How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(5)
The day David offered us his sign of peace, Ms. Bockman, who initially thought David was finally being respectful of Catholic tradition, went off on me in homeroom. When I wouldn’t tell her why I was laughing, she walked me into the hallway and pointed down to the principal’s office.
“Kiese, you’re not giving me a choice,” she said. “Move it!”
As I walked down the hall to the principal’s office with Ms. Bockman at my side, our homeroom door opened behind us.
“Hold up!” It was David Rozier. “Kiese ain’t do nothing,” he told Ms. Bockman. “It’s my bad he was laughing. I’m responsible.”
I looked at David and waited for something more, something familiar.
I got nothing
David just stood there swaying with his peanut head tucked into his chest. He wouldn’t stop tracing the brown splotches on the floor with his toe.
Since fourth grade, David Rozier and I had spent every day calling and responding, daring each other to revise all the rules of Mississippi juvenile delinquency. We were the Run-DMC of bad behavior at Holy Family Catholic School, and Lerthon was our Jam Master Jay. But in that second, I was a spectator, a confused fan. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t understand the movement, language, and work of American responsibility, especially coming from the mouth of David Rozier.
“I made Kiese laugh in Mass,” David told Ms. Bockman.
“But you didn’t laugh,” she said.
“I passed gas in my hand and I spread it,” I remember David saying without a smirk. I busted out laughing again. “Kiese wouldn’t be laughing without me. I’m saying I’m responsible.”
While we sat outside the principal’s office waiting for the secretary to call our mamas, I joked that I saw Ms. Bockman smell her hand. David wouldn’t laugh. After a minute or two of forced yawning to break the silence, I asked David why he’d accepted responsibility for my acting a fool.
“I don’t even know,” I remember him saying. “Coach Stanley said we gotta be more responsible for our team, and my grandma said I gotta start acting responsible, too. I forgot at first. Then I remembered.”
I couldn’t understand.
David and I got suspended from our rickety black Catholic school that day. Later that evening, in our black neighborhoods, our mothers called their mothers. Under our grandmothers’ guidance, our backs, elbows, knees, necks, and thighs were destroyed. We now knew that the worst whupping you could get was the playing-fart-games-in-Catholic-church whupping. We figured it was our mothers’ way of keeping us out of black gangs, black prisons, black clinics, black cemeteries. We knew it was their way of proving to our grandmothers that they were responsible.
The licks, during my whupping at least, were in sync with every syllable out of Mama’s mouth.
At least twenty-five solid syllables. At least twenty-five stinging licks.
Near the second half of the whupping, Mama, who was usually reckless with her belt, channeled the precision of Grandma and dropped ten licks to the words, “don’t…you…know…white… folks…don’t…care…if…you…die…”
Even as a juvenile delinquent who didn’t fully understand what “responsibility” meant, I understood that when Mama said “white folks,” she meant the worst of white folks. I knew this literally because there were so many different types of white folks on television, and the only white folks I knew personally at the time—Ms. Bockman, Ms. Jacoby, Ms. Raphael, and Lori Bakutis—were complicated, caring white folks who didn’t want me dead. The truth was that you didn’t have to know white folks personally to understand what the worst of white folks nudged your family to feel and do.
The worst of white folks, I understood, wasn’t some gang of rabid white people in crisp pillowcases and shaved heads. The worst of white folks was a pathetic, powerful “it.” It conveniently forgot that it came to this country on a boat, then reacted violently when anything or anyone suggested it share. The worst of white folks wanted our mamas and grandmas to work themselves sick for a tiny sliver of an American pie it needed to believe it had made from scratch. It was all at once crazy-making and quick to discipline us for acting crazy. It had an insatiable appetite for virtuoso black performance and routine black suffering. The worst of white folks really believed that the height of black and brown aspiration should be emulation of itself. White Americans were wholly responsible for the worst of white folks, though they would make sure it never wholly defined them.
I didn’t know a lot as a seventh-grader in Mississippi, and I had far fewer words to describe what I actually knew, but the worst of white folks I knew far too well. David Rozier and I both did.
It passed through blood.
***
Up in Maywood, Illinois, which is about ten miles west of downtown Chicago, my first cousin, Jermaine, was just as familiar with the worst of white folks as we were in Jackson. Though the winters were colder, the vowel sounds shorter, the buildings taller, and the yards a lot smaller, the Chicago I visited as a child always felt like an orange piece of Mississippi that had broken off and floated away…with one major exception.
Whereas the mid-twentieth century saw millions of black Americans leave Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi for Chicago, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Gary, and Detroit, by the mid-1980s we were in the midst of a much less concentrated reverse migration. Chicago’s Vice Lords and Folks had made their way into Jackson and Memphis.