How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(12)
Shay and Barry had what Grandma called good home-training. They simply watched Kurt’s kids watch us from a distance and whispered in each other’s ears.
Our apartment held one chair, one desk, a blow-up bed, a fridge covered in word magnets, and a cranky Mac. While Kurt’s place smelled like fried meats, thin gravy, sticky fruit punches, and nappy carpet that rarely got vacuumed, our place smelled like new paint and feet. Miseducation, ATLiens, Aquemini, and the greatest hits of Joni Mitchell and Curtis Mayfield worked to shield our ears from Kurt’s mash-up of Zeppelin, short-people screams, laughter, and that gotdamn Cartoon Network.
One July weekend, someone got shot in the building next to ours. As soon as the police left, Kurt and I walked over to see what we could.
As we walked, Kurt asked me how to pronounce my name. He’d heard his kids call me “Keith” and Nicole call me “Key” or “Kiese.”
After I told him that Keith was fine, he asked me if he could borrow ten dollars. I told him I’d give it to him when we got back to our building.
Kurt and I kept walking and talking about his odd family arrangement and money a little while longer before he asked me if people got shot a lot where I was from.
I stopped to look him in the eye and see if he was asking a question he really wanted answered.
He wouldn’t look back.
I didn’t tell Kurt anything about missing Mississippi, or how I was reckoning with the fact that a friend of mine had taken a young woman into the Central Mississippi woods, blown her brains out, and was now serving a life sentence. I ignored Kurt’s question completely and asked him about Pennsylvania amusement parks, Italian ices, and when he planned on getting a job.
After he answered all my questions, Kurt got really close to my face. He looked up at me and didn’t run from my eyes. “Keith, youse should move here,” he said. “I’m serious. Youse are different. Youse ain’t like your kind.”
He kept saying it too, absolutely sure he’d given me that gift that a number of white folks I’d met loved to give black folks at the strangest times, the gift of being decidedly different than all them other niggers. It felt like Kurt wanted a pat on the back for not saying the word “nigger,” two pats for distinguishing one nigger from another nigger, and three pats for inching closer to the realization that black Americans were never niggers to begin with.
On the way back from the murder site, Kurt walked ahead of me. I gripped his bony shoulder before we got to the hill leading up to our building. I asked him if his greasy mullet, his two in-house partners, his caved-in chest, his white BeBe’s kids, and his belief in niggers made him different than his kind.
“I ain’t racist, Keith,” he kept saying.
“That’s sweet,” I told him.
Kurt wiggled free of my grip and walked up the hill to our building. I caught up with him outside of our glass door. I told him that the problem was that the niggers he believed in knew so much more about his kind than even he did, and that the niggers he believed in were taught to never ever be surprised by the slick shit that came out of the mouths of white folks. Then I got all graduate school on him and spouted some mess about dissonance, dissemblance, white absolution, and how it might be impossible for him to know if I was different than my kind if he didn’t know himself.
Kurt turned his back on me and my big words.
He walked upstairs to his family and slammed his door. I walked into our empty apartment, partly disappointed that I didn’t slap the taste out of Kurt’s mouth and mostly ashamed that there was so much more I wanted to say to him.
If white American entitlement meant anything, it meant that no matter how patronizing, unashamed, deliberate, unintentional, poor, rich, rural, urban, ignorant, and destructive white Americans were, black Americans were still encouraged to work for them, write to them, listen to them, talk with them, run from them, emulate them, teach them, dodge them, and ultimately thank them for not being as fucked up as they could be.
That’s part of what I learned in Emmaus, Pennsylvania.
Kurt avoided me the rest of the summer, but his kids still banged their muddy hands on our sliding glass door every morning. A few days after Kurt said I was different than my kind, his youngest child walked into our apartment and started playing with the word magnets on our refrigerator. I placed the words “wash” “your” “dirty” “face” “and” “hands” “sometimes” “boy” in a line and asked him to read that sentence.
Kurt’s son looked at the words, moved them around, smiled, and clapped his muddy hands like he was lightweight touched before proudly saying, “Nope. I can’t even read, Keith. Nope. I can’t. I can’t even read!” The little muddy joker said it the way you would expect a white child to say, “Gee! I found the treasure. Yep! I really found the treasure.”
I laughed in that child’s face for a good minute and a half.
Deep. Terrible. Evil. Sad laughs.
And he laughed back, thinking I was laughing with him.
For worse—never better—nothing I saw, or heard, or smelled, or touched, or felt from Kurt and his family surprised me that summer.
I can’t say the same thing about myself.
A month or so after I laughed at that little boy’s illiteracy, two of Nicole’s friends came to visit. I don’t remember much about Nicole’s friends except one of them was the roundest short adult I’d ever met and she tried too hard not to sound like she was from rural West Virginia. Every few seconds, she managed to throw the words “ridiculous” and “totally” into something that wasn’t ridiculous or totally anything.