Long Division(34)

If you didn’t want to read books at the Melahatchie library, you could read magazines or get in line for one of their two computers. The only problem was that the computers were usually used by dusty oldheads sneaking looks at big-booty porn sites.

I sat down at one of the computers and saw that someone had been googling “long division.”

“Can you come here?” I asked Uncle Relle.

There was nothing about the book I’d been reading for the past two days, so I typed a sentence from Long Division and googled it: I still have no proof that I ever made Shalaya Crump feel anything other than guilty for leaving me with Baize Shephard.

There was still nothing on the screen that had to do with the book.

“What you doing copying sentences out of that book?” Uncle Relle said. “Thought you wanted to find out about yourself. You messing around?”

“You think it’s possible to have a book and not have it appear anywhere on the internet?” I asked Uncle Relle.

“Who wrote the book?”

“I don’t know.”

“What you mean you ‘don’t know’? Who wrote the shit? Look up his last name.”

“For real,” I told him. “I don’t know who wrote it. It could have been a boy or a girl.”

“Well,” he sat next to me and poked me in the chest with his nubs. “If it ain’t no author, it ain’t no gotdamn book, is it? Unless it’s one of them pamphlets that niggas be calling a book. That shit be embarrassing to me. And even some of them pamphlets be on the internet, City. Now, can you please look up that other shit so we can go? I got a meeting in 20 minutes.”

I knew Uncle Relle didn’t have a meeting, but I went to YouTube and typed, “City, Can You Use That Word in a Sentence” anyway. The YouTube clip of my speech already had four million hits. It was called “The Wave Brush Rant.” It had been linked to by over 80,000 people on Facebook. Another clip, the one of me trying to understand the word “niggardly,” had two million hits and was called “City Spells Niggardly.” The clip of me telling that white boy on the bus that I hated him only had 24,000 hits. On the right side you could see LaVander Peeler’s link, too. His only had 300,000 hits and it was called “Chitterlings are Chitlins.” Right below that was a still picture of me from a distance throwing rocks toward Pot Belly’s truck called “City, the Nigger, running.”

Everything that had happened to me the past three days, except the whupping from Grandma and catching her making out, had made it onto the internet.

“City Be Busting Heads” had over 200,000 views and “City, the Nigger” had 90,000 in less than a day.

Uncle Relle showed me how someone had added the T-Pain voice coder to my voice when I was talking to the Mexicans from Arizona. Folks were selling T-shirts online with a picture of me brushing my waves and underneath, in deep black, was the word “niggardly” with a question mark.

I turned the volume down on the computer so only I could hear the sound and I pushed play on the video from the contest. I’d made YouTube videos before but they always had other people in them and really none of the videos I’d made were just about me. But this was so different. For example, when I was going off on that stage at the contest, on the computer, I looked like I wanted to kill that Mexican girl from Arizona when really I didn’t even know her. I was just desperate to find something to make them feel pain and be sad and embarrassed like I’d been embarrassed on national TV. But when I saw the video, there were so many white kids around that I could have said mean things about and I didn’t say hardly anything directly to them. Also, I never thought I was super cute but I didn’t realize how much my thighs rubbed together and how the back of my head was bigger than every other head in all the videos. Even though I felt all of that strange stuff, I can’t even lie: the thing I still felt the most was famous.

The first comment under the contest clip was, “dis my nigga right here. crackers mad city stay keeping it real. flav ain’t got nothing on city. fuck white folks just like he said.” It was posted by someone called “LockNess.”

Beneath that, someone called “CawCuss” commented, “Note to Niggers: Niggardly is a word that has nothing to do with Niggers. Learn to read before complaining Niggers.”

Uncle Relle said we had to go but after reading CawCuss’s comment, I really had to look up “niggardly” and see what it actually meant.

“Uncle Relle, did you see a tape of the contest?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I watched your part ’bout a hundred times.” He put his hand on my head and started laughing. “Why?”

“I’m saying, do you think ‘niggardly’ is, you know, about us?”

“City, you can’t ever put anything past the white man. They knew that word had ‘nigga’ in it. That’s all I’m—”

“But, you know, do you think maybe it just like, happen to have ‘nigga’ in it and anyone would have gotten that word?”

Uncle Relle actually paused and took his hand off my shoulder. He bent down and started twirling the threads that were coming out of his hem with his nubs, then looked back at me. “Look,” he said, “they knew what they was doing. You shouldn’t have had nothing to do with that word if you were on TV. That’s all I know. Look how they did your friend. Let’s get out of here.”