The Black Kids(90)

I look at LaShawn but he turns away, his face red as a Jordan jersey.

“You know, people think black folks don’t blush, but we do,” Julia says. “Like right now you’re blushing like a motherfucker.”

“I am not,” LaShawn says.

“Boy, why you lying?”

“Put your head down,” Candace says to me. There’s such an intimacy in the feeling of another person’s hands in your hair, greasing and parting across your bare scalp, your brain at their fingertips.

Julia and Fat Albert load Streets of Rage while Candace works her way through my head. Julia tries to play as Blaze, probably because she’s the girl and arguably the fastest character, but Fat Albert selects her before Julia gets a chance.

“Too slow!”

Together, they walk as the girl and the black guy down the city street, beating people up. They’re supposed to be working together, but Julia keeps snatching up the food and weapons and then “accidentally” attacking Percy, who keeps yelling, “Stop hitting me, fool!” while Tarrell alternately yells, “Yo, go get that dude over there!” and “Why y’all so sorry?”

Candace’s parents come home together. They yell out greetings and look as though they’re leaning on each other so as not to fall over. Her father is a security guard at the same hospital where her mother works as a nurse, and they spend all day on their feet. In Nigeria, they had servants, Candace says.

Candace’s father has the biggest, warmest brown face I’ve ever seen, like a sculptor took those cheesy images of the sun smiling and made them into a real person. They talk to Candace for a bit in their language. Her parents have thick voices, their words like skipping stones. Then the house absorbs them into itself. Her father turns on a drumbeat from inside its bowels.

“What is that?”

“My daddy loves himself some Fela.”

I make a mental note to find out what “Fela” is.

“Hey, did you guys know Lana Haskins isn’t white?” I say.

“Girl, duh,” Fat Albert says.

“She’s half-Egyptian,” Julia says, like this was somehow common knowledge.

“Her white ass is, like, literally African American,” Tarrell says, and everybody laughs.

“They are you. Those are your people. They are we,” Daddy said.

I like being part of this we. It’s weird how sometimes you can be part of us and sometimes you can be part of them, and find a way to be at home in both.

“Done. Want beads?” Candace asks.

My mother thinks beads look tacky, but I like the little wooden balls Candace has in her box of hair goodies. They look like somebody tore apart a necklace and placed its pretty entrails in your hair.

“Sure!” I say.

“What you wanna bet them white girls at school will see you and be like, ‘Omigod! You know, I got my hair braided in Mexico once,’?” Julia says, and we start to laugh.

Candace hands me a mirror, and it’s like I’m looking at myself but not. I run my hand down the length of my hair. The thin ropes are thicker than the ones I got when I was little, but just as pretty.

“You look incredible,” LaShawn turns to me and says.

Then the whole room starts echoing his words as Tarrell, Julia, Percy, and Candace proceed to mock the shit out of him.

“He’s right, though,” Percy says. “Candace got Lisa Turtle looking like a goddamn Nubian princess.”

Then he belly laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever said and smiles at me. “You’re all right after all, Lisa Turtle. You’re all right.”

LaShawn winks at me.

I flip my hair to the side and hear the click-clack of wooden beads like a drumbeat, my hair a kind of music drowning out everything else.

The world is so big and we’re so little; still each bead announces, “I’m here!”





CHAPTER 24


THE COURTROOM SMELLS like the past. The shellacked court reporter clacks in shorthand the details of my sister’s supposed crime. Sunspots dot the top of the judge’s head like speckles on an egg. He looks to be shrinking into his robes. The arresting officer takes the stand, a man who seems to be on a collision course with every doorway he enters, and the doorway might actually lose. He’s hard, hair shorn, militarily erect, a recent Gulf War vet. He tells his side of the story succinctly—an agitated crowd, a Molotov cocktail, a building on fire.

Jo purses her lips as he speaks; her whole body screams, but she doesn’t interject. I don’t know whether you’d know that if you didn’t know her, but she’s my sister, so I can tell the frustration in the twitch of her eyebrow, or in the way she scratches at the dry patch of stress behind her ear.

“This is your fault,” my father said during a quick break to Harrison, who, for once, fought back.

“Have you met your daughter? Do you know her at all? Your daughter doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do,” Harrison spat back.

Jo said calmly, “Auntie Carol says Grant’s one of the best. It’ll be okay. Everything will be fine.”

Grant is Jo’s lawyer. He fiddles with his watch occasionally while the prosecution speaks—not checking the time but checking to see if time is still there. He carries himself exactly like Mr. Katz, a man used to getting what he wants. A man for whom no danger is imminent. He’s confident in his remarks to the jury, charming. His slicked hair has a bit of gray at the temples, and his eyes are a beachy blue. His suit is perfectly tailored to the body he clearly approaches like one of his legal briefs, sculpting, erasing, adding until it’s perfect. He looks like he belongs to one of those corporate clusters you see out in the water on weekends, floating on uninitiated surfboards, waiting for the wave on which they can briefly be somebody else. When he speaks to us, he smiles when it’s appropriate and looks serious while talking about serious things. He speaks down just a little, because that’s how he speaks to everyone.