The Black Kids(77)

“Anyway, the trouble started the way these things usually do—a white woman accused a black man, and the white folks got riled up. It was at the height of the lynching season between the world wars. A bunch of the black men, World War I vets, decided to go protect the black kid from being lynched, so instead of lynching the one boy, the white folks decided to lynch the entire goddamn city. They used planes—fucking warplanes—to fly over the neighborhood and drop bombs on all the black people and their houses and businesses, to burn those uppity black folks to the ground. You know they had a machine gun mounted on a truck to fire at people? A fucking machine gun. They did drive-bys through the neighborhood, even the church—the goddamned house of the Lord.” Ronnie raises his voice and spits a little as he speaks.

My dad stands up from where he was sitting and starts to pace the living room. Then he stops abruptly and turns to face me, his voice cracking as he speaks. “When your grandmother described the machine gun, she shook and rat-a-tat-tat-tat-ed on the table. Told us about choking on the smoke in the air. Everything was black, she said, ‘I couldn’t breathe.’ When she said it, even all those years later, it was like she was still choking.”

My mother walks over to my father and wraps her arms around his waist, and even though he’s way taller than her, in her arms he looks like a little boy.

“Your great-grandfather had a gun and tried to defend his family, but they shot him in his own entryway. They called it a riot, but it was more of a massacre. Or like what they did to one of those Jewish areas in the old country.” Ronnie pauses for a moment, searching for the word.

“A pogrom,” my father interjects.

“Yes. That! The whole neighborhood was gone. Bunch of black bodies dumped into a mass grave. Your grandma said it was even in the New York Times. And then everybody forgot about it, like it never happened.” Ronnie pauses again.

Across the room, my mother keeps her arms around my father, closing her eyes and rocking him back and forth. Morgan has tears in her eyes.

“She only ever told us the once, and even then, not till we were teenagers. I think she was kinda like those Vietnam vets you hear about who aren’t quite right afterwards, who still rattle the war in their heads years later. Except it was right here in the United States, and your grandmother wasn’t nothing but a little-bitty girl carrying that in her heart her whole life.” My father chokes on the words, like all that heavy’s too much even for his vocal box. He turns around and buries himself in my mother’s arms.

Lucia speaks quietly, almost as if to herself, “Como los indios in the village next door. The disappeared.”

“Yes,” my father says. “Very much so.”

“You know your grandma Shirley’s brothers died in World War II? Enlisted soon as they could. Never did understand how they could do that after what their country had done to them,” Uncle Ronnie says.

I think whatever sadness I thought I knew, whatever I’ve felt before, hasn’t fully prepared me for this. Uncle Ronnie was right—it’s in my very marrow itself. It’s like when we first really learned about slavery in history class. It’s not that I hadn’t known; my parents introduced the concept to us when we were very young, bought us age-appropriate books, and told us we were from Africa. For Country Day at school during Spirit Week, I’d even dressed in ankara bought from a boutique in Leimert Park. But this was different. Our teacher put a series of photos up on the projector. Men and women, dark, glistening, and folded over fields, the stooped body of a kid around our age in the foreground. A famous photo that I’ve seen many times since of a man with stripes of flesh carved out of his back, a topographical map of scars, of evil. A series of black male and female bodies strung by broken necks from southern trees. The white folds of the dangling woman’s skirt reminded me of the black angel ornaments we stuck on our fir come Christmas. Enough! I wanted to scream. Enough! This is not where I begin! The classroom grew so quiet that not even the smart-asses said a word. I could feel several pairs of eyes on the back of my head. I bit my tongue hard to hold in the tears until I could feel the metallic taste of blood pooling in my mouth. I would not allow my classmates to see me cry, so I waited until lunchtime to hide and eat and process what I’d seen in the handicapped stall. There I gasped, struggling for air, feeling the ropes tight around my neck every time I tried to swallow.

Right now, I can feel the black smoke in seven-year-old Grandma Shirley’s lungs, the ash, the unbearable sadness of breathing.



* * *




A knock on the door startles us. It’s followed by the ring-ding of the doorbell.

Morgan runs to answer it.

“Who are you?” she says, holding the door open only a crack.

“I’m Jo’s husband.”

Morgan opens the door just a bit more, still uncertain.

“Are you a giant?” I hear her say.

Harrison looks around bleary-eyed, like he didn’t sleep. Under this lighting, his hair looks more brown than red, his eyes more blue than green. His pimples are gone, and what’s left is smooth and ruddy. He’s barely even able to grow enough stubble for two days’ stress. What must it be like to look at yourself in the mirror and see something a little different every time? To have such an indecisive head? It’s startling to see his whiteness after a story like that, like a ghost at the door.