The Black Kids(76)

Or, in this case, my daughter committed a felony, can you help a sister out?

“What is it you’re trying to prove?” my mother yells at Jo. “There are better ways to find yourself than getting married and setting things on fire.”

“But I didn’t even set anything on fire!”

“I mean, honestly, Josephine, we would’ve paid for you to study abroad!”

“Where is he?” my father says.

“On his way,” Jo says quietly.

“He left you to get arrested by yourself?”

“He didn’t come with me.”

I sense that things are about to blow. As always, best to provide a distraction.

“I nearly got shot,” I say.

“You?” Jo says.

“At prom?” my mother says. “How?”

“I left with a friend.… We didn’t do anything wrong. I mean, he wanted to check on his family, and…”

“Jesus Christ. Have you girls gone mad?”

“The whole city is mad,” Jo says.

“You don’t go rushing into chaos. You’re girls. Pretty girls. Spoiled girls. We made you that way. You act like you know everything, but you have zero street smarts. You could’ve been hurt, or killed.”

“We’re already hurt.” Jo sighs.

People glorify protest when white kids do it, when it’s chic, frustrated Parisian kids or British coal miners or suffragettes smashing windows and throwing firebombs at inequality. If white kids can run around wearing their bodies like they’re invincible, what do the rest of us do? Those of us who are breakable? Those of us who feel hopeless and frustrated and tired and sick of feeling this way again and again? Sometimes, we just go ahead and break ourselves.

Morgan, who I’ve forgotten is in the room right now, speaks up slowly, measured, like she’s pushing each word through a strainer: “My daddy just lost everything in his shop. Our shop. The shop our grandma worked really, really hard for. That y’all never even visit. And you go to some neighborhood that isn’t even yours to set other people’s shops on fire?”

“What are we supposed to do?” Jo whispers.

“Not that!” Morgan explodes. “What the hell is wrong with you? How could you even do that after what happened to Grandma Shirley?”

“Exactly because of what happened to Grandma Shirley! It’s not right. They can’t keep doing this to us. They can’t. We can’t forget, or pretend that stuff didn’t happen. We have to do something!”

Jo starts to blubber hysterically, body shuddering, snot running down her face. She looks to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“Did you tell her?” my father says to Uncle Ronnie.

“I didn’t know you hadn’t. How could you not tell the girls?”

“When did you tell her?”

“She came over to visit the store about a year ago. Said she was doing a class project about family or whatever. She said you were too busy, so she figured she’d ask me for help.”

“Why didn’t you tell me she’d been over there?”

“You don’t talk to me, Craig! When’s the last time we had a full-ass conversation before this whole thing went down? Besides, I figured she’d told you she was coming over.”

“Jesus Christ, Ronnie. I didn’t want the girls living with that. Not like we did. Not if they didn’t have to. I wanted them to have a new start. To be the new start.”

“Ain’t no new starts, Craig. It’s their history. It’s in their bones.”

“The hell with that!” my father yells. “I wanted a new start!”

Jo keeps repeating until she runs out of air, “We can’t just do nothing. We can’t just do nothing! We can’t just do nothing?”

Then she turns around and goes up to her room, taking with her all of the air. Her crying is so loud that you can hear it downstairs. Nobody yells at her to stop crying, or that we don’t have the blues in the house or whatever, because whatever it is she’s feeling, we feel it too.

“Um…,” I say. “So, what happened to Grandma Shirley?”

Uncle Ronnie and my father look at each other.

“You might as well tell this one too,” my father says to Uncle Ronnie. Uncle Ronnie walks over to the couch, looks at me, and pats the cushion next to him.

“Your great-grandfather was a lawyer. His mama had been born a slave, but he worked and he studied and he scratched his way through school, even when his mama could barely read herself. He made it all the way through college and law school to become a lawyer. In college, your great-grandfather Elroy met your great-grandmother Ida, who, according to your grandma Shirley, was even smarter than her husband. But they got married as soon as they graduated, and he went on to more school and she got started making a home for them. Blacks and Indians had got rich on oil land, this oil land that the white folks didn’t know had oil, outside Tulsa in this place called Greenwood, which folks got to calling Black Wall Street. All these black folks up from nothing, not even sixty years after slavery ended. So Grandma Shirley’s mama and daddy got it into their heads to go out west and open up a practice there. And it was good for a while. Real good.”

Uncle Ronnie pauses and looks at my father, who nods at him to keep going.