“…”

Special.

I didn’t have a girlfriend halfway through 9^th grade and it wasn’t because I had wider hips than Lisa Louis or because I hated the smell of deodorant or because I treated my blue sweat rag like that white boy, Linus, treated his blanket. It wasn’t even because Principal Jankins was heard over the intercom whispering to his wife, Ms. Dawsin-Jankins, that the back of my head was the flattest head he’d seen in 14 years as a principal. I never had a girlfriend because the last time I saw Shalaya Crump, she told me that she could love me if I helped her change the future … in a special way.

Shalaya Crump lived in Melahatchie, Mississippi across the street from Mama Lara’s house. My problem was that none of the 8^th, 9^th and 10^th grade girls who liked me wore fake Air Jordans with low socks or knew how to be funny when you didn’t expect it or had those sleepy, sunken eyes like Shalaya Crump. You never really knew what Shalaya Crump was gonna say and she always looked like she knew more than everybody around her, even more than the oldest grown-ups who acted like they knew more than Yoda’s daddy.

But really, the coolest thing about Shalaya Crump was that she made me feel like it was okay not to know stuff. She always asked these hard questions about the future but she didn’t treat me like dookie chunks when I didn’t get it right. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t ever been around someone whose not like that, but no one else in my whole life made me feel like it was okay not to know stuff like Shalaya Crump did.

Shalaya Crump claimed she could love me three months. It was the last day of my Christmas Break in January 3, 1985. It was right after she asked me if I thought warm new Coke would taste like condensed milk. Neither of us had even had the new Coke so I didn’t understand the question. I was about to leave Melahatchie, Mississippi and head back to Jackson. We were sitting still under a Magnolia tree in the Night Time woods, sharing the last bit of a can of sardines. I knew I was about to leave and I was kinda tired of not saying all of what I wanted to say to Shalaya Crump so I licked the sardine juice off my fingers, picked up my sweat rag and I just asked Shalaya Crump what I’d been waiting to ask her as long as I knew her.

“Shalaya Crump!” I said, “Break it down for me one more time. What do I have to do to make you love me?”

Shalaya Crump laughed and looked down and started digging into the red dirt with her dark bony thumbs that were covered in these Ring Pop rings. Right there is when Shalaya Crump wiped her greasy mouth with the collar of her purple Gumby t-shirt and said, “Why you gotta be so green light lately, City?”

“Green light?”

“Yeah, you never stop. What happened to the old you? Now, all you talk to me about is love. Plus, I already told you that I could love you if you found a way to be  …”

“To be what?” I interrupted her. “Skinny? If I lost weight in my hips like Prince and them? “

“No, boy. You think you’re fatter in your hips than you are. Just let me finish.”

“I look like I weigh 220 but I only weigh ‘bout 190. That’s the second most in the eighth grade, I know that. But I’m 5’9 so I could look even fatter if I was short as you …”

She looked at me without moving anything on her face, then laughed to herself and said,  “City, you ain’t as fat as you think. You ain’t nearly as fat as Human Beat Box or Rozier’s auntie. I’m saying …”

“What? What are you saying? I can take it. Be honest.”

Shalaya Crump looked me right in the eyes and grabbed the fingertips of my hands. “City,” she said, “if we could take a space ship to the future, and we ain’t know if we’d ever come back, would you go with me?” Shalaya Crump was always changing the subject to the future whenever she wanted to change it.

I swear I tried to come up with something smart, something that would make her think I was the skinny smart boy she wanted to spend the rest of my life with.  “Girl, in the future,” I told Shalaya Crump, “when we take that space ship, I think that Eddie Murphy is gonna do a PG movie. And, I don’t know, maybe we can go see it together in our space ship.” Shalaya Crump didn’t look too impressed. “And umm, I think that Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder and the Mississippi Mass Choir are gonna come together and sing a song at our wedding. Wait. Can we have nachos with the jalapenos? I’ll leave my sweat rag at home, for real.”

“City, stop.”

“And Stevie Wonder gon’ be smashing on the organ and eating all the nachos all nasty and smiling sideways like he always be doing, but ain’t nobody gonna care ‘cause everyone at our wedding is gonna know.”

“Know what?” she asked me.

“Know what love really looks like.”

“City!  Why you gotta be all short school bus? She paused and actually waited for an answer. I didn’t have one so she kept going. “You talking about the love and I’m talking about the future. What happened to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that one day you were just regular and we were playing Atari and hitting each other in the head with pine combs. Then, just like that, you get to stealing Bibles to impress me and wearing clean clothes and talking about love way too much. You can’t just be yourself?”

“I am being myself,” I told her. I knew that making Shalaya Crump love me wasn’t gonna be easy so I didn’t let her little speech throw me off. “You talk about me, but you didn’t used to always talk about the future like you do now. For real.” I looked in her eyes but she was looking at the ground. “Shalaya Crump, no offense, but you talk about the future way more than I talk about love.”

“But I’m not just talking,” she looked in eyes and wiped sardine off my lip. “That’s the difference. I’m asking about what you’d do with me in the future, like in the 2000’s. Would you come with me if I could get us there?” I just looked at Shalaya Crump and wondered how she could say I was being all short school bus when, seriously, she was the one always wondering about life in the 2000’s. No black kid in 1985 admitted to thinking about life in the 90’s and definitely not in the 2000’s, not even after Return of the Jedi came out. “Nevermind,” she said. “You don’t get it. ”

“I do get it,” I told her. “I get that I ain’t the one for you. My head is too flat and you think my sweat rag stinks.” I looked up and hoped she would interrupt me. She didn’t. “Anyway. You could never love me even if I was the skinniest, smartest boy in the South. I know that now.”

Shalaya Crump finally laughed and looked me right in my mouth. “City, I’ma ask you one more time to stop being so Young and the Restless. This is real life. I don’t know where you at sometimes.”  Shalaya Crump was the queen of taking a show or a person, place or thing and using it like an adjective. No one else in Jackson or Melahatchie or TV could do it like her.

She took her eyes off my mouth and kinda started looking at my hips. “Look here, I could love you if you found a way to help me change the future in, I don’t know … a special way. But I need to know if you’d come with me if you could, even if we couldn’t ever come back.”

Shalaya Crump was always saying weird stuff like that. One day, she called me on the phone long distance and said, “City, when I’m President, for real, I’m wanna make it illegal for parents to leave their kids with their grandparents for more than three days at a time. What you think?” I waited for her to laugh since my Ma was always sending me to stay with my Mama Lara for weeks at a time but she didn’t so I fake laughed and said, “You love you some Social Studies classes, don’t you?” I thought Shalaya Crump should have at least laughed at that but to tell you the truth, I kinda didn’t get what she was talking about. A few seconds later, when no one was saying a word, she started laughing all late. Only Shalaya Crump could laugh all late like that and not care about using up her Grandma’s long distance.

Anyway, I had a lot of questions about how to change the future and be special but my Ma drove in front of Shalaya Crump’s trailer right after she said that. She told me that it was time to pack and get ready to drive back up to Jackson. I left Shalaya Crump that Christmas Break and said, “I’m coming back to fly to the future with you for Spring Break, Shalaya Crump. And when I do, you better love me. Or at least like me a lot.”

“I already like you a lot,” she told me I got in the car. “Just be yourself and come back and help me.”

I promised myself right then and there that I’d find a way to be special and change the future when I came back down to Mississippi for Spring Break. In the mean time, no matter where I was in my dreams, I always found a way to kiss Shalaya Crump. Sometimes I’d be in a blue jungle or raggedy glass airplane, but there would always be a phone hanging out of tree or underneath an airplane seat. I’d find a phone and dial 1-4-1-1. When the operator answered, it was always Shalaya Crump and she always gave me the best directions to get to her. Once I got to where she was, every single time we kissed with a little tongue and pressed our fronts together until I woke up sore.

In real life, between January and March, I thought of all kinds of ways to show Shalaya Crump I was special and thought about the future. Sometimes I would think I had the perfect plan but after a few days, I knew that whatever I came up wasn’t good enough. Then, on the first day back down Melahatchie for Spring Break, I got lucky.

Long Division.

Old Morton Road, folks like to bathe, eat and put on clean clothes just to sit on the porch. When I woke up, I ate a cheese sandwich with some old Miracle Whip. Then I sat out on the porch in a yellow Yzod, some faded cut off jeans and the Magic Johnson Converse Weapons Mama Lara got me for Christmas. I called my Grandma “Mama Lara” because everyone else did. She said that boys weren’t supposed to call or knock on girl’s doors until they were seniors in high school so my plan was to wait on the porch all day if I had to until Shalaya Crump came outside.  That’s when I’d drop some new game on her.

Mama Lara’s husband was a man named, Lerthon Coldson. I never knew him. Shalaya Crump’s grandfather and Lerthon Coldson were best friends way back in the day. They disappeared 21 years ago in 1964 in this place we called The Shephard house. The Shephard house was in the middle of the Night Time woods and it was the only real house on Old Morton Road. Every other house was a trailer or shot-gun house lifted off the ground by some cinderblocks. The Shephard house was built right from the ground up, and it had lots of grass that looked like veins growing up all over the house. The house was huge and it was all one level, but it didn’t just look like a box. It looked kinda like a tic tac toe board from the outside with a huge roof in the middle.

Neither Shalaya Crump or me knew our grandfathers, but sometimes we’d wonder about how two grown men could go in a house one day, then never come back out. That wonder kinda brought us together. But even if our grandfathers didn’t disappear we still would’ve been close. Shoot, we’d been friends ever since I could remember having friends.

When Mama Lara came out to talk to me on the porch, she told me how her girlfriends were mad because they got group-rate tickets to see the Price is Right and she decided at the last minute not to go. Sitting right there talking to her, I realized that Mama Lara was the thickest Grandma in all of Melahatchie, Mississippi. I ain’t saying Mama Lara was perfect either, but even the annoying stuff about Mama Lara, like how she couldn’t cook like other Grandmas was  … well, kinda … thick.  And everything that was thick that Spring Break reminded me of Shalaya Crump, even though she was on the slim side.

Anyway, thick is the word that kept swirling around my head on the porch while I was waiting for Shalaya Crump. While I was out there, Mama Lara hugged me and held her hands on my hips.  “Jesus, my baby boy is a fat little man who almost made that Honor Roll,” she said, “Your granddaddy would not believe how fast you sprouting out.”

I sat there waiting for her to explain what she meant. I folded my arms across the top layer on my stomach as Mama Lara kept talking.

“Oh,” she said. “Naw, baby,” she grabbed my left hand. “Unfold your arms. I ain’t calling you fat in a bad way. What I’m saying is that your mind and mouth and your heart finally working right. You finally sprouting out.”

“Okay. You making me feel funny, Mama Lara.”

“You ready to move,” she said and looked me right in my eyes. “Yeah, you ready in mind, body and soul.” Mama Lara claimed she would’ve gone to California with her friends but she didn’t like driving with church folk in close spaces for more than one state. Plus, she only liked to travel on the weekend because she hated to miss the stories on CBS during the week. I loved Mama Lara more than life, but she was a little on the shady side, to tell you the truth. She was always disappearing at the weirdest times.

I looked across the street at Shalaya Crump’s trailer. Shalaya Crump was on Spring Break just like me, but I knew that she wasn’t going anywhere because her Grandmother had to work. Plus, she had never gone anywhere for break. Not once. She blamed it on her parents giving her away to her Grandma as soon as she was born. Shalaya Crump never met her real parents but she thought they would have wanted to at least travel to New Orleans or Alabama if she lived with them. She had only been out of the county one time, and that was for the State Science Fair finals in Jackson.  And even then, her Grandma didn’t let her spend the night.

Shalaya Crump looked so happy to see me and I tried hard not to look as happy as I was to see her. I started pulling my dingy Yzod up over my mouth and fake yawning. Shalaya Crump offered me a saltine and a sip of cold drank and then she gave me the kind of full body hug that made me taste melted Jello Pudding Pops.

I don’t know how to say this without making you hate me but Shalaya Crump smelled like she’d just come back from about six recesses right on top of one another. And at every recess, she must have been swimming naked in a sea of cube steak gravy. I didn’t mind her gravy funk though for three reasons. One — I hated the smell of deodorant. Two – Shalaya Crump’s funk smelled better than most girls’ best perfume. Three — I liked cube steak.

“How you been?” she asked me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“You really want to know?”

“I do!”

Shalaya Crump grabbed my hands and started walking towards the Night Time Woods. The Night Time Woods separated our trailers from Belhaven Street  where most of the white folks lived in their trailers. Grown folks always told us that no good could come from getting caught in those woods after dark because of this crazy family called the Shephards. I had heard that the Shephards house got burned down a number of times in the 1960’s by the klan. All the Shephards were dead now except for this one old woman we called the Shephard Witch. I had never really seen the Shephard Witch but I heard she lived in what was left of the nasty church right in the middle of the woods.

“I’m worried about the future, City.”

“Oh. That again.” I tried to say it like I was so surprised she was bringing it up. “I ain’t thought about it that much, but you think it’ll be fresh? Like, I wonder if it’s gonna be like moving sidewalks on the Jetsons and flying cars …”

“No, stupid. Like what if there’s this huge flood that kills people? Or if the water in the Gulf is completely black. Or if we have a black President and …”

“A black President?” I asked her. “And black water? And you say I’m stupid.”

“Just listen, okay? I mean if something you couldn’t believe happened like we got a black President or a flood swallowed the whole town, you would wanna know how that changed your life, wouldn’t you? Do you even see what I’m saying?”

Shalaya Crump was really asking me a question and you know what I was really doing? I was really half listening and half looking at her lips wondering if they ever got chappy. She had the kind of lips, especially the bottom one that always looked full of air and shiny, but not too shiny from all that gloss.

“Well, do you?” she said again.

“Yeah, I think so,” I told her. “You wonder what the future has to do with you if all these new things are happening. Like, everybody knows you’re extremely super bad and popular right now in 1985, but if you saw yourself in 1999, would you be like, ‘Oh lord. Who is that homely ass girl right there cleaning the mess out her toes?’ Or maybe things happening in the future would make other people so mad that they would want to make you be invisible.”

“Yeah, yeah, City!” she grabbed my forearm and looked me in the eyes. “That’s exactly what I mean. Kinda. What happens if we disappear in the future?”

It was like the smartest thing I’ve ever said and it was the first time I used the word “extremely” in a sentence but the sad part was that I didn’t really know what I meant. I just knew it sounded like something Shalaya Crump would want to hear. Ever since Shalaya Crump said that thing to me about the future over Christmas break, I thought a lot about it. Really, I thought more about smart stuff to say to Shalaya Crump about the future than I actually thought about the future. That thing I said about not knowing yourself if you saw yourself in the future and being invisible was something I’d been practicing for two months in my Mama’s bedroom mirror. It was all a set-up for my last part. “Hold up, remember when you said that you would love me? Wait, first, did you mean it?”

“If I said it, I meant it.”

“For real? That’s good. Well, ever since you told me that all I needed to do was be special and say something cool about the future, I kinda …”

Shalaya interrupted me. “City, speed that up. Why you gotta be long division? For real, you don’t have to tell me all the background. The story doesn’t have to go on and on and and on.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No,” Shalaya Crump said. “Everything with you is long division. You busy trying to show your all your work. Just get in and get out.”

“But my favorite part of long division is the work,” I told her. Shalaya Crump had thrown my game off. “I hate the answer. I do. We had this conversation already. You said you hated the answer, too.”

“I hate the answer because I don’t believe the answer. Just get on with it, City. Please!”

“Okay, well, remember when I stole those Bibles over Christmas?”

“Yeah, I do. We already talked about this.”

“Do you remember what you said to me when I tried to convince you in wasn’t me?”

“I said that I know it’s you because stealing Bibles takes a whole different kind of crazy than Melahatchie crazy.”

“Right! And you said that you liked that I was Jackson crazy. That meant that I was crazy enough to go around stealing pleather green Bibles from folk’s trailers just to impress you. Well, I’m still Jackson crazy, baby. That means I’m crazy enough to fly to the future with you, too …” I acted like my shoes were untied. “But when I do, I want to know what I get.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if we flew to the future with you, I hope that maybe you’d want to, you know, kiss a nigga.”

“City,” she started laughing. “Why are you calling yourself ‘a nigga’? You don’t even talk like that.”

“Whatever,” I said. “You know, maybe kiss a nigga on the lips! With a little bit of that tongue.”

“City, just talk like yourself! Saying ‘a nigga’ a lot ain’t gonna make me love you.”

Shalaya Crump was no one to argue with about stuff like that. If she said you were saying “a nigga” too much, you probably were.

“Aw, girl! I wasn’ even tryn’ to make you love me,” I tried to correct myself.

“Yes, you were. Now you doing it again.”

“No, I ain’t.”

You should have heard the way I said, “I wasn’ even tryin’ to make you love me.” I made “wasn’t” and “trying” one syllable each. And I sucked my teeth after I said it and rolled my eyes, too.

“When you first came down here, you didn’t even say ‘a nigga’ a lot,” Shalaya Crump said.

“I said ‘nigga’ sometimes.”

“Yeah, but a little bit is normal. Now when you trying to too hard to make me like you, you say stuff like ‘hard on a nigga’ or ‘worrying a nigga’ or ‘grinding on a nigga’s nerves.’ I laugh when you do it, but …”

“But what?”

“But that’s just not you. I know you, City,” she told me. “You was all scared of flies and chicken when you first came down here. Now, you sucking on your teeth and wanting me to ‘kiss a nigga?’” She started laughing and walking deeper behind some baby sticker bushes. “Just be you.”

I knew I should have said okay, but I always had to have the last word, even with Shalaya Crump. “You know what, Shalaya Crump? You don’t leave enough room for folks to change. I’m serious. You always gotta control everything. How come no one else can change but you? Maybe I changed how I talk from listening to you.”

“Whatever, boy. The point is I ain’t giving out no kisses like peppermints. How ‘bout that? Now can you shut up and let me show you something? Please.”

We stepped into the cold Night Time Woods together. From inside the woods, the purple grey of the road cut through the green just enough that it was kinda the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. Any other color against that green wouldn’t have been so pretty, but this purple grey and green was more than pretty. This purple green and grey made me know that Shalaya Crump and me were meant to be kissing soon.

Future Tense.

I grabbed Shalaya Crump’s hand as soon as we got deep in the woods.  In six years of knowing Shalaya Crump, this was the first time I had ever held her hand and had her lead me somewhere. We had held hands before when we were in Sunday School and I tried to tell her that her hands were the sweatiest girl hands in the country. But this time was different. Shalaya Crump held on and even when I loosened my grip, she held on even tighter. I felt like we were in our own version of Thriller.

“City, I can’t do this by myself any more. I need you to come with me.”

“Need me to what?”

“To come with me.”

“Where?”

Shalaya Crump knelt down next to this rusty handle that was covered in pine needles and leaves. The handle looked like the handle of this rusted brown iron Mama Lara used to keep her doors open. When Shalaya Crump pulled the handle, this hole inside the ground opened up. The door to the hole had rusty handles on both sides so someone inside the hole could pull the door shut if they needed to. Inside the hole were these dusty steps that led straight down to red clay. Shalaya Crump stepped half down in the hole in the ground and looked up at me. All that was left outside the hole was her boobs, her head and her arms. She looked back at me and said, “Please, City. Don’t let me go by myself this time. I need to show someone.”

If anyone else in the world, including my Ma or Mama Lara were boob-deep into a hole in the ground, asking me to follow them into secret hole in the ground I would have run away and called the police.

But standing right there, watching Shalaya Crump want me to help her so bad made me ask myself when was the next time I could count on Shalaya Crump inviting me anywhere dark, small and secret with her. I figured the worst thing that could happen is that we could get covered in worms or maybe it would be too hot in the hole and my sack would start to stink.  But worms didn’t bite, I told myself and Shalaya Crump’s underarms were already funky as six recesses.

The hole wasn’t the easiest to get in if you had wide hips but after a while, I was in. “Now what?” I asked her. “Does my breath stank like stale Miracle Whip?”

Shalaya Crump grabbed my hand with her left hand and grabbed the handle with the other hand. “Don’t let go,” she said, “until I open the door again, okay?”  Shalaya Crump pulled the secret door closed and darkness swallowed everything you were supposed to see.

“Your eyes closed, Shalaya?”

“Naw,” she said. “Yours?”

“Yeah.” I kept them closed for about ten seconds and tried to find Shalaya Crump’s hand. “What about now? Your eyes still open?”

“Yeah, City. You should open yours, too.”

“Mine are open now,” I lied. “I ain’t scared of the dark.”

“Okay,” Shalaya Crump said. “Just be yourself when we open it. I need you to be yourself and don’t say a word to anyone.”

Shalaya Crump pushed the secret door open after about seven more seconds. Just like that, the woods were green like the Hulk’s chest instead of green like a lime. It felt colder when we stepped out of the hole, too. Took a while for my eyes to adjust to the brightness.  You could see bigger slithers of dark road from where we were in the woods, like the woods had gone on a diet. The road didn’t seem like a road anymore either. It looked like a tar black slab of bacon that was way fatter than it was before we went in.

“What’s wrong with Old Ryle Road?” I asked her.

“It’s new,” she said. She looked at my face hoping that I’d act like I understood. I didn’t. “This ain’t the same woods we know, City.”

“It ain’t new,” I sucked my teeth. “How could woods be new in like 5 minutes?” I looked around and saw the Shephard house. Then I turned and looked at Shalaya Crump who was watching me watch everything around us. “Why you watching me like that?”

Shalaya Crump didn’t answer me. “You smell that?” I asked her and started coughing. The air in the woods was heavier than it had been. I always wanted my Mama to get me one of those plastic asthma bottles like some of the white kids on TV, but she said I never needed one. “I think I got asthma, girl. I’m serious.” She looked at me and forced a fake laugh. “What happened all the trees? And that house,” I pointed towards the Shephard house. “What happened to it?”

I started running towards what I thought was the Shephard house and Shalaya Crump ran behind me. It was the same shape of the Shephard house but it had “Melahatchie Community Center” on the front door.

“City, calm down. Please. You have to be calm. Don’t be so loud. They’re gonna hear us.”

“Who?”

I looked through the woods towards Old Ryle Street and saw a crazy blue Monte Carlo with the goldenest wheels I’ve ever seen in my life. Loud music was coming from the Monte Carlo. The rattling of a license plate was in rhythm with a deep boom over and over again. It was the craziest, best sounding sound I’d ever heard in my life.

“You hear that? What is it? Is that some new Run DMC or Herbie Hancock? Who is that?”

“Be quiet, City.”

“How you gonna tell me to be quiet and you got me going in a hole feeling crazy? What’s wrong with you, girl?”  I grabbed her by her shoulders. “Are we on that show, The Candid Camera?”

Shalaya Crump pushed my hands off. “Don’t ever push me.” She looked me in the eyes. “Ever! I don’t care if you feel crazy or not. All we can do is watch, okay? We can’t let them know we’re here. And it’s not ‘The’ Candid Camera. It’s just Candid Camera. Shhh. Listen.”

We stood there in the middle of what kinda looked the Night Time Woods, looking at what kinda looked like Old Ryle Street. I tried to block out anything other than the sounds of black birds chirping and stiff leaves blowing up on our feet and squirrels digging around in trees.

“Yeah, shoatee. Call me,” the voice said from the street. “I’ma keep my phone on.” But there was no one with him.  The man was talking to himself.

“Is this a dream?” I asked Shalaya Crump. “Is it? It is, right? Well, I’m bout to wake up myself up.” I took my sweat-rag out and started trying to pop myself in the middle of the forehead, hoping I would wake myself up.

Shalaya Crump took my rag from me and told me to shut up. I heard more rattling boom coming from another strange truck with all black windows and white hubcaps. I looked at Shalaya Crump and the confusion made me start tearing up right in front of her face. I tried to wipe my eyes with my sweat rag but it was too late. I was so Young and the Restless. Shalaya Crump was right.

“City,” she breathed all heavy and acted all weird like she was on a soap opera, “You know how I asked you not to show your work before?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, don’t ask me to show my work when I tell you this, okay?”

“Okay!” I wiped my eyes and tried to get the boogers out with the same wipe.

“This is 2011, City and …”

“What?”

“Let me finish. I’m scared because, well, I think I’m dead. Can you help me?”

I waited for her to say more, or at least look at me with a goofy grin. But she didn’t. Not at all.

“Shalaya Crump, I want you to show all your work now. All of it. I don’t even care if it’s long division.”

Baize …

Instead of showing her work, Shalaya Crump took me by the hand and led me to edge of woods where the sticker bushes met the shallow ditch that separated the woods from the Old Ryle Road.

“You can’t talk to anyone, City. I only come out here at night when can’t no one could see me,” she said. “I keep trying to find myself.”

I wanted to ask Shalaya Crump all kinds of questions, but across the street, in what should have been the house next to Mama Lara’s house was a girl sitting on the porch with a tiny silver brief case on her lap. Down the road, I saw that Mama Lara’s trailer wasn’t even there any more. The girl on the porch had her head was down, except for every now and then when she’d raise it to drink from this huge bottle of Sprite. Every time she took a swig, she looked towards the woods. It looked like she was talking to herself and playing with a calculator.

“Where did that girl get that big ol’ bottle of Sprite?”

“Everybody dranks big bottles here.”

I looked harder at the girl and looked over at Shalaya Crump hoping she would give me something more than she was giving me. “Well, why is she sitting on Mama Lara’s porch?”

“Does that look like your Mama Lara’s porch, City?”

“Well, kinda. I mean, not really. I mean it does, but it doesn’t. But …” I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say. Shalaya Crump was right that the place didn’t exactly look like my Mama Lara’s any more. It looked like what my Mama Lara’s place would look like if it had been in a few tornados.  It made me feel funny that Shalaya Crump didn’t say anything about how the girl sitting out on the porch, at least from where we were, looked almost just like her except this girl was thicker with longer shinier braided hair, maybe a bigger nose and boobs that looked like the balled up fists of a seven year old.

“Who is that?” I asked her. “That girl looks a little bit like you.”

Shalaya Crump didn’t answer and I got tired of asking her questions she wouldn’t answer so I started across the street towards my Mama Lara’s porch.

As I got closer to the porch, the girl on the porch closed the silver briefcase and stood up. She put a big red dictionary on top of it. The briefcase was one of those weird things you only see on TV. When she stood up, you expected her to say something. Or you expected me to say something, but I didn’t say nothing and she didn’t say nothing. I just looked at her for probably 10 whole seconds. Then she finally said,  “Excuse you! Who you looking for?”

I walked closer and realized that Shalaya Crump had the same eyes and face shape of the girl, but this girl was a little lighter than her and she had really long legs and arms like a penguin.  Shalaya Crump had short hair where you couldn’t really see her forehead because the hair curled over it. Up close, you could see that this girl’s forehead was one of biggest, greasiest you’d have ever seen in my life.

“You might wanna check yourself, don’t you think?” the girl said. “You think you can just walk up on folks because you can dress?”

“Um, I can dress?”

“Mayne, where you get them Converse? I like that little hipster white boy thang you got going on.”

“You do? I got these for Christmas.”

“What’s your name?”

I just looked at her and made up a name, “Voltron. But you can call me T-Ron,” I told her. I never told white folks or strangers my real name, not even in 1985, and I sure wasn’t gonna tell it to some greasy head girl who looked like a fake Shalaya Crump.

The girl rolled her eyes then opened up her little brief case and sat back down. “Okay T-Ron, my name’s Baize,” she said and did something behind the briefcase for about a minute before talking to me. “Look mayne, I don’t mind you being on my porch, but you gotta quit looking like you wanna steal my rhymes.”

“Rhymes? What kind of rhymes? Girl, what’s wrong with you? Why you keep calling me ‘mayne’?”

“That’s what we say.”

“How do you even spell that?” I asked her. “Just be yourself.”

“You don’t even know me,” the girl said. “And I don’t know you either. Mayne! But I know how you look. And you look like the type to wanna steal somebody’s rhymes off their computer. Plus, with a name like T-Ron, what do you expect?”

“That’s a computer?”

“Yeah, what else would it be?”

“I thought it was a silver briefcase.”

“A briefcase?”

“Yeah, for children.”

She laughed loud and hard. “You trying to spit game?” she asked me. “What does that even mean? Show me a kid who uses briefcases. I know you’ve heard of a lap top computer.”

“A lab top computer?”

“Lap. Lap, mayne. See,” she picked the computer up and put it back on her lap. “This is a computer and this, see this?  This is my lap. Stop fronting. Why you playing stupid? You go to school around here, don’t you?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Then you must’ve gotten one last year with the last of that Katrina money they sent us. Don’t tell me your Mama and them sold it?”

I was thinking of how to answer her question as I heard a man’s voice in conversation behind me. I turned to the road as a taller man with a big brown t-shirt was walking down the street talking to himself.

“How come everyone around here likes to talk to themselves?”

“He’s on the phone,” the girl said. “Why you trippin’?”

“What do you mean? I can see he’s talking to himself.”

“Look, you ain’t gonna get loud with me on my own porch.  That’s Bluetooth, mayne. I know it’s played out. They think they styling with the little headsets just like you think you think you styling with that outfit,” she paused, “and that curly shag.”

I looked across Old Morton Road at Shalaya Crump and motioned for her to come on over. “My friend is over in those woods and I want her to see this all this. Is it okay if she comes over and see Katrina’s computer?”

“No,” she said. “Why didn’t she come with you?”

“No?”

“Your ‘friend’,” she made these quotations marks in the air, “is a girl, right?”

“Unh huh!”

“Oh, okay. Yeah, well, no. I’ve seen her sneaking around here at night. She looks shady to me.”

I walked over beside her and saw that the computer really wasn’t a brief case for kids at all. There was a keyboard and a TV screen, and on the TV screen were all these colorful images and boxes and words. I couldn’t blink. Or breathe. Or move.

“Don’t think I’m hating on your girlfriend over there ‘cause I’m not. I just saw this strange white boy over in those woods yesterday and I let him use my computer. He was dressed like one of those white children who get home-schooled so I gave him one of my daddy’s old shirts.”

“Wait, what?” I asked. I heard her but I didn’t really hear her. All I could do was watch and listen to my heartbeat as the girl moved her fingers across the letters.

“Yeah, he told me he was looking for more clothes that matched the time.”

“Matched the time?”

“I told him to go downtown to the Salvation Army.” While she was talking, she pushed something below the little square thing on the computer and in a second, the screen flipped on to what looked like the front page of a newspaper. The headline on the newspaper was “The Obamas Get Another Family Dog.”

“Who is that?”

“Who is who? The dog? I don’t think they named it yet.”

“Not the dog. The man and the woman and those girls. Who are they? And how are you watching some TV on your computer?”

“Stop playing. You think the oldest one cute? All the boys in my class stay falling out over that girl.”

I looked at the bigger girl and was kinda amazed at how cute she was. “I mean, yeah, she kinda cute but who are these folks and why does that one look like Spock with black lips?”

“What do you mean? We cared about dumb white dogs when the President was white. Why we can’t make a big deal about dogs when the President is black?”

“That’s the President?”

“Yes!”

“And this is a computer and a TV and a newspaper all on that screen?”

“Yes, boy.”

“And what is that?”

I pointed to a little rectangle on the side of the newspaper where someone named UAintNoStunna815 wrote Smh @ you goin to that Spell Off and someone named YeahTheyReal717 wrote TTYL LOL@ cute herb on my porch.

“Instant messaging,” the girl said, “but that ain’t none of your business.”

“Wait. And people here talk on phones with no hands?”

“Voltron!” It was weird because even though my name wasn’t Voltron, it made my insides tingly to hear her call me by what she thought was my name. “Why are you acting like you stuck in the 90’s?”

“What year is this?” I asked her. “Be for real.”

“2011, crack head. You got that new swine flu?”

A voice from inside the house interrupted my good feelings, “Baize, come on in here and set this table. We got to practice them words for that Spell Off.”

“That’s my Great Grandma.” Baize looked down at my hips. “She wants me to come in and study for the spelling bee tomorrow. It’s over in the community center. You going? Want me to ask her if you can eat with us? I ain’t gonna lie; her cooking is wack but she can fry some fish.”

As the screen door slammed close, I got closer to the lab top. Right next to the computer and the dictionary was this little black thing that looked like some kind of special black calculator. If it wasn’t sitting next to that computer, I would have been super interested in it, but it was kinda boring compared to that lap top computer.

I didn’t know what to focus on when I looked at the computer, the machine carrying the pictures and the words or the pictures and the words. I had never felt anything like that before. I just wanted to talk to someone who would also understand none of what I was seeing and all of what I was feeling. And that someone was across the road peeking her slow/fast blinking her big eyes through green and orange and brown trees.

I picked the lap computer up with two hands underneath like it was a tray and looked towards the hole. Then I put the calculator in my mouth and jumped off the porch, heading back to the woods.

When I got in, I gave Shalaya Crump the calculator and we both ran towards to the hole.  Shalaya Crump got in first and I followed her. With just my head outside the door, I could see Baize sprinting towards us. She was screaming, “You don’t understand! Keep the phone. Just leave the computer. Please don’t leave  …”

But it was too late. The secret door was closed. The computer, the calculator, Shalaya Crump and me were in it … and we were headed back to 1985.

Breathe.

When the door opened up, you couldn’t see Old Morton Road at all, but you could see the fuzzy glow of the streetlight. It was almost night. Shalaya Crump was next to me breathing louder than I’d ever heard her breathe. I had never even seen her tired in all the years I knew her. She actually had the best wind of anyone I’d ever met.

“Look at this. That girl, her name is Baize. Did you ever meet her before? She told me this is called a lap top computer from Katrina.” I angled the screen towards her so she could see the pictures and the newspaper and the black president, but the screen was blank except for little shapes along the bottom. “I don’t know why it’s not working. I swear when I was on the porch, there was all this stuff on the screen.”

Shalaya Crump turned and walked off. “I’m going home, City,”

“Wait. Why? Why’d you stay in the words? You talked to that girl before? She said she’s seen you before. She’s like a fatter version of you, but not really …”

“You like her, don’t you?”

“Like who?”

“I know you do.”

“That girl? Baize?” For some reason, I thought Shalaya Crump was really asking me if I liked the girl, so I thought about it and told her exactly what I thought.

“I don’t like her, but she didn’t get on my nerves that much either. She had these big circle earrings and there was something strange about how she talked. She kept talking about rhymes and saying the word ‘mayne.’ Her face was bumpy, too. And then she liked how I dressed. She looked like you, except her hair was way longer than yours and some other stuff. Maybe I liked her but not that much. I think she knows more than I know and I guess I think I know more than her about other stuff, too. You understand?”

“Bye City.”

Shalaya Crump walked off in front of me out of the woods. I followed her down Old Morton Road talking the entire time about the girl and the lap computer and asking her did we really just jump to 2011. We must have looked crazy to anyone who saw us. Well, I know I must have looked crazy holding that silver lap top computer and talking behind someone who obviously didn’t wanna talk to me.

When I got in front of Mama Lara’s house, I said bye to Shalaya Crump but she just went to her trailer without saying a word to me. I would have cared if it was any other day. But this wasn’t any other day. This was the day that I had a lap top computer from 2011 all to myself.

When I got in the house and started playing with the computer. I moved the little arrow thing around the screen. It was like playing video games except I didn’t know how you were supposed to lose or win.

After a while I pushed on something called “Word” and a blank screen opened up. After you pushed “Word” there was something called “File” and at the bottom of “File” were all these sections that said Storm Rhyme #1, #2, #3, #4 and all the way through 10. When I pushed on Storm Rhyme #4, some writing appeared right in the center of the screen:

… Not your everyday rapper

but everyday is a haze.

Who took the moons outta June?

Come take the pain outta Baize.

My big fat beautiful mouth

was born right here in the South

where Ma and Daddy, they went swimming,

tryin to find a way out.

But Katrina was hummin’

and my folks, they was runnin.

Ears open for God but she

ain’t telling them nothin’.

Now Melahatchie ain’t exactly what

We thought it was.

Blues for days, dark mayonnaise

and kinda country …

Uhh …

You wanna touch us?

Oooh …

You really fucked us!

Booo …

I had a hunch that you’d try to crush us

so I grabbed my tool.

And now you’re scared of a dike?

This ain’t a brick, it’s a mic.

You went for yours, growled a little

and I was scared of you.

Sike …

Matter fact you suck,

and quite wack, you duck.

Now quack, or cluck

cuz Baize don’t give a …

Sometimes you read the stuff people write and have a hard time thinking the person would write the stuff you read. That’s because most people try to write like they’re writing for a bad Honors English teacher or a librarian even when there’s no Honors English teachers or librarians around. The only honors class I was ever in was English and my teacher, Ms. Shivers, said everything you wrote had to be believable. It’s more important that it’s believable than it’s smart, she told us. “Make the reader believe what seems unbelievable. Make them fall in love with your words. Make characters come alive.” English teachers were always talking about “the reader.” Whoever “the reader” was, it never seemed like me. How could you make someone do something they didn’t want to do, especially something as hard as making a character the reader didn’t know come alive?

Anyway, even though I couldn’t figure out how the words were supposed to sound when Baize rapped them, I could still hear Baize saying the words to Storm Rhyme #4 in my head. I was “the reader” and I believed everything she said about someone named Katrina. By the end, I hated Katrina just as much as she did.

But I knew no Honors English teacher or librarian was “the reader” for Storm Rhyme #4.  And it wasn’t just because of the cussing or rhymes. It was mainly because of those dots she used. She used dot-dot-dot to start the rhyme, and she used dot-dot-dot in the middle of the rhyme and she used dot-dot-dot at the end of rhyme. And it just seemed kinda perfect to me. I’d seen those dot-dot-dots before but I never really knew what they meant or how folks were supposed to use them. I used them once on a test when I didn’t know the answer and the Ms. Arnold wrote, “Citoyen, you really should be ashamed.” That made me think that dot-dot-dot must mean way more than I thought. I never asked Mama or Mama Lara because it was the kind of thing they’d tell me to look up myself.

I had never really even been allowed to spend much time on a typewriter or a big computer but typing on a lab top computer was even better. Whatever you typed showed up on the screen and if you didn’t like what you wrote, you could erase it and rewrite it. After you rewrote it enough, it was like your words were famous. Even if you had the best pencil-writing style in the world like Shalaya Crump, no matter how good the writing looked, it never looked famous. And if you erased too much and the paper was all smudged, you just looked dumb, poor and messy. But the words on Baize’s computer screen looked famous like words in a book, even if you wrote something that you would never see in a book like Storm Rhyme #4.

I started typing a lot and erasing a lot. It took me about ten minutes to come up with:

My name is City. Shalaya Crump says I’m like long division.

Then, out of the blue, I realized something. Shalaya Crump was jealous of me liking that girl, Baize. I guess I should have known it earlier but I never thought I could do anything to make Shalaya Crump jealous. Just thinking about her being jealous made me feel so good about myself.

If she was jealous, I knew it would only be a matter of time before she was kissing me. My plan was to keep her jealous for a little bit, then prove to her that I liked her way more than Baize by saying all these things that I liked better about Shalaya Crump than Baize. A few minutes after that, I knew we’d be kissing. Once I got kissing Shalaya Crump back in my mind, I couldn’t think of anything else. It was always like that. So I typed and erased about her for hours until I went to sleep. At the end of the night, all I had was one good sentence and I used the dot-dot-dots in it too. It felt like the right thing to do:

I never had a girlfriend because the last time I saw Shalaya Crump she told me that she could love me if I helped her change the future … in a special way.

Quarter Back.

In the morning, I left my computer under my bed and came out on the porch. After Mama Lara disappear down the road for her morning walk, I went back and brought my lap top computer on the porch. I knew Mama Lara wouldn’t let me keep it if she saw it. She’d think I’d stolen it, which I did. But I still wanted everybody who walked or rode down Old Morton Road to see that I had something they could never have. I also wanted to put my plan in motion with Shalaya Crump as soon as I saw her.

I’d been typing on the computer and waiting on the porch for Shalaya Crump for 30 minutes when I saw a person out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head towards the Night Time Woods and saw the person jump back into the woods. I was never scared of those woods or The Shephard Witch, to tell you the truth. I kinda didn’t believe in witches or magic, plus I figured it was just Shalaya Crump trying to play me for a fool. She was good at that.

When I got all the way in the woods, it felt like one of those dark dreams where you’re watching yourself. I pulled my sweat rag out the small of my back, closed the lap top computer and got ready to pop a ghoul in the forehead if they stepped to me. I was never one of those kids who was afraid to pop you in your forehead. If you hurt me or mines or talked about my Mama Lara, you were probably gonna get busted in your mouth with a fist or popped in your forehead with a sweat rag.  But I also wasn’t one of those boys who could hit you in your forehead for a minute straight and never feel bad about it. I could hit you in your forehead for about fourteen seconds then I’d start thinking the person I was hitting was a baby rabbit with tender skull, even if the person was bigger than Andre the Giant. And I can’t even lie. I could pop a rag better than anyone I knew, but I couldn’t always pop my sweat rag like a professional. If you gave me ten shots at your forehead, I could pop it good probably about 6 times, and that’s with the rag being extra soggy.

As soon as I took about three steps into the woods, I had to pee really bad. One of the best things about coming down to Melahatchie for Spring Break was that I got to pee outside without getting in trouble. I found a dusty area near the Shephard house where I could try to spell my name.

“Hey. Hey!” a voice behind me said. “What are you holding?” The voice sounded like it was coming from behind a box fan.  The voice was deep and froggy. I didn’t even plan on turning around while I was peeing, but I did just to see the face that was carrying a froggy voice like that.

The head of the white boy talking to me looked like a boulder on a q-tip stick. I’m serious.  The only white boy I’d ever seen with an ‘fro was this old dude on PBS who made you fall asleep and dream about floating while he painted the finest in bushes and clouds. But this white boy had the same kind of ‘fro. He wore a puffy blood-red sweatshirt with bleach stains on it and Fresh across the front in green letters. The sweatshirt was way too big for him but he had it tucked in these nice sky blue pants that weren’t really jeans, but weren’t slacks either. I always wanted a pair of pans like that.

I angled myself so he wouldn’t see my penis while I was crossing the T in my name.

“I ain’t trying to see your Johnson,” the boy said. “Relax.” I shot my eyes down to his feet and these glowy green fat laces in his All Stars. “What you looking at?” he asked me. “You some kind of queer? If you are, you are. I just want to know.”

“Naw, man,” I told him. “Um, I like booties. I like girl booties.” It sounded so corny when it came out.

“You like booties? Seriously?” He knelt down and brushed his shoes off. “Where you from, buddy?”

“Jackson, man. I’m down here for Spring Break because Folks and Vice Lords stay shooting folks too much in Jackson.” I was so nervous and I had no idea why. “What about you, with that fro? White boys ain’t supposed to have ‘fros like that, in case you didn’t know.”

“I ain’t white. I’m from a little bit of everywhere,” the boulderhead boy said.  He started coughing and eyeing my lap top computer. “Where’d you get that thing in your hands anyway?” He wiped his mouth. “What’s the date?”

The white boy had the chappiest bottom lip I’d ever seen in my life. It looked like frozen frosting was just sleeping on his bottom lip. And his nose was closer to his mouth than it should have been so it looked like he was trying to smell something. The skin on his face was so Saran Wrap tight that the head and jaw bones damn near burst right through his skin.  And I hate to gross you out, but there were a few scabbed up scars on the top-right side of his face that jutted out like raisins. I kinda wished I had some scabs like that on my face so I could pick them off before I went to bed.

“This is a lap top computer,” I told him. “What’s your name?”

“Evan,” he told me. “That’s what they tell me.”

“They? What’s your last name?”

“Altshuler.”

“Like aw shucks?” I asked him. “Man, your name, it don’t make a lick of sense. It’s 1985. March. You from the future?”

“Naw, I ain’t from no future,” he pointed past the Shephard house, towards Belhaven Street. “I’m Jewish.”

Evan’s eyes opened up big after he said that, like he expected me to say something mean or act surprised. I was kinda surprised because I never met a person who said they were Jewish before, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t have a clue what that really meant. I had heard about Hitler starving Jewish people on TV and how some Jewish people got hanged and drowned around Melahatchie back in the 1960’s trying to help black people vote, but that was it.  So I didn’t know if I was supposed to love him for being Jewish even though he just looked like a white boy to me.

“Can I ask you a question?” I tried to change subjects and come back with a question that might make him stop looking at me so hard. “Is it okay if I ask you why you look so sick and dusty? How old are you?”

He looked at the ground mumbled, “I’m fifteen. And I told you that I ain’t white.”

“My name is Voltron,” I told him. “Folks call me T-ron.”

“No it’s not,” he said. “You’re name’s Citoyen. Folks call you City.”

“What did you just say?” I asked him.

“I know who you are. Your name is Citoyen Coldson. You lost your Grandfather in these woods. Right over there.”

“I gotta go, man,” I told him. “Don’t take it the wrong way, I just don’t like the looks of your eyes and sometimes I pop what I don’t like in the forehead.”

“Citoyen, you need my help,” the boy said. “I need to show you something.”

“What?”

“The past.”

“The past what?”

“I need to show you the past,” he said. “Listen to me. We can change it.”

I couldn’t figure out how Jewish Evan Altshuler knew anything about our Grandpas disappearing. It was something that only the truly craziest of white characters on TV would say. And one of the few things that I did actually listen to my Mama, Mama Lara and Shalaya Crump say was that truly crazy-white-folks-talk always came before truly crazy-white-folks-action. And Shalaya Crump always told me if you popped someone who was white and crazy, you could go to jail for life.

“Oh really,” I said. “The past, huh? I hear that. That’s really nice. And um, I want you to show me that past, but I’m gonna go home first and eat me a bologna sandwich. You want me to bring you one?”

I started walking backwards towards the Old Ryle Road, but Evan walked towards me. “I’m serious, City. You need to see this. We can stop it. Come back with me. I know it sounds out of this world. I know, but I need your help. And you need mine. That house,” he pointed to the Shephard House. “It used to be a Freedom School. You know what a Freedom School?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I lied, “I know.”

“They burned that house down with our families in it. Yours and mine and they took their bodies over to the water.”

“Yeah, I hear you,” I told him. “So you want Miracle Whip on your bologna sandwich, right?”

And with that, I turned towards the road and sprinted like Carl Lewis until I was all the way out of the Night Time Woods and back on the porch of my Mama Lara’s house, hands on my knees, huffing and puffing.

I wasn’t on the porch longer than 2 minutes wondering how much of what Jewish Evan Altshuler said was true before Shalaya Crump opened the door to her trailer and started walking towards Mama Lara’s house back into the Night Time woods that I’d just come back from. She had a package of saltines in one hand and a cold drank in the other.

Shalaya Crump looked across the road at me. I thought she’d come over to my porch but she walked down the road and hopped in the woods. I figured Shalaya Crump was gonna go in and wait 5 minutes for me to follow her. When she saw that I didn’t come after her, she’d come talk to me on my porch about the trip and my lap top computer and how she was jealous of the girl with the greasy forehead. That didn’t happen. She never came back out.

And the worst thought in the history of thoughts just laid down in my mind. What if Jewish Evan Altshuler and Shalaya Crump fall in love with each other because they’re time-traveling superheroes?

That thought stayed there in my mind for four minutes and some seconds until I remembered that I’d never ever heard Shalaya Crump say anything nice about white boys in the 7 years I knew her.

But still, I wondered.

Gell us.

I walked back in the woods 20 minutes later to find Shalaya Crump sitting on the ground with her legs crossed Indian Style. She and Jewish Evan Altshuler were messing around with that calculator-looking thing I’d stolen from Baize.

“It’s a phone,” Shalaya Crump told me as she started pushing more buttons. “I realized it last night, but I can’t get no reception.” She put it up to her ear and kept saying “Hello” but no one answered. “I know it’s a phone,” she said to both of us like we all knew each other.

Jewish Evan Altshuler started talking to Shalaya Crump about about something called a “Bell Boy” that he had heard of before and “area to area calling.” Shalaya Crump tried to explain to the kid what buttons were on a phone. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make him understand how long distance, beepers and answering machines worked.

“Explain it to me one more time,” he said. “Just the part about how you can tell someone you’re not home when you’re not home and they can leave a message even though you’re not home. I don’t get it.”

I would’ve been laughing at Evan but I wasn’t thinking about him being a moron. I was thinking of how I had never seen Shalaya Crump sit like that. She was leaning back on her hands and when she wasn’t talking about phones, she was just listening to him. Kneeling right next to her on one knee was that sick-looking Jewish Evan Altshuler. I couldn’t figure out how they ended up in that position, with him kneeling and her sitting. Sounds small to you, but I kept wondering what could Jewish Evan Altshuler have said to make Shalaya Crump sit on the ground like that and just listen.

“I guess I need to see the answering machine to understand it. But listen, we can save all three of them but I reckon I’ma need help,” I heard him tell Shalaya Crump. I walked closer to them with my computer in my arms. Jewish Evan Altshuler looked up at me.

“What are ya’ll doing?”

“We need you, too,” Evan said. “We decided we’re going back. Right now.”

“Save who?”

“You know that hole we went in yesterday?” Shalaya Crump asked me. “It’s not just a time tunnel to the future, City. We think it’s one in 1985, that one we went to in 2011 and that one that we ain’t even seen to 1964.” Shalaya Crump looked over at Jewish Evan Altshuler. “He said he’s been there already. That’s where he’s from.”

“This white boy is lying to you,” I told her.

I was getting so tired of Jewish Evan Altshuler. It messed with me that Jewish Evan Altshuler knew my name and knew that my Grandfather disappeared in those woods. But that’s not what messed with me most. When I looked in Evan’s face and eyes, I couldn’t see fifteen, fourteen or thirteen-years-old. And that was weird. When I looked at Shalaya Crump’s fourteen year-old face and eyes, I could see how I thought she looked during every year of her life. I swear that I could look at Shalaya Crump and see her as a 4-year-old girl straight running Head Start.

And thinking about it right there, and watching her, I understood that it was Shalaya Crump’s eyes that showed me her age more than the face. Sometimes, Shalaya Crump’s eyes stayed big as dirty silver dollars and they didn’t blink for minutes. When they finally blinked, you would think you were in a tiny bathtub with a ton of humming birds ‘cause they blinked so fast. Other times, Shalaya Crump’s eyes looked right at me, blinked slow and made me feel like I was jumping off of a space mountain onto trampoline of clouds drawn by that other white boy painter with a ‘fro. It’s hard to explain but I swear a lot of it had something to do with Shalaya Crump’s eyes and how slow and fast they blinked.

But if I saw all that in Shalaya Crump’s eyes, you’d think it would be pretty easy to see something like that in Jewish Evan Altshuler’s eyes, too. But this dude’s eyes were so tired, so droopy and so blue that it was hard for me to believe that he was fifteen, ever. I mean, he looked thirteen or maybe even ten in the body, but his face looked like it had died a long time ago. Jewish Evan Altshuler looked like he had spent all fifteen of his years getting punched in the eyes by cold-blooded ghosts with the boniest fists you’d ever seen in your life. And I couldn’t figure out how a white boy who looked like that could get the attention of someone as magical as Shalaya Crump.

“I ain’t lying,” Jewish Evan Altshuler said. “And I ain’t white. I told you, I’m Jewish. I was born right here in Melahatchie in 1949. My uncle and his family live right next to us.” He looked at me. “You’re from Jackson, you said. We go to Temple every now and then in Jackson at Beth Israel. You know where that is?”

“Wait. What?” Shalaya Crump asked him. “That would make you 36 years old?”

“I’m 15 years old. Be 16 next month,” he said. “Some of my family worked on these Freedom Schools for, you know … Negroes.  They worked with both of your folks before they disappeared.”

Jewish Evan kept talking. He explained that in 1964, his family was one of a few Jewish families from the area who wanted black folks to have the right to vote and go to schools with decent books. He claimed that our Granddaddies and his Uncle and brother didn’t just disappear. He said that all four of them were run up on in the Shephard house, which was really a Freedom School, and they were hanged and burned by “people acting like they were the Klan.”

“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean by ‘acting like’ they were in the Klan?”

“The people who killed them dressed like they were in the Klan but it wasn’t really the Klan. The people who did it had to kill them, but they wanted people to think the Klan was responsible.”

“Why?” Shalaya Crump asked him.

“Because they didn’t want it to come back on them. They took my uncle, my brother and your Grandfathers down to The Gulf after they killed them and weighed them down with cinderblocks.”

Shalaya Crump interrupted him again. “So they dressed up in disguises of folks who already wear disguises?”

“Exactly. I know it sounds crazy as a four-eyed dog,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet. But it’s gonna happen tomorrow. If we can stop this, believe me, we change the future forever.”

I just stood there waiting and wondering if there was any more to the story. “Okay,” I said, “but I still don’t get why we should go back and risk our lives to save folks who we think are dead anyway.” I looked over at Shalaya Crump. “What you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that I don’t wanna wake up in the future and wish we would have done it.”

“But do you want to do it?”

“I mean, City, we’d want someone to come save us today if we knew we were gonna die tomorrow. Shit, that’s a fact, right?”

“But would they?” I asked her. “Would your Grandma even do that for you if some white boy who called her a ‘Negro’ was the one telling her to do it?” Shalaya Crump was looking all in my eyes and I was so focused on what I saying that I couldn’t even try to spit game front of her. “We don’t know nothing about them old dudes and nothing about no Freedom Schools and nothing about no Klan. All we know is the Klan ain’t nothing to mess with. You told me that!”

“It’s not the real Klan,” Evan said.

“Does it matter if they kill black folks the same way the real Klan does?” Shalaya Crump asked him.

“The Klan didn’t just kill Negroes. They killed Jews, too.”

We waited for Evan to say more, but he just held his mouth open, kept both hands on his hips and kept swallowing his own spit. I grabbed Shalaya Crump by the hand. “Shalaya Crump, we lived our whole life this far with no grandfathers. Think about it. I know if this was a book or a dumb movie, we would be all like, ‘Golly, let’s go save the Grandfathers we never knew.’ But like you always say, this ain’t no book. This is real life. In real life, do we really need our Granddaddies?”

Shalaya Crump laughed and actually looked at me like she thought I had a point. Then she looked over at Evan and flicked her gum at his feet and started doing these weird toe-raises. “City’s right,” she said. “We don’t know a thing about having Granddaddies. Even if we did, I mean, what happens if we change our future by changing the past? It’s impossible to not change the future if you change the past? More would change than just us having Granddaddies.”

Shalaya Crump was always taking the best thing you ever said then adding something even better to it to make the best thing you ever said sound pretty lame. I understood what she was saying. Even if we saved our grandfathers and his folks, what if it changed everything and we ended up not being born.

“Listen,” Evan said, “you’re both right, but I know the future.”

“So what!” we both said. “We do too.”

“No, you don’t. I know how the hole works and I know what happens to both of you.”

“You do?” Shalaya Crump jumped in. “I’ve been looking and I can’t find myself.”

“He’s lying, ‘Laya.” It was the first time I shortened her name to ‘Laya. “How can this goofy white boy know what happens to us or even know the future if he don’t even know what an answering machine is?”

Jewish Evan ignored my question and got right in her face. She kinda backed up. “I promise if you come back and help me, I’ll tell you what happens to you in the future. I know what happens to your parents in the past, too.”

“You lying?” Shalaya Crump asked him.

Jewish Evan Altshuler cut his eyes to me, then focused on Shalaya Crump. “I’m not much to look at. I know that, but I know so much more than you think I do. I give you my word. Both of you.”

“Oh God,” Shalaya Crump said, “Just promise. Don’t say ‘you give your word.’  That’s so Ronald Reagan.”

“Hell yeah,” I said and fake laughed.

I wanted to fight Jewish Evan Altshuler so bad right there, but I could tell by the way Shalaya Crump’s eyes didn’t blink and by the way she was looking at his crusty lips and feeling sorry for them that we were headed to 1964. Shalaya Crump was gonna go back whether I went or not. That was a given as soon as dude said he could help her find her parents in the past and herself in the future. And if I didn’t go, I was pretty much admitting that it was okay for her and Jewish Evan loving each other till the end of time. You think I’m crazy, right? Well, I know that you can’t travel through time with someone and save folks from the Klan and not kiss them unless you’re slightly deformed or smell like death. And even then, there’s still gonna be some serious grinding going on.

Shalaya Crump got in the hole first. Jewish Evan Altshuler followed her. I followed him. Before I closed the door, I looked around at the woods and zeroed in on the Shephard house. “Wait.” I said. “Who is that?”

I wanted to tell Shalaya Crump that there was a dark outline of a woman watching us from the Shephard house window but she wouldn’t have believed me since she knew I was the only one of us three that didn’t want to go to 1964.

“Nothing,” I said and closed my eyes. “Don’t worry about it.” I lowered myself under the ground with the lap top computer in my left hand, closed my eyes and I pulled the door down on all three of us.

Thin Antiseptic.

When we pushed open the door to 1964, air was thin and you couldn’t even see Old Morton Road because everything was so thick and green. Right in front of us where the Shephard house used to be was a building that was only half painted yellow. It had the same shape of the Shephard house. Evan told Shalaya Crump that we were looking at the Freedom School.

“Should we go over there?” Shalaya Crump asked him. “What’s the plan?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I know that these men dressed like the Klan surprise our families when they go in there on this date. They kill them and burn the school down. They take the bodies to the Gulf.”

“So if we just stop them from going to the school,” I said, “they’ll be fine, right?”

Shalaya Crump looked up at me. “Maybe, but that doesn’t solve the problem of them killing our families. What if they just don’t kill them tomorrow, but they kill them next week?”

“That’s a good point,” Evan said. “We have to make sure they don’t ever kill again.”

I looked behind me in the hole at Shalaya Crump. “I told you that this white boy is crazy and he gonna get us killed. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Wait,” Shalaya Crump said. “Hold up. Why didn’t you say something about killing people before you got us here?”

“I didn’t think of it until now.”

“White folks are the sneakiest people on earth,” Shalaya Crump said in a whispery voice, but loud enough so Evan could hear.

“I’m not white.”

“So you’re sneaky because you’re Jewish then?”

“I thought you were different.”

“Different than what?”

“Different than antisemitic.”

“Anti-septic?” I asked?

“Antisemite. Antisemitic. Your little girlfriend hates her some Jews.”

“Hold on now. I’m too big to be ever somebody’s little girlfrend. That’s the first thing,” Shalaya Crump said. “I’m a woman.”

“You’re 14 years-old,” Evan told her. “You ain’t a woman. You telling me that I’m white when I know I’m Jewish? Then I can tell you you’re a girl when you think you’re a woman.”

Jewish Evan Altshuler had kinda had point there but I wasn’t gonna agree with him.

“All I did was ask you if you were sneaky because you’re Jewish,” Shalaya Crump told him. “Anyway, a question can’t be racist especially if it’s being asked by a black person about a white person.”

“Are you serious?” Evan asked. That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Do you know anything about Jews?”

I expected Shalaya Crump to give him an A+ speech about Jewish people since she seemed like she knew at least a little bit about everything. But she didn’t say a word. Nothing. She just looked at me for help but what could I say?

“See,” he said. “Do you even know what a temple is? Or a bar mitzvah? Or when the Holocaust started?” Shalaya Crump was quiet. “It’s more racist to not know nothing about Jews than to know the wrong thing about Negroes.”

I looked back and Shalaya Crump was looking right in Evan’s face again and he was looking right up at me.  “You were so right, City,” she almost yelled. “I can’t believe we came back to help this sneaky white boy. Let’s just go home.”

Doing It …

After a while, as much as I wanted to hear Shalaya Crump slap the nasty taste out of Evan’s mouth, I started to get lightweight bored. You can only listen to people call each other racist and anti-septic for so long before it makes you wanna cut your ears off.

I hopped all the way out of the hole and started walking towards Old Morton Road with my lap top computer in hand. It was weird because even before you really completely saw Old Morton Road you could tell that it wasn’t a road. It was all dirt and rocks and it was a lot thinner than the road in 1984.

When I reached the edge of the woods I peaked through at what should have been my Grandmother’s house. The house wasn’t there, but a little country looking store with cold drank machines and a gas pump was. The store had these red letters taped on the door that spelled “The County Co-Op.”

“City,” I heard Shalaya Crump say behind me, “don’t say nothing to no one. This is not how I wanted to change the future. When you come back, we’re going back home.”

I ignored Shalaya Crump and stepped all the way into the road. There wasn’t even a ditch separating the woods from the road any more. Down the road, all those clean and organized houses and yards made me think of those dumb picture books we had in the second grade. In those books, everything took turns talking, including houses, cars, dogs and yards.  Even as a second grader, you knew that houses, cars, dogs and yards didn’t have imaginations and they couldn’t talk. But you always wondered if they talked in a language or style you couldn’t understand. Standing right there in 1964 though, I started to think that if those Old Morton Road houses, yards and gardens had an imagination and they knew how they were gonna look in the future, they should go ahead and kill self because the future wasn’t gonna do them too many favors.

There were probably half the houses and trailers that were there in 1984. Mama Lara’s house was still there and Shalaya Crump’s trailer was still there, too.

I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do but I went across the street to the Co-op to ask people if they’d heard of the Coldson’s. If our house wasn’t there, I just wanted to know where we lived. Plus, I had my own plan.

Evan was stupid to think that we had to kill people. I know I wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone, but my plan was basic. It was to convince my Grandpa to watch out for the Klan if I got a chance.

That’s it.

It was that simple. Either he would believe me or he wouldn’t, but at least he’d know.

Everything at the co-op was so old looking. While I was peeking in the dusty window, a sorry sounding “meow” scared the mess outta me.  I looked around and there was this fat head, skinny black cat looking right at me. You know what’s crazy? I had never ever seen a cat in Melahatchie in my entire life. Never. And I never thought anything about it. There were more limping Dobermans than there were people but you never saw a cat.

Anyway, the cat came closer to me and just kept meowing. “I ain’t got no food for you. What?”

Meowwww

“Oh, you wanna see my computer? You too little and dumb to understand something like this. Gone now. Leave me alone.”

The cat came closer and I backed up.

Meooowww

“Look, I’ll let you look at it but if you pee or shit on my computer, I’m kicking you. I’m serious. Right in that fat head.”

I put the computer down facing the cat. Do you know that cat just walked right around the computer and got even closer to me.

Meeooow

“Oh, you talking noise? Don’t be mad because you don’t understand how to use it.” As I was talking, the fat head cat walked off towards the side of the building. Before it turned the corner it meowed louder.

“You want me to come with you?”

Meow

“Why?”

Meooow

I looked towards the woods and in the Co-op, then walked towards the edge of the building following Fat Head. I turned the corner of the Co-op and didn’t see the cat anymore. But there were two doors on the side of the Co-op. The first door was closed and it said WHITES ONLY-KEY IN FRONT. Scratched under the word FRONT was the sentence Jews ain’t wanted here. I tried to open it but it was locked. I kicked it hard as I could with my right foot but it still didn’t budge. The second door that was cracked opened said COLORED.  I walked towards the door, about to poke my head in when Fat Head cat came out and meowed again.

“I wish somebody would try and tell me I couldn’t do number 2 in that white bathroom,” I told the cat. “I don’t play that.”

Meoow.

“I’m serious. If that white folks bathroom was open, I swear to god I’d go in there get to dookying right in that sink.”

Meoow

“I don’t care if it is a white folks sink. I would! I ain’t from here. I’m from 1985. I don’t play that mess.”

I stood there waiting for the cat to meow again, but it didn’t. It just stood there looking at me. I realized that when I stopped talking all big and bad that a heavy whiff of sad I’d never felt kept getting closer and closer to my neck. Reading about my family and other black folks not being able to be pee in a good bathroom was different than seeing a white folks’ bathroom locked and a colored bathroom just open for anything that wanted to come in. It said colored on the door, but it might as well have said cats, spiders, possums, coons and roaches ‘cause it was open to them just like it was open to us.

Fat Head took me all the way to back of the co-op where there was this rusty clothesline with white sheets hanging on it. Right there in the middle was this one scraggly Doberman doing the do to this other fatter Doberman. They weren’t making no barks or no moans. They were just doing it like they were the last dogs on earth.

The fat head cat walked up to about a foot from the Dobermans and sat on its hind legs. Then it started looking back and forth at the Dobermans and me. I can’t really blame the fat head cat. I’d seen dogs doing it before but this was different. I would have bet my new computer that they wouldn’t be doing it like that if they were doing it with any other dogs. You never think of dogs being in love, but those dogs were so in love. They really were.

While I was watching those dogs, as crazy as it sounds, my body started to feel like I was watching HBO after dark. The Dobermans weren’t even that cute as far as dogs go either.

I didn’t like how the dogs were making me feel so I started stomping and yelling, “Ya’ll ain’t in love. Stop!” but they kept doing it like no one was screaming. All around the back of the co-op were these little jagged gray rocks. They were too little to really throw far or hard but they were good enough to hit a dog in the head if you threw a hand full.

I cocked my arm back and dotted the heads of those Dobermans with gray rocks. The scraggly top Doberman got off the bottom Doberman real slow and they both just looked at me, along with the fat head cat. And you’re not gonna believe me but I swear the cat licked it paws and actually said in the suavest voice I’d ever heard in my life, “Wow. You a real fat asshole for that right there. You don’t know better than to throw rocks at love?”

“You talk?” I asked the fat head cat. Right then, I wondered if everything I’d experienced in the last day and a half was a dream. I thought animals talked to one another but why was I understanding this one all of a sudden?”

“Don’t even worry about what I do,” the cat said. “You better get your flat head fat ass to running.” I slowly turned the corner and headed back towards the woods with Shalaya Crump and Jewish Evan Altshuler. When I looked over my shoulder, all three beasts were sprinting, led by that fat head cat whose head looked less fat when he was sprinting.

I took off.

They were getting closer but I jumped the ditch and landed in the woods. Even though I scratched up my face, my legs and the computer, I didn’t even care. Once I got in, I ran towards the hole and kept looking back to see if they were following me. My wind wasn’t the best.

When I got closer to the hole, I wanted to tell Shalaya Crump about the Dobermans and the talking fat head cat and the colored bathroom. The closer I got though, I didn’t hear Shalaya Crump and Evan arguing at all. I figured I’d look in the hole and they’d be right there wrestling or playing Mercy or Thump in a way that would make me wanna throw up on my Weapons.

I walked all the way up to the hole and peeked down in it. Shalaya Crump and Jewish Evan Altshuler were gone. I was in 1964 all by myself.

Eyes have it.

In the movies or a dumb book, I knew that I could look down at the ground and follow footprints to see where Shalaya Crump and Jewish Evan Altshuler had gone but the problem was that I’d never even seen a real footprint. There wasn’t much sand or even dirt in Jackson and when there was, I can’t say that I spent even a second looking for somebody’s footprints.

I walked over to what Evan called the Freedom School. To the left of the door was a tilted cardboard sign with white letters, a dot-dot-dot and an exclamation point on a black sign.

Be a FIRST CLASS Citizen

REGISTER…VOTE!

I peeked in the window at three people covered in sheets. They were walking around the inside of what looked like an old fashioned classroom. There were three desks in the middle of the room. The ceiling was super high and you could see bird nests all at the top. The floor was part carpet, part wood, part tile and all around the corners of the room were wooden sculptures and saws and pictures. The men in sheets weren’t wrecking the room or trying to set anything on fire. They were just walking around, looking at the walls, talking to each other. I was zoning out when all of a sudden, I felt a shot to back of knees.

I turned around and another one of those men in white sheets poked me in the kidney with a t-ball bat. I still didn’t drop the lap top computer. I’d seen plenty of movies about people in the Klan. In the movies, they always talked in those rough country voices that only northern people playing southern white men actors could have. But in real life, the men weren’t saying a word. They didn’t even grunt. They didn’t even breathe loud. I never really understood before that Klan sheets didn’t have a mouthpart before. You would think that they had to breathe heavy unless they wanted to suffocate under those sheets.

When they pulled me in the school, they sat me in an old fashion desk I could barely fit in. The men walked around and circled me. One of them reached down for the computer but I didn’t let it go.

“I ain’t letting this go,” I told him. He pulled his sheet up and showed me the barrel of his rifle. “Oh, but you know what? I’mo show you how to turn it on,” I told him. “Did any of ya’ll see this pretty black girl and this other white boy with a ‘fro who looked … he looked … um, not good. His name was Evan. He was your color and …”

Before I could finish, one of the men slapped me right across my mouth and looked me right in the eyes. You couldn’t even see his eyes because he had on glasses. I looked at all the men’s eyes for the first time and realized that they all had on glasses under their sheets.

“Just so you know,” I told them, “that’s the first time I ever let someone hit me in my mouth. I’m serious. And if you didn’t have that gun, I’d probably pop that old ass with my rag. I’m serious.”

Another man slapped me right across the mouth after I said my piece. My problem was that I’d seen so many pictures of Klansmen. They were always in pictures. And the pictures made you know that the men under the sheets were real men with real stinky breath, real rotten teeth, real pot-bellies. I figured it was like football. As soon as you put on your helmet and shoulder pads and your jersey, you were like everyone else on your team, especially to people watching. Our football coach, Coach Foots, wouldn’t even let us have our names on the back of our jerseys because he said the team is more important than the player. But even with no name on the back on your jersey and dressed in the same uniform, the game was filled with seconds where it was up to you to make a play. Not your teammate. You. That meant that all of those men were stronger as a Klan team, but I knew that each of them was feeling fear and trying to figure out a way to seem less afraid than they were to the other teammates on their squad.

But when you’re getting the taste slapped out of you mouth for no reason, it almost doesn’t matter if the person doing the taste-slapping is probably just as scared as you. And it makes you feel weird that no matter what, the taste-slappers never talk … they just breathe funny and watch. It made it easier to believe they lived their whole lives behind those white sheets, slapping black folks up and never breathing right.

“I wanna be honest with you,” I told them.

One of the men was looking at the lap top computer and playing with the keys. He tapped the shoulder of the one who was standing over me and he bent down and started looking at the lap top computer, too.

“Look, I wanna be honest. You know what that is? That’s a computer.”

They didn’t say a word. “A lap top. I can get you three of them, but you gotta let me go and you gotta let me take that one with me.”

One of the men stood up after I said my speech and stood over me. “I’m serious. I can get you whatever you want. I’m good at stealing. Computers, telephones, color television, tape players, penny loafers, Bibles, tickets to Fresh Fest. I know ya’ll lackin’ in 1964. Just tell me what you need.”

When you can’t see people’s face and they’re not saying anything, it’s really hard to know if you’re getting through to someone. I held my hand out. “Look, let’s go ahead and shake on it. I’m serious.”

The Klansman who slapped me in mouth a second earlier, reared back and hit me in my head so hard that the blood in my mouth tasted like canned spinach. “Nigger,” one of the them said, “you talk too damn much …” I couldn’t hear anything except the crunch of his work boots stomping my legs to mush and the echo of Nigger.

Everybody I knew, at one point or another, had called someone “Nigger” but I never heard the “er” when we said it to each other. It was just something that all of us said. We didn’t mean it to hurt each other and we didn’t mean it to make someone feel lucky. It was like the only word that meant lucky and hurtful at the same time. But when that white man behind that sheet called me “Nigger” I heard all the “er” and I wasn’t sure that he even said a lot of “er” if you know what I mean. He sounded country, too. And country folks hardly ever pronounced the “er” in words. I knew, when the man said it, that he really thought I should have to use the colored bathroom with fathead cats and other beasts. I knew when he said it, he thought I was not just less than him, but less than a human. Or at least, he was trying to really convince himself. More than anything, I could kinda hear other white folks saying in 1985 even if they weren’t really saying it at all.

Either way, it made sense to me in that second, while that white man was stomping my legs to mush, why Grandma would whup me so hard when I acted up in front of white folks. In 1985, everything little thing we did in front of white folks had to be perfect according to Grandma. And if I acted like I wasn’t perfect around them, Grandma would tell me to go get her switch and syllable by syllable, she’d give me twelve licks to “act like I got good sense when those folks were watching.” I didn’t know if Grandma had ever been beaten by a white man behind a sheet. I did know she had walked by the locked white folks’ bathroom, though. She had seen and felt what I was feeling in that Freedom School whether she’d had her legs stomped to mush or not. I wondered if Jewish Evan Altshuler’s people knew the same feeling.

I was trying so hard not to scream and let them know they hurt me when the door to the school busted open and Jewish Evan Altshuler and Shalaya Crump rushed in. One of the men who had been looking at the computer ran towards Evan. And you know what that boy did? Evan pulled out this long BB gun and just started shooting at the chests of the whole Klan. I figured that the Klansman with the real rifle was gonna shoot us all in the head but he didn’t reach for it at all. Shalaya Crump came over near me and dragged me out of the school.

She let me rest a lot of weight on her, but I didn’t wanna put too much weight on her because she’d know how fat I really was.

“I’m okay,” I told her. “But they got Baize’s computer.”

“We’ll get it later. We gotta get outta here.”

Shalaya Crump didn’t say a word until we got to the hole. I tried to let her get in first but she didn’t want to. “City,” she said, “let me help you.”

I got in the hole and she looked back towards the school. I peaked my head out of the hole and all three of the men had their hoods off, and one of the men was whupping Jewish Evan Altshuler like he was his Grandmother or something.

“That’s his uncle,” Shalaya Crump said.

“What?”

“And that one, that’s his father. And the others are his cousin and brother.”

“Wait. What? His family is in the Klan? They’re the folks who kill our Grandfathers?”

“Not really. It’s hard to explain. They had to do it. He took me to his house and he told me the truth. He showed me. You should meet his Mama. She told me to tell you she was sorry.”

I backed away from the mouth of the hole to give her room to get in. “Just come in the hole and tell it to me more when we get home.”

“We can’t leave him, City.”

“What do you mean? He lied to us. That’s his problem. Who knows if our families are even alive around here? I saw a talking cat. For real. And I saw this colored bathroom. We don’t belong here …”

Shalaya Crump looked back towards the School. I couldn’t see what was happening but I heard Evan screaming and I heard what sounded like wet open palms slamming down on someone’s back. “You’re right,” Shalaya Crump said. “Scoot back and give me room to get in.”

I crouched and made more room for Shalaya Crump. It was the first time I’d been in the hole by myself and I’m not sure why but it seemed bigger and colder than before. I was crouched for a good ten seconds. Shalaya Crump didn’t get in so I stood up. She looked me right in the eyes.

“I’m sorry, City,” she said and slammed the door to the hole shut.

Belief Boy.

I pushed open the door of the hole slowly. Before my eyes could adjust to the light, a pine comb bounced right off my forehead. “I knew you’d be back. Gimme my damn computer …” It was Baize.

“Where am I?”

“You know where you are. I want my computer! And my phone.”

I couldn’t figure out what she was saying about her phone. “Oh, I didn’t take a phone. I only borrowed your computer.” Baize was wearing the same outfit she had on when I saw her before but different shoes. She had on these red, black, green and yellow hi hop Nikes.

“Where they at, Voltron? I’m serious.”

“Umm,” I was trying to decide whether to lie or not. “One of my friends has the phone and someone else has the computer.” I looked at her face and more than anything, I just wanted her to hug me. Sounds crazy, but after getting your legs stomped to dust by white men in sheets, you kinda want someone black to touch you in a way that’s nice and soft. “Okay, look, I’m gonna tell you everything.”

Baize picked up another pine comb and threw it right at my head. “I don’t want to know everything,” she told me. “I don’t even want to know anything from you. I just want my computer back.” She picked up another pine comb and started picking the leaves off. “When was the last time knowing everything about something ended up good for you?” I didn’t know if Baize was really asking so I started asking her to help me out of the hole. “I’m serious,” she said. “When was the last time?”

I didn’t know how to answer her question so I got out of the hole and told Baize how my friend showed me the hole a few days earlier and took me to 2011. I told her about meeting a white boy who said he could take us back to the past. I didn’t tell her that his name was Evan because I figured if she knew I was lying about my name being Evan, she’d think I was lying about everything. I told her that we really went to 1964. And I told her that I needed to go back and help my friend get back home alive.

You know what she said after I explained it to her?

“I believe you. I still want my computer. All my rhymes are in there. Plus, I needed it for the Spell Off.”

“You do?” I stood up and tried stretching out my knees. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are all your rhymes in there?”

“Because it’s my computer.”

“Oh. Why do you need it for a Spell Off?”

“Because I wanted to look at some Spell Off clips on youtube. I got this perfect introduction and I wanna make sure they let us introduce ourselves. It’s so dope.”

“Oh. I don’t really know what you talking about. One more question. Well, why do you believe me?”

“Because I know people can disappear.

“Wait. What?”

“Nevermind. Let’s go.”

Channels.

Baize said that I could come stay at her house until the morning when her Great Grandmother got off work. She said her Great Grandmother was hugging her neck and saying Bible verses and cooking yummy sweets before she left for work like she was never gonna see Baize again.

I told her that I didn’t need to stay that long. Before I limped in her house, she told me to sit down on her porch. My legs were killing me. I just wanted to eat something and come up with a plan to save Shalaya Crump.

“Just tell me,” she said, “is it us or is it the hole that sends us through time?”

“You know about the hole?”

“I saw you jump in that hole after you stole my computer,” she told me. “And I got in the hole myself the next day.”

I hadn’t really thought about whether or not it was us or the hole. Jewish Evan Altshuler said he knew how it worked but I left before he could explain it to me. Part of me thought it was just Evan and Shalaya Crump who could time-travel. I assumed that I could do it only if I traveled with them, but then I traveled forward to 2011 from 1964 by myself. If Shalaya Crump could time-travel and Evan could time-travel and I could time-travel and now Baize could time travel, I figured it must be the hole.

“I ain’t gonna lie to you,” I told her. “I think it’s the hole. Can we go inside? I’m hungry.”

Baize’s house and her porch were so raggedy that I didn’t really wanna walk in the house. Super nasty houses always made me itch even if nothing was crawling on me.  But the TV in their living room looked like it belonged in Richie Rich’s house. It was almost as big as the wall and nearly tall as me.

“Why your TV so big and nice but your house is kinda, you know …”

“Tore up from the floor up?”

“Yeah, how do you,” I paused to try to get my words right. “How much is a TV like that? Like 2000 dollars?”

“More like a few hundred. But my Great Grandma, she rents it.” Baize sat in the one chair in the living room and I sat on the floor. She turned on the TV with one of the three remotes. I had never even held a remote control. I’d seen them on TV, though.

Before the TV came on, all these lights went from red to green. When it finally came on, it was the sound as much as the screen that I couldn’t understand. The thing sounded like life. You know how in life, there’s hardly ever just that one sound you’re listening for. Sounds are all around you. Like even when I imagined Shalaya Crump telling me she loved me, I imagined hearing the wind whistling and a few different car horns behind us and maybe a train far far away. That’s how the sound was on that TV. You could hear everything. And the screen looked even more real than life. If everything you saw in real life had the best light behind it, and was polished super shiny, that’s how the TV looked.

Baize gave me the remote and told me that she was gonna make something to eat. “Even if we had a lot of money, we wouldn’t waste it on the outside of our house. That could be gone in a second with a hurricane or a tornado. You want Oriental Ramen or Chicken Ramen with your French fries and butter beans?”

“What’s Ramen?”

“Noodles, boy. Ya’ll don’t even have Ramen in the 80’s?”

Baize walked through the other room into the kitchen.

The first thing I did with the remote was check how many channels the TV had. When I pushed below 1, the TV went to channel 1975. I sat there on the floor pushing through all the channels and scaring myself with the surround sound.

Back in my time, we’d watch TV and say, “Ain’t nothing good on.” I didn’t know how anyone could ever say “Ain’t nothing on” in 2011. Everything good was on. Cartoons were on. Sports was on. Soap Operas were on. Andy Griffith was on. Cosby Show and Cheers was on. And the PBS shows that looked exactly the same as they looked in 1985 were on.

But on more channels than you could imagine, there were people who looked and sounded regular. I’m serious. There were folks who were being filmed doing stuff like cooking, going on dates, dressing up, kissing, fighting, sleeping. They didn’t seem like actors or comedians, just like some of the people you would see on a game show or on the People’s Court or in the stands at a game, except there they were acting like the stars.

Baize came back in the room and just sat on the floor next to me.

“What?” I asked her.

“What, what?” she asked me. “Don’t ‘what’ me in my house.”

“Why you sitting next to me so close?” She didn’t answer, but her hip was kinda touching my left hand. So I moved it and asked, “Is the Ramen ready?”

“Almost. I warmed up the biscuits to go with the butter beans and French fries.”

“Okay.” I kept changing the channels. “Why do all these channels have these regular people on the shows? And why they got black people on McDonald’s commercials now?”

“I don’t know. That’s a good question.” I could tell she wasn’t really listening to me. “Um, do you wanna smoke?” she asked.

“Nah, girl. Aren’t you like 12? How do you even buy cigarettes?”

“I’m 13. And I didn’t say smoke crack. I just said smoke,” she said while shaking her head. “I don’t buy it and I don’t roll it. This boy down the road, he be mixing a little weed in with his cigarettes and he hits me off with a few squares every now and then.”

“Naw, I’ll watch you and your squares, but I’m good. You ain’t never heard of ‘Just Say No?’”

“Wow,” she said. “You should have your own show. Keep doing you, Voltron. I’m smoking before I eat.”

“Why don’t you say ‘mayne’ any more?”

Melahatchie Dreaming.

Baize walked back towards the kitchen and I just sat there and thought about running back towards the hole. I didn’t even try to jump to 2011 and I didn’t know how much help a smoked out fiend/girl rapper would be when it came time to fight off the Klan and bring Shalaya Crump home. After a few minutes I got really curious, though. I had seen my uncles smoke weed and older boys in my neighborhood, but never a girl and never a girl who was my age.

I walked towards the kitchen and saw that there was a screen door. Sitting on the step on the other side of the screen was Baize. And she had a square in her mouth. Right in front of her was the area where those two Dobermans were doing it. And next to that was a huge workshed.

“You ever wonder what happened before you in the same place you’re standing now? Like, I’ve seen a talking cat.”

I looked at her and waited for her to ask me to explain myself. “Look,” she said, “Let’s talk but don’t be coming out her messing up my high. Don’t say nothing to me about how I shouldn’t smoke either. I’m thick and I’m extra and I smoke. Leave me alone.”

“You’re extra what?”

“Just extra.”

“If you ask anyone around here about me, they’ll probably say I’m extra.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “You ever wonder why people smoke with their hands so close to their lips?” I asked her. “Like if your fingers were more off your lips, smoking wouldn’t even look cool.”

“Then you’d burn your fingers,” she said. “Voltron, you messing up my smoke for real, mayne.”

“Oh. My bad. People still say ‘for real’ around here? You talk like you’re way older than 13. Sometimes you call me ‘mayne’ and sometimes you call me ‘boy’ and sometimes, you call me Voltron.” Baize inhaled more but actually took her fingers away from her lips a bit. “You know why I think you sound so old to me? Because your TV has every age on it. Every age! Like my TV back home, it has four channels including PBS, and you gotta watch all the commercials because you can’t be flipping a lot ‘cause grown folks say that’ll break the TV. Your TV has all the channels and you know what else?”

“What?”

“All the shows I watch in the 80’s, you can watch now with your cable. And all the black and white shows people watched back in the day, you watch now. Plus you watch those crazy shows where the regular folks act like stars. So I think all of that means you take in more and you might take it in faster than me. But 2011 still ain’t better than 1985. We got both Mikes and Eddie.”

“Who?”

“Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson and Eddie Murphy,” I told her. “I mean, I don’t know who ya’ll got, but they was pretty much running thangs in 1985.”

“I guess,” she said, like she knew something I didn’t. “We still got Jay Z, Nicki Minaj, Kanye, Eminem and me.” I expected her to tell me that I was talking to much, explaining too much. Instead, she said, “You know that I really never thought too much about what was here before me until I bounced to the past. It was like I was invisible when I went back there. No one cared.”

“You walked around?”

“Yeah.”

“Girl, that was dumb. Why would they care? You ain’t even born.”

“That’s what I’m saying. It’s hard to go back because you see that there was a time when people didn’t even care or think nothing about you. But somehow, I’m still related to those folks. When I went back, I wanted to see what music was like and see if I could find my parents.”

“Did you find them?”

“I was scared to look.”

“Where are they now?”

“Dead,” she said. “I mean, I think.”

I had never had someone tell me that their parents were dead and I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t want to say something to ruin her high, but since I’d never ruined someone’s high before, I wasn’t sure what kind of stuff could ruin your high.

“Man, having dead parents must be like, um, like having to eat dessert first for the rest of your life and having that dessert be something like, um, pears instead of peach cobler, huh?” That’s all I could come up with.

Baize didn’t say anything. She just kept smoking. “No,” she said. “Having dead parents ain’t nothing like eating dessert first.” She blew smoke right in my face. “I only half knew them. They had me when they were young and they died when I was young.”

“You’re still young,” I told her. She just looked at me and didn’t say a word. “They died together?”

“Yep, we had come had back from the swings over there at Gaddis Park. And everyone knew that Katrina was coming. So we were gonna go stay with my cousins and my Grandma in Meridian. So they dropped me off, and went back because they wanted to get a few things out of the house in case the storm was as bad as folks said it was gonna be.”

“Then what?”

“Then nothing.” She blew smoke like a professional smoker. “I never saw them again.”

Baize threw what was left of the cigarette on the grass and mashed it with her Nikes. “They got swallowed up by the water, I think.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they wouldn’t have left me.” Baize got up, looked down at me and walked inside the screen door. “If I had my computer, I could play one of the songs I made for them.”

I figured I’d read the words to Baize’s song but I didn’t want to hear her rap it. It would have embarrassed me too much if she couldn’t rap a lick. I knew I should have been thinking more about her parents and what kind of flood could just make people disappear but I kinda wasn’t. I was thinking of those two  Dobermans who just earlier in the day were right where I was looking now and I was thinking about what Shalaya Crump and Evan were doing. I didn’t think they were kissing any more. I knew that they were trying to stay alive, fighting to not disappear together, which was even worse for me.

“Baize?”

“What?”

“That wasn’t a real cigarette, was it? I never smelled smoke.”

“Shut up, Voltron,” she said. “Let go inside.”

Thriller.

Baize liked to control the remote when she was in the room and she never left it on one channel for longer than 5 minutes. She mostly changed almost every minute. “I usually don’t watch this much TV, but since you stole my computer and my phone, I don’t have a choice.”

“We could turn the TV off and you could just write in a tablet or we could watch a movie,” I told her. “I got this spoiled cousin who has this thing called a VCR.” Baize started laughing to herself, but I just kept going. “And it’s weird because that dude never really watches regular TV. And he never even goes to the movies either. All he does is watch old movies on that VCR. The only cool thing is that he can fast forward to the best part of the movie and watch it over and over again. One time me and my best friend, the girl who was waiting for me in the woods yesterday, we went to his house. You know that part in Purple Rain where Prince drives his bike to Lake Minnetonka and he says that dumb-sounding words about Appolonia purifying herself?”

“That’s a Dave Chappelle sketch, right?”

“Who? It’s from Purple Rain. We watched that part over and over again for three hours straight. It got funnier every time, too.”  I didn’t tell her how we’d have to all watch it lying with our pelvises smashed into the carpet.

“Are you one of those people?” she asked me. “My father used to be like that. I remember he was always telling my mother to turn the TV off so he could watch a movie or tell some ol’ silly story.”

“Were they good stories?”

She started smiling. “Yeah, they were. You would have liked them.” I knew I was supposed to ask why, but I didn’t really want to. Didn’t matter because she kept talking anyway. “He said a lot in his stories, kinda like you do.”

Right after she said that, there was this picture of this white woman with stringy black hair and big eyes and nose that reminded me of a tiny paper boat.

“Who is that lady? Turn it up.”

“That’s Michael Jackson.”

I got closer to the TV and watched different scenes with this person dancing and sounding like Michael Jackson but nothing about the person looked like the Michael Jackson I knew.

“Wait.”

“Yeah,” she said.  “He died last year. Sorry.”

I slumped on the ground away from the TV and just watched the first part of the show about the life and sound and death of Michael Jackson with my head resting on my shoulder. I thought about Shalaya Crump telling me to just be myself. What did that even mean if years in the future, you could look like a totally different person and be dead? There was no way to be yourself and be the same way you were. And even if you did manage to be yourself, one day, you were gonna die and probably regret it all anyway. That’s what I realized watching the show about Michael Jackson. When a commercial came on, I jumped up.

“What are you doing?”

“This is real, Baize. This shit is real.” I stood there not caring what I looked like. I understood that if Michael Jackson was really dead, it meant that people I knew were dead too. “I gotta find my Mama and my Grandma. What if they disappeared in some flood just like your parents?”

“Tomorrow, okay? Look,” she stood up and took the remote controls from me. “You gotta rest so your legs feel better. Then tomorrow, well …” she paused.

“What?”

“You gotta decide if you go back and help your friend or if you stay and look for your family. I don’t care what you do. When the morning comes, I’m going to the Spell-Off then jumping back in that hole and finding my computer and my phone.”

“But what if all my family is dead?”

“What if they are?”

“Well,” I said and thought about her Baize’s question. It was the kind of question that I would have asked someone, but no one had ever really asked me. “I guess if they’re dead, I’d want to know and maybe when I go back to my time I can do what I can to stop them from dying.”

“But what if you’re dead?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if you go looking for your people and you find out that they’re alive, but you ain’t?”

“Then, well, I guess …” I just didn’t know what to say. “Where am I sleeping tonight?”

“On the floor in my room, I guess.”

I followed her in the bedroom and then I stopped. “Baize?”

“What?” she turned around and looked me right in the eye.

“Is all of New Edition dead too?”

“Who?”

Blue Nails.

Baize made a nice little area to sleep on the floor next to her bed. I should have asked to take a shower but when I went in their bathroom there wasn’t a shower. They only took baths and the bathtub was dirty looking, the same way my Grandma’s tub was. Couldn’t understand how they had all the technology to get over 200 channels and make the TV sound like life, but they didn’t have no technology to make their tub go from the brown of a double yoke egg to a somewhat regular white.

I sat there on the floor of Baize’s room and pulled up the sheet to look under her bed. There were maybe a hundred notebooks underneath and all kinds of raggedy keyboards, drum sticks, turntables. Surrounding all of the instruments were these tiny fingernails.

While I was trying to count how many fingernails were under her bed, Baize leaned her head over towards me. “If things start to crawl on you, you can just get in the bed with me long as stay on your side.”

“Wait, what’s gonna crawl on me? Fingernails.”

“No, mayne. Roaches.”

“Well then, can I just … you know?”

“Don’t get it twisted, okay? Acting real hoish, we off that.”

“Whatever that means.” I told her and got in the bed. “Ya’ll slang is kinda stale in future.”

Baize put four of her tablets between us. She told me that I couldn’t cross over the tablets without getting punched in the gizzard and I told her not to worry. It’s not hard to explain what I felt about Baize. She had the perfect mix of funk and perfume. And she was cuter than a cute girl. And she was finer than a fine girl. And she was smarter than a smart girl. And she was even weirder than the weirdest girls. But she wasn’t as good-smelling, as cute, as smart or as weird as the girl I loved. And even if she was, which she wasn’t, I really told myself that if I didn’t touch Baize, then maybe, just maybe Evan and Shalaya Crump weren’t touching either.

Baize started talking about her music and how hard it was for girl rappers like her to be taken seriously. I told her about Salt & Pepa, Roxanne Shante, the Real Roxanne and how in 1985, we all loved rappers who could were fresh, no matter if they peed standing up or sitting down. Baize didn’t believe that people actually liked girl rappers who weren’t acting like strippers back in the day.  She said she was gonna do something called “google” all the Roxannes when she got her computer back.

“I know at least one of them had to be acting like a stripper,” Baize said. “Tell the truth. I’m not mad at them. I’m just saying.”

I wanted to stay up and ask Baize more questions about life in 2011 but the day and the Klan had beaten me down. A few minutes after my head hit that crappy pillow, I turned away from Baize and was cold knocked out.

Some time during the night, I had one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming. Everything in the woods was a different shade of maroon. Shalaya Crump had my hand in hers and she was pulling me through the woods towards the Freedom School. When we got to the door, everything turned black and white.

“Why you talking weird,” I asked her, “like this is a stupid book?”

We walked all the way to the center of the room into the smell of burning hair and pancakes. When we stood in the room, the sound of one of those TV shows I watched on Baize’s TV was surrounding us.

“He’s different than you think he his, City.”

“Who?”

“This guy.” Shalaya Crump pulled out a picture of a white boy I’d seen before on TV. He looked like Ricky’s friend on Silver Spoons. “Evan.”

“That’s not Evan. That boy is way cuter than Evan. You kissed him, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t, but I sorta want to.”

“Wait. This is a dream. I know it’s a dream but you can’t really think Evan looks like that? For real. ‘Laya, he don’t look like that at all. Why couldn’t you pull a picture out that looked all sick and gangly and like he’s smelling something? You know he’s raggedy as a roach, right?”

Shalaya Crump put the picture in her front pocket and put her hands on my shoulder. I’d practiced kissing her enough to know that I was supposed to put my hands on her hips and come in with my eyes closed and my nostrils kinda flared.

“Open your eyes,” she said, and kissed me on the left side of my lips, then on my cheek, then on my neck. Everywhere she kissed felt like a trail of rubbing alcohol and smelled like butterscotch.

Shalaya Crump was coming back towards my lips. “Do I keep my eyes open,” I asked her. “I ate a Banana Laffy Taffy before we got in here. You smell it?”

“Shush,” she told me. “Let’s just do what we want.”

“What if Evan finds out?” I asked her.

“I’m gonna tell him,” she said.

“Me too,” I said.

Shalaya Crump pulled me even closer and took my bottom lip between her lips. Every feeling in my body sprinted between my wide hips. And for just about 10 seconds, all those feelings screamed and tried to blow out these candles I didn’t even know were lit. After ten second of blowing hard as they could, the feelings ran from my hips back to my feet, my toes, my knees, my eyeballs and wherever else they came …

When I woke up, Baize was standing up looking at me like I was straight crazy.

“Get up, Voltron,” she said. “I’m serious! Now I gotta wash these damn sheets before my Great Grandma get home. God, I hate boys!”

Spell Off.

We had to get up early enough that Baize’s Great Grandma wouldn’t see that I was in the house. She said her Great Grandma got off work at 8 a.m. and went to her second job from 9-2, but sometimes she came home in between to drink coffee and make sausage. The plan was to go to Baize’s Spell Off and then head back to 1964 and save Shalaya Crump before 2 p.m.

Baize was running around the house getting everything ready so she really didn’t have time to talk to me about what had happened the night before. I waited out on the porch. When she finally came through the door, she had on a backpack, a little carry case and a wave brush in her hand.

“What you doing with all the mess? This ain’t no vacation. We gotta go!”

“It’s a Diva thing, Voltron, you wouldn’t understand.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Means that you should mind your stanky business, mayne, and let a brush touch your beady beads.” She handed me the brush. “If I wanna go outta town looking fresh, that’s on me. If you wanna go outta town looking like the driver off the nappy head truck, that’s on you. Niggas from the 80’s gotta do what niggas from the 80’s do.”

I wanted to tell her to be herself when she used the word “nigga” and “mayne” in the same sentence. “But we’re not going out of town,” I told her. “I bet you brought money, too, didn’t you?”

“Like I said, you wouldn’t understand. If I had some money, I would’ve brought all of it.” I stood there shaking my head. “Wanna be useful and carry one of my dictionaries?”

We walked across the street into the woods and stepped headed towards what used to be the Shephard House and what Evan called the Freedom School. Baize said that now it was now called the Melahatchie Community Center. A deaf Mexican man named Oscar who had a mullet and a yellow short sleeve shirt held out his hands and gave me some dap. Baize introduced me and said he worked security at her school.

I whispered in her ear, “You know deaf Mexicans?”

Baize ignored me and started throwing sign language with the dude.

After a while, we walked down the hall. “What did you just say to that Mexican dude?” I asked her.

“I told him that Obama was gonna be in the audience of the Spell Off. Don’t call him ‘that Mexican dude.’ His name is Oscar.”

I looked at the center and the few cars that surrounded it and knew there was no way some President would come to a place as raggedy as that.

“If Obama doesn’t show up, we’re gonna be the only three black people in this thing. Everybody who woulda come is at work. I hope you know how to act around white folks.”

“Girl, I live up north.”

“Where?”

“Jackson.”

“Jackson is blacker than Melahatchie, dummy. You stay catching L’s, don’t you?”

“L’s?”

“Losses!”

While we walked down the hall, we had to shake hands with people. Well, Baize did. I had her dictionary in one hand and brushed my hair with the other. Soon as someone put their hand out for a shake, woman or man, girl or boy, I’d make a fist while gripping my wave. I’d never seen that many white people on Old Morton Rd. before and I was surprised that all the white folks we passed knew to give me a pound. I knew it was the future, but white folks in 2011 acted way more familiar with you than white folks in 1985.

“We’ve been waiting for you, Baize,” said this white lady named Cynthia. “Who is your friend?” She took both of our dictionaries and said that there were no aids allowed beyond this point. Baize said hold on, looked up two more words and gave it to her.

“This is my friend, Voltron.”

“Voltron what?” the lady asked. “Did you compete in the prelims? I don’t remember seeing your name.”

“No,” I told the lady. “I was out of town.”

“He’s from New Orleans,” Baize told the lady. “9^th Ward.”

“Well bless your heart.”

“Yes ma’am, well, he was born and raised in Melahatchie, but he went down to New Orleans after the storm. He’s just up here visiting for the week.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yes, ma’am. He’s one of the best spellers in the 9^th Ward. He won the 9^th Ward Spell Off last year, didn’t you, Voltron?”

“Yeah, I umm, I made that Spell Off fall out and tap out. Then it called me master.”

Baize put her hand on my shoulder and said in my ear, “Go ‘head and chill with the ad libs, Voltron.”

The lady took off down the hall. She kept look back and saying, “Don’t leave. I’ll be right back.”

“Why you lie to that lady?” I asked Baize while we walked in this room.

“Because now I know she’ll let you spell.”

“Why? I don’t even want to spell.”

“Because you’re from New Orleans and you’re a boy.”

“Why, though?”

“Wow! I’m so glad I didn’t grow up in the 80’s,” she said.

The room we walked into was only thing I’d been in since I’d been in 2011 that felt like home. Everything else from the shiny hubcaps to the six foot TV’s to the music to how folks wanted me to win a Spell Off seemed different. I guess I should describe the room or something, but there ain’t really nothing to say about it except it felt like home. Looking back on a room, you can make up all kinds of flowery stuff about it if you want to, but this room had four dirty walls, a high ceiling and a dusty floor and it was empty just like most of the rooms in 1985.

When we left the room, we walked into another bigger room. Here, the 15 spellers were supposed walk around, talk with each other and mouth the spelling of words. Over in the corner were these two white girl twins who had “Katrina’s Finest” on the back of their yellow shirts in brown block letters.

“They weren’t even here when the storm hit,” Baize told me. “They from up somewhere near Jackson but their father, Mr. Gaddis, that man runs the whole town.”

“That’s crazy,” I said, but really it wasn’t crazy at all.

The twins were outside a huge group of kids huddled in the corner. They were holding hands, on their tippy toes trying to see over the cluster of about fifteen kids. Between pinkish beige faces and white shirts, I saw a cheek and the neck that was a little darker than mine. And to the left of that cheek was a folded forearm that was close to Baize’s color.

I tapped Baize on the shoulder and pointed to the crowd. “Are they Mexican? Or are they black? Thought you said that we were the only black ones.”

Baize walked towards the crowd, got on her tiptoes, swiveled her head a bit and started playing with her braids. She looked back at me and exhaled, then shook her head again. “Shame, shame, shame,” I saw her say to herself. She walked to the other corner of the room and slumped in the corner.

I watched her eyelids half covering the brown of his eyes, bottom lip just hanging. “What happened?”

“South Asians,” she interrupted me. “South Asians happened.”

“What?”

“South. Asians.”

“What does that even mean?”

I looked towards the crowd again. I saw the dark straight hair, the dark eyebrows, the white of their eyes, the confident casual way they had their hands in their pockets. All the white kids surrounding the two black-looking kids folded their arms tight across their nipples. Other folks crossed their bellies. And those folk who didn’t cross kept fake yawning, and smiling crooked while the eyes moved up and down the bodies of the black-looking kids. I knew that look-style. It was the look the white boys gave us black boys the first few days of basketball camp up in Jackson. They looked at you like that whether you could play or not.

“Wait. Can South Asians spell super good or something?”

“Voltron, please. I need a plan.”

“What! I ain’t even heard the words South Asian before. We don’t have them in 1985. We really don’t. How can you tell a South Asian from a dark skinned Mexican?” I asked her. “They look a little Mexican to me.”

Baize ignored my question and said, “I’m pretty much going for fifth place.”

“Because of South Asians?”

“Yes, Voltron. Or maybe they’re gonna let me win. Either way, things could be way worse.”

“How,” I asked her.

Baize just looked at me and shook her head.

LeVar Burton.

As soon as those hot white lights hit my forehead and the crowd started clapping, the sweat got to gushing. My Grandma always said that pressure burst pipes and cameras make a coward out of your favorite hero. Pipes were bursting and there were plenty cowards marching around that hot stage. Even though Baize and I were there together, I felt embarrassed. And embarrassed, I understood on that stage, was just another way of saying you felt alone. It was the first time I felt alone since I’d been in 2011. Up until now, Baize made it hard to feel alone.

Right there, though, I remembered that I’d forgotten about Shalaya Crump. Even though I dreamed about her, I’d forgotten how I needed her. If Shalaya Crump would have been there, we could have dealt with the cameras and the crowd together. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do on that stage in front of those people. And even more than that, I couldn’t believe I was on some stage in 2011 when the girl I loved was forty-seven years away from me, probably doing something fun with the ugliest boy I’d ever seen in my life.

I couldn’t see anybody in the crowd because the lights were shining so bright. I sat on the left side, third seat from aisle and Baize was on the same seat on the other side, looking over at me and shaking her head. At the end of my line was the South Asian girl. At the end of Baize’s line was the South Asian boy.

The judge made us stand up for the pledge of allegiance. While everyone stood, I walked over to Baize who still sitting down looking like she was talking to herself. “Look,” I whispered in her ear. “I’m gonna go, okay? Shalaya Crump needs me. Thanks for everything. If I find your computer, I’ll bring it back to you, okay?”

I started walking away from Baize when I heard, “I’d like to thank Melahatchie for inviting me host your third annual Spell Off,” a man named Dr. Jacques Bailey said. His voice sounded like the guy who painted clouds on PBS, but it was more nerdish. “I’m sure this one will be as spectacular as the last one I hosted in Port Arthur Texas. Someone joked that I am becoming the Michael Buffer of Spell Offs. I surely hope so. Baize,” the announcer said, “is our first contestant. I’m sure most of you know that Baize tied for fifth place in last year’s Spell Off. Baize lost her parents in Katrina 6 years ago and she actually lives right down the road. In addition to doing her homework, Baize is an aspiring rapper and entrepreneur. She writes in her bio, ‘Do not get it twisted, Mayne. My name is Baize. I do not need to win the Spell Off to know I’m special. This is Baize Against the World, not Akeelah and the Bee.’”

I looked over at Baize and she just nodded.

“Baize, your first word is ABNEGATIONS.”

Baize stepped to the microphone with her fist clenched and looked down at her red, black, green and yellow hi top Nikes.  “A-B-,” she started.

“Would you like a definition or etymology?”

“Naw, I’m good,” she said, “N-E-G-A-T-I-O-N-S,” she finished. “Abnegations.”

Baize walked right back to her seat, fists still clenched. No etymology. No usage. No pronunciation. The crowd and the spellers started clapping in spurts. I was clapping loud and hard as hell … until they called my name.

“Voltron. Voltron, from 9^th Ward, New Orleans, please come to the stage.”

I stepped to the mic, pumping my fist and looking at Baize who kinda had her head tucked in her chest. I wondered if she was embarrassed for me.

“Voltron, we’d like to welcome you, too. Voltron has been added as an alternate. He is a special wild card competitor in our Spell Off. Voltron was born in Melahatchie but moved to New Orleans after the storm hit.  He has won numerous Spell Offs in New Orleans. We expect great things from him. Since you didn’t provide us with a bio, Voltron, would you like to say something about yourself?”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “Back home, we … uh, we say that reading, it’s … umm … it’s fundamental.” Everyone was quiet. I guess they expected more but I was done playing a role in this dumb Spell-Off. I needed to go find Shalaya Crump. “I’m sorry, but um, I have to go home to that ward in, uh, New Orleans. My stomach hurts. Listen though,” I said into the mic. “Be nice to Baize, okay? She probably don’t want me to say this, but she’s worried about the Asians from the South.” I looked over to them. “Yeah, ya’ll. I don’t know why she so worried. Don’t take it personal. You heard of Reading Rainbow with LeVar Burton?”

No one said a word so I looked down at my feet as they slid off that stage and tried to not to imagine the looks on folks’ faces as I headed out the door of what used to be a Freedom School. I wanted it all to be a dream.

Future Suffering.

I wasn’t out the door more than 20 seconds before Baize came running after me. When she caught me, we didn’t say a word. We just walked towards the hole. During the first minute of our walk back to the hole, Baize was quiet. I watched my feet miss most of the thin branches that had fallen in the woods. Every time I stepped an inch from a branch I thought about how I couldn’t wait to tell Shalaya Crump that I was on a stage in 2011 talking about stuff I knew nothing about.

The second minute, every time we passed an ant bed, I thought of all the folks in 1985 who would have been shamed if they saw how I represented them. I looked like a complete idiot in front of people I didn’t even know. I could feel Baize looking at my face too hard while I was thinking. “Don’t worry about it, Voltron,” she said. “How you feel?”

“Why you even saying that?” I asked her. “I’m fine.”

“I mean, you caught an L,” she said. “No doubt about that. That was a fail and a half back there, but you had your heart in the right place.” She put her hand on my shoulder as we walked. “We should have never come anyway. It was more important that we went back and saved your friend.”

“You didn’t have to come, though. You should have stayed and saw if you were right about the Asians from the south.”

“South Asians.”

“South Asians, I mean.”

“It didn’t matter if I was right or wrong. I wanted to win but more than that, I wanted to say that ‘This is Baize Against the World, not Akeelah and the Bee’ line on stage. I thought they were gonna let me say it.”

I should have asked her what that meant but I didn’t really even care. Baize said that she saw a boy taping the Spell Off on his phone. She said that boy loved to post embarrassing things about folks on something called “youtube” and “twitter.  In two days, Baize claimed that messages would be sent with subjects like, “What happened to hometraining? Click that link” or “Jade, brace yourself, girl.”

It was weird because up until that point, I kinda hated people who were skinnier than me and taller than me and smarter than me and funnier than me. And I hated folks from different states and folks who had shinier penny loafers and who had rounder heads than me, and folks who didn’t need as much sauce as me. But right then, I didn’t even hate those people. I did, however, hate the future. I mean, Klan-hate, too. After I saved Shalaya Crump, I wanted to do everything I could to come back to future and make it suffer for helping me embarrassing myself.

With all my hate bubbling, we walked to the hole. Baize got in first and I followed her. While we were in the hole, deep in the dark, Baize grabbed both of my wrists and made her way down to my to the palm of my hands.

“Baize,” it was the first time I’d called her by her name, “You were scared to stay back there by yourself, weren’t you?” I asked her. “Your eyes open?”

“Yeah, Voltron. They’re open and yeah, I was scared to be there alone. Are you scared right now? And if you ain’t scared, how come?”

Sounds crazy to you, but that was the best question anyone had ever asked me. The thing was I was never scared of what I should have been scared of. I wasn’t scared of bad things happening to me and I wasn’t scared of people finding out I stole those Bibles. I wasn’t really even scared of the Klan. I was scared of living knowing that Shalaya Crump was in love with someone else. Nothing else scared me. And if nothing really scared me, I wondered if anything else really even mattered. Everything else just made me mad or made me embarrassed or made me nervous. But all of those feelings had to do with Shalaya Crump in some way or another.

“Ain’t no reason to be scared,” I told her and took my hand back from her. “What can people do to you really?”

“They can make you disappear.”

“Yeah, but then you’re gone. I ain’t afraid of disappearing. I bet disappearing doesn’t even hurt, to tell you the truth.”

“People can mash your heart of your chest, Voltron, while you’re still alive. They can take people from you. That’s something to be afraid of. Stop fronting, boy.”

I said okay but I didn’t think I was fronting at all. I knew people could hurt people way more than Baize would ever know. Shalaya Crump and I had this friend named Rozier. I liked to think about girl booties as long as Rozier knew me, and Rozier liked to think about boy booties as long I knew him. That’s just how he was. The weirdest thing about Rozier was that he was the kind of guy who you met and 29 minutes later, you knew he was gonna be better than Eddie Murphy when he grew up. Rozier invented farting out loud in homeroom. He really did. He also invented calling people “Ol’ blank-blank-blank ass nigga.” Like if you ate an apple too fast, Rozier would call you an Ol’ eating-apple-like-it’s-a-plum ass nigga” or if you failed for a test, he’d call you an “Ol’ watching-Three’s Company-when-you-shoulda-been-studying ass nigga.”

If you called Rozier a name he didn’t like, Rozier could slap you in the face better than any kid in Melahatchie, except for maybe Shalaya Crump. The summer of ‘84, Rozier got jumped by some dudes from Waveland. Rozier had embarrassed one of the dudes in front of his family earlier at the arcade. After the boy called Rozier a faggot, Rozier said he’d never met a boy who smelled like sack and dookie through his church clothes. He called him an “Ol wiping-your-ass forward-instead-of-backward-so-the-dookie-get-caked-up-under-your-nuttsack ass nigga.” He said the boy needed Mr. Miyagi to teach him to “Wipe on, Wipe off.” Even his friends started laughing and when the dude got in Rozier’s face, Rozier slapped the boy across his mouth twice with both hands. That’s four slaps right in front of his family. Then he ran.

The boy who got slapped four times got three of his friends to help find Rozier when he was by himself in the Night Time woods the next day. Rozier slapped the best he could but they ended up calling him a faggot and beating him down with t-ball bats. Rozier ended up in a coma and one day later, he was dead. Shalaya Crump and I didn’t speak a word about revenge until the night after the funeral.

That night we planned how we were gonna kill the boys for the rest of the summer and I came up with a good plan, too. But that’s the strange thing about planning to kill boys with someone like Shalaya Crump. She had the worst temper of anyone I knew but she was also the smartest person I knew. At some point, Shalaya Crump realized that we didn’t really want to kill the boys.

“We just want them to hurt like we hurt,” she said. Shalaya Crump said that in order to hurt the boys, we’d have to “kill some little boy they loved, but not kill them.” And neither of us really had it in us to kill some “little boy we didn’t know.” By the end of the summer, all four of the boys involved got sent to juvenile detention centers for five years.

Anyway, I didn’t feel like explaining to Baize how I’d seen Rozier disappear, too, so I just said, “I hear you.  You’re right. I should be afraid.”

I opened the door to the hole slowly so we wouldn’t be slapped across the face by the 1964 Klan. I sniffed as I opened the door to the hole and knew we were where we needed to be.

Found Babies.

“It’s so dark here?” Baize said. She was bent over coughing and touching the leaves on some of the Magnolia trees … (want more? let me and Putnam/Penguin know)

The week you were born, I hid behind a Raggedy Ann and Andy toy box and waited for your Mama to bring you home. I didn’t hide simply because I was sad that you were taking my place as the baby of the family; nor did I hide because I, as a 7 year old child, had never seen a new born.I hid because I was scared of what you would demand of me. With you in the world, I had the responsibility of not only aimlessly living life; I had the responsibility of saying yes to life. Yours and mine.

When Mama carried you in the door of that house on Queen Eleanor Rd, I jumped from behind that toy box. I couldn’t help it. I ran into the living room and slowly, sheepishly peeked at you, the three-day-old Catherine Nichole Coleman. My first cousin.

Like our Grandma, you had still piercing eyes that somehow caught and cradled everything in the room. Even then, your tiny balled up fists punched at what seemed like hundreds of invisible ghosts as I knelt and made goofy faces hoping to make you laugh.

In a way, we’d spend the rest of our lives that way … punching the unnamed blues away and desperately trying to make each other laugh. Deep down, though, we knew.

As years went on, we both dealt with the unfair weight of life and love. Those invisible ghosts, those shapeless blues, began to take shape. They got heavier, meaner, more persistent. We knew what we were fighting and though we rarely spoke to each other about the contours of our pain caused and the pain withstood, we could see the toll taken in our voice, our fiery temperament and our ever-changing health.

Yet we still wanted to make each other proud from thousands of miles away. I prayed this year, Nicole, to transfer the pain of your heart, your body and your baby to me.

In my immediate absence you’ve were blessed through your absolutely amazing Mother, your generous Aunt Linda, your receptive Aunt Mary, your indomitable namesake, Grandma Catherine Coleman, your wonderful friends and, thankfully, Mr. Ashanti Smith.

In one day of seeing you and Ashanti together, I’ve seen a peculiar, particular grace simply in the way you look to each other, smiling across a crowded room, saying “I got you,” without  actually saying a word.

As you and Ashanti walk away from this ceremony, husband and wife, take the best of what you’ve seen and learned from all of your family. But please remember, as James Baldwin says, Love does not begin and end the way we often think it does. Love is a battle; a passionate war reliant on honesty, acceptance, fairness, will and imagination; Love is the product of lovely decisions. Love is courageously growing up.

You and Ashanti are the sturdy bridge between two proud families but you two are also the architects of your own love. Create shapes we’ve yet to see. Paint your love with colors we’ve yet to imagine. Most importantly, walk together with God … face to face at times, back to back when necessary, but always hand in hand, always graceful, tenaciously remembering from whence you came and affirmatively saying yes to life. Together. No matter what.

Thank you for letting us love you as best we can, Nichole. Thank you for life.

Your cousin, Kiese

Would you change the future of Mississippi even if it meant never
falling in love with girl you were destined to marry?

14 year-old City Coldson will do anything to make Shalaya Crump
love him … including traveling 26 years into the future, stealing a
lap top and jetting 21 years into the past to fight the Klan during
Freedom Summer.

Set in the coastal community of Melahatchie, Mississippi in March 1985,
City and Shalaya Crump travel to March 2011 via a time portal
in the woods. There, they meet a mysterious young rapper named Baize who
has lost her parents in Hurricane Katrina. City steals Baize’s lap top
and cell phone and takes them back to 1985.

The following day, Shalaya Crump and City meet another worn down
time-traveler from 1964 named Jewish Evan Altshuler. Evan is desperate
to protect his family against the Klu Klux Klan during Freedom Summer.
He convinces Shalaya Crump that he can help her find her parents and her
future self if she brings the lap top computer back to 1964.

Unexpectedly, City and Shalaya Crump are separated, with Shalaya Crump
stuck in 1964 and City stuck in 2011. Can they find each other? How will their
time apart change them? In their wanderings back and forward through time, much
is revealed about segregation, Freedom Summer, the destruction of Hurricane Katrina,
the Gulf Oil spill and the limits of technology and love. Far more, however, is revealed about City’s relationship with Baize and the power of writing and revising Mississippi and its character(s).

Chapter 1 — “Special”

I didn’t have a girlfriend halfway through 8^th grade and it wasn’t because I had wider hips than Lisa Louis or because I hated the smell of deodorant or because I treated my blue sweat rag like that white boy, Linus, treated his blanket. It wasn’t even because Principal Jankins was heard over the intercom whispering to his wife, Ms. Dawsin-Jankins, that the back of my head was so flat it made Sister Raphael’s booty look round. I never had a girlfriend because the last time I saw Shalaya Crump, she told me that she could love me if I helped her change the future … in a special way.

Shalaya Crump lived in Melahatchie, Mississippi across the street from Mama Lara’s house. My problem was that none of the 8^th, 9^th and 10^th grade girls who liked me wore fake Air Jordans with low socks or knew how to be funny when you didn’t expect it or had those sleepy, sunken eyes like Shalaya Crump. You never really knew what Shalaya Crump was gonna say and she always looked like she knew more than everybody around her, even more than the oldest grown-ups who acted like they knew more than Yoda’s daddy.

But really, the coolest thing about Shalaya Crump was that she made me feel like it was okay not to know stuff. She always asked these hard questions about the future but she didn’t treat me like dookie chunks when I didn’t get it right. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t ever been around someone whose not like that, but no one else in my whole life made me feel like it was okay not to know stuff like Shalaya Crump did …

Coming soon (maybe) from Penguin/Putnam!

How good are you at LONG DIVISION?

Our Grandmas used to beat us to remind us that there was a massive price to pay for being black, free and imperfect. Years later, we’re still paying that price and we have yet to accept the probability that, all things considered, not one black man in this country really deserves the positive or policed attention we get in the classroom, in prison, on Main Street, in the bedroom, on the playing field, in Jena, on the page, in the White House or on the porches of our own homes.

Last Thursday, Henry Louis Gates was policed for being the nigger.  We all know that the nigger is the American icon, the most infamous, characterless “it” in American history. It is at once a real mirage and a real object like those translucent, two-dimensional prizes at the bottom of sugary red, white and blue cereal. Because of it, real fleshy black men like you, me and Henry Louis Gates wade waist deep in abundant amounts of unearned attention as Geraldine Ferraro stated about a year ago but we also drown in unwarranted discipline and state-sanctioned policing, often regardless of class or geography. There’s not a grown black man alive who has not been shown this over and over again, right?

Then why do we act surprised when we find out that Henry Louis Gates, one of the most decorated scholars in the country, was arrested outside of his home last Thursday. Why are we shocked that police were called when a neighbor reported “two black males with backpacks” on the porch and one of the men, according to the neighbor, was attempting to “wedge his shoulder in the door, as if he was forcing entry.”

Gates supposedly snapped on the white officer called to his residence, calling the officer racist and asking “Do you know who I am?” And of course, the arresting officer’s claim that Gates continued to call him racist in a loud, disturbing and “tumultuous” way will persuade millions of folk that Gates, a supposed uppity race man, got what he deserved.

Most of the folks I love tend to laugh or sugar shake off the the idea of anything post racial yet we’ll gasp at Gate’s arrest, saying to ourselves or other folk, “I can’t believe it” or “Racism is alive and well” and “If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone.”

Yep, and water is wet. 

We know that police will stop targeting us somewhere around the time when middle aged black men stop abusing blue tooth technologies and white folks stop jogging. Our question has never been, “Will cops unfairly target us because we’re black men?” That’s the vaporous stuff of synthetic op-eds, 24 hour news channels and crappy town hall meetings. 

In real space and time, it’s simple, absolutely binary. Do we snap on the cops when they unfairly test us or do we play it cool as Grandma and them taught us?

That’s it.

Though the later runs through our mind, almost all of us choose the former almost all the time because well, we like life and fear jail. Whatever we do, we try to survive with dignity. But that dignified survival has many faces and even more consequences.

Right now, I’m wondering and wandering beyond simply how we should react when we’re unfairly policed. I wonder what happens when we go beyond being the stars and narrators of American racist spectacle. On days like this, I’m tempted to say that my discovery of what it means to be a young black professor begins and ends with Professor Henry Louis Gates getting arrested outside his own house. But I could only utter that corniness if I really believed in post-racial/post-racist anything.

2.

Realistically, the discovery begins, ends and begins again with my arrival on Raymond Avenue in Poughkeepsie, New York after a fourteen-hour drive from Bloomington, Indiana. I drove directly to the Main gates of Vassar College and instead of going through what I knew would be the hassle of security, I u-turned and found my way to the Alumnae House, the college hotel.

The Alumnae House was the first hotel I’d ever been in that had no televisions in the room. What Alumnae House lacked in televisions, it made up for in spooky pictures of little beady-eyed white children. All through the Alumnae House, I found myself being looked at by the hollow eyes of little Brody, Chad and Hannah. I called Grandma from the room and told her that Vassar didn’t feel like home, that I didn’t like the way the little kids were looking at me and that I didn’t like how Vassar looked like a guarded castle. Grandma said that Northern white folks loved to put ghost-looking pictures of white children on walls and that I didn’t drive fourteen hours to, “ … find no home or judge no white folks’ pictures. You have a home. You up there to get a job,” she told me. “So get it!”

I got it.

My first day as an actual professor at Vassar, I was asked by a white student in flip-flops and a crooked smile if I could sell him some weed. I told the boy that I worked here and that I was not the dope man. He just looked at me and nodded up and down, still waiting for his weed. When I told him that I taught English, he brought his brow together, looked at me, said “Word?” and jogged off.

Later that year, a white woman student came to my Spring office hours in a string bikini beneath her trench coat. That was followed by a white senior professor telling me how “lucky” I was to be at Vassar and how he wished “he was me” because of all the attention he believed a young black guy could get from female students at Vassar. At the end of that first year, security twice entered my office demanding to see my identification despite pictures of my family and me on my desk.

My first year on tenure track, a senior white member of my department stole a draft of a recommendation from our departmental printer and showed it to the Dean of Faculty, highlighting the typos and the possible disservice I was doing to Vassar students as a writing teacher.

After I got my first book deal, I was told by another senior white member of my department that I was “special” and it was “alright” if I speak to him “in ebonics.” This cat continued to consistently confront me with claims that he is fighting for me and other black American faculty without ever asking me, and maybe other black American faculty, the simple question of who we are, how we are doing and what he should be fighting for. That was before he threatened to take me to court for calling him out.

Last summer, four security guards stopped me for walking past the President’s house at night with no identification. When I asked one of the officers,  ”How do you not know me? I sold you a fucking car a few years ago,” they said I was threatening them.

Last semester, a volunteer coach at Vassar called me “a visitor, a guest” while I was playing ball with some of my boys. After I cussed him the fuck out, the old jogger persued a personal investigation into my character and went to the Dean and the Office of Affirmative Action with the claim that I harassed him and hence had no place at Vassar.

Blah, racism, blah, evil white folks, blah, blah, the weight of white folks, blah, bluesy blah blah …

3.

When I talk to white folks about my Vassar beginning, I often talk about the dope man experience, the experience of staying in the Alumnae House under the gaze of little white ghosts. Or I talk about security policing me in my own office, the presumptuous woman in the string bikini and my obliviousness to departmental politics. When sharing these narratives, I long for that particular group of people to understand the shape and origin of my identity at Vassar by understanding the shape and origin of white racism’s oppressive relationship with bodies like mine (i.e., I want those white folks to drown in guilt while my black ass wants to wade in innocence, or vice versa).

But in more ways that I want to admit, telling these kind of origin narratives is a dishonest act of desperation, a clumsy conflation of policed struggle and whole experience. Investment or indulgence these dishonest acts could really make discovery and acceptance of what it means to be a black human being who reads, writes, acts and acts up for a living impossible.

As true as all racist spectacles are, dangling them out there as defining narratives of my Vassar tenure is dishonest primarily because I have reckoned with these experiences. Similarly, reckon or not, it’s dishonest to crystalize all that it means to be black man or a black male professor or a black man in America in the Gate’s policing. The retelling of these racist spectacles is often mediated through a desperate desire for particular listeners to see that we’ve been recognized and policed as the nigger from our beginning. And if that white listener, reader, watcher and I invest in this desperation narrative, I don’t have to do the hard work of accepting my nuanced relationship with sexuality, gender, home, whiteness, entitlement, anger and ironically the other Niggas I love.

Desperation blots out our ability to accept our multiple identities and the paradoxical people in our own origin narratives and our own lives. Often, those are the people who make us feel most loved, most vulnerable and most challenged. If I am going to honestly engage with the discovery of what it means to be young black professor or in 2009, I don’t need to statically indulge in versions of “If it can happen to Gates, it can happen to all of us.”

I’m more interested in how the love of people close and far leads me to tell every security officer asking for my ID to show me their ID. And sure, I experienced a white female student disrespectfully, and expectedly coming into my office in a bikini but in a twisted way, I often tell that story to my boys in the hopes that they’ll think I, you know,  just got it like that. And I deal with racist ass colleagues who call me lucky to be at Vassar by being better than them and telling them to their face, in front of my department, that they are racist ass colleagues. Then I brace myself for their definite but unpredictable retaliation. I’m imperfect and fucked up and longingforbelonging just like you,  just like Gates and — though I hate to admit it — just like the trifling up cops who arrest us for peddling crack when throwing peace signs out a window or stealing a computer when typing outside our apartments.

I’m interested in how Henry Louis Gates would describe his feelings when walking into a faculty meeting filled with men and women who would never be arrested in front of their own homes. How would that feeling differ from what he’d feel when walking into a room filled with mostly black men who could never say to a cop, “Do you know who I am?” I’m also interested in what Henry Louis Gates would have said differently if the arresting officer were a white woman, a South Asian woman, a black person, and not a white man. But more than that, I can’t front; I want to know what Professor Gates ate for dinner when he came back from jail. Did he drink Faygo Peach with crushed ice? Did he watch Tracy Jordan’s belly play hide and seek on 30 Rock? Did the cops confiscate his cane? Did he look in the mirror, wipe his eyes and cry when he got home. When the cameras came, was he happy he had a nice shape-up? Does being one of the most incredible academics in the world make being treated like a nigger less painful? 

I’m still discovering what it means to be a young black professor, but the dimensions of that discovery, at least today, are not dictated by the racist spectacle itself.  They’re dictated by the details of my messily drawn character. Our Grandmas beat us so we would understand that there was a price to pay for publically acting like we were real characters with real character. We pay the price and we don’t want to get beat no more.  We are real characters with real character, not stars and narrators of racist spectacle. We are real characters with real character, not stars and narrators of racist spectacle. We are real characters, not stars …

Ether.

The air down here feels even hotter with you gone. 

In the Spring of 95, after I was suspended from Millsaps College, I went to Jackson State University. You destroyed us that year, 52-34 while completing a freakish 29 of 34 passes for 533 yards and 5 touchdowns … but don’t front! You know that the Sonic Boom of the South eviscerated Alcorn’s band.

Air, I guess I should get on to saying what I need to say to you. See, you were one of the best football players to ever play, but I just don’t think you were as tough as you needed to be. The sickest thing about it is that I didn’t really care. I always assumed that you, like Baldwin, Ali, King, Jim Brown and almost every other black man I know needed drugs, manipulative sex and/or spectacle for security.

When I look around the walls of my living room, I see a picture of James Baldwin with the words, “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” To the left of that picture is a life-size picture of Muhammad Ali. Across the room from that is a Zimbabwean sand-painting of a young woman with fruit on her back, a baby in one arm and a shield in the other. Across from that is the top half of a life-size picture of you that cuts off at the waist. The bottom half of your body is pasted across the door of my office on campus and it’s been that way for years.

You’re up on my wall with Ali and Baldwin because, among other things, I trust your toughness. In your death, though, I see what I should have seen a long time ago. Toughness ain’t survival or cunning. Meaningful toughness entails willing yourself, no matter the costs, to make healthy imaginative decisions for your family, your team, your people, yourself. For example, your meaningful toughness saved hundreds of lives during Katrina, while my spineless ass stayed up here safely wiring money to Mama and them.

I’m still a fan, Air, and you’re still the hero you were when we met in high school. A few years after our second meeting Mama and I watched the draft of 95 with absolute pride as you were the first black Mississippi quarterback to really be given a chance to lead an NFL team. Folks from other states watched and heard the announcers talk about how you “made it despite humble beginnings.”  But Mississippi black boys and girls knew the contours and sounds of those beginnings. We knew that you went to Alcorn partially because none of the bigger, whiter schools trusted your black All-American ass to play quarterback.

When you walked across that stage, we knew what you knew. You knew that Walter, the greatest running back ever, came from Mississippi and went to Jackson State University. You knew that Jerry, the greatest receiver of all time came from Mississippi and went to Mississippi Valley State.  You knew when you crossed that stage that Mississippi and the SWAC had already produced the greatest college quarterback to never get drafted in Willie Totten. You remembered 1984 when Willie threw for 58 touchdowns, 28 of them to Jerry Rice.

We were barely 9 and 11 years old when the NFL disrespected Willie.  We learned then that quarterbacking was different than running or catching that ball. The quarterback’s decision-making and toughness mattered more than anyone on the field. The Bears and the 49ers didn’t draft Walter and Jerry to lead their teams to the Super Bowl, though they both did. They drafted them to help get their teams to the Super Bowl.

Warren Moon would later work his way into the league as a black quarterback from Canada Football League and his success with The Oilers made their drafting you in 1995 more likely, just as your eventual success made Vince Young’s drafting in 2006 a reality.

If you were alive, I’d bet you a cold drank that Vince won’t make the same mistake you made. I don’t just mean the mistake of falling asleep on a couch in the presence of an angry woman. I mean, Vince will no doubt really think about how to transition from NFL star to retired quarterback when he leaves the game. He’ll be more aware of the destructive possibilities implicit in emotional and physical insecurity.

Here’s where it gets tricky though. Your murder is an opportunity for Vince and all of us to reckon (though far too many of us will see your death as simply as a femiphobic warning to black men to stop cheating on our wives with young reckless women).

The warped thing about all of this is that we’re acting like your murder should be more eye-opening than our STD rate, more tell-tale than our HIV rate or the rising rate of HIV in black women or the tinny miasma we hear and see when we close our eyes and really listen to the sounds of black men killing each other over and over again.

Our lack of toughness destroys lives. And again, we pay a price for the decisions we make and we pay that price with the lives we lead. Black men aren’t the only human beings striking unhealthy poses and sucking down unhealthy amounts of suspect sex, drugs, violence and spectacle but I swear that I can’t figure out why our affliction and dependency on drugs, manipulative sex, violence and spectacle seem to be so much more destructive.

We loved you so much, Air. We did. But the truth’ll burn a hole in a cup of water and the truth is that you died too soon. I wish your living legs, eyes, mind and heart were back in Mt. Olive, Mississippi given one more chance to tough it out. I know you wouldn’t let yourself, your wife, your sons or us down. The big question, though, is how many of us down here sucking up air will be tough enough to reckon with our own spinelessmess in the life we have left.

Ether.

Ether.

When I was a sophomore at Millsaps College, I agreed to tutor a Japanese exchange student named Hideki for extra credit. I can’t remember Hideki’s last name to save my life, but I do remember that he drove a maroon Dodge mini-van, rocked a backwards Waffle House hat and wore these extremely high-waisted Japanese jeans. Hideki’s torso seemed to start at his nipples.

After my first meeting with Hideki, I learned that he didn’t speak a lick of English and that the only English he really wanted to know was slick shit from the skits on the Chronic (“Wait, when I say Deeez Nutz?”) and just enough that he could understand our jokes about BeeDo’s fake weed, skin flutes, O-Dog’s Napoleon complex and Ramen noodles.

My boys asked Hideki every ig’nant question imaginable about the differences between Japanese girls and Chinese girls (“So you saying it’s straight up and down, Hideki, not a line across?”) In turn, Hideki never failed to entertain, and the more he entertained, the more my boys gave me props for bringing the first — as Gunn would say — “nigga from the Deep East” into our clique.

Hideki let me know early that he had no problem with my doing his papers as long he did well enough to pass. “That pass,” he would say half laughing, half frowning, “just that pass.” “That pass” for Hideki was a grade of C or higher on all his papers. “That pass” would ensure that he was on track to graduate when he went back to his university in Japan. After all of our “just pass” sessions, Hideki paid for these heavy to-go platters from IHOP or this Chinese buffet called Ding How. 

Around Thanksgiving, when the college closed, I invited Hideki to my house since he really had no place to go. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I remember expecting Hideki to get me one of those heavy all-you-can-eat platters from Ding How even though I hadn’t helped him “just pass” in the  last week.

When Hideki handed me the weighty platter, I remember the cheeky smile and gazillion crows feet webbing from the corners of his eyes. I figured that Hideki was just extremely happy that I’d given him a place to lay his head over Thanksgiving break and an entrance into my home.

The next day at my Grandma’s house, I introduced Hideki to each individual member of my family like this: “This is my man, Hideki. He from Japan.” “This is my man, Hideki. You know he from Japan, right?” “This is my man, Hideki. He speak Japanese.”

 And whether it was my Grandma, my aunt or my little cousin, the person shaking Hideki’s hand would do a little bow. And shameful as it sounds, so did I.

There’s a difference between making a guest feel at home and making a guest feel special. Like most folks, my family and I conflated the two. We thought we were making Hideki feel at home by giving him the reclining chair in Grandma’s living room, making sure his cup runneth over with the finest in Cold Drank, giving him constant access to the remote control, laughing when he laughed and telling him that he “can have” whatever he picked up.

I smiled the entire time at how generous and unracist or enlightened my Dirty South family and me were that Thanksgiving. During supper, Hideki ate everything that was put in front of him, including 3 pieces of German Chocolate cake. After he ate, he gave my Grandma a Happy Mother’s Day card for “her makings good chicken.”

Even though his card and its broken use of English made me look like a pretty lame English tutor, we all laughed our way into the living room. While Hideki changed channels, we all fell asleep. 

A few weeks after we got back to school, I started to see less of Hideki. At the time, I remember thinking it was because he didn’t need any more tutoring. I remember thinking he just wanted to be with his Japanese crew or maybe he got tired of all horizontal vs. vertical questions.  

But now,  I wonder.

I wonder just how thankful those eyes of Hideki really were when he gave me that platter of Ding How food. I wonder if maybe my black southern family delivered Hideki from evil because he didn’t treat us like we were lessthan. As with most wonders, this wonder is rooted in what I know.

I know Hideki should have despised my family and me for not explaining why we laughed at his Mother’s Day card. I know Hideki could have pitied us for never attempting to ask him a question about who he was, where he was from, what his last name was, what he felt about being in our house, away from his home. I know Hideki might have hated my fat ass for expecting to get compensated with mounds of food every time I did his homework for him.

I also know that when Hideki didn’t come around us anymore, I didn’t really give a shit.

Hideki, high pants wearing exchange student from Japan, had already delivered me from evil and I had already given him his pass. Or maybe he had gotten his deliverance from evil and I had gotten my pass. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. We used each other up and we were done.

We weren’t done because we were mean or because we hated each other; we were done with each other because we were desperate and all we cared about was getting more credit than we deserved and being absolved of guilt. Right now, I wonder if that is the best and/or worst of what enlightened but desperate human beings are capable.

Ether?

Mama wanted me to love Michael Jackson as she did, but I couldn’t because all I could see was his work. My Mama, a 53 year-old woman from Forest Mississippi felt like she grew up looking horizontally at Michael and his brothers. Mama heard not only the Jackson 5’s work, but also their asphalted American journey. As a black girl who moved every summer from Mississippi to Milwaukee with her singing sisters, my mother recognized the contoured place from which Jackson’s bended notes sprang. Mama moved through the world a virtuosic, curious, confused, defiantly capable, black girl in schizophrenic post-Brown United States. Like Michael, Mama was the child of two beautiful, persistent and sometimes destructive parents.

Let Mama tell it, she grew up different, alone, the “peculiar dove” in a caring but limiting nest. Let both of her sisters tell it, each of them was the peculiar dove longing for belonging. All three sisters tell the story of my grandmother working hard to get them their first stereo and first record during the Christmas of 1969. The album was a 45’ with “I Want You Back” on the A side and “Who’s Loving You” on the B-side. After huddling in the living room and listening to the both sides of the 45 over and over, Mama remembers telling Grandma thank you, then wading through Chinaberry bushes and climbing a hanging moss tree where she wrote about Michael Jackson’s happysad voice, her hatred for ugly Isiah Horde and the colorful isolation she felt from the world.

2.

As a single working parent in the late 70’s,  Mama worked to create music despite the heartbreaking noise of flimsy job security, mangled romantic relationships, unpaid utility bills. Mama found some order through limiting my consumption. I could watch our 12 inch black and white television for one hour a day. I could go outside only after I wrote an essay using words that neither of us knew. I couldn’t eat much sugar, salt or cold drank unless Mama was there to okay it. Playing any form of Hip Hop was a beatable offense while all music played on my little radio couldn’t exceed 5 on the volume … except for Michael Jackson.

When Mama and I weren’t jamming til all hours of the night to Off the Wall tape I got for Christmas, I was in my room listening to the tape alone. There, I could sing the songs the way I wanted and be weird and fascinated by the minimalist album cover of Mama’s Off the Wall album. The Off the Wall cover foreshadowed part of my future with Michael Jackson. Like a lot of folk, I’d be mesmerized by the work of Michael’s feet while also wondering about his face.

The contrast between the dense black of Michael’s high-watered tuxedo slacks and the glow of his white socks up against a haggard brick wall created a depth, or a crease into which I could easily slip. In that crease, it’s easy to say that I wanted to be Michael. But I don’t think that’s really true. Much more meaningful that personal adulation or some strange kind of body transference, didn’t we all want to work, work it like and be worked by Michael Jackson. We wanted to dress as he did while he was at work and defy rhythmic possibilities. And we tried, too, didn’t we, over and over again in mirrors, at dances, in bedrooms, on stages, in classrooms, at parties, in our dreams?

3.

Michael’s work post Thriller changed the way we consumed music. Lots of black folks who I respect have said that Michael was ours on Off the Wall and he became the property of world’s post Thriller. I’ve said that shit too, but I’m not so sure about that any more.  I am sure that he belonged to music pre Thriller, and post Thriller, the video as a form and workable possibility belonged to him. In forcing MTV to play black music videos, Michael’s work dictated to us the tight vivid narratives in the songs we loved. Where all of us made up a thousand scenes, characters, familiar details of our own life to songs like “Rock With You” or “She’s Out of My Life” we now knew the exact the story of “Billie Jean” “Beat It” “Thriller” “Say Say Say” “Smooth Criminal”. Michael’s vision became ours. Hence the story of where you were, what you were doing, what you felt when you first saw “Thriller” or “Beat It” is as vivid for us as the “videos” we used to make up while listening to Off the Wall.

4.

Today, Michael Jackson, the greatest American worker of my life, is dead.  His work connected us. His work made us wear pants that flooded and strange white sequined gloves from our Grandma’s usher uniform. His work encouraged us save up lunch money for the Beat It jacket with the zippers that didn’t work. His work bullied us into celebrating the presence of a confessional, a plea and  incredible physical ferocity in one audio-visual setting. His work nudged us into acceptance of a cardboard kind of androgyny, though we didn’t know what that meant. His work redefined rhythm, rhythmic abrasion and colorful darkness while moaning “look at me” and “look at you” and “it hurts if you look at me too hard.” Michael’s work was our badman, our trickster, our tragic mulatto, our Pinnochio, our boyfriend, our girlfriend, all at once.

Most of us all remember where we ran, or where we wanted to run, after we watched Michael turn around with those yellow eyes at the end of the Thriller video. We don’t just remember his many moonwalks; we remember Motown 25 and way his work brought us out of seats and really made us wonder if we were watching some altered televisual effect. We worried and dropped our cool when we heard he’d burned his curl while shooting that Pepsi commercial, but even then we never ever thought he could die.

5.

As we’ve grown into our 30′s, we’ve become more capable of looking horizontally at Michael Jackson, too, just like our parents. Post Thriller, Michael’s body became as important as his voice to his body of work. In a nasty, but almost awesome twist of fate, we’ve been forced to reckon with our greatest American worker being a ferocious American black boy from Gary who performed in white face while begging us to “shum on.” Michael Jackson, like us, didn’t really know what to do with the eyes of white folks. He seemed to believe that one could find asylum from the aestethic burdens of blackness in the creation of ultra black music and parodying of white skin and features.

But we do reckon, and we know that there are more ways to perform in white face than to bleach your skin, slice off your nose and fry your hair. 50 years ago, James Baldwin wrote that it is only in “his” music that the American Negro is able to tell “his” story. Baldwin, as boldly imaginative as he is, could not forecast what Michael Jackson’s work would do forever to the way we heard and saw our story. Michael worked to entertain us and at the end, like most good workers, he seemed to believe the customer was always right (even though he had to know that there are far too many customers and far too much good work to take for granted for that to ever be true).

Like a lot of you, I been up all night waddling in the work of Michael Jackson and wondering if we failed to let him know how thankful we were for his work. I cry not when I think about his dead whitened body or when I think about his kids. I cry when I see my Grandma watching my aunts and my Mama huddled around the new stereo in their tiny living room in Forest Mississippi. Grandma is behind the door swelling with pride as her daughters listen to that last note of “Who’s Loving You” spin safely away into a series of grainy hiccups. Neither Grandma, Mama, Aunt Linda or Aunt Sue can imagine a day some 40 years in the future where their grandson, son and nephew will write that The greatest American worker of our time, a curious little black boy from Gary who felt compelled to work in white face while changing the way music and black masculinity sound and look, died today. Michael Jackson will never work for us again.

Thank you, Michael. You were so fucked up, and so are we. We see you, really. And we love what we see. We know you were tired, and now maybe you wanna go take care of yourself. But please don’t worry. The work ain’t going nowhere.  Get your rest, brother.

Your work is here.

Ether.

A few paragraphs later in that first part of the essay, I wrote that my Grandma said, “Don’t never be no one’s charity. I’d rather stay in my burnt up house that I worked to burn up than a house somebody give me an’ day of the week. That first house is mines … (the second one) is mines too, they’ll tell me, until they think it’s time to pay up. That means it was never mines in the first place. And I can’t work it in like I want to.”

Now I understand the following letter was my reckoning with the choice that Grandma made me understand. Even more important than that, it was my working the house that was given to me “like I want to.” 

Ether.

Dear Professor —–  and Professor —–, how are you? I’m writing in response to some of your comments on equity and the English department at our last faculty meeting. Both of you were busy talking to other people immediately after the meeting which actually gave me time to get my thoughts together.

I’m interested in your understandings of equity. Both of your arguments seemed to be predicated on an understanding that our English Department has benefitted from institutional inequity, especially in the area of faculty growth. Smidgens of your argument were echoed by different people in our faculty meeting who seemed to also critique the “growth” of the English department in the last few years.

As an institution, how do we critique the English department for its “growth” (most of which has been excellent faculty of color) without critiquing those colored bodies who actually comprise the growth? Is it possible? Some of us newer members of the English department, as bodies of color and faculty members trying to bring quality to our institution and department felt implicitly critiqued by the cryptic, clunky, demeaning, yet wholly “civil” comments made by senior faculty.

Again, I’d like to ask you both to reconsider not only equity, but quality and tradition.

The recent hires in English haven’t simply ballooned and colored our numbers; we’ve also brought an incredible amount of quality to the institution, the programs and our institution. Absent from the discussion of the ballooning faculty in English last week was any crumb of quality. In and of itself, that kind of commentary is short-sighted. But when we think about how that balloon is a quite colorful balloon, “shortsighted” intent can morph into potent fuel for the hawking of colorless Vassar tradition.

The recent hires of color are the result of excellence on the part of the individual hires and an institutional reckoning on the part of the college. The English department, as a part of the institution, has done some departmental reckoning of who are, where we are and who we want to be. It’s been painful and we, no doubt, need to do a lot more. But I’d like both of you to know that those hires who you claim have “ballooned” and/or “overpopulated” the English department and Vassar College are The English department and Vassar College. We are at the center of the English department bringing quality to our classes, our publishing and our service.

We are at the center of the college, just like you. And as centered folks aspiring to quality, excellence and transformation in this trying time, I want you to know that both of your comments implicitly neglected what we bring to Vassar, our home. Your comments, at best, reduce us to numbers and something called diversity. At worst, your comments conflated us, ironically, to the evidence of inequity. We are colleagues, not evidence.

Last thing …

Though spin would have many believe we in the English department want special treatment and hope that the cuts that need to happen will happen elsewhere, I want you to know that a number of us think English should bare a larger hit than other departments because of our size. We have also, since day one, pleaded with people to make quality cuts, not quantity or opportunity cuts.

I believe that faculty across ranks who aren’t bringing quality should be partially cut. Of course, this is naieve and short-sighted, but that’s one of the perks of being a young untenured faculty member who is indirectly to blame for the ballooning faculty in English, right?

Many of us see the work of the two people in our department as being excellent and would hope that excellence, no matter the rank, is never punished. Some of us have offered to take percentage cuts to keep excellent professors in our department and we would make the same offer to save excellent professors in any department. But none of us, the multicolored evidence of inequity that we are, want English to bare less of a brunt than anyone else. We want fairness, equality and continued excellence from ourselves and our colleagues. We see a lot of that excellence in the de facto Creative Writing Program.

We’re working on exorcising the demons of the English department and owning up to our individual and departmental shortcomings, but I’d also hope everyone in the college is owning the implicit and explicit trajectory of the comments they make in faculty meetings and the potential damage those comments are doing to OUR institution.

I’ll holla,

Ether.

Ether.

I never expected to keep my job as a professor at Vassar, not even waaaaaay back in the day when money folded both ways and people still bought new cars. So of course, I don’t expect to keep my job in this recession.

But what fool does?

I’ve been on the tenure track at Vassar College for the last 5 years. And every night of those five years, I expect that tomorrow my Vassar apartment, my Vassar job, the Vassar part of my home will come tumbling down in the form of a cryptic email from the dean of faculty, a generous email my chairs or a knowing glance from the President. “Oh shit,” I’ll think, “How am I gonna break it to Grandma and them that these white folks done sent me fishing?”

When I actually lose my job, I’ll cry in the dark and whisper like a less husky voiced Bessie Smith, “Backwater Blues done called me to pack my things and go/My house fell down and I caint live there no mo’” until I fall asleep. Then I’ll wake up, laugh, find a new way to make monies, search for a new house and take that loss with me forever.

I heard the Bessie Smith verse the first time in Grandma’s Impala back in 1985. Then, of course, it was just interesting noise between WOAD and WJMI. Now, I think there’s this understated acceptance of disaster and reckoning with personal failure in Bessie Smith’s Back Water Blues. The song was written after a flood of the Cumberland River struck Nashville on Christmas morning in 1926. This acceptance and reckoning seem wholly absent from our nation’s and our institution’s current conversation about community, economics, fairness, race, gender, justice and charity. Bessie Smith was not only accepting disaster and moving on with that disaster forever a part of her; she was also reckoning with the truth that other people’s houses are falling down all around the world and that this particular flood has produced one of the many mounds of soggy debris on her path towards death.

I wish it was a strange feeling to, on one hand, accept a place as home, yet know with certainty that your complete safety and destruction in that home are illusory. But it’s not strange at all. Homes, like houses, like jobs, like relationships, baths, casinos and trips to the doctor are not wholly safe. And yet, homes, like houses, like jobs, like institutions, like relationships, baths, casinos and trips to the doctor shield us from total destruction.

Belated Disclaimer — I partially expect to lose my job because big mouth black folk, no matter how excellent we are, tend to lose jobs at a higher rate that other folks … or so I need to tell myself. But this recession has forced me to think and remember homes, diversity, charity and disaster a bit differently. Even worse than losing my job as a professor at Vassar would be keeping my job or getting promoted while others around me who were more deserving, more generous, more capable of excellence through work lost theirs. I don’t wanna be unemployed, but even more, we didn’t make it this far to be no one’s charity. Did we?

As a wobbly black boy growing up in Forest, Mississippi, I was warned about looking for homes in other people’s houses and lowering myself to immobile status of charity. I saw how treading in that Backwater Blues was something parents and grandparents spent years prepping their children for. But I did and didn’t understand. My mother, my aunts and most importantly, my Grandma were women who loved, shared and taught through touch. But like most kids, I took the touch and work of people who loved me for granted. 

While my Grandma worked full-time as buttonhole slicer at a chicken plant in Forest, Mississippi, one of her side-hustles was washing clothes for this family called the Mumfords. The first Thursday in August of 1985, when Grandma got off work at the Chicken Plant, we went to Mumfords because Grandma had grown-folks business to take care of. I had heard a lot about the Mumfords but had never been to their house except to pick up and drop off packages with Grandma.

The Mumfords lived right off Highway 35 and I was always amazed at how the houses off of 35 were the only houses in Forest that looked like the houses on Leave it to Beaver and or even What’s Happening. I was and always will be a fat black boy, so like most fat black boys, when I imagined the insides of rich folks’ houses, my senses locked in on the kitchen. I imagined gobbling up hands full of Crunch and Munch in their walk-in pantry and filling up my cup of cold drank with ice that came from the ice dispenser built into the outside of their tar black refrigerator.

Can we earn a shift to present …

Anyway, Grandma gets out of the Impala and tells me she’ll be back in about 20 minutes.  She leaves the key in the ignition and says, “Don’t say nothing to that bad ass Mumford boy if he come out here, you hear me?”

Sprawled out across entire front seat of the Impala, I hear Grandma. I roll up the window, wave bye and go on about my business of flipping from the moaning gospel of WOAD to pleading rhythm and blues of WJMI. Caught in between WOAD and WJMI is a blues station with the slightly less than husky voice of a woman singing, “My house done fell down and I caint live there no mo’.” As much as I like the sound of her voice, that song is something I can listen to with Grandma in the car so I decide not to waste my Grandma-free time on no blues.

I flip to WJMI and watch Grandma go in the door of the Mumfords house. In a second, out comes this boy who looks to be no more than 10 or 11. He opens the door of the driver’s side, and tells me to come out and play.  The boy smells like cut grass and cinnamon with just a pinch of dog shit. That’s how the Mumford’s clothes smell, too, before Grandma washes them.

I get out of the Impala, keep my hands in the pockets of my jean shorts and alternate looks between the cracks in the driveway and the curly hanging moss on the trees. I catch the boy checking out my forehead and then my shag. His look makes me feel like I have two smushed penises growing out of my eye sockets.

“So you Ms. Kat’s Grandson?” the boy says. Before I can say yes, this boy has my hand in his, dragging me to his neighbor’s house. There, he introduces me as “my friend.” He waits for the neighbor to say “for real?” before they both go to ask the parents if they can bring me in the house. I stay out in the driveway imagining pantries full of vanilla wafers, sugary cereal and cold dranks by the case.

They come back out and we walk to another neighbor’s house.

At the new neighbor’s house, the first neighbor, not Johnny Mumford, introduces me to this neighbor as his “new friend.” They all go inside. I don’t want to have to decide whether or not I enter if their parents and grandparents allow me in the house. I know that a decision of yes leads to many backlashes from Grandma, and a decision of no leaves me feeling lonely and lessthan.

They come back out and we walk to another neighbor’s house.

This continues for 2 more houses. In a stupid book, after school special or some desperate academic’s talk, I’d be traumatized by not being allowed to make the decision to enter into these white folk houses on Highway 35, but this is Forest, Mississippi, a place that smells and tastes unlike any stupid book, after school special or pandering academic’s talk I’ve ever experienced. The place tastes like the husky voiced verse from the blues song in the Impala. Even at ten years old, Forest teaches you not to expect white folks’ to do all the way right by you. It also teaches you that the bended notes sneaking under the door of Concord Baptist church or  the sight of too much powder on your Grandma’s chest every morning before she takes the insides out of chickens or the crumbs of fried catfish left after a night of watching Dukes of Hazzard or 5:59 a.m. Christmas morning make you the luckiest people and place in the world.

And/But with all that said, you still wonder what it’s like to walk into a pantry.

After about 15 minutes, all of these kids I’ve never met are back in the driveway of the Mumfords and a kid with a slight harelip asks Johnny Mumford, “So, we can go inside and play Atari after,”  – he points to me –   “… you know?”

Johnny Mumford and his friends ignore the harelip boy’s question. Johnny asks me to take my hands out of my pockets so they can see the lines on my palms. They kept telling me how cool and “balled up” my hair is.

Without saying a word, I walk to back my Grandma’s Impala and get in while Johnny Mumfords and his friends all go in the house to, I imagine, wrestle in a ring lightly coated in cinnamon and turnbuckles dipped in decayed dog shit. Less than a minute after the door closes, Johhny comes back out and opens the Impala’s driver side door again.

“You wanna come in and play?”

“Naw. I’m good,” I think I tell him.

“We want you to use the good controller,” Johnny says and waits for my response. “And you can eat whatever you want. Mama said so. Please.”

Though the “eat whatever you want” part is even more tempting than his strange insistence, I think about what my Grandma will do if I go in that house. “I’m serious,” he keeps talking. “You can even borrow my old Intelevision if you want it.”

Right then, my Grandma comes out. Johnny Mumford asks her if I can come in for a few minutes. In her fakest accent ever, Grandma says, “No Johhny. I sure don’t think Kie can come in this time. Maybe next time, baby.”

When Grandma gets back in the Impala, her eyes are humming bird wings. She tells me that she is never was letting me come back to the damn Mumfords’ again.

“Why?” I ask Grandma. “The boy was nice, even though … do you think white folks smell funny?”

Grandma laughs but ignores my question so I keep pushing. I tell her how no one would let me in their house at first, but how Johnny offered me the best stuff in the house and was even gonna let me use his video game system.

“Why would they keep you out the house,” Grandma asked, “then turn around try to give you everything in the house that ain’t nailed down?”

Grandma and Mama aren’t really alike but they were absolutely the same when it came to the question of why. Unlike most folks, they really wanted to know why and they would wait literally until Christ came strutting back before letting you talk about something that wasn’t why-related.

I honestly can’t remember what I said. I do remember that Grandma interrupted my goofy attempt at exploring why with,  “I don’t care whether it’s a dollar, a house or a job. Don’t ever take nothing from white folks that you ain’t earned.”

“Why?”

“Because you and some nigga down the line is gonna have to pay for what you think you got for free and there ain’t enough money, ain’t enough work in the world to pay for that.”

I didn’t understand much of what Grandma, especially considering how she was all in the Mumford’s house, and spent a number of hours a month washing their dirty clothes and complaining when they didn’t give her extra money around Christmas, but I did understand that she only said white folks, so I asked her if it was okay to take something I didn’t work for from folks who weren’t white.

“You too worried about the color, but I’m worried about the work,” Grandma tells me. “Don’t never be no one’s charity. I’d rather stay in my burnt up house that I worked to burn up than a house somebody give me an’ day of the week. That first house is mines …”

“What about the second one?” I asked her.

“It’s mines too, they’ll tell me, until they think it’s time to pay up. That means it was never mines in the first place. And I can’t work it in like I want to. And they trying to get heaven on my back.”

Can we earn a shift to past …

My Grandma was an American genius, but honestly, at that time I didn’t know it. I knew she was effective (which was way more meaningful than being an American genius) and I knew she talked in the black Southern version of fortune cookies, which confused me even more when what she said and what she did didn’t line up. I kept looking at Grandma as we drove home in the Impala trying to decide whether I would ask her about why she seemed to live a different story than the lesson she was trying to teach me. But I didn’t say anything. I just looked at her face and saw deeper frown lines and shinier eyes than I’d ever seen.

As we got out of the Impala and walked on our porch, Grandma, who was walking behind me, said, “I do what I do so you can know why you make choices you gotta make, Kie.”

“I know,” I said to my Grandma, or to myself. 

Either way, I was lying.

24 years later, in Poughkeepsie, New York, at Vassar College, in midst of a recession where almost everyone I know who hasn’t been fired is worrying about whether they’ll be kicked out of the house tomorrow, I wonder if I finally understand the Back Water Blues …