Long Division(35)

“Naw,” I told him. “Hold on.”

Uncle Relle watched me open Microsoft Word on the computer and type “niggardly” in a new document. I highlighted it and dragged the mouse to Tools where the thesaurus was. Before clicking on Thesaurus, I just held my finger there and imagined what I’d see.

“If you gon’ click it, click it,” Uncle Relle said. “What you wasting drama for? You supposed to save all this drama for the show.”

I looked right at Uncle Relle and begged him to shut the fuck up without even moving my lips.

“Ungenerous (adv.)” is what popped up under “meanings.” Under “synonyms” were the words “stingy” and “meager” and “miserable” and “miserly” and “measly.” Under “antonyms” was the word “generous.”

The actual definitions confused me even more.

“Come on, City,” Uncle Relle told me. “We gotta get it moving.”

Uncle Relle was pissing me off. I looked at him in a way I’d never looked before. And he did something I’d only seen him do with Grandma. He looked down at his fingers, picked up a folded newspaper that was right between the computers, and said, “Okay, favorite nephew. Just hurry up.”

In a huge color photo on the cover of the paper was a picture of Baize Shephard. The photo must have been one of those yearbook pictures, because Baize had a look on her face I’d never imagined her having in real life. The left side of her mouth was smiling and the right side had a little bit of her tongue sticking out. I figured the photographer probably told her not to make faces and she did the goofiest face she could get away with. Plus, she had this thick fake rope chain around her neck that she always wore.

The headline said, “Investigators Have New Lead in Disappearance of Honor Student, Baize Shephard.”

I typed “niggardly” in the Google finder and clicked on the mouse.

Uncle Relle didn’t say a word to me the first five minutes of the ride home.

“Look, City,” he said as he pulled in the driveway of Alcee Mayes, his weed man, “just ’cause you the face of…”

“The face of what?” I asked him.

Uncle Relle looked down. “Sometimes the glass is way more than empty,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying. Sometimes the glass is way fuller than a motherfucker, even if you can’t see it. You better drink.”

Uncle Relle ran into Alcee Mayes’s trailer and left me in his van. I knew he was thinking I should be happy that millions of people around the world were looking at me and typing my name on the internet, but seeing my picture pop up when I googled “niggardly” broke my heart. I just couldn’t figure out how I had become the face of “niggardly” in less than three days. If I could have stayed at the library longer, I would have responded to every messed-up comment on YouTube and I would have typed my own response to the fake @MyNameIsCity Twitter feed someone made up.

Instead, I stayed in Uncle Relle’s van and continued reading Long Division, a book that, according to the internet at the Melahatchie local library, didn’t exist at all.


A few minutes after we walked in the house, Grandma pulled the screen door open and whispered something in Uncle Relle’s ear. Next thing I knew, I was in the bedroom and was told not to come out until she or Uncle Relle came to get me.

I pulled out my book and wrote:

It was like she wasn’t even Grandma anymore. I never heard my grandma say “ma’am” to someone who was younger than her. And I heard that my grandma brought the Jheri not “Gary” curl to Melahatchie from Milwaukee back in the early ’80s. Now here she was acting like she couldn’t even pronounce “Jheri” right.

Under the revving of box fans and the hum of crickets, I heard about 20 minutes of loud cuss words coming from mashed-up voices. Slowly though, the yelling and cussing slid from the trailer park to the back of Grandma’s house, where the railroad tracks were.

And after a while, there were no voices at all.

When Grandma finally came in the house two hours later, she made me sit on the toilet in the bathroom while she took a bath. The suds in the tub were brownish and pink from the dirt and blood on Grandma’s hands. I tried to only look at this little pinkish-brown moat of suds near the back of the tub the whole time she bathed, but I kept catching her long nipples out of the corner of my eye.

We didn’t say one word to each other until I asked her, “What happened today, Grandma?”

“Nothing, City. That man, he gone far away from here.”

“What man? Gone where?”

“Ain’t nothing in that work shed for you, you hear me?”

“Did somebody mess with you? ’Cause I never seen you just …”

“That man is gone home, I reckon,” Grandma interrupted. “You got to be a special kind of evil to spend your whole life getting more than you deserve, then turn right around and hate on folks for getting half of what you was born into. Just evil.”

“Who is a special kind of evil?” I asked her.

“Listen.” She reached out of the bathtub and her hands touched my knee. “That man, that truck, this day, ain’t none of it even real as you think. Treat it like it never happened, you hear me? You are a smart child, an educated young man. You try to act grown in front of them cameras? Well, grown black folks forget what they need to forget. That’s what grown black folks do. Can you do that for Grandma?”