Heads of the Colored People(4)
She called her sketchbooks a collection of heads, for she never drew bodies, and anyway, Paris was lighthearted and laughed frequently, showing the gap between her teeth, not nearly as morbid as her job and curated heads make her sound. She called Riley Fuzzy Lumpkins, and he called her Bubbles. She was listening to “Say My Name,” attached as she was to all things nineties, even though she was nineteen and had been born after Tupac and Biggie were already dead. That morning, Paris had watched reruns of Martin and laughed at a character’s plea for a wish sandwich. In the nineties, she felt—and you should fill in for yourself a kind of longing here—something melancholy, plaid, flannel, but not overwrought.
It isn’t true, at least not in Paris’s case, that you can sense what the future holds. That day, she had jokingly, in an exercise of character acting, avoided pronouncing Riley’s name near the word “death” or at the graveyard or while dressed as Eucliwood, lest she kill him. But no psychic, metaphysical force warned her to tell Riley not to go to Comic-Love or to avoid arguments without spoils or to immediately put his hands up when instructed to do so. Nothing told her, still humming “Say My Name” in her best humming voice, not to walk toward the large crowd of flashing lights, police cars, and costumed and uncostumed bystanders. Her stomach urged her to look away, once she got close enough to be sickened, but she couldn’t then.
She didn’t feel more alive from the surge of panic in her body or in comparison to Riley on the ground.
Years later, she would regret not drawing the offending officer that day. Since then, she has sketched his face over and over, penciling his name and image in her notebook as a sort of plea, saying it aloud, wishing that she, like Eucliwood, could pronounce the names of those she wanted to die and make it so.
When an artist named Kevan Peterson wrote to her about a project he wanted to finish—really, to finally begin—Paris was glad for her sketches of Riley.
5.
A well-read, self-aware, self-loving black man with blue contact lenses and blond hair and a periwinkle suit was shot down in Los Angeles after a reportedly violent altercation with a well-read street promoter, who was also shot, after police officers answered a complaint. “Who was also shot” here signals the afterthought that was Brother Man, Richard, because he was not the one with the blond hair or blue contacts or in any way exceptional, except for his size and the things he had overcome (too many to name here), and his comic books.
And you should fill in for yourself the details of that shooting as long as the constants (unarmed men, excessive force, another dead body, another dead body) are included in those details. Hum a few bars of “Say My Name,” but in third person plural if that does something for you.
A few more points I should not leave to the imagination: in the chalk drawing on Fifteenth, you can see Riley’s leg kicking out like Spike Spiegel and an additional rectangle above the outline of Richard’s hand, where he might have held his comic books or a laminated mock-up.
The picture the Associated Press chose came from a Throwback Thursday photo that Riley had posted on social media, a picture of him in a costume from an undergrad party, at which he wore an oversize blue shirt and a bedazzled blue bandana over cornrows. His mother, and girlfriend, Paris, explained repeatedly that he was not dressed as a thug, but as nineties Justin Timberlake.
Brother Man’s picture was an old mug shot, accompanied by a story that emphasized a criminal charge from five years ago—for child support nonpayment and tax evasion—and his penchant for false names.
Both men’s families would say the pictures didn’t say anything, that that’s not how anyone who knew them would remember them.
The Neil deGrasse Tysons disagreed over the number of gunshots they heard; the one in blackface said ten, while the one with a brown face called black said thirteen. The autopsies would not conclude, but there might have been marijuana in Riley’s or Richard’s systems, at some point.
6.
I think a cop shooting is too melodramatic when the story was interesting on its own, and my preoccupation with race is perhaps overdone, but it was O’Connor, I think, who said—and I say “I think” here more as a device, to affect a sort of nonchalance, when in fact I know she said—everything that rises must converge or something like that (“or something like that” serving as another affected clause). But that makes the ending sound intentional or overdetermined, when it wasn’t, though I believe—I know—it was Donika Kelly who said “the way a body makes a road,” or in this case an outline, impression.
? ? ?
How to end such a story, especially one that is this angry, like a big black fist? The voice is off-putting. All the important action happens offscreen; we don’t even see the shooting or the actual bodies or the video. Like that one guy in fiction workshop said, meta is so eighties. The mise en abyme is cool but overdone. This is a story of fragments, sketches. Dear author: Thank you for sharing this, but we regret.
I concede that it might have been so much more readable as a gentle network narrative, with the cupcakes and the superheroes and the blue eyes and the nineties image-patterning. But I couldn’t draw the bodies while the heads talked over me, and the mosaic formed in blood, and what is a sketch but a chalk outline done in pencil or words? And what is a black network narrative but the story of one degree of separation, of sketching the same pain over and over, wading through so much flesh trying to draw new conclusions, knowing that wishing would not make them so?