The Black Kids(31)
“Yeah. But shit’s been crazy, too,” he says softly.
Ms. Hawley continues to watch us from afar. She finishes her sandwich and wipes the remaining crumbs on her pants. Then down-ass Ms. Hawley wipes a spot of mustard from her chin.
“I should get back to work.” LaShawn sighs.
“Hey, when you were little, did you go take pictures with Black Santa or White Santa?”
He starts to laugh. “That’s hella random.”
“I know.”
“Neither. My mom told me Santa wasn’t real. She didn’t want me believing that no white man came into our house in the middle of the night and gave me things for no reason. ‘Everything you got, I buy or you earn,’ she said.”
“I sat on Black Santa,” I say awkwardly as he starts to roll away. LaShawn turns around to look at me but keeps pushing the book cart forward.
“Did he give you what you wanted?”
“Except the pony.”
“How was the nigga supposed to fit that down the chimney, though?”
LaShawn disappears once more around the corner, still laughing. He’s got a great laugh, a little high and a little low, with a hint of nerd snort thrown in.
I shouldn’t have said what I did at lunch about him and the shoes. LaShawn has never once said or done anything unkind to me, or to anyone else for that matter, far as I know. It’s not his fault everybody loves him and he’s beautiful and he’s in at my dream school while I wait. Forgive me, I think, even though he knows not what I’ve done.
CHAPTER 7
THROUGH THE GLASS window of the front office, I can see the school secretary watching the rioters run into and out of buildings on a little black-and-white portable television. They fuzz out of focus, and she bangs on them to make them clearer.
The school pay phone smells like spit and hormones. There are a lot of penises etched into it. Two boobs. One very detailed dragon. Many pronouncements of eternal love, like “LOY+KGF 4 ever” and “N+T BFFs!” I personally wouldn’t declare myself anyone’s soul mate next to a pay phone dick. But I guess love does make you do crazy things.
Sometimes I’ll see kids sitting and eating lunch alone inside the phone booth, as though the act of being there renders them as invisible as they feel, until some asshole kicks the glass and yells at the poor loser, “I gotta call my mom, dipshit.”
Jo actually picks up the phone. She sounds like a person underwater.
“Were you sleeping?”
“I was out late last night.”
“What? Why? You said you were going to stay home.”
“I never said that. We went out to hand out flyers and protest at the Parker Center.”
I think back to last night, the images of the protestors turning over the parking kiosk in front of the Parker Center, standing on it, fists raised in the air, and lighting it on fire, like those photos you see of coups in faraway countries. The Parker Center isn’t that far from Jo—less than ten miles—but it’s not that close, either. Not when the city’s hemorrhaging left and right.
“How did you even get there?”
“Our friend drove us. It was kinda crazy, but we made it.”
“You guys could’ve been hurt, or killed, even.”
“We were fine. Besides, you can’t let fear keep you from doing what’s right, what you believe in. Harrison and I are communists, Ashley. Communism gets a bad rap, but that’s only because there’s never been a truly communist state. This isn’t just a race riot; it’s also about class. It’s a rebellion of the poor and disenfranchised. The communist party has a long history of supporting the rights of black people, you know? Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and W. E. B. Du Bois were communists. Lena Horne was blacklisted. Angela Davis was a communist.”
“The Afro lady?”
I don’t know how to argue with my sister because I don’t know much about communists other than that we’re supposed to hate them, but honestly that never quite seemed right to me, either. The Wall’s down. The USSR’s dead. The Gulf War’s done. Several months ago, Bush said that we won the Cold War.
“What good are flyers gonna do in the middle of all of this, anyway? Everybody’s gonna dump them in the trash,” I say.
Jo ignores me and continues, “It’s not just about Rodney. It’s about all of us. About all our black and brown brothers and sisters struggling to make ends meet in a system set up for them to fail. We have to change the system.”
Now she sounds awake, like she’s revved up, a person about to start. Start what? I don’t know.
“Our parents aren’t failing.” I know exactly what she’s trying to say, but her dumb ass doesn’t need to be out in the streets saying it. Not now. It’s too dangerous.
“Don’t be willfully obtuse, Ashley. I could’ve been Latasha. Or you. If there’s not justice for one of us, there’s no justice for any of us.”
“Is that from one of your flyers?”
She grows silent on the line.
“Please, Jo…”
I let my sentence dangle. I don’t know what to say or how to say it, exactly. I hate you I love you I miss you come home everything’s on fire and our parents are scared I’m scared, but we aren’t sisters like that. If we were brothers, instead of our silence, maybe we might punch each other in the teeth or in the gut. We would use our bodies to say what we couldn’t. We would feel bone against bone and tendon against tendon, and, bruised, be reminded of the shared DNA in our black and her blue. Or perhaps we would be like Mr. Holmes’s asshole brother and lob firecrackers at each other without any regard for where they might land. So maybe it’s better that we’re sisters after all. We hurt, but at least we still have our pretty faces.