What Lies Beyond the Veil(Of Flesh & Bone #1)(9)

“Yeah?” I whisper.

“Don’t you leave this house without my permission again.” He sets the remote down and folds his arms cross his chest.

“Well, I ain’t really go nowhere, just out in the back mostly, and up front for a little but only to watch them kids cross the street—”

“What kids?” Granddaddy interrupts.

“Umm, I don’t know,” I stammer, “them white kids cross the street with the red wagon.”

“Kenyatta, stay away from around that house.”

“How come?”

Granddaddy’s voice becomes somber as he sits up straight and uncrosses his arms. “Cause they don’t like people like us.”

“What you mean, people like us?” I hope it ain’t a silly question. Maybe they don’t like us cause Granddaddy and Nia both so mean.

Granddaddy is quiet for a while, then finally says, “Kenyatta, do you know bout racism?”

I shake my head, even though I heard the word before. A grown-up word that I pretend not to know so Granddaddy can explain it to me. All I do know is from what I hear other kids say. It ain’t ever happened to me, but some kids at school say that white people sometimes do mean things to them just for being Black, like yell at them or call them names. But I wasn’t ever really sure what to believe, since Momma never told me nothin’ bout racism, and the one time I tried to ask Nia, she opened and closed her mouth once, then twice, before telling me to shut up and leave her alone.

“Well, I should start at the beginning, then. Back when I was growing up, a lot of the country was still segregated. That means Black folks couldn’t be with white folks.”

I nod, cause I remember learning bout Rosa Parks in school during Black History Month. We learned that she was important cause she ain’t wanna give up her seat on the bus to a white person. After my teacher told that story, I asked her a bunch of other questions bout Rosa Parks, but she ain’t seem to know much bout her, cept that one little ol’ story.

“Even though Black folks was supposed to be equal,” Granddaddy continues, “most white people at the time weren’t ready to start welcoming Black people with open arms.”

“So, what would they do?” I ask, shifting my weight to lean against the arm of the couch.

“Well . . .” Granddaddy pauses. “They would do all sorta mean stuff, to let Black people know that we wasn’t never gon’ be equal, no matter what the law said.”

“What kinda mean stuff?” I ask again. Granddaddy don’t start answering right away, so I add, “Did any white people ever do mean stuff to you back then?”

Granddaddy clears his throat like he’s gon’ say something, but then he don’t. Instead of talking, he keeps turning his hands over so that first his palms are up, then he flips them over and picks at his nails. He repeats this pattern three times, slow, but still don’t speak.

“Granddaddy?” I whisper, which causes him to finally stop flipping his hands and look back up at me. “What happened?”

When I ask this, something in Granddaddy seems to soften, just a little. He sits up, sighs deep, then sits back again and folds his arms. “It was the first day of summer,” he begins. While he talks, he looks up at the ceiling like the memory is up there, waiting for him to pull it down. “I was nothin’ more than seven, eight years old. Me and my buddies, Lil Earl and Tyrone—we called him Head cause he had a big ol’ head—was gon’ go down to the store and buy some candy, cause we had earned some change doin’ little jobs round the neighborhood.”

At this point, Granddaddy sits up and starts to talk a little faster. “We was excited the whole way to the store,” he says, “cause we ain’t usually have no money to buy nothin’. This was gon’ be a big day for us.”

I look down at my hands, scratch my pointer finger with the nail on my thumb. Seems like this bout to be the bad part.

“But before we even got to the store, we was stopped by a white man who saw us walkin’ down the street, talkin’ loud and wavin’ our coins in the air. He ran up on us and called us some thieves. Said we must’ve stole from somebody, cause he ain’t ever seen no nigger boys with that much money.” Granddaddy looks me straight in the eye now. “That white man took all the money we had worked so hard for, and ain’t even look back when we all laid down, right there in the middle of the sidewalk—me, Lil Earl, and Head—and cried.”

Granddaddy look like he might cry now, just thinking bout it. I try to imagine what it would be like to have something like that happen to me, but it don’t seem like nothin’ that would happen anymore. Still, I wanna make sure Granddaddy know I been listening, so I think and think of a good question to ask.

“Why you ain’t just get some more money and go back to the store?” I finally ask, cause I can’t think of nothin’ better. Plus, it don’t seem like such a big deal to me to lose a couple coins.

Granddaddy sighs. I can’t tell if he’s disappointed or just tired. “Well, in the time after slavery, things was different than they are now. And not just cause of segregation. Black folks ain’t have the same opportunities as white folks, to do stuff like go to school or get a good job. Back then, a lot of Black folks still worked for the white folks. Like my grandfather, he worked twenty-four years for a white man named Mr. Harvey.” I clear my throat and he stops, but I ain’t got nothin’ to say yet, so he goes on. “He worked every day for Mr. Harvey, from sunup to sundown in scorching-hot fields with no shade and not much water. Then, at the end of the week, Mr. Harvey would give him seven pennies.”