy-Sam's resolution. Entwined in his own troubles, Tyronne had begun to virtually ignore Sammy-Sam.

            "I know how you feel, brer."

            It took a few moments for Tyronne to realize the guy behind him in line was talking to him.

            The guy needed a shave.

            "Here, take a swig."  The guy held up a partially used half pint of Old Granddad.

            Tyronne had said he wasn't gon let nothing drive him to drink or to drugs. Tyronne might drink a beer or two, but not no serious drinking. And smoking a joint every now and then to cool out wasn't really doing no drugs. God, it was like ten something in the morning. Tyronne didn't want no drink. But he needed a drink.

            "Man, the first time I come down here I near 'bout died. But what you gon do?  It's either this, or stick somebody up or sell some dope. Me I'm too scary to heist nobody and if I was to get my hands on a whole bag a dope I would do it all up myself 'fo I could make some profit."

            Then the guy laughed.

            "My name is Joseph. Joseph LaCabe. And you?"

            "Tyronne Johnston."

            "They calls me Jojo. What they call you?"

            "Tee."

            "Well Tee, welcome to the 'grind a nigger's ass down' line-up to show you you ain't shit."  Jojo took a nip. "I used to be a plasterer. Now I'm a professional line waitin', form fillin' out, hand-out takin' fool. You ever made a Bloody Mary with that tomato paste crap that they hand out here?"

            Jojo didn't wait for Tyronne's answer.

            "Take it from me, don't."  Jojo chuckled, coughed hard (Tyronne could hear fluid moving about inside Jojo's chest), chuckled again. Took another nip. "Look here home, if you don't catch a nip soon, ain't gon be nuth'n left. You don't holla, you don't swallar. I don't offer but once and the offer stand as long as the liquor lasts, which I don't think gon be all that long."

            The line moved.

            "Tee, I got four crumb crushers and a walking mouth they call a wife. Jojo do this. Jojo do that. Jojo go get the commodities. Jojo take the kids for a hair cut. Jojo clean the hallway. Jojo mop the flo. Jojo clean the toilet. Sometimes I feel like you might as well put a dress on Jojo ass. How many kids you got?"

            "Two."  Tyronne started to say "Two and a used to be."  Tyronne remembered how the deal went down.

            Rita decided and they drove out there. In silence. About a block or so away, before they pulled into the parking lot, before they saw the three men and two women standing outside handing out leaflets talking about why people shouldn't be getting abortions, Tyronne forced himself to speak.

            "Rita we ain't got to."

            "If you was pregnant and didn't want to be, and if I was out of work and you decided to get a abortion, would you let me talk you outta it?"

            "If is a mighty big word that can change a bunch of things. Right nah I'm talking about what is, not what if."

            "Well, the baby in my stomach, and I'm saying no. And that ain't no what if, that's a what is."

            Rita got out the car. Earlier they had had the money argument.

            "Rita, we can't afford to spend no two hundred dollars right nah."

            "Yes we can, 'cause spending two hundred nah for a abortion is way less than what we would have to spend to have it, much less raise it."

            They had had the moral argument.

            "You think a abortion is the right thing to do?"

            "Tee, don't be no fool. This ain't bout no right or wrong. This bout whether its better for the four of us to make it or the five of us to fail. We ain't in no position to deal with no baby. I don't want it. You don't really want it. It's better to stop it now then to have it and not want it and treat it like it ain't wanted. I ain't bout to fool myself. I know I don't want no mo children. I done gave you Gloria. So, what you saying? Do you really want another baby?"

            "No, not really but I mean, yaknow, abortion..."

            "Bullshit, Tee. This just somethin' you thinkin' bout in yo head. For me this somethin' I'm gon have to live with. I ain't bout to have no mo babies. Period."

            There really wasn't nothing more to be said.

            When they got out the car in front the clinic, one of the white guys who was wearing brown shoes, white socks, black pants, a plain white polo pullover, and a "Try Jesus" button, came over toward him while the two women approached Rita.

            Tyronne heard the shorter woman, the one with the freckled face and her brown hair pulled back tight off her head, lecture Rita, "Don't deny a child a chance to enjoy the life the Lord gave him through you. Don't just think about how you feel now. Think about the baby's feelings. I'm not trying to tell you what to do. I can see you two are some intelligent people. I'm just asking you to think about what you're doing. Pray on it. Instead of going in there today, why don't you think about it, talk to your minister, talk to God. Wait a few days before you do something that nobody can undo."

            Tyronne had started to say something non-offensive, but Rita spoke before he did.

            "If you so worried bout giving the living a chance why don't you go feed the hungry or shelter the homeless instead standin' here tryin' to tell me how to run my life. You want to be like Jesus, do some Christian work. Tryin' to make people feel shame bout what they doin' ain't Christian. That's cheeky. Now get out my fuckin' way."

            That night Tyronne and Rita had smoked a joint together and Tyronne had slept with his arms around Rita. He had felt worse than she did.

            The line was moving again.

            "Two kids huh. You lucky. Wish I would'a had sense enough to stop when I had two."

            The line moved again. Jojo kept talking.

            "It's hard to feel like a man when you can't put enough food on the table to feed yo family."

            Tyronne thought about the money on the table. Six hundred and fifty dollars sitting on the table. When Sammy-Sam told some off the wall story about working for it, Rita had gently questioned him.

            "Samuel, ..." Rita always called Sammy-Sam "Samuel" when she was serious about something, "... working for who?"

            Tyronne remembered how he had stood on the periphery of the discussion, transfixed by the stack of money. They needed that money. Bad. But Tyronne knew where the money was coming from. Rita knew too. Rita wasn't no dummy.

            "Samuel, I want you to stop. This ain't no good..."

            "Mama, what I'm suppose to do, stand around while we starve."

            "Ain't nobody starving."

            At that moment Sammy-Sam had wanted to cry, Rita successfully fought off the temptation to get sentimentally teary-eyed, and Tyronne had wanted not to cry.

            Tyronne had not been able to think of anything to say. Everybody had been trying not to say "drugs."

            "Mama, I ain't stupid. I know what you thinking. You thinkin' I'm dealin'  But I ain't dealin'. I ain't usin'. All I do to make my money is ride around the block on my bike when I see the cops comin'. S..."  Sammy-Sam stopped abruptly, catching himself before he revealed his employer's identity. "I gets $25 dollars a day just to ride my bike when I see the cops coming. Mama, I ain't doin' no drugs. I ain't dealin' no drugs. I ain't stupid."

            "Baby, I don't think you stupid. I just don't think it's safe for you. I want to see you grow up to be a grown man. I want you to live a long time. I don't want you in no jail. I don't want you dead 'fo yo time."

            The object of the discussion, the six hundred fifty dollars had sat mutely on the table while mother and son tried to resolve their differences.

            Finally, Sammy-Sam had blurted out, "Mama, the money fo' you" and had rushed out the house. His body had been visibly shaking from the super heavy effort he was making to fight back the tears. He had had to blink real fast a couple of times, but he hadn't cried.

            "Thank you, Samuel," was all Rita had had time to get out as her son had hurried away from the painful scrutiny of her gaze. She had softly said "thank you" because she could see Sammy-Sam had wanted her love and admiration. She had seen it in his eyes. But when she had looked back down to the money, she really wasn't thankful. She was sad.

            Less than a hour later, Tyronne and Rita was arguing about that money.

            "I say we should make him stop."

            "Why cause he making money and you ain't?"

            That was the end of the argument.

            At that point Tyronne had briskly walked out the bedroom.

            Rita immediately had followed him.

            "I'm sorry. I didn't mean that."

            "You said it, you ain't got to take it back."

            "Tee."

            "Rita, I don't know what to do. That's yo boy. He come in this house and put mo money on that table than I done put on that table in two months. All I know is we need the money and if he get caught up in that dope shit he gon die. But if I say he gotta stop you gon think it's cause I'm thinkin' Sammy mo man than me. I want the boy to live. I wanted the baby to live. You aborted the baby. Nah you letting Sammy kill hisself. Or something. I don't know. What I know?  I'm just a security guard with nothing to guard."

            Rita had then walked back into the bedroom and shortly returned with the six hundred fifty dollars. Tyronne was sitting stiffly in his easy chair. With the solemnity of a true believer making a difficult sacrifice, Rita had placed the money in Tyronne's lap.

            "You decide what to do with the money. Whatever you decide, I'll go 'long with that. You decide what to tell Sammy. Whatever you decide, I'll go 'long. I can't deal with this shit no mo. My head hurt. I dealt with the abortion. You deal with this. What difference do it make. We all gon die anyway."

            Looking into Rita's clear brown eyes, which were without even a hint of tears, Tyronne had both wanted to cry and not cry. Although a faintly perceptible tremble remained in her voice, Rita's hand was steady as a rock.

            Just like when he had been pinned down by the corpses of his two fellow squad members, Tyronne had sat there weighted down by the money in his lap, silently accepting the burden he was forced to bear.

            After Tyronne forced his eyes to focus on the money, and after he looked up at Rita retreating into the bedroom, and after Tyronne just stared blankly into space for a few minutes, he gingerly touched the money. Then he gripped the stack of bills decisively and actually picked up the money and held it in his hands. When he couldn't think of anything else to do, he counted it. Tyronne would never forget the feel of that money, the crumpled texture of those two fifties and a bunch of twenties and one ten. Six hundred and fifty dollars.

            Tyronne had never thought he would be in a situation where he would have six hundred fifty dollars in his hand and not know what to do with it.

            The line moved again.

            "Hey, brer ain't much left, you look like you need a shot."

            Jojo could have told Tyronne he was crying but Jojo felt a man ain't suppose to cry so you don't be telling a man he crying, you just give him a drink and help him deal with it.

            When the tears had started, Tyronne had been thinking about when he was trying to talk to Sammy-Sam. He didn't hardly know the boy. The boy was going on fourteen and he had only knowed him three years.

            It was funny, Tyronne remembered thinking, he had known Rita and Sammy the same number of years but he knew Rita and he didn't know Sammy. He could talk to Rita, he couldn't say anything, not one word, to Sammy.

            "Sammy..."  Tyronne started to say "I want you to stop working for Snowflake," but where did Tyronne get off telling Sammy what to do?  Besides, Rita had already said that, and what good would it do to repeat it. If Sammy won't listen to Rita, why should he listen to me, Tyronne had concluded as that phrase repeated itself, over and over inside Tyronne's head: "Why should he listen to me?"

            Why should a young kid like Sammy-Sam listen to a middle aged, unemployed, public high school educated, Black man whose only real expertise was in using a gun and protecting property?

            Unlike a lot of men his age whom he knew, Tyronne's burden was that he had no illusions about himself, he knew he wasn't shit. That's just the way it was. He didn't amount to nothin'. Well really the other men like him knew it too, deep down they all knew it, they just didn't think about it, wouldn't allow themselves to think about being nothing.

            But how could you not think about your own smallness when a child who was ready to be a man stood in front of you waiting for you to show him how to be a man?

            Tyronne had never really talked to Sammy-Sam about anything important, had never given him advice, had never even known how to approach Sammy-Sam. He couldn't call him "son."  Well, he wanted to but he just couldn't get it out.

            Not only didn't Tyronne feel like Sammy was his son, worse yet Tyronne didn't feel like he really could ever be a father. Caught in the vertiginous swirl of his own deepest feelings of impotence, Tyronne had felt ashamed of himself.

            Tyronne felt so little at that moment. He hadn't wanted to feel little, but he had been unable to think of anything to make himself bigger.

            Tyronne had started to say "son," and it would have been sincerely said if he had been able to utter it. That simple word, spoken by Tyronne and received by Sammy-Sam, would have enabled Tyronne to carry the weight of all his own developing years long ago when Tyronne had been a mother's child but never a father's son.

            Tyronne had not been afraid to say "son," rather he had been afraid to say it and not be able to live up to being Sammy-Sam's father, and if the full truth be known, Tyronne was afraid he could not be the kind of father for Sammy-Sam he had always wanted for himself.

            Sammy-Sam, a man to be, sensing the weight of the moment, had waited with a palpable anxiousness as Tyronne struggled to be a father. Oh that had been such a lonely moment for Tyronne when he realized not only was he lost in the wilderness, but, indeed he could not reach out and help this boy who was just beginning his own journey through this America which was, for men like Tyronne and millions of others, literally "no man's" land.

            "God," Tyronne had though to himself, "this is not fair. Life is not fair."

            Looking the future full in the face, Tyronne had no idea what to say, where to go, what to do. Nobody had ever shown him.

            After a minute had passed, the opportunity was gone. What had been but a thin wisp of anxiousness keeping them apart now calcified into a heavy veil of male inadequacy that separated them beyond not only reach, but also beyond hope. The veil was so weighty, that even though both Tyronne and Sammy wanted to lift it, neither separately nor together, could they find the handle to lift the veil.

            Tyronne's mouth opened but no words came out. Sammy-Sam listened intently, he was alert to Tyronne's body language, to the thick emotions shimmering in a blue aura around Tyronne's chest, Sammy-Sam had actually seen a faint blue color all around Tyronne's body. But there were no words.

            Tyronne had not been able to say anything. His eyes pleaded for understanding. Sammy-Sam saw that and waited. But no words had come forth. The more nothing Tyronne said, the worse Tyronne had felt.

            Tyronne cursed himself. Tyronne was a man, he should have been able to say something. He had wanted to say something even if it wasn't "son" like he wanted to be able to say. There should have been something, but there had been nothing he could say. Nothing. He couldn't.

            As premature as it was, at that moment, by default, another young manchild had become a man without ever being a father's son.

            The moment of manhood came when Sammy-Sam closed the door behind him, forever stepping out of the shelter of being anyone's son to be reared.

            The moment was almost imperceptible. Sammy-Sam leaned back slightly, lifted his head slightly, squinted his eyes slightly, and without the barest flicker of regret, slightly raised his shoulders. From that point on, Sammy-Sam was sure he no longer needed anyone to tell him what to do with his life.

            If Rita or any other female had been looking, they might have missed the meaning of the moment. The two men had been facing each other for only 132 seconds, a little over two minutes, but when they had started staring at each other it had been a man and a boy, now as their eyes unlocked, deformed as it was, Sammy-Sam's passage was complete, and Tyronne and Sammy-Sam separated one man from another, no longer man and boy, and never ever father and son.

            Tyronne had thought to himself, "I can't tell him what to do."

            Sammy-Sam had thought to himself, "he can't say a thing to me."

            After their thoughts had been completed, they shared one final look at each other across the abyss.

            Finally, as Sammy-Sam slipped further and further away from him, the only sharing Tyronne could think to do was to reveal his nakedness to Sammy-Sam.

            "Sammy, man, I don't know what to say. Me and yo mama we scared for you. We know you smart and all, but I don't know, I just kind'a want to tell you to be careful. Be real careful. You messin' with people what don't care bout people. What don't act like people. You messin with killers."

            "I know. I know. I know what I'm doing. I ain't stupid."

            The "I ain't stupid" reply hurled back across the divide was like a condemnation. Sammy-Sam had always known he was dealing with killers, hence he had been unable to understand why Tyronne had even so much as thought Sammy didn't know that, why Tyronne had even felt it necessary to say that.

            The echo of Sammy-Sam's last three words sealed any further conversation. It had hurt Tyronne not to be able to say anything else, but what could he have done?  His good intentions lay shattered at his feet. Finally, as a last resort, Tyronne physically reached out his hand to Sammy, like to shake or something. Tyronne sort of felt like hugging Sammy-Sam but that was too much, so Tyronne had just reached out his hand.

            Sammy-Sam briefly shook Tyronne's hand.

            It had been an awkward moment when their hands had touched. Although it had been brief, the moment of touching ached with embarrassment.

            As their hands dropped apart from each other, Sammy-Sam looked quickly away.

            "I'ma be all right."  Then Sammy-Sam walked out the house.

            Tyronne stood for three solid minutes and when he did turn around he saw Rita standing in the bedroom doorway looking at him. He had started to go to her. But he did not. He had simply walked out the house without saying a word.

            Tyronne had stood on the porch.

            Tyronne had walked off the porch.

            Tyronne had stood on the sidewalk.

            Sammy-Sam had gone out the back door.

            Tyronne had gone out the front door.

            Rita had stayed inside with Gloria.

            Tyronne was remembering all of that and was not aware of the tears that flowed as he stood on the sidewalk in the commodities line transfixed by the awful pain he had felt when he had stood on the sidewalk after confronting Sammy-Sam.

            At first vaguely, and then with growing clarity, Tyronne recognized the bottle, with the brownish liquid at the bottom of it, that was being held a few inches in front of his nose. Tyronne now knew the reason he could not see clearly was because he was crying, without saying a single word, Tyronne received the bottle and drank the liquor in two quick gulps.

            The second gulp of Jojo's liquor was longer than the first.

            A dude Tyronne used to know drove pass the commodities line while Tyronne was drinking. The man didn't know Jojo. Didn't know it was Jojo's bottle. Didn't know Tyronne was crying. All he knew was it was so sad to see his old high school buddy, T. C. Johnston, standing in the handout line drinking liquor before twelve in the daytime.

            Tyronne's friend witnessed Tyronne's falling but he didn't know Tyronne's wrestling.

            That was the first time Tyronne had cried.

 

***

           

            Death stinks.

            Tyronne stood up over the body of Sammy-Sam. Tyronne heard the siren growing closer. He pulled the unused cigarette from his lips and pushed it deep into his right jacket pocket. A slight nausea fouled his mouth; he wasn't going to throw up, he could handle this, but this death was not like the death of somebody he hardly knew.

            As he stood looking down, Tyronne realized, although it was true he hardly knew Sammy-Sam, the difference between this death and even many of his Nam buddies was Tyronne had really wanted to know Sammy-Sam, was supposed to know Sammy-Sam, indeed, actually needed to know Sammy-Sam because knowing Sammy-Sam and really being a father to Sammy-Sam would have salvaged a core element of Tyronne's manhood.

            In a moment of blinding and helpless honesty, Tyronne realized he was not crying just for Sammy-Sam, he was also crying for himself. All his life he had vowed he was going to be the father to his son, the father he himself had never had, and now, with Sammy-Sam's death, the deadly circle had run its full course.

            Tyronne cried because he knew not only was he never going to be any man's son, he cried because he also realized his own opportunity to be a young man's father lay dead at his feet.

            Suddenly a painful revelation flashed through to Tyronne, suddenly Tyronne knew the full extent of how slavery had destroyed Black men.

            "If we cannot be fathers and sons...," Tyronne let the whispered thought trail off.

            It was dark now. Except for the path carved out by his car's front lights, there was not much Tyronne could see on the ground before him. The back of Sammy-Sam's T-shirt, his tennis shoes, some blood on the grass. It was dark.

            This time, unlike much earlier this ugly day while standing in the commodities hand-out line, this time no one saw this man's tears. 

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

AIN'T GOING BACK NO MORE

 

1.—The mountain village

     It was raining by the bucket-fulls. The door to Soulville, which is what we called our collectively rented hooch, was open and it was early afternoon. Rain softened daylight streaming in. And warm, a typical summer monsoon day.

 

     Em, which was the only name I knew her by, was near me. She was reading the paper. I had a Korean bootleg Motown record spinning on the cheap portable player plugged into the extension cord that snaked out the window to some generator source that supplied this small village with a modicum of juice. Did I say village? The place was erected for one reason, and one reason only, to service the service men stationed on the other side of the road, to supply the base with cheap labor and even cheaper pussy. I know it sounds crude, but that's the way occupying armies work.

 

     I had never fucked Em, and, as it turned out, never would. I remember one wrinkled old sergeant, a hold over from World War II, talking on the base one day about Em sucking his dick, but that was not the Em I knew. Somehow, the Em I knew, the woman reading the paper I couldn't read because I couldn't read as many languages as she could, somehow, the lady who put down the paper and, as the rain fell, calmly carried on a conversation with me, clearly that Em was not the same Em that the sergeant knew.

 

     It would be many, many years later before I realized that sarge never knew Em. How can one ever really know a person, if one buys that person?  If you buy someone, the very act of the sale cuts you off from thinking of that someone as a human equal. Sarge simply consumed the pleasure given by a female body to whom he paid money, a body which kneaded his flesh and opened her flesh to him, made him shudder as her thighs pulled him in or as she sucked him. A business transaction. Nobody buys pleasure in order to get to know the prostitute. In fact, the whole purpose of the deal is to remove the need for a human connection while satisfying a desire.

 

     I didn't think like that at that time, laying in the hooch with my boots off, day dreaming as I gazed out into the rain, my chin on my arm. In Soulville, just like in all the other hooches, which were usually little more than a large room that doubled as both a living room and a bedroom, we took our boots off upon entering. Even now I like to take my shoes off inside. At the time it was a new thing to me, a difficult thing to get used to, especially with combat boots rather than the slip-ons which most of the Koreans wore. But that's the good thing about going to a foreign country: learning something that you don't already know, something that you can use for the rest of your life.

 

     It's funny how stuff can catch up with you years later, and only after rounding a bunch of corners does the full impact of an experience become clear. I mean more than a delayed reaction, more like a delayed enlightenment. I remember one of the cats we used to hang out with. He was a real deep dude and sometimes he would sit on his bunk holding court while we played an all night game of tonk on a make shift card table constructed of two wooden footlockers stacked one atop the other and a big bath towel (to keep the cards from sliding when we slammed our winners down) serving as playing surface. Some argument or the other would come up and we'd all look to Unk to settle it — his name was Samuel, which naturally got shortened to Sam, and since we were in the army, Uncle Sam was almost inevitable, which in turn got transformed into "Unk” by one of them country dudes out of Alabama with a molasses slow drawl — early one morning when we was mustering up for roll call, Hezakiah came strolling up in a lean back amble, his fatigue cap rolled up in his back pocket (which he knew he should have had on his head the minute he stepped out doors), Hezakiah (whose named didn't get shortened) fell in next to Sam and, with a glee-filled slap on the back, greeted Sam with a loud, long, hearty, albeit southern-slow "what's happening Unk?" It was just the way Hezakiah said it, cracked everybody up and from that day ‘til Sam went back states-side, everybody called Sam by his new handle: "Unk."

 

     Anyway, I don't even remember what the particulars was that we were arguing about, but I do remember, just like it happened yesterday, that when we turned to Unk for his Solomonic judgment, he pulled a draw on his pipe and casually dropped a gem.

 

     "Don't neither one of you ignant motherfuckers know what the fuck you talking about.”  Unk looked to his left, "Billy, you just plain dumb‚ and country, and cause the only schooling you ever had was how to hitch up a mule and how to pick cotton, I wouldn't expect you to have no real learning.”  Unk looked over to the other combatant, "And, Jones, you from the big metropolis of southside Chicago, but you dumb‚ too.”  Then Unk inhaled a long draw on his pipe, took the pipe out of his mouth, studied his cards with feigned seriousness, casually blew the smoke through his nose, and continued just like he had never stopped talking.

 

     "Billy, he ain't never had the advantage of schooling but he got brains.” Then Unk turned his full attention to Jones, who was sitting to his right, "You had the advantage of schooling but you ain't got no brains, which is why you just dissed that deuce and let me go on out. Read um and weep gentlemen. Tonk!”

 

     As he collected his pot, Unk continued the lecture. "Let that be a lesson to all yalls. If you got to choose between an ignorant motherfucker and a stupid motherfucker, choose ignorance. Cause stupidity, just like ugliness and diamonds, is forever. Whose deal is it?”

 

     Billy picked up the cards and started shuffling. Unk was on a roll and, with a two beat paused punctuated by his cackling laughter, Unk just kept on talking right through Billy's fast shuffle which ended with the deck sitting in front of me for my cut. "You know what I mean,” Unk turns to me, "cause at least you can enlighten an ignorant dude, but a stupid motherfucker, huh, you wasting your goddamn time. Cut the cards, man.”

 

     Except I never could figure out how it was that Unk fell in love with Jenny, what with her being a prostitute and all. I mean like on the serious side. Got so, he paid her a $100 a month, and she wouldn't even much look at nobody else. I could understand her, cause Unk was her ticket to ride. Anybody in her position would want to get to the states.  But why would somebody like Unk want to bring Jenny back with him to the states?  It was deep, too deep for me to figure. I wasn't sure whether my inability to comprehend where Unk was coming from was cause I was ignorant or cause I was stupid, so I never did say no more to Unk about it.

 

     When Unk's time was up, the money was on him leaving Jenny behind, just like did ninety-nine percent of the GI's who fell in love in Korea. To no one's surprise, although there was some awfully sentimental moments, Unk went back and Jenny stayed behind.

 

     My reminiscence was broken by Em's hand on my arm. I looked over at her. This wasn't no sexual thing. We both knew and observed the one rule of Soulville, i.e. no fucking in Soulville. Soulville was a place to hang out and cool out. We put our money together and rented Soulville so as anytime day or night when you didn't feel like being around the white boys, if you was off you could come over to Soulville and just lay. And you didn't have to worry about interrupting nothing. It didn't take long for all the girls in the village to know Soulville was like that. So a lot of time was spent in here with Black GIs and Korean women just talking or listening to music. It was the place where we could relate to each other outside of the flesh connection.

 

     From time to time we had parties at Soulville. And of course, some one of us was always hitting on whoever we wanted for the night. But when it came to getting down to business, you had to vacate the premises. We had had some deep conversations in Soulville. One or two of the girls might cook up some rice or something, and we'd bring some beer or Jim Beam — although I personally liked Jack Daniels Black, Jim Beam was the big thing cause it was cheap, cheap, cheap — and, of course, we brought our most prized possessions, i.e. our personal collections of favorite music, and we'd eat, drink, dance and argue about whether the Impressions or the Temptations was the baddest group. As I remember it, there wasn't much to argue about among the girl groups, cause none of the others was anywhere near Martha and The Vandellas. Soulville, man, we had some good times there.

 

     Em was getting old. She had been talking about her childhood and stuff. And when she touched my arm and I looked over at her, I could see a bunch of lines showing up in her face. Most of the time, when you saw the girls it was at night or they had all kinds of make up on their face. But it was not unusual for some of us to sleep over at Soulville and if we were off duty we'd just loll around there all day. Early in the morning we would hear the village waking up and watch the day unfold. Invariably, one of the girls would stop by to chat for ten or fifteen minutes. Or sometimes, two or three of them would hang out for awhile.

 

     On days like this one, you'd get to see them as people. Talking and doing whatever they do, which is different from seeing them sitting around a table, dolled up with powder and lipstick, acting — or should I say, "trying to act” — coy or sexy, sipping watered down drinks through a straw and almost reeking of the cheap perfume they doused on themselves in an almost futile attempt to cover the pungent fragrance associated with the women of the night.

 

     Just like when we was in Soulville we was off duty, well it was the same way for them. And I guess without the stain and strain of a cash transaction clouding the picture, we all got a chance to see a different side of each other.

 

     I started wondering what it must have felt like to be a prostitute, a middle aged prostitute getting old and knowing you ain't had much of a future. A prostitute watching soldiers come and go, year after year. What it must have been like to have sex with all them different men, day in and day out and shit. Especially for somebody like Em who spoke Korean, English, Japanese and Chinese, and could read in Korean, English and Chinese. I mean, from the standpoint of knowing her part of the world, she was more intelligent than damn near all of us put together.

 

     Her touch was soft on my arm. I looked down at her small hand, the unpainted fingernails, the sort of dark cream color of her skin. I looked up into her face. Her eyes were somber but she was half smiling.

 

     "Same-o, same-o.”  She said, rubbing first my bare arm and then her bare arm. "Same-o, same-o.”

 

 

     2.—The border town.

 

     There was no Soulville in Juarez, Mexico, which was the service town at my next duty station at Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Texas. Tay-has, as the Mexicans say it, actually North Mexico. The stolen land. Well, actually, all this land is stolen land, but that's another story, right now, I'm just telling you why I ain't going back in there no more.

 

     As clear as it was that the relationships between the indigenous women and us Black men was a business, the exchange of sex for cash, still, in Korea, there had been a human side to it, a side which had some of us falling in love, and most of us, to one degree or another, made aware that there was only a very thin line between us. But Juarez was different.

 

     Different in that it was brutal and inhuman. I remember my first and last trip to get laid. It was such a downer that I came close to making up my mind then and there, that I wasn't going back anymore. At first I thought my problem simply was that I wanted more than a quick fuck.

 

     Life is so funny. We be changing and growing up, but because it's us, and because it happens day to day, we don't notice it much. I hadn't noticed how Korea had helped me grow.

 

     I immediately noticed the obvious changes in some of the other guys who I had shipped out with to Korea. They had been assigned to different bases up and down the peninsula, and now it was like a whole year later. We was running into each other and swapping lies about our tour in the land of the rising sun.

 

     The growth process was most noticeable in the guys who came from the small southern towns. By the time we hooked back up, everybody was slick in their mannerisms and modes of dress. Shit, if Korea didn't do nothing else, it had us all dressing like hep cats. Even Roger, who I never saw hanging out much, had brought back a silver-gray, sharkskin, tailor-made suit from Korea.

 

     Within a year we were all either actual or aspirant pool sharks. We all drank like crazy and acted like today was our second to last day on earth. I saw it clearly in them. I don't know if they saw the same thing in me.

 

     I don't know how much I had changed or what I looked like, but I do know that there was some things I just couldn't deal with and at the top of the list was Juarez pussy.

 

     When you find yourself doing something you don't like doing even though you thought it was something you wanted to do, you get real philosophical. So standing in this dark, dimly lit room where the only light was shadows, an old hag, which is not an exaggeration, holding out her deformed hand for the money and then afterwards asking to see my dick to make sure it wasn't infected or something, and feeling it expertly for blemishes and sores, standing there under than short arm interrogation, Louis Jordan's song was beginning to sound in the back of my brain: "if I ever get out of here, I ain't never coming back no more.”  At least I think it was Louis Jordan who sang that, maybe it was me making it up and kind of attaching it to something that I half remembered Jordan singing. Whatever, the point was the same. This shit was awful.

 

     After I passed the test and made the requisite payment, I was led into a smoke drenched haze that set my nostrils to flaring under the sharp assault of musky odors in the room which was an even darker room than the dark room of shadows I was just in, a room so dark that til this day I can't tell you what the woman I fucked looked like, or, for that matter, whether she was really a woman, or for that matter whether I really fucked her, or him, or whatever or whoever it was in that lightless hole.

 

     Memory is never accurate. Memory is colored by feelings and limited by awareness, especially when you are dealing with an emotionally charged situation. I guess you can tell I been spending more time in the library than across the border, more time reading a book than drinking in a bar. I'm not ashamed to say that I never went back even if it do mean that I wasn't a man like the other men who went over to Juarez all the time.

 

     I still went over there, but for the most part all I bought was cheap liquor. Boy, one time it was so funny. Between four of us, we collected about twenty dollars, made a quick run and came back with two shopping bags full of rum and brandy. We sat in the deserted, Sunday evening barracks and drank, and drank, and drank until we literally couldn't drink no more.

 

     I never will forget the feeling. I mean we were so stoned that if you had made a movie of us, it would have been the perfect thing to show to kids to scare them off drinking. At first we were just drinking and telling tall tales, lies and what not. Then we was drinking and thinking that we was talking — you know like in that routine Richard Pryor does when first he's talking mucho shit, then he's mumbling, and then his mouth is moving but he ain't saying nothing, then he's nodding, and then all of a sudden his head snaps back and his eyes buck-wild wide open and he shouts "was I finished?", well, we was like that.

 

     The "high point” of that particular session happened towards the end when one of us, I forget who, I know it wasn't me, at least I don't think it was me, but one of us was sitting with our legs crossed and then, boom, just keeled over and fell on the floor. I remember thinking that who ever it was was on the floor. He had fell out. And nobody laughed or nothing. Nobody moved. He had fell out on the floor, the rest of us had fell out sitting up. I mean at that point we was so cool and so stoned that literally the only move any of us could make was to keel over.

 

     Eventually, I gave up that kind of drinking after I got puking drunk on wine one night. But all of that was something I learned over time, this Juarez pussy thing was instant.

 

     I don't know why I even went through with it. I mean even after I had paid my money I could have left. It wasn't nothing but five or six dollars or so, but you know, the thing about being a man is that once you start something you supposed to see it through. No, I'm lying, what the deal was is that I kept thinking that somewhere in the process there had to be some pleasure. After all it was like the old joke between the two privates who was arguing about whether fucking was fifty-fifty pleasure and work or whether it was more work than pleasure. A old master sergeant comes along and settles the argument by telling them, there wasn't no work involved in fucking, it was all pleasure, cause if there was any work involved in it, the officers would make the privates do it for them, and wasn't no officer asking no private to do his fucking for him.

 

     So, I believed that there had to be some pleasure somewhere and I was going to find it.

 

     But you can't find what ain't there. There was no pleasure, only a deeper and deeper disgust with myself. She said something. I don't remember whether it was in English, Spanish, Splanglish or what. I don't know what it was we did it on. It wasn't a bed.

 

     This wasn't anything but unadorned sex and the basic sex act itself. No petting. No caressing. No talking. Not even no real touching. I came as fast as I could to get it over with. And left in a hurry with my head down, truly ashamed of myself.

 

     I never went back.

 

                             

 

     3.—The desert shack.

     Masturbating was better than Juarez. I saved money, it was cleaner and I didn't feel guilty afterwards. Still, being that I was what we used to call a "cock-strong” twenty years old, there was the undeniable desire, indeed, there was almost a driving compulsion, to fuck. I found myself wishing for Korea sometimes.

 

     At that point, I really wasn't opposed in principle to participating in prostitution, just opposed to what I perceived to be the degradation of Juarez compared to the "enlightened” prostitution of Korea. Sometimes it takes us a while to get our ethics straight. I was ready to do it as long as it didn't repulse me, and I wasn't really thinking about the women.

 

     The women who were the "same-o, same-o” as me. In fact, the Mexican women were darker and often looked more like sisters than did the Korean women. But I wasn't ready yet to see women in the same way I saw men. So even if we were the same color and suffered the same racism, when it came to the particulars of their situations, I didn't really see and understand the particulars of the suffering of women.

 

     I remember Yoko Ono saying — I believe it was Yoko, or somebody associated with the Beetles — that women were the niggers of the world. To me that seemed like an over simplification of a complex condition, meaning the complexity of racism rather than the complexity of being a woman. I never even thought of how complex it must be to be a woman. But, like the song say, if you live, your time will come.

 

     Sometimes we have to learn the hard way.

 

     We were at a party somewhere in New Mexico. I don't even remember how we got there. By then I had wheels and one of the three of us that hung together had heard about this party and suggested that we ought to go, said there was going to be some sisters there.

 

     Now, you have to be in the army, stationed in a place where Black women (who would associate with soldiers) are few and far between, to understand what it meant to go to a party where there was going to be Black women there. I mean you'd drive to another state for a party like that. Which is what we did.

 

     The party was a small, house party and there were some women there — two in particular. One was plump and one was tall. Skee-zazz, whom we sometimes called "Lil Man,” cause he was short, decided to pair up with the plump girl and I went after the tall one.

 

     The rap on soldiers was all we wanted to do was fuck and after that forget it. Of course that's an over generalization, but it's not too far from the truth. But on this night whether we finally fucked or not, we were having a good time. The liquor was flowing. There was some food there. And whoever was responsible for the music, had a bunch of good jams.

 

     We drank, we danced, got sweaty, talked, slowed dragged and belly rubbed. As the night wore on, this tall sister got to looking more and more outrageously fine to me.

 

     My rap was kind of on the weak side and I hadn't really developed no game. I mean I did my share of bullshitting with the guys and stuff, but as far as talking a girl out of her drawers, you know like when you meet somebody cold at a party or dance or something, and then get them in bed four or five hours after you just met them, I had never done that.

 

     Skee-zaz˙ was in the corner laying down his line and giggling through his teeth, flashing his big dimples. Me and Tall Girl was talking about something, I don't know what. I think what was saving me was that I could dance. So, when a good jam came on, I would jump up and talk shit, clear out space on the floor, cut the fool and give everybody a good laugh. I think on that night nobody even came close to some of the moves I was laying down.

 

     There's something intoxicating about dancing when you get into the flow of the music. Everything I could think of, I was able to do with a panache that only, say, James Brown would have been able to match. I guess being in the army and being in good shape helped a whole lot. But I know the real deal was having this big, tall, fine, healthy Black woman smiling at me as I whirled and twirled, talked shit and popped my hips was the real spur to my confidence.

 

     That particular warm New Mexico night it was getting so I couldn't do no wrong. By about one a.m. when peoples started drifting off, I knew it was time to make a serious move. We was slow dragging on some number, my hands was crawling up and down Tall Girl's torso — I can't tell you her name cause I don't remember her name, besides, names ain't important on one night stands — I gave Skee-zaz˙ the eye and he winked back at me.

 

     Skee-zaz˙ had his bottom lip tucked into his mouth and was squeezing his eyes shut with exaggerated concentration while he rocked his head from side to side. Tall Girl was saying something in the general vicinity of my ear. I nibbled a reply on her neck. She kind of moaned a little. My left hand was resting on the top of her butt, rotating in synch with her rocking from side to side.

 

     "How you getting home?”

 

     Tall Girl answered me. I didn't hear her answer. I really wasn't listening to a word she was saying. My radar was locked in on the target and I was close enough that my heat seeking missile was about to explode with a direct hit. It didn't matter to me what she thought.

 

     "Say man, let's go,” Skee-zaz˙ commanded with the terse finality of a general ordering troops forward into battle. Our foursome stumbled out into the star encrusted desert night way out in lost-found New Mexico. Shit, I didn't know where I was and didn't care. I had this fox on my arm and I was about to get laid.

 

     I don't remember what Skee-zaz˙ and Plump Girl was saying. Knowing Skee-zazz, he probably had a drink in his hand and was laughing into his fist, his characteristic gesture when he was having a good time, bent over slightly at the waist and then abruptly rearing back hollering, "Stop, stop, stop” as he laughed full out, holding his balled up hand to his lips like he was drinking an imaginary bottle.

 

     I was cooler than that. I had Tall Girl on my arm and probably was asking her to stand still a minute, stepping back and framing a shot with my "air camera” and then waving the make believe picture back and forth until it dried Polaroid style and then looking at it with intent interest and pronouncing, "Just like I thought, this proves it, your smile put the moon to shame.”  And then Tall Girl would blush with her mouth of twenty-five or so gold capped teeth — she was missing a few but that wasn't no big deal to me, and she obviously didn't feel uncomfortable about it cause she laughed with her mouth open and didn't hide her smile with her hand or turn her head away the way people who are self-conscious about their bed teeth do. I liked that she was comfortable with her self.

 

     There was no question about where we was going. Skee-zaz˙ and his pick-up was in the back seat, I was driving, and Tall Girl was sitting there beside me with that tight green dress riding up those long, luscious legs. Skee-zaz˙ leaned forward and touched my shoulder in pretentious imitation of what he though a rich man did with his chauffeur, "Aug Jeeeeee-veeeesssss, take us...” and then he turned to the girl, "where you live baby?  Is it alright if we go to your place?”

 

     "I stay with my sister. Yeah, I guess it'll be ok. But I got to ask her when we get there, you know.”

 

     "Yeah, yeah. Yeah.”

 

     "Well,” I said.

 

     "Well what motherfucker,” Skee-zaz˙ said impatiently.

 

     "Well where the fuck am I going?”

 

     Skee-zaz˙ turned to the girl again, "Where we going baby, what's the address?”

 

     The plump girl said something. Skee-zaz˙ relayed the info, "yeah, that's where we going. Just drive motherfucker. We'll tell you where to go.”

 

     I pulled off.

 

     The plump girl said something. Skee-zaz˙ hollered a loud guffaw,  "Hey, Doc, you going the wrong way. You got to turn around.”

 

     After I dropped Skee-zaz˙ off and we had agreed that we would rendezvous in two hours or so, I turned to Tall Girl and just smiled.

 

     "What're you smiling at?”

 

     "You.”

 

     "Why.”

 

     "Cause you make me feel like smiling,” and I put my hand on her thigh above her knee. She didn't move it. "Come on, tell me how to get to your place.”

 

     Tall Girl lived way out in the desert. I'm sure it wasn't really that far out, but it was at least two or three miles away from where I had dropped off Skee-zazz. Fortunately, these one horse towns don't have too many streets to get lost on. It was mostly straight shot highway.

 

     When I pulled up to what looked in the dark like an adobe style blockhouse, the first thing I noticed was there was no lights on nowhere and it was deathly quiet. As I rolled my window up and stepped out the car, I heard my footsteps and Tall Girls footsteps making a real loud crunching sound in the sand of the walkway leading up to her door.

 

     Like a friend pulling my coat, I had an eerie intimation that perhaps this wasn't going to turn out like I thought it was going to. For some reason I just got the impression that this house was a one room hut and there was some kind of faint, familiar odor which I couldn't identify.

 

     Although it wasn't as dark walking up to her front door as it had been in that room back in Juarez, and although Tall Girl's crib‚ was far more substantial then the hooches back in Korea, still I had this strange, but brief, deja vu premonition that I had been through this scene before. Just then a coyote howled from not too far away. Tall Girl paused briefly when she heard the canine's call. On cue, my arms flew around her waist and pulled her to me. We kissed. Then she stepped back to dig her keys out of her jacket pocket, which was when I noticed that she didn't have a pocketbook with her.

 

     I imagined by now that Skee-zaz˙ was humping and pumping, and I intended to be doing the same in a few minutes. Tall Girl started talking some talk about having a good time and thanking me for bringing her home and shit. The missile had left the launcher. I didn't want to hear no stalling and side walling.

 

     Inside her place was a musty aroma really different from the night air we had been breathing. The house really wasn't hardly nothing more than a front room with a open kitchen behind it and what must be her bed room off to the side. I didn't see where the bathroom was. Maybe it was out back.

 

     I was trying to follow Tall Girl without bumping into anything. She was bending over something and then I saw she had a child laying on a cot. I said to myself, "Goddamn girl, you left that child here all by herself.”  Child didn't look like it could have been no more than three or four years old. Fortunately the child was sleeping.

 

     After pulling the cover up around the child's shoulder and passing a kiss with her hand from her lips to the child's head, Tall Girl said "Thanks.”  Again.

 

     Fuck that I thought. We was going to fuck or fight. I put my hand on Tall Girl's butt. Just wanted to make sure she understood where I was coming from.

 

     She squirmed away.

 

     I followed her into her bedroom. There was this big bed and another child sleeping in a crib.

 

     I started to hit myself with the heel of my hand upside my head. Wanted to make sure I wasn't dreaming.

 

     Tall Girl kicked her shoes off.

 

     She left her two kids sleeping to go partying. Goddamn what kind of mother was she?

 

     The sound of her zipper brought me back to my senses.

 

     She had on a black slip.

 

     What if the child woke up while we was doing it?

 

     She sat on the bed.

 

     I kissed her and felt up her right breast.

 

     She lay back on the bed. "I'm on my period.”

 

     Meaning what?, I started to ask. I was still thinking about those kids. How she could just leave them out here in the middle of nowhere. Then I thought, if that's bad, then how is it you can be here trying to fuck this woman, why you want to fuck her if you think she's so trifling?

 

     Ignoring both my question and her statement, I kissed her again. Maybe she was just saying she was on her period to get out of fucking. I reached my hand under her slip, up between her legs, and felt the lump of a sanitary pad sitting like a stop sign at the fork in the road.

 

     "Please...” and she just looked at me, didn't try to move my hand away from between her legs, didn't even try to turn away or nothing. She just looked at me.

 

     I was rubbing her thigh and at the same time I could see her eyes searching my face. Her brown pupils moving back and forth in the moonlight. Didn't say nothing else. Nothing more.

 

     I didn't know which of us was more pathetic.

 

     My eyes were growing accustomed to the surroundings. I couldn't help not see that baby in the crib. I couldn't help not think about it. I was close to getting some pussy. But at what cost?

 

     We stayed like that for almost a minute. It got so quiet I could hear the child's light snore of contented sleep. It was clear Tall Girl wasn't going to stop me if I really wanted to do it, yet the more I thought about it the madder I got with myself. What was I doing laying next to this menstruating woman, a woman whose name I couldn't remember, a woman I never wanted to see in life again. It was too much. I couldn't do it.

 

     I got up.

 

     Stood over her for a few awkward seconds.

 

     "Thanks.”  She sat up. I didn't say nothing. As I started to turn to leave, Tall Girl said, "I really did had a good time.”

 

     I realized just then that she was thanking me for not forcing myself on her. "I would offer you a drink or something, but I don't have nothing,” she said matter of factly without a trace of self pity. That's just the way it was.

 

     "Yeah, that's ok.”  Then there was another anguished pause. I didn't know what to say, "well, see you around.”  I took my keys out of my pocket. We both knew that we would never see each other again.

 

     I walked out, or rather, to tell the truth, I stumbled out. I don't even remember what else I said, or even if I said anything else to Tall Girl. When I got to the car, I realized that I had been almost holding my breath on the way out. The smell was the same smell I had smelled in Juarez, in Korea, the smell of poor women at the mercy of men, men like me, men like Skee-zazz, like old sarge, like any of us, no matter whether we was a private or a general, poor women at the mercy of men.

 

     Tall Girl, I thought to myself, you sure got a hard row to hoe, and you can't even afford to get your head bad and forget about it. There she was, lying on that bed, not wanting to fuck but resigned to the rules of the game. I wondered what I would be like if I had to let somebody fuck me every time I just wanted to have a good time.

 

     I turned around in the middle of the deserted street. I took my time driving back to retrieve Skee-zazz. A lot of thoughts was tying up in my head. Although I probably did the right thing, I felt bad because I had come so close to not doing the right thing.

 

     It looked like it took me twice as long to get back to where Skee-za˙ was at then I remembered it taking when I had dropped him off, and even so, I still had to wait outside til almost 5:30 before he came out.

 

     Although I had rolled the windows up, locked the door, let the seat back, slouched down deep and pulled my black leather lambskin cap over my eyes, I didn't really sleep. I kept hearing Tall Girl saying "Thanks” and seeing her large eyes looking at me.

 

     Later, on the ride back to the base, Skee-zaz˙ told me how he had "got them drawers. She kept saying, no, no, no. But I just pulled them drawers off her and got me some. I told her, I said, baby, if you didn't want to fuck, you shouldn't fucked with me. Them bitches know how the game go.”

 

     I told him about Tall Girl being on the rag.

 

     He said that wasn't nothing, I should have just pulled that rag out of there and gone ahead and got that pussy. "You should have got that pussy, man. That was your pussy. Yours for the taking. Betcha, if I would have been there, rag or no rag, she would have been fucked.”

 

     I was confused for a moment. Skee-zaz˙ was from Newark and could be cold blooded as a knife in the back. Sometimes he didn't have no respect for nothing or nobody.

 

     I kept vacillating between being satisfied with the decision I made not to fuck Tall Girl and the desire to be more like Skee-zazz. To young men there's something attractive about being a barbarian, something manly about being a ruthless hunter and a stone killer, just taking whatever you want regardless of what it is or who it belong to, which is why, I guess, "to Bogart” was a major verb in our everyday vocabulary. Skee-zaz˙ and Humphrey Bogart would have fucked Tall Girl, maybe I was being too southern, too soft. I don't know.

 

     When you're growing up, sometimes the hardest decision to make is the decision to be yourself, especially when being yourself causes you to have to put principle above pleasure.

 

     So here we are, driving through the New Mexico night back to El Paso discussing whether to fuck or not to fuck. I didn't say nothing about how the place looked. I didn't say nothing about the kids. I was just mad with myself cause I was in the middle of some trifling shit that I finally decided I had no business being mixed up in.

 

     That was it. As we crossed the state line I made a pact with myself. I wasn't going to buy no more pussy in Juarez, or no place else for that matter, for the rest of my life. And I wasn't going to be taking advantage of no women who were so poor they didn't have nothing but they bodies.

 

     For the rest of my natural born life, as much as I could help it, I wasn't never going to take advantage of a poor woman just for some pussy, and it wouldn't make no difference if she was yellow, black, brown or white.

 

     It would be over seven months later, not until I returned home and had been mustered out the army, before I made love to a woman, but that's a nother story, for another time.

 

     I guess I must have been thinking real hard to myself and ignoring Skee-zaz˙ cause the next thing I knew, Skee-zaz˙ was sitting with his head thrown back, snoring loudly as I drove back to the base.

 

     Directly in front of me, in the east, the sun was coming up. A new day was on the way.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

RAOUL'S SILVER SONG

 

 

     Raoul stood on the wooden patio balcony enjoying the twilight's slow departure.  With the patient concentration of a piano tuner unhurriedly working in an empty ballroom, Raoul watched the evening shadow creep up the cream colored concrete wall as the sun light gradually dimmed and the criss-crossing sunbeam shafts merged into the darkest green of the shadow shrouded banana tree trunk.

     With each slow breath, through nostrils that barely moved when he inhaled, Raoul caught the bouquet of courtyard odors: frying sausage from somebody's pan, shrimp in the alley from last night, and the sweet subtle fragrance of watermelon waffling upward from the Johnsons just below him, sitting out eating the pink fleshed fruit and chatting about their grandchildren.

     But more than what he saw or what he smelled, Raoul liked what he heard: the sounds of a New Orleans evening in the Treme area muted by the wood of old buildings, sounds mingling like the melodic strains of a brass band improvising, different elements going to the fore and then receding: a rancorous car horn blown at two kids chasing a ball into the street, the high squeal of the car's brakes a cacophonous counterpoint to the car's blasting horn; Mabel singing to herself while she cooked, today her natural alto was stuck on "Amazing Grace" sung in C; the Johnsons listening to their favorite Louis Jordan recordings; someone's radio on loudly (the person was probably sitting on their front steps, with a beige touch-tone Princess telephone perched on the door sill, talking to a friend who was probably doing the same in her neighborhood), the station was WWOZ and the fifties R&B show had not too long ago come on; water and sewage moving through the plumbing -- thick, heavy iron pipes which were common decades ago -- that ran up the outside of the building next to the stairwell; a television barely heard, Raoul couldn't tell what show it was or where it was coming from, but he could tell it was a television because every 35 or 40 seconds a burst of forced laughter erupted instantly and died down quickly; the long soft watermelon burp from below; and, the low eruption from his own bowels as Raoul passed gas.  What he liked about all these sounds is that no one sound was supreme, neither noise nor music was so loud or lasted so long that it dominated the soundscape -- this was a good band.

     Although the catalogue of sensual stimulants was long and varied, Raoul felt relaxed here.  He savored the ballad tempo of day's exit in this little courtyard.  The atmosphere was soothing, it invited reflection, meditation, cat-napping, snoozing, quiet cigarette smoking, thinking things through, forgetting, reading letters over and over, a good long novel, memorizing a short poem.  Everything.  Nothing.  Raoul liked this.

     Raoul's hand rested lightly on the heavy wood railing, a railing pitted by the bombardments of time, a railing no longer smooth like it was when initially, proudly, installed by the Heberts, a neighborhood family of laughing carpenters (a father, Harold, two sons, Francis and Eric, and a cousin, Daniel, whom everyone called "Two-Step").  Whatever paint had once graced the railing was long since gone.  Now the wood was colored by the pigments of natural aging: rain borne atmospheric dirt and rodent excrement, bird droppings and tiny insect slime; the bleaching of the merciless semi-tropic Crescent City summer sun; the seasoning of sweat and other body fluids; sundry dyes from a plethora of spilled drinks composed of every imaginable concoction of juices and flavorings used to disguise the sharp taste of the alcohol; colorings from an exhaustively long line of liniments, potions and medications (for example, a three-quarters full bottle of some chalky white substance of dubious medicinal value which had been pitched in real anger at the genitals of the third in a long series of tenants by a live-in lover on the way out -- the bottle broke on the railing when the tenant successfully sidestepped the not unanticipated missile); the indelible blotches left by blood from a terrible accident with a knife which left a little hand permanently scarred; soot streaks from a holiday inspired outdoor barbecue that should never have been lit there in the first place; not to mention the many burns from snuffed cigarettes and the 159 ice pick holes assiduously bored into the wood by someone who was bored out of their skull one day waiting for a certain individual who never came.  None of this would have surprised Raoul.  Like the patina of most elderly humans we meet whose skin tones reflect a full life, this railing had a long survival story.  Raoul liked graceful survivors: people and things which held up well, didn't cry or carp about life's severities, but rather simply persisted in being what they were.

     Raoul lived alone.  He chose his lifestyle.  He...

     Someone was knocking at his door.  He stood motionless.  They knocked a second time.  Raoul thought about not answering the door.  A third knock.  Louder.  With the unhurried motion of a man who has enjoyed a long life and feels no pressure to accomplish anything else, Raoul moved slowly from the balcony into the front room and to the front door.

     When Raoul opened the door a young girl stood there.

     They looked at each other.  She couldn't have been more than 17 or 18.

     "Raoul Martinez?"

     "Good evening."

     "Excuse me.  Good evening.  Are you Mr. Raoul Martinez?"

     "Who wants to know?"

     "My name is Mavis Scott."

     "And?"

     "And.  I'm, uh, looking for Raoul Martinez."

     "What for?"

     "Music lessons."

     "I don't give music lessons."

     "........."

     "I said I don't give music lessons."

     "I know all your music."

     "What music?"

     Mavis unhitched her large leather bag from her shoulder, lowered it gently to the floor, knelt beside it and quickly retrieved her flute case.  She place the case on top of the bag, opened it, and assembled the flute, blew air through the silver cylinder to warm it, stood quickly and began "The Silver Song."

     "Well.  Uh huh.  I still don't do lessons."

     Without hesitation Mavis started into "Ra-Owl."

     "Where you learn that from?"

     "A record."

     "I ain't got no record."

     "June Johnson -- The Copenhagen Connection."

     "That was...  How you got holt to that?"

     "I like your music."

     "How you found me?  How you know I was here?"

     "I like your music."

     "I like a lot of stuff.  That don't mean I know everything."

     "But if you really like something, you learn about it."

     "Mavis..."

     "Mavis Scott."

     "Alright.  Come back tomorrow.  Four-thirty."

     "You'll teach me?"

     "No, I'll think about it.  I'll tell you my answer tomorrow."

     "You want me to call before I come?"

     "Can't call."

     "Oh they have phones at school."

     "Can't call me.  There ain't no phone here."

     "Oh."

     "Good evening Miss Mavis Scott.  I'll see you tomorrow."

 

                               ***

     "Come on in."

     When Mavis walked into Raoul's room, she felt like she was falling into a past she had never seen but a past she wanted desperately to know about. 

     Raoul walked away from Mavis.  He opened a half closed door and disappeared into the adjoining room.

     An old armoir and an old piano dominated the room where Mavis stood.  She looked for a television but there was none.  She looked for anything that would give clues to Raoul's personality, but there was nothing else personal in the room.  The balcony doors were open to the courtyard and the window on the street side of the room was closed and tightly shuttered.

     Raoul reentered the room, a trumpet in his hand.     

     Mavis looked at the piano.  Raoul assumed she could play some piano.  If she couldn't at least play some chords on the piano it would be a waste of his time to try and teach her anything.

     "Ok, hit some chords."

     He pointed toward the piano with his horn.

     "Go head, girl.  You say you wanna learn.  This your first lesson."

     She sat at the stool, her hands just above the keys and then rested them lightly on the keys.  She wanted to cry, unable to think of anything that seemed appropriate to play.

     "Mavis, blues, b flat, watch me.  Uh, uh, uh-uh-uh-uh."

     Mavis tried to think of blues chords, some notes, blues songs even.  Every song she thought of she rejected because it was not the song he wanted.  She didn't know what he was going to play but whatever he was going to play she knew it wasn't what she was trying to recall.  With great effort she lifted her hands.  It felt like some invisible force was trying to hold her hands down.  Her hands dangled above the keys, coiled tightly, a leopard waiting to pounce but no prey passed her way.

     Mavis bit her lip.  Her nostrils itched and burned slightly.  Tears formed on the inside edges of her left eye.  He had already counted it out.  Would it be too corny to play "CC Rider"?  That was too simple.  So was "St. James Infirmary" or even "Goin' Down Slow."  But what key.  B.  Yes, he had said B.

     Whenever Mavis was under pressure to perform her subconscious would flood her mind with so many possibilities that the hardest part of the creative process was not the thinking of something to play, but rather deciding on which one idea to play.

     Once she had sat in at Jay-Jay's place...

     "Girl, you don't know no blues?  You don't know no blues, how I'm gonna teach you to play jazz?"

     Raoul walked out the room.

     Mavis cried quietly to herself.  When Raoul returned with a piece of paper in his hand he pretended he didn't see her tears.  Mavis quickly wiped her eyes with her forearm.  Raoul sat the sheet of music on the piano stand.  It was just a series of chords.  No melody.  No time signature.  No bass lines.  Just chords.

     Raoul snapped out a slow walking tempo.

     "Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh."

     Mavis smiled when she heard Raoul's trumpet.  This was "Ra-Sing."  She hadn't recognized the changes written out on paper, but she knew the song.  By the time they were at the tune's bridge, Mavis was very comfortable with the chords.  If she were playing flute there is so much more she could have done, but on the piano all she could do was feed chords.

     Suddenly he gave it to her.

     Mavis was ready.  She did a break and filled the hesitation with three deftly timed, chimming block chords.  Then started a phrase that consisted of four chords which resolved on the next chord in the progression.  At the bridge she dropped the tempo compeletely and strung out a set of altered chords which she had thought of two years ago while listening to the record over and over.  Mavis was ready.

     "Go on, go on, girl."

     "I could play it better on flute.  I don't have much piano chops."

     "OK.  Do it"

     Mavis picked up her flute case from beside the piano stool, assembled her flute, held it to her lips and waited for Raoul's count.

     Raoul closed his eyes.  The only count was an almost imperceptible nodding of his head.  But Mavis saw, she saw and was ready.  He would see.  She was ready.

     They played "Ra-Sing."  At the bridge he dropped out and Mavis confidently flew. 

     "Play it pretty baby, play the pretty way you talk."

     They played the song through twice.

     "Yea.  Now that's better.  Where you from girl?"

     "Right here."

     "Yea, huh."

     "Yes," she smiled, resting her hands and her flute in her lap, allowing her head to tilt a bit to one side.  "Same place you from.  We both coming from the same place."

     "Yeah," he said with a slightly mocking "we'll see about that" tone.  "Let's take it from the git go.  Watch me now."

     They chased each other playing a fleet "Ra-Owl".  He laughed at her swirling trills.

     "Don't put no dress on this man now."

     "No, just a pretty shirt," and she did it again.

     It was uncanny the way this young girl played something like June did.  At the bridge June had always hung back, quarter noting just behind the beat.  She was playing it like June played it.  They ended together, Mavis voiced below Raoul.

     "Solid."  He smiled.  There was nothing like playing.  Raoul thought about playing with June.  Mavis was still laughing.  "Yaknow, June always used to say," Raoul altered his voice to imitate June's famous growl, "mannn, ya don't play music.  You serious music."

     Mavis stopped laughing.  She didn't stop smiling.  She looked at Raoul.

     "Girl, music is more than just a love, it's a passion and that's the way you got to play.  It's got to be like you can't help yourself."

     "You mean you got to give yourself to it."

     "No, baby.  I mean you got to get everything you need to live from it.  Fish need water.  Birds need air.  You got to need music.  Yaknow, you got to need it bad, so bad that when you don't play, you can't live."

     There was still so much Mavis did not know about herself, especially about what she needed to feel fully alive.

     Raoul wasn't looking at her.  He started to play.  His horn was at his lips.  He fingered the valves quickly.  His cheeks puffed out.  He almost started but didn't.  Raoul thought of something.  Mavis didn't know what he was thinking but she could tell he was thinking of something.

     Raoul didn't know why he thought so suddenly of Martin Luther King getting shot in the neck, except that really living was the only thing worth dying for.  Living the way you wanted, doing what you wanted to do, that's all was worth dying for.  Raoul played "The Silver Song."

     Mavis joined him.  They played forty-six and one half choruses when Raoul just stopped suddenly.  He put his horn down.  Stood up.  Walked out the room.  The lesson was over.  It was almost night.  Mavis packed her flute quietly and sat for a minute looking at Raoul's horn.  She fingered the top of her flute case like it was a piano, she was fingering the changes to Raoul's "Silver Song."

     She played the piano well, so well that her piano teacher encouraged her to become a piano major.  He said she had the passion to play like he had never seen in a student in a long time.  When Antonio Luzzio said that, Mavis wondered what did he know about her passions.  All he could teach her was technique, she remembered thinking when Mr. Luzzio spoke softly about piano and her passion.  Later, Antonio Luzzio said to her one day when she was playing Chopin for him: "Your hands love the piano and the keys love them back.  I will teach you the technique so you can forget the technique."

     Now, studying with Raoul, Mavis blushed to herself.  She never thought she would be so thankful for what Mr. Antonio Luzzio had taught her.  He had taught her to play correctly, so now there was nothing between her and the music.  She could hear the changes and hit the right chords.  She could also alter the changes and create new chords that were harmonically correct.  "Thank you Mr. Luzzio," Mavis said to herself.

     Raoul finally came back into the room.  He was getting his soft leather cap out of the almost antique armoire.  She had seen cedar robes before, with the long dressing mirrors and the strong but pleasant wood smell.

     "I can't come tomorrow," she said as she watched him methodically place the black cap on his head.  The cap looked expensive.  Mavis did not know that the cap was from Norway, nor did she know it was a gift which Raoul cherished.

     Her saying she couldn't come tomorrow reminded him to tell her she couldn't come on Friday; she didn't need to know why.

     "Neither next day, either.  Look here, for next time, work us out a 'rangement for "A-Train" in slow to mid tempo.  You better mute me too."

     "Why?"

     "Why?  'Cause I said so."

     "No, not the lesson, I understand that.  I mean why I can't come on Friday."

     "I done already tolt you, 'cause I said so."

     "OK, Raoul," God, she hoped she had said his name casually enough, "because you said so."

     He didn't answer.  He left the room.  The lesson was over.

 

                               ***

     They were playing Monk -- rather Raoul was playing Monk and she was struggling to find something to play.  Everything she thought to play was so obviously not what should be played.

     "Why is Monk's music so hard to play?"

     "It ain't hard to play.  It's hard to fake!"

     Mavis chuckled almost inaudibly, agreeing with Raoul's pithy summary.  Raoul played a half chorus and stopped.

     "Monk made you play or else sound like you couldn't play."

     Silence.

     "Like the hardest thing about Monk is rhythm, and that's the hardest thing in life, to find your own rhythm."

     "But when you playing with others you can't just play your own rhythm."

     "The trick baby is to know when to solo, when to ensemble, when to comp and when to lay out.  That's life.  That's music.  Sometimes you take the lead with a solo, sometimes you play your part right long side everybody, sometimes you're in the background accompanying what's going on, sometimes you don't play. Dig?"

     "But how do you ensemble when everybody else is playing a way you don't want to play?"

     Raoul turned to the piano and played the head of "Evidence" again.  He picked up his horn and played variations on the theme.  He got up off the piano stool and kept playing, motioning for Mavis to sit at the piano.  Mavis put her flute on top the piano, sat and comped the changes.  He stopped.  She stopped.

     "When you can't play, lay out."  He played some more.  She joined him.  He stopped.  She started to go on.  She stopped.

     "Some fools think shedding is about perfection, yaknow that 'practice makes perfect' bullshit, but, yaknow, that ain't where its at.  Shedding is for learning what not to play, learning what doesn't work and learning not to do that.  I mean your woodshed ought to be full-a all your mistakes.  Practice making mistakes.  Playing makes perfect.  Shedding is all about making mistakes, baby."  He started again.  He stopped.  She started to play something.  It didn't work.  She stopped.

     "When you can play what you can't play now, then you can play."  Raoul started again.  Before she could start, he stopped.  "Yaknow, it ain't about you.  Monk was about Monk.  But when you play Monk, you got to be you playing Monk.  When you play your stuff then its about you."  Raoul played "Evidence" again.  Mavis comped.  Raoul soloed.  He altered the changes.  Mavis followed laughing.  Raoul's logic was so clear.  He returned to the head.  They ended together with a flourish, she had the sustain pedal down and the piano's resonance undergirded the mirth of their entwined laughters.

     "Mavis.  Blues.  B flat.  Use the flute.  Uh.  Uh.  Uh-uh-uh-uh."  And they were flying.  She had a variation of "Killer Joe" that was smoking and matched perfectly what he was doing.  Soon she found that she was leading the song.  At the bridge she stomped her foot loudly on the floor, indicating a stop-time.  She ripped off four measures and threw it at him.  He was pleased with her self-confidence and began trading fours with her.  She started flutter tonguing and screaming false notes.  He wah-wah muted the horn with his hand.  She hummed into her horn.  He picked up a metal ash tray and got right nasty.

     This was something like that night in Jay-Jay's when she had sat in but it was better because it was just happening, and she was not having to prove anything.  Mavis remembered something she had played that night, it was something she had heard Rahsaan do on a record and she had copied it.  When she did it that night, the crowd loved it.  When it was her turn, she did that same thing.

     Raoul stopped.

     "Nah, why you played that.  That shit don't fit.  It ain't you, is it?"

     "What do you mean it's not me."

     "Who you heard do that?"

     She started to deny that she had heard anyone do that.  They were having so much fun playing.  It had felt so good to be playing on an equal basis with him.

     "Rahsaan."

     "Who?"

     "Rahsaan Roland Kirk on the alb..."

     "Rahsaan can play Rahsaan.  You play you and when you ready to play Rahsaan then you be you playing Rahsaan but don't be taking Rahsaan shit trying to make it yo shit.  You don't know what all that man went through to get that sound.  You don't know what he was thinking.  And I don't want to know what you thought he was thinking or feeling.  I wants to hear what you thinking and what you feeling, even when you playing his shit.  Play me some Mavis Scott.  I wants to hear Rahsaan, I'll put a record on."

     "I just, I just thought it would fit there."

     "Imitation don't never fit in jazz.  Don't care how much some people might think they like it.  Jazz is for real and if you ain't being for real, you ain't playing jazz."

     Raoul walked out the room.  Lesson was over.

     Just as Mavis was about to leave, her flute packed and her feelings shredded like a tom cat's favorite scratching pole, Raoul returned into the room with a picture in his hand.  He held it out to her.

     Mavis looked at it quickly.

     "That's me and June in Copenhagen."

     "Um humm."  Mavis barely held the metal frame a full minute before gently returning Raoul's most treasured photograph.

     "I thought you might like to see it, you know, you knowing all about me and June and such."

     Raoul had no way of knowing that Mavis saw his picture everyday.  How could he know that Mavis had her own copy, sent to her mother by June who was her second cousin.  Raoul knew everything but he didn't know this.  He thought Mavis was hurt because of what he had said to her, why else didn't she look at the photograph which he had seldom shown to anyone.

     "Thanks."  They stood uncomfortable in the silence like musicians listening to the playback of a sad take late in a recording session that has not gone well -- even though they had tried their best, the outcome did not sound too good.  Maybe the best thing was just to pack it up and try again on another day.

 

                               ***

 

     After knocking twice and getting no reply, Mavis tried the door knob.  The door was unlocked.  She let herself in, moved quickly to the piano, and set up to shed -- it was no longer like basic lessons, now they spent most of the time practicing together.

     The way they played together was almost like they were equals -- well not really equals, because Mavis was only a beginner, but they played together like colleagues, musical colleages.  No, it was more than that, there communion felt to her like more than band mates who only played periodic gigs together and seldom saw each other beyond that.  Well, although it was true these sessions were the only time they saw each other, still it was more than just sessions.

     The way they would break out laughing simultaneously after playing a good exchange or after hitting an unplanned ending abruptly but precisely in tune with each other, that was like friends.  That's what it felt like, good friends.

     After all, Raoul didn't play in public anymore.  Absolutely refused.  So, in a sense, Mavis was Raoul's only peer.  "Don't nobody want to hear no old man playing no more."

     "You ain't old."

     "You too young to know what old is."

     But there was also something else simmering between them.  Something just beneath the surface.  At least, Mavis wanted there to be something else.  Well, at least, sometimes she wanted there to be something else.  She wasn't sure if he wanted there to be something else.  He had never even so much as touched her before.  Well he had touched her shoulder once and had nudged her with his hip to catch a beat or something, but his bare hand had never touched her skin.

     Where was he?

     Mavis played her flute for a minute or so, waited.  Raoul did not appear.

     Another Raoul-less minute passed slowly.

     "Raoul."

     Nothing.

     Mavis looked at the bedroom door, or rather looked at the door she supposed led to Raoul's bedroom.  She had never gone any further into Raoul's apartment than the front room where they shedded or quickly dashing in and out of the little bathroom on a couple of occasions.

     Should she go inside the bedroom?

     She went to the door.

     Should she knock?

     The door was already ajar.

     "Raoul," she called out.

     Nothing.

     She touched the door.

     Should she push the door open?

     She opened the door.

     Raoul lay sleeping on his bed.  Naked to his waist, or maybe he was totally naked and only exposed to his waist; a spread covered the lower half of his body.  Mavis could not tell if he had any other clothes on.

     She trembled.

     Should she?

     She started to call his name.

     Should she wake him?

     Or, should she... ?

     She undressed quietly, quickly.  Maybe, if she just climbed into his bed.  The window was open.  A breeze blew through.  Maybe, he wasn't really asleep.  Maybe, he was waiting to see what Mavis was going to do.  What was she going to do?

     Mavis felt the wind dashing slyly between her legs, mocking her quandry, challenging her to move from the spot where she stood glued in confused frustration.

     The wind blew again.  She felt a chill there.

     The curtain moved.

     Mavis turned her head to look at the curtain.  Is this what Lot's wife felt like, unable to go and unable to stay?  Mavis' head hurt.  Why was she even thinking about the bible and where did Lot's wife come from?  Something moved.

     Raoul had moved, turned half way over toward her.

     No.

     Raoul snored.  It was a soft snore, but a snore.  Would he wake up before she could get out of the room?

     Carefully, slowly, Mavis bent to retrieve her clothing which lay in a shameful little pile beside her.  This man was older than her father.  Almost old enough to be her grandfather.  Mavis did not understand the attraction, nor the repulsion, but she felt both, and, after initially acting on the former, was now being swayed by the latter.

     The curtain moved again.

     Mavis held her breath.

     God, this was stupid.

     With clothes in hand, Mavis stood trying to figure what was the better choice, try to dress quickly and silently in here, or slip naked back into the front room and dress in there.  Suppose Raoul woke up while she was dressing?  Suppose when she moved to go into the front room the floor squeaked or the door squealed and Raoul saw her naked?

     How could she explain this to Raoul?

     Raoul moved again, rolled away from the door.

     Mavis dashed quickly into the front room.  It took her so long to get dressed.  Her hand trembled terribly.

     Once dressed, she picked up her flute -- the metal felt so cold -- and stood silently in the middle of the floor.  What now?

     Eventually, she decided to leave.

     At the front door she wondered whether Raoul was alright.

     Mavis opened the door and closed it softly behind her and started to walk away.  But suppose he were sick.  He hadn't looked sick or anything.  He looked alright.  But maybe he had a heart attack.  But she was sure he had been breathing normally.  At least she hoped he had.  Mavis didn't remember his snoring because she herself had not been breathing normally.  If something were wrong and she left him like that; she couldn't do that.

     Mavis went back into the apartment.  Everything sounded ok.

     Mavis walked across the room.  She didn't hear anything that sounded wrong.

     Mavis stood in the bedroom door.  Raoul slept soundly, except he had turned toward the door and lay fully exposed.  Mavis saw him facing her nude.  She trembled anew.  Finally she left.

 

                               ***

 

     "Hey girl what happened to you yesterday.  I fell asleep about two and didn't get up til six.  Did you come and think I wasn't home or something?"

     "No.  No.  I didn't, couldn't come yesterday.  I just came by today to pay you what I owe you because I won't be able to come anymore."  Why had she lied?  She wanted to call it back, but didn't.

     "You don't owe me nothing.  I just want to hear you when ever you start playing if you do like you say you gon do and if you keep playing like you been playing."

     "Yes, when I really start playing I'll let you know and if you play, you have to let me know."

     "I won't, but then, one never knows, do one?"

     "No, for sure, one never knows until one does."

     "Yeah you right, girl.  Until one does, one don't."

     Mavis stood up, "Raoul, thanks for your help."  Her hand was sticking out toward him.  He took her hand into the warmth of both of his and held it.  He looked her in the eyes.

     "Mavis, you pass it on whatever it is you think you learned funny girl."

     "For sure.  Always learn.  Always teach.  And always know when you suppose to be learning and when you suppose to be teaching."

     He was still holding her hand.  "Lady, you got it."  He slowly returned her hand to her.

     Everything felt so final, like this was graduation and even if they saw each other again it would be different.  Maybe that's what calling her "lady" meant.

     "Do you still, I mean are you still tied up on Fridays?"

     "What made you ask that?"

     She walked toward the door away from him, "Oh youth I guess."

     "You'll get over it."

     "Yes, well..."

     "Goodbye sweet lady, play what you must but always be ser..."

     "....always be serious about the music."

     Raoul kissed her on her nose.  She turned quickly, nearly stumbling as she ran hurriedly down the stairs onto the waiting sidewalk below.  She heard a radio.  She heard a tv.  She heard some kids playing.  Cars passing.  Somebody arguing about something.  A riverboat whistle blowing on the river.  The St. Claude bus pulling off three blocks away.  And quietly above it all, Mavis heard Raoul's "Silver Song."  At first she thought the sound was in her head.  Then she looked up.

     Raoul was sitting by his front room window, playing with his horn stuck out the window, playing for the whole neighborhood to hear.

     A new found confidence squared Mavis' shoulders as she loped down the street humming along with Raoul's trumpet.

###

—kalamu ya salaam

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

Clapping On Two and Four

 

The African American approach to performance has many aspects, some of which, such as impovisation and emotional intensity, are frequently cited. This essay will address two seminal, albeit frequently overlooked, characteristics of public performance in the Black cultural context. The first aspect is the use of the music as a language and the second is the function of performance as a means of achieving social stability and cohesion.

A Black (or more precisely, African-heritage) approach to public performance necessarily includes music. Even with the visual arts, masks and costumes dance, i.e., they are made to move rhythmically. Indeed, Black music is often characterized as rhythm-driven.

I believe this rhythm emphasis is both contextual and inherent. Contextual in that Black music came of age contemporaneously with modern industrial developments in America. The recording industry; electricity (plus electronic amplification and alteration); radio; cars, trains and planes; all of these  were born and developed during the same epoch. This industrializing and speeding up of daily life produced a major change in the psyche and emotional desires of Americans.