Long Division(26)

Grandma didn’t have a hall, either, like the houses on TV and in books. Grandma’s house had a living room with an old floor-model big-screen TV, a glass table with some Bibles and photo albums on it, a played-out stereo that only ever played Mahalia Jackson, and my Uncle Relle’s sleeping bag right in the middle of the floor. Uncle Relle stayed with Grandma probably four times a week. Anyway, pictures of our family, the ones live and dead, were all over the living room. Walk ten more feet, there was a dining room with a plastic chandelier over a round wooden table. On one side of the table were two big deep freezers full of dead animal parts and food from her garden. On the other side of the table were a washing machine and a basket filled with the white folks’ clothes Grandma washed to make a little more money. Fifteen more feet and there was a tiny kitchen. Four more feet and you were out the back door, under a clothesline, where there was a scary work shed I was never allowed to go in and a chinaberry tree.

I kept looking at Relle’s sleeping bag, wondering when he was coming home. I wanted to know what he thought of what I’d done at the contest the night before. I figured he was going to be the only person in my family who was actually proud of me.

“Grandma, do you get wireless yet?”

“Wireless? Wireless what?”

“Internet!”

“Naw, we ain’t got none of that mess, and you ain’t gonna be hooking up no wireless to my TV.”

“It ain’t got nothing to do with the TV,” I told her. “It’s so people can check their email. What does Uncle Relle do if he wants to check his email?”

“He heads up the road to the library like everybody else, I reckon.”

I wanted to push it more but I didn’t want Grandma getting mad at me. I know Melahatchie was only a bus ride away, but it felt like a time warp. It always felt like it was behind whatever time we were in up in Jackson, but after Hurricane Katrina, it’s like time went fast in reverse instead of just slowing down.

“Why you sweating, City?” Grandma asked me. “Go in the bathroom and wipe your face off.” I turned to open the screen door and half-stepped in the door when Grandma finished her sentence: “…and go get my switch.”

“What!?”

I stared at Grandma’s face, not hardcore like I had the power to shoot liquid heat from my eyes, but more like I had X-ray vision and I was looking at the raggedy spinal cord that held the skull, that held the mouth, that held the tongue that formed those terrible words, go get my switch.

“You remember where it is, don’t you? Go on and get my switch now,” Grandma said. “You can’t be acting a fool like that in front of them folks. You know we can’t have that.”

Man, she said it so calm. Like it was only a whupping. Grandma hadn’t whupped me in two and half years.

But what could I do?

Nothing except drop my head, walk through the front screen door, through the living room, through the kitchen, out the back screen door, around the side of the house, and under the chinaberry tree. I had just matured to a point where I could get nice with myself in places other than the shower and the bathroom at school, and here I was about to get a beating like a child.

I almost hated this part of the beating way more than the actual beating. The anticipation and fear of all those lashes builds and builds, and then you realize how shameful it is that you’re about to get your ass and back beaten by the same switch you’re about to pick. And the whole time you’re thinking that you don’t wanna mess up on purpose and pick a little thin switch. You also don’t wanna pick one that’s too big to leave welts, because that means Grandma is gonna take her fine ass out there to pick the switch herself. And it didn’t matter how deep in that bush the perfect switch was, Grandma would always find it.

I narrowed my choices to a slender one with a lot of leaves on it, or a big one that wouldn’t wrap around my fat back too well.

Now, I had to hand it to her.

Should I smile or cry?

Grandma was out on the porch scaling the nasty big fish we were going to eat for dinner when I finally made it back.

Should I smile or cry?

I opened the screen door and waited for her to extend her hand.

“Here you go, Grandma.” I acted like I was going to hand the switch to her, but when she reached for it, I dropped it on the ground and took off through the screen door, through the TV room, through the kitchen, and out the back screen door.

And Grandma came flying after me.

I ran on the other side of the clothesline and tried to use one of her yellow fitted sheets as protection. “Boy, put down my damn fitted sheet,” she yelled. “Put it down!”

I threw the yellow fitted sheet on the ground and ran and ran. And Grandma ran and ran, too. Then she stopped by my granddaddy’s work shed, right next to the chinaberry tree. She threw down that wack switch I gave her and then dove right in the bush and pulled out a switch that looked like a six-foot whip with a handle.

I understood right there that I wasn’t simply running away from the greatest whupper in our family. Hell, I was running away from the greatest whupper in the history of Mississippi whuppings.

Grandma started running after me again. When I reached the back of the house, she was in the switch’s reach, but she tried to turn the corner too sharp, and slid into a split.

Damn.

I knew Grandma would no longer just beat me for acting a fool at the contest. In the fourteen years that I’d known Grandma, she’d whupped me about six times, and the crazy thing was how she never looked at me like she wanted to rip the spine out of my back when she was whupping. You could tell that it was just regretful work for her.