Long Division(52)

When they pulled me into the school, they sat me in an old-fashioned desk I could barely fit in. The men walked around and circled me. One of them reached down for the computer, but I didn’t let it go.

“I ain’t letting this go,” I told him. “I’ll give you this book, but I can’t give you this computer, man.” He pulled his sheet up and showed me the barrel of his rifle. “Oh, but you know what? I’ma show you how to turn it on,” I told him. “Did any of y’all see this pretty black girl and this other white boy with a fro who looked… he looked…um, not good. His name was Evan. He was your color and…”

Before I could finish, one of the men slapped me right across my mouth and looked me right in the eyes. I couldn’t see his eyes because he had on glasses. I looked at all the men’s eyes for the first time and realized that they all had on glasses under their sheets.

“Just so you know,” I told them, “that’s the first time I ever let someone hit me in my mouth. I’m serious. And if you didn’t have that gun, I’d probably pop that old ass right in the jaw. I’m serious.”

Another man slapped me right across the mouth after I said my piece. My problem was that I’d seen so many pictures of Klansmen. The pictures made you know that the men under the sheets were real men with real stinky breath, real rotten teeth, real pot bellies. I figured it was like football. As soon as you put on your helmet and shoulder pads and your jersey, you were like everyone else on your team, especially to people watching. Our football coach, Coach Foots, wouldn’t even let us have our names on the back of our jerseys because he said the team is more important than the player.

But even dressed in the same uniform and with no name on the back of your jersey, the GAME was filled with seconds where it was up to you to make a play. Not your teammate.

You.

I knew that each of the Klansmen was feeling fear and trying to figure out a way to seem less afraid than he was to the other teammates on his Klan squad. But when you’re getting the taste slapped out of your mouth for no reason, it doesn’t matter if the person doing the taste-slapping is probably just as scared as you. And it makes you feel weird that no matter what, the taste-slappers never talk…they just breathe like new asthmatics and watch you. It made it easier to believe they lived their whole lives behind those white sheets, slapping black kids up and never breathing right.

“I wanna be honest with you,” I told them.

One of the men was looking at the laptop computer and playing with the keys. He tapped the shoulder of the one who was standing over me and he bent down and started looking at the laptop computer, too.

“Look, I wanna be honest. You know what that is? That’s a computer.”

They didn’t say a word. “A laptop. I can get you three of them, but first, you gotta let me go and you gotta let me take that one with me.”

One of the men stood up after I said my speech and stood over me. “I’m serious. I can get you whatever you want. I’m good at stealing. Computers, telephones, color televisions, tape players, penny loafers, Bibles, tickets to Fresh Fest. I know y’all lackin’ in 1964. Just tell me what you need.”

I held my hand out. “Look, let’s go ahead and shake on it. I’m serious. This book…how about I give you this book, and you let me go?”

The Klansman who slapped me in mouth a second earlier looked at the book and actually reached for it. I pulled it away from him and, without lingering at all, he reared back and hit me in my head so hard that the blood in my mouth tasted like canned spinach. “Nigger,” one of the them said, “you talk too damn much…” I couldn’t hear anything except the crunch of his work boots stomping my legs to mush and the echo of nigger.

Everybody I knew, at one point or another, had called someone “nigger,” but I never heard the “er” when we said it to each other. It was just something that all of us said. We didn’t mean it to hurt each other and we didn’t mean it to make someone feel lucky. It was like the only word that meant lucky, cool, and cursed at the same time. But when that white man behind that sheet called me “nigger,” I heard all the “er” and I knew when he said it, he thought I was not just less than him, but less than a human. Or at least, he was trying to really convince himself.

Either way, it made sense to me in that second, while that white man was stomping my legs into rubber bands, why Mama Lara would whup me so hard when I acted up in front of white folks. In 1985, every little thing we did in front of white folks had to be perfect, according to Mama Lara. And if I acted like I wasn’t perfect around them, Mama Lara would tell me to go get her switch and she’d give me twelve licks. I didn’t know if Mama Lara had ever been beaten by a white man in a sheet. I did know she had walked by the locked white folks’ bathroom, though. She had seen and felt what I was feeling in that Freedom School, whether she’d had her legs stomped to rubber bands or not. I wondered if Jewish Evan Altshuler’s people knew the same feeling.

I was trying so hard not to scream when the door to the school busted open and Jewish Evan Altshuler and Shalaya Crump rushed in. One of the men who had been looking at the computer ran toward Evan. And you know what that boy did? Evan pulled out this long wooden BB gun and just started shooting at the chests of the whole Klan. I figured that the Klansman with the real rifle was gonna shoot us all in the head, but he didn’t reach for it at all.