Authors: Kiese Laymon
I waited and waited and waited for her to come back to my porch. After 20 minutes, I don’t know why, but I was sure that Shalaya Crump was never coming back out of those woods.
I stood up and got ready to go find Shalaya Crump when the worst thought in the history of thoughts just smacked me in the back of the head:
What if Jewish Evan Altshuler and Shalaya Crump travel through time together like superheroes and have lots of babies the color of cheap graham crackers?
That thought stretched out for two minutes and some seconds until I remembered that I’d never ever heard Shalaya Crump say anything sexy about white boys in the seven years I knew her. Even when this one white boy named Parker Vincent who looked like a pudgy Michael J. Fox moved to Melahatchie from Memphis and all the other girls said they’d never mess with a white boy but if they did, they’d mess with Parker Vincent, Shalaya Crump told me, “I wouldn’t mess with Parker Vincent or any white boy on earth, not even if I was white and white boys were the only boys left on earth. I’m serious. I’d start liking girls before I did that.”
I walked back in the woods 20 minutes later with my computer and
Long Division
to find Shalaya Crump sitting on the ground with her legs crossed. She and Jewish Evan Altshuler were messing around with that calculator-looking thing I’d stolen from Baize.
“That’s a phone,” Shalaya Crump told me as she started pushing more buttons. “I figured it out last night but I can’t get no reception.” She put it up to her ear and kept saying “hello,” but no one answered. “I know it’s a phone,” she said to both of us like we all knew each other.
“That ain’t all that cool,” I told her.
“Better than it is now,” she said. “I’m tired of sneaking to use the phone all the time. You know how big of a deal it is if you have your own phone in your room? Imagine if you had your own phone
that you could take with you everywhere you went. I wonder if you gotta pay for long distance with it?”
“Hell yeah! Why wouldn’t you? And who you talking to on the phone long distance anyway, other than me?” I asked her. “I thought—”
Jewish Evan Altshuler interrupted my question and started talking to Shalaya Crump about something called a “bell boy” and “area-to-area calling.” Shalaya Crump tried to explain to the white boy what the buttons were for on a phone, because he’d only used the slow-mo rotary kind. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make him understand how long distance, beepers, buttons, and answering machines worked.
“Show it to me one more time if you don’t mind,” he said. “Just the part about how you can tell someone you ain’t home when you ain’t home. They can leave a message that you can hear on your phone?”
I would’ve been laughing at Jewish Evan Altshuler’s dumb ass, but I wasn’t thinking about him being a country white moron from the 1960s. I was thinking of how I had never seen Shalaya Crump sit like she was sitting. She was leaning back on her hands and when she wasn’t talking about phones, she was just listening to him. Kneeling right next to her on one knee was that sick-looking Evan. I couldn’t figure out how they ended up in that position, with him kneeling and her sitting, in only 30 minutes.
“I reckon I need to see the answering machine working to understand it,” he told Shalaya Crump. “But listen, we can save all three of the folks I told you about. Just gonna need your help for just one day. Y’all can make it back before the sun goes down.” As I walked closer to them with my computer in my arms, Jewish Evan Altshuler looked up at me. “We need you too, City,” Evan said.
“You know that hole we went in yesterday?” Shalaya Crump asked me. “It’s not just a time tunnel to the future, City. He thinks—”
“My name’s Evan,” he interrupted.
“Evan thinks there’s one in 1985, and that there’s one we went to in 2013, and there’s one that we ain’t even seen to 1964.” Shalaya Crump looked over at Jewish Evan Altshuler. “He said he’s been there already. That’s where he’s from.”
“This white boy is lying to you,” I told her.
I was getting tired of Jewish Evan Altshuler. It messed with me that he knew my name and that my granddaddy disappeared in those woods, but that I didn’t know nothing about his life. That’s not even what messed with me most, though. When I looked in Evan’s face and eyes, I couldn’t see fifteen years old. His face was timeless in a terrible way. It looked like a face in a book that I would never read.
When I looked at Shalaya Crump’s face and eyes, I could see how I thought she looked during every year of her life. I swear that I could look at Shalaya Crump and see her as a four-year-old girl straight running all the kids in Head Start. And thinking about it right there, and watching her, I understood that it was Shalaya Crump’s eyes that showed me her age more than the face. Sometimes, Shalaya Crump’s eyes stayed big as dirty silver dollars and they didn’t blink for minutes. When they finally blinked, you would think you were in a tiny bathtub with a ton of hummingbirds ’cause they blinked so fast. Other times, Shalaya Crump’s eyes looked right at me, blinked slow, and made me feel like I was jumping off of a space mountain onto a trampoline of clouds drawn by the baddest artist in the world. It’s hard to explain, but I swear a lot of it
had something to do with Shalaya Crump’s eyes and how slow and fast they blinked at the same time.
If I could see all that in Shalaya Crump’s eyes, you’d think it would be pretty easy to see something like that in Jewish Evan Altshuler’s eyes, too. But this dude’s eyes were so tired, so droopy, and so blue that it was hard for me to believe that he was fifteen
ever
. I mean, he looked thirteen or maybe even ten in the body, but his face looked like it had died a long, long time ago. Jewish Evan Altshuler looked like he had spent all of his years getting punched in the eyes by bucktooth ghouls with the boniest fists you’d ever seen in your life.
And I just couldn’t figure out how a white boy who looked like that could get the attention of someone as magical as Shalaya Crump.
“Ain’t lying,” Jewish Evan Altshuler said. “And I ain’t white. I told you, I’m Jewish. I’m a Jew. Born right here in Melahatchie in 1948. My Uncle Zachariah and his family live right next to us.” He looked at me. “You from Chicago, you said. My cousins go to temple every now and again ’round over at Beth Israel on the West Side. You know where that is?”
“Can you hold on?” Shalaya Crump asked him. “That would make you 36 years old?”
“Fifteen years old. Be sixteen next month,” he said.
Jewish Evan kept talking. He explained that in 1964, his family was one of a few Jewish families from the area who wanted black folks to have the right to vote and go to schools with decent books. He claimed that our granddaddies and his uncle and brother didn’t just disappear. He said that all four of them were run up on in a Freedom School, and they were hanged and burned by “people acting like they were the Klan.”
“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean by ‘acting like’ they were in the Klan?”
“Folks who got them were dressed like they were in the Klan, but it wasn’t really the Klan,” he said.
“Why?” Shalaya Crump asked him.
“I don’t mean no disrespect. It’s just that in my life, I seen clear as day that there ain’t really no ‘why’ when you dealing with the Ku Klux Klan,” he said.
“Yeah, but you just said we ain’t really dealing with the Klan,” she said.
“Get your lies straight, man,” I told him. “You said we were dealing with folks who dressed up like the Klan.”
“What I know is—”
Shalaya Crump interrupted him again. “There’s always a ‘why,’ Evan, and what you saying don’t make no sense at all.”
“Exactly. I know it sounds crazy as a four-eyed dog,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet. But it’s supposed to happen tomorrow.”
I just stood there waiting and wondering if there was more to his crazy story. “Okay,” I said, “but I still don’t get why we should go back and risk our lives to save folks who we think are dead anyway.” I looked over at Shalaya Crump. “What you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that I don’t wanna wake up in the future and wish we would have done it.”
“But do you want to do it?”
“I mean, City, we’d want someone to come save us today if we knew we were gonna be dead tomorrow. Shoot, that’s a fact, right?”
“But would they?” I asked her. “Would your grandma even do that for you if some white boy who called her a ‘Negro’ was the one telling her to do it?” Shalaya Crump was looking all in my eyes and
I was so focused on what I saying that I couldn’t even try to spit game front of her. “We don’t know nothing about them old dudes, and nothing about no Freedom Schools and nothing about no Klan. All we know is the Klan ain’t nothing to mess with. You told me that!”
“It’s not the real Klan,” Evan said.
“Does it matter if they kill black folks the same way the real Klan does?” Shalaya Crump asked him.
“The Klan killed Jews, too.”
We waited for Evan to say more, but he just held his mouth open, kept both hands on his hips, and kept swallowing his own spit. I grabbed Shalaya Crump by the hand. “Shalaya Crump, we lived our whole life this far with no granddaddies. Think about it. I don’t know if we somehow got stuck in a dumb book or movie. Right now, I feel like we supposed to say, ‘Golly, let’s go save the grandfathers we never knew.’ But like you always say, life ain’t no book. This is real life. In real life, do we really need our granddaddies?”
Shalaya Crump laughed and actually looked at me like she thought I had a point. Then she looked over at Evan and flicked her gum at his feet and started doing these weird toe-raises. “City’s right,” she said. “We don’t know a thing about having granddaddies. Even if we did, I mean, what happens if we change our future by changing the past? It’s impossible to not change the future if you change the past, right? More would change than just us having granddaddies.”
Shalaya Crump was always taking the best thing you ever said and then adding something even better to it to make the best thing you ever said sound pretty lame. I understood what she was saying. Even if we saved our granddaddies and Evan’s folks, what if it changed everything and we ended up not being born?
“Listen,” Evan said, “you’re both right, but I know the future.”
“So what!” we both said. “We do too.”
“Then you know that the future has to be changed? Look,” he looked at Shalaya Crump. “I know what happens to both of you.”
“You do?” Shalaya Crump jumped in.
“He’s lying, ’Laya.” It was the first time I had ever shortened her name to ’Laya. “How can this goofy white boy know what happens to us or even know the future if he can’t even understand how an answering machine works?”
Jewish Evan Altshuler ignored my question and got right in her face. She kinda backed up. “I promise if you come back and help me, I’ll tell you what happens to you in the future. Not only that, I can change what happens to you. I know what happens to your parents in the past, too.”
“You lying?” Shalaya Crump asked him.
Jewish Evan Altshuler cut his eyes to me, before focusing on Shalaya Crump. “Ain’t much to look at. I know that. Can you listen to me?” He actually grabbed Shalaya Crump’s pinky. “I know so much more than you think I do. I give you my word, Shalayer Crump. Both of you.”
“Oh God,” Shalaya Crump said and took her pinky back, “Just promise. Don’t say you ‘give your word.’ That’s so Ronald Reagan.”
“Hell yeah,” I said and fake laughed. “And it’s Shalaya, not Shalayer.”
I wanted to fight Jewish Evan Altshuler so bad right there, but I could tell by the way Shalaya Crump’s eyes didn’t blink and by the way she was looking at his crusty lip and feeling sorry for it that we were headed to 1964. Shalaya Crump was gonna go back whether I went or not. That was a given as soon as the dude said he could
help her find her parents in the past and find herself in the future. And if I didn’t go, I was pretty much admitting that it was okay for her and Jewish Evan Altshuler to start loving each other til the end of time. You think I’m crazy, right? Well, I know that you can’t travel through time with a girl and save folks from the Klan and not kiss them unless you’re slightly deformed or unless you smell like death. And even then, there’s still gonna be some serious grinding going on.
Serious
grinding.
Shalaya Crump got in the hole first. Jewish Evan Altshuler followed her. I followed him. Before I closed the door, I looked around at the woods and zeroed in on the Shephard house. “Wait.” I said. “Who is that?”
I wanted to tell Shalaya Crump that there was a dark outline of someone watching us from the Shephard house window, but she wouldn’t have believed me, since she knew I was the only one of us three that didn’t want to go to 1964.
“Never mind,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.” I lowered myself under the ground with the laptop computer in my left hand and
Long Division
in my right hand, and closed my eyes. Then I pulled the door down on all three of us.
When we pushed open the door to 1964, the air was thin and you couldn’t even see Old Ryle Road because everything was so thick and green. Right in front of us, where the Shephard house used to be, was a building that was only half painted yellow. Evan told Shalaya Crump that we were looking at a Freedom School.
“Should we go over there?” Shalaya Crump asked him. “What’s the plan?”
“I reckon our plan is to make sure the Klan in Melahatchie don’t ever kill again,” Jewish Evan Altshuler said. “I can get us some rifles.”