Authors: Kiese Laymon
“You done?”
“See, that’s your problem, Wide Load. You play too much. White man see your big ass acting a fool on TV, and he gon’ have a reason to take away the rights we done worked so hard for. Y’all gotta learn how to manage that freedom we got for y’all. You see what I’m saying. Ain’t enough to be free. What you gon’ do with the freedom?”
Coach was pissing me off even more than Principal Reeves when she gave that wack freedom speech. “Coach, you know something?” I was about to call him a half-ape, half-faggot in too-tight coach pants.
Instead, I said, “You probably should just give me the watermelon before I say something to hurt your feelings,” and went back around to the side of the truck.
He leaned close to me. “You act like a li’l head-buster, but don’t never forget, City, that you got a head, too.” Coach leaned back, blinked a few times, and swallowed some spit. “Here you go, boy. That’ll be six dollars.”
He really had a look in his eyes that told me he wanted to elbow me in the jaw. I thought about how since my friend Gunn was known as the best young fighter in Melahatchie, there really was no telling how effective Coach Stroud was with his hands, but still I wanted him to know something.
“Coach Stroud.” I looked down at MyMy and thought about not saying this in front of her. “You pissed me off in the back of your truck a few minutes ago, but I guess I really don’t think you be busting Gunn’s booty. I don’t. I just think he’s too young to have a grown boyfriend or girlfriend. And I thought about calling you a ‘faggot’ back there, too, but then I remembered how you were damn near a ninja,” I told him. “I also kinda remembered that ‘faggot’ sounds like some kind of balled-up monster made of ground-up dookie chunks, razor blades, and rotten muscadines. You ain’t no monster, Coach. Not to me.”
I looked at Coach and I grabbed MyMy’s hand and got a little distance from the truck. “I hear what you saying back there, but can I give you some advice? Fuck white folks,” I told him. “For real! Their eyes ain’t gotta be everywhere you are. Y’all are too old to care about them so much. They can only do as much harm as you let them, and all y’all oldheads are letting them do way too much.”
Saying that made me feel like Satan in a way because I knew that Coach Stroud couldn’t go up in anyone’s house in Melahatchie, including Grandma’s, and tell on me. Everybody in Melahatchie would allow Stroud to walk on their porch. And they’d sit down with him and they’d laugh loud and talk louder about the weather, the Saints, white folks, or some trifling heathen who wasn’t there to defend himself. But I didn’t know of one grown person in Melahatchie who would let him all the way in their house. Not one.
Coach Stroud drove his truck on down the road and MyMy and I were on our way out of the woods when that green truck that was parked in the trailer park drove slowly toward us.
It stopped in front of us. Four men were squeezed into the cab. They were blasting that old Ricky Rozay song, “I’m Not A Star.” One of the dudes had crossed eyes, dimples, red hair, and a pot belly that looked far too old for his face. I had a baby watermelon in one hand, my brush under my arm, and
Long Division
in the other.
“You the boy who was on TV yesterday?” Pot Belly asked. “The one with that brush who done all that talking?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” I told him. “My name is City.”
“City?” He looked down at me. “What’s a boy named City doing out here in the country?”
“I don’t know. I’m just visiting my grandma,” I told him. “City is just a nickname.”
“I see,” he said. “Let me ask you this. You fast as you is smart?”
“For my size, I’m alright.”
“You faster than this man right here?” he asked and pointed to the only boy in the truck, who wore a V-neck shirt with the arms cut off.
“That’s a boy,” I told them. “He ain’t no man.”
“City love to sass, don’t he,” Pot Belly said to the other men in the truck. “You had plenty of sass yesterday on that TV, didn’t you?”
Pot Belly whispered something to the round-face white boy. The kid jumped out the back and stood next to me. The truck was right in front of us.
“Now, we gonna say go,” Pot Belly said, “and I want y’all to run after the truck ’til we say stop.”
“Naw, I’m good,” I told the man. “I’m tired of running. I don’t even know y’all like that.” I put the watermelon down and started brushing my waves. “Plus, my wind ain’t that good ’cause I just raced.”
“That’s alright, Chucker. We ain’t going that far.”
“My name is City,” I told him and kept brushing my hair. “You know what? I don’t like the feeling of this situation, so we’re finna go on about our business.”
“Mind if I look at your brush, Situation?”
“Why?”
“Never seen one up close,” he said. “Just wanna look at it.”
“Naw,” I told him. “I’m good.”
“You don’t wanna race. You don’t wanna share your brush. What you wanna do, Situation? Use some sentences. How you practice for something like that?”
“My name is City,” I told him again. “Not no Situation.”
All the men in the truck were laughing so hard at this point. One of them said, “Situation, you wanna use ‘brush’ in a sentence?”
“I can do that,” I told him and started walking toward them. “The next funky-ass white boy to ask me for my brush is going to get knocked out Deebo-style, and if his friends jump in and try to help, they might get a few
licks off, but I’m gonna get my revenge with my Jackson army one way or another. Let’s go, MyMy.” I grabbed her hand.
“Here,” the man said, and threw a comb on the ground. “You are so talented, Situation. I’ll let you see mine if you let me see yours.”
The comb wasn’t like the heavy plastic black combs Mama and them used sometimes. It had smaller edges and a thin handle. I reached down to pick it up and hand it to him, when out of nowhere, I felt a heavy foot in the center of my back. My solar plexus smashed into the ground and my lips kissed the asphalt right as my brush popped out of my hand. Then I felt another kick in my ass.
I looked up. One of the men picked up my brush and threw it to Pot Belly, and they all jumped in the truck. I spit the little rocks, dirt, and blood from my lips and looked at the eyes of the other men in the car. “Use that in a sentence, you nigger son of a bitch,” Pot Belly yelled. Red dirt started pouring out of the back of that truck and they slowly rolled away. I sat there on the ground swallowing the taste of rocks. It felt like someone was tickling the back of my tongue with one of those square batteries.
I went in my pockets, grabbed those right-heavy rocks, and tried to break out their back windows. MyMy ran with me. She was beside me throwing rocks. Pot Belly’s voice was still back there laughing, pointing, teasing, watching me. The young boy that he had called a man was recording it all, too, on a cell phone. “Hey girl, hey,” Pot Belly yelled as the boy recorded it all. “You best don’t grow to be no nigger-lover. Leave Situation alone.”
I turned around in the middle of the road, wiped the dirt off my face, and walked back into the woods. “Move, MyMy,” I told her, and spit a bloody piece of the inside of my bottom lip on some sticker bushes.
My mother had beaten me probably over a hundred times in Jackson, but no man and no white person had ever put their hands on me. Ever. I had lost some battles at school with LaVander Peeler and felt like I had lost on that stage a few days earlier, but in those situations, I always thought I could fight back. Even if I lost, I knew that the other person or other people fighting me knew that they had been in a fight.
This was completely different.
All I could do after getting my chest smashed into the ground and being called a “nigger” by those white men was hope it all stopped hurting. That was it.
MyMy started trying to wipe the dirt off my face. “Don’t get dirt all on your clothes,” I told her and wiped my face again with my own shirt.
“They called me ‘nigga’ too, City.”
“MyMy, you ain’t no nigga,” I told her. “And don’t say it again.”
“How come?”
“Because it hurts when you say that word.” I turned back toward the road behind us. “And I know it doesn’t really hurt you when you hear the word. You feel me? It’s because no one can treat you like a nigga.”
“It does hurt me,” she said and kept trying to look me in the face. “I didn’t like it when they said it.”
“It didn’t really hurt you, though. It’s like the word ‘bitch.’ My principal said boys shouldn’t ever say that word because we never have to deal with being treated like a bitch. She’s right, too. Or…” I started thinking about how I treated that Mexican girl at the contest. The only bad word I knew to call Mexicans was “spic.” Really, I should have just called Stephanie a “spic bitch” because that’s how I treated her and that’s how I wanted her to feel.
“But you just said it,” MyMy interrupted my thought. “You said ‘bitch.’”
“I was making a point,” I told her. “Don’t say that word either. You too young to say words like that.”
“City,” MyMy tugged on my shirt. “What does that word really mean?”
“Which word?”
“‘Nigga.’”
“Damn, girl. Didn’t I just tell you not to say that word? Look. I know that I’m a nigga. I mean…I know I’m black and—” I thought for a few seconds of what Mama told me the word meant when I was in Jackson— “but ‘nigga’ means below human to some folks and it means superhuman to some other folks. Do you even know what I’m saying? And sometimes it means both to the same person at different times. And, I don’t know. I think ‘nigga’ can be like the word ‘bad.’ You know how bad mean a lot of
things? And sometimes, ‘bad’ means ‘super good.’ Well, sometimes being called a ‘nigga’ by another person who gets treated like a ‘nigga’ is one of the top seven or eight feelings in the world. And other times, it’s in the top two or three worst feelings. Or, maybe…shoot. I don’t know. I couldn’t even use the word in a sentence, MyMy. Ask someone else. Shoot. I don’t even know.”
“City,” MyMy interrupted me. She kept moving side to side, tearing leaves off of little lilac clovers. “I think we can kill them. They made you sound crazy on TV.”
“Naw, girl. We could try to kill a few, but they had rifles in the back of their truck and they were taller than us and they could kill us a lot quicker than we could kill them. Plus, if I kill a white person, they would throw everyone in my family under the jail,” I told her. “Me and you can do bad things, hood-rat things, but we can’t ever kill white folks. How do you not know that?”
We started walking out of the woods when MyMy stopped and looked at me with those crazy eyes. “City, I have a brown thing on my hand. See?” MyMy held out her left hand and showed me a little brown dot in the middle of her palm. Looked like a big freckle. “I wish this thing was white and the rest of me was the color of my birthmark.”
“Don’t be dumb. Just be happy that you are whatever you are,” I told her. “At least the way you are, ain’t nobody kicking you in the back and making you use ‘niggardly’ in a sentence. It’s not that you’re dumb, MyMy, but you’re kinda dumb compared to me. You feel me?”
“City?” MyMy said.
“What?” I could tell she was flipping subjects again.
“I don’t know what n-i-g-g-a is,” MyMy was talking her ass off now. “And you do not know what n-i-g-g-a is, but we can say I’m not n-i-g-g-a and you’re not n-i-g-g-a and Baize is not n-i-g-g-a.”
“MyMy, we can say that if you really want us to, but I’m pretty sure I’m a nigga for life,” I told her. “And you might wanna stop talking about Baize since you didn’t even know her. Because I’m almost positive Baize would tell you that she was a nigga for life, too.” We started walking again. “I swear
that white folks need to just shut the hell up sometimes. Y’all make it hard for everybody.”
We started walking out of the woods. “MyMy, watch out for them sticker bushes,” I said.
I had
Long Division
in my lap when Grandma came out on the porch and asked me what was wrong. I told her that I was sad because I didn’t want to get baptized and I wished she had internet so I could see what people were saying about me.
“What happened to your lip, baby?” she asked me.
“I just fell in the woods. Why?”
Grandma went in the house and came back out on the porch with some peroxide and a washcloth. “Don’t ask me why,” she said. “Tell me what happened to your lip, City.”
“Grandma, do white folks like watermelon?”
“I reckon they do.”
“More than black folks?”
“I don’t reckon they do.” She started laughing.
“Well, Coach Stroud didn’t want me to buy a watermelon in front of white folks. That’s what he said.
“Baby, Coach Stroud was just trying to protect you.”
“From what, Grandma?”
“From life, City,” she said. “Stroud ain’t all the way right, but he just want you to survive. Keep your guard up, because you don’t never know.”
“Never know what, Grandma?” I was getting anxious and a little mad at the goofy answers Grandma was giving. “How far they go to get you? That’s what you said when I got off the bus. But what if I do know how far they’ll go? I know. I do!”
Grandma didn’t say a word.
“Well,” I said, “if someone was tired of hearing about white folks, do you think they should say, ‘Forget white folks,’ or ‘Forget what white folks think’?”