Authors: Kiese Laymon
What Uncle Relle lacked in money, he made up for in the way he talked and taught the ratchet gospels. The sound of his voice made everything he said sound right. When he opened his mouth, it sounded like big old flat tires rolling over jagged gravel. And he had these red, webbed eyeballs that poked out a lot even when he was sleeping. I could tell you crazy stories
about Uncle Relle’s eyeballs, his voice, and his sagging V-neck T-shirts, but that would be a waste of time, especially since the detail you just couldn’t forget about, other than his voice, was his right hand. The day after he got back from Afghanistan, Uncle Relle lost the tips of three fingers in a car accident with our cousin, Pig Mo. Now, he had three nubs, a pinky, and a thumb. You would think that if you had three nubs, a pinky, and a thumb, you would keep your hand in your pocket, right? Uncle Relle always had his right hand out pointing at folk or asking for stuff he didn’t need or messing around with weed and prepaid cell phones. He told everyone outside the family that he lost the tips in Afghanistan.
Grandma said Uncle Relle lied about his nubs because he wanted everyone to know he was a damn survivor. In private, in a much thicker voice, she said, “A real survivor ain’t got to show no one that they done survived.” Grandma was always saying stuff you would read in a book.
“Lavender Peeler,” I told him while brushing the sides of my head and looking at his creased khakis, “Oh, Lavender Peeler, my uncle and grandma thought you would say something wack like that. Look, I don’t have to consider all things to know you ain’t special because you know ‘plagiarize’ is spelled with two a’s, two i’s, and a z, not an s, especially since if you train them XXL cockroaches in your locker, the ones that be the cousins of the ones chilling in prison with your old thieving-ass brother, Kwame, they could spell ‘plagiarize’ with ummm,”—I started to forget the lines of my mental warfare—“the crumbs of a Popeyes buttermilk biscuit, which are white buttery crumbs, that stay falling out of your halitosis-having daddy’s mouth when he tells you every morning, ‘Lavender, that boy, City, with all those wonderful waves in his head, is everything me and your dead mama wished you and your incarcerated brother could be.’” I stepped closer to him, tugged on my sack, and looked at Octavia Whittington out of the corner of my eye. “That’s one sentence, too, wack nigga, with an embedded quotation up in there. And your fade still don’t fade quite right.”
Without even looking at me, LaVander Peeler just said, “Roaches can’t spell so that sentence doesn’t make any sense.”
Everyone around us was laughing and trying to give me some love. And I should have stopped there, but I kept going and kept brushing and looked
directly at the crowd. “Hell, Lavender Peeler can be the first African American to win the title all he wants, y’all,” I told them. “But me, I’m striving for legendary, you feel me?”
Even the seventh-grade Mexicans were dying laughing at LaVander Peeler, who was closest to me. He was flipping through one of those pocket thesauruses, acting like he was in deep conversation with himself.
“Shoot,” I said to the crowd. “I’m ’bout to be the first one of us with a head full of waves to win nationals in anything that ain’t related to sports or cheerleading, you feel me?”
Toni Whitaker, Octavia Whittington, and Jerome Wallace stopped laughing and stared at each other. Then they looked at both of us. “He ain’t lying about that,” Toni said. Octavia Whittington just nodded her head up and down and kept smiling.
The bell rang.
As we walked back to class, LaVander Peeler tapped me on the back of the neck and looked me directly in my eye. He flicked his nose with his thumb, opened his cheap flip phone, and started recording himself talking to me.
“I’m not going to stomp you into the ground for talking about my mother, my brother, and my pops because I don’t want to be suspended today, but this right here will be on YouTube in the morning just in case your fat homosexual ass forgets,” LaVander Peeler told me. “I do feel you, City. I also do feel that all your sentences rely on fakeness and magic. All things considered, I feel like there’s nothing real in your sentences because you aren’t real. But do you feel that a certain fat homosexual is supposed to be riding to nationals tonight in my ‘halitosis-having daddy’s’ van? I do. All things considered, I guess his mama don’t even care enough to come see him lose, does she?”
LaVander Peeler got even closer to me. The boy smelled like fried tomatoes, buttered cornbread, and peppermint. I held my arms tight to my body and counted these twelve shiny black hairs looking like burnt curly fries curling their way out of his chin. I scratched my chin and kept my hand there as he tilted his fade don’t fade down and whispered in my ear, “You know the real difference between me and you, City?”
“What?”
“Sweat and piss,” he told me. “I’m sweat. All things considered, sweat and piss ain’t the same thing at all. Even your mama knows that, and she might know enough to teach at a community college in Mississippi, but she ain’t even smart enough to keep a man, not even a homeless one who just got off of probation for touching three little retarded girls over in Pearl.”
LaVander Peeler closed his flip phone, said, “One sentence,” and just walked off.
Turns out LaVander Peeler commenced to tell our principal, old loose-skin Ms. Lara Reeves, that I called him a “nigger”—not “nigga,” “negroid,” “Negro,” “African American,” or “colored.” I figured it was just LaVander Peeler’s retaliation for someone turning him in two months ago for calling me a “faggot.” I know who snitched on LaVander Peeler, and it wasn’t me, but after he got in trouble for calling me a “faggot” he started calling me a “homosexual,” because he knew Principal Reeves couldn’t punish him for using that word without seeming like she thought there was something wrong with being a homosexual in the first place.
I guess you should also know that no one else at Hamer or in the world ever called me a “faggot” or “homosexual” except for LaVander Peeler. I’m not trying to make you think I’ve gotten nice with lots of girls or anything because I haven’t. I felt on Toni’s bra in a dark closet in Art and she twerked on my sack a few times after school. And I guess I talked nasty with a few people who claimed they were girls on this website called
WhatYouGotOn-MyFreak.com
, but really that was it. Truth is my sack stayed dry as hell, but I don’t think you’re supposed to feel like a case about sex unless you make it through tenth grade with a dry sack. The point is that even if LaVander Peeler caught you watching him piss once, I don’t think that should really qualify you as a homosexual.
Anyway, I sat in Principal Reeves’s office waiting to tell her that I didn’t call him a “nigger,” but that I did bring my wave brush out after lunch by mistake.
In Principal Reeves’s office, next to her huge bookshelf, was a big poster with a quote from Maya Angelou. The backdrop of the poster was the sun and in bolded red letters were the sentences, “Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean. Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”
I hated sentences that told me that my emotions were like something that wasn’t emotional, but I loved how those red words looked like they were coming right out of the sun, red hot.
Ms. Lara Reeves had been a teacher since way back in the ’80s and she became the principal at Hamer about four years ago. The worst part of her being the principal was that she was also my mama’s friend. My mama was known for having friends you wouldn’t think she’d have. Mama had me when she was a sophomore at Jackson State fourteen years ago. She’s old now, in her early thirties, so you would expect her to have only black friends in her thirties, but she had black friends, white friends, African friends, and super-old friends like Principal Reeves.
Mama taught over at Madison Community College and Principal Reeves took a politics course from her. When I first heard that my principal was my mama’s student, I thought I’d get away with everything. But it was actually harder for me to get away with anything since whenever Principal Reeves didn’t do her homework or answered questions wrong, she liked to talk to my mama about how I was acting a fool in school.
On Principal Reeves’s desk, you saw all kinds of papers flooding the bottoms of two big pictures of her husband, who disappeared a few years ago. No one knows what happened to him. Supposedly, he went to work one morning and just never came back. If you looked at pictures of Principal Reeves back in the day, you’d be surprised, because she looked exactly the same. She had the same curl at 62 that she had at 31, except now the curl was lightweight gray.
Principal Reeves also kept a real record player in her office. In the corner underneath the table were all these Aretha Franklin records. Mama loved Aretha Franklin, too, but she only had greatest-hit CDs, which she’d play every time she picked me up.
I invented calling Principal Reeves “Ms. Kanye” behind her back because even though she asked a lot of questions, you really still couldn’t tell her nothing. She asked questions just to set up her next point. And her next point was always tied to teaching us how we were practically farting on the chests of the teenagers on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee if we didn’t conduct ourselves with dignity.
Before Principal Reeves stepped her foot in the door of her office, she was saying my name. “Citoyen…”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Take this test,” she said, and handed me a piece of paper. “Don’t look at me with those sad red eyes. Just take the test.”
At Hamer, they were always experimenting with different styles of punishment ever since they stopped whupping ass a few years ago. The new style was to give you a true/false test if you messed up. And the test had to be tailored to what they thought you did wrong and what you needed to learn to not mess up again. The craziest thing is that it was usually harder understanding what the test had to do with what you did wrong than taking the actual test itself.
Name________Year_____True/False — Underline one
1. Desperation will make a villain out of you.
True/False
2. Only a fool would not travel through time and change their past if they could.
True/False
3. You were brought to this country with the expectation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
True/False
4. If you push yourself hard in the direction of freedom, compassion, and excellence, you will recover.
True/False
5. Loving someone and loving how someone makes you feel are the same thing.
True/False
6. Only those who can read, write, and love can move back or forward through time.
True/False
7. There are undergrounds to the past and future for every human being on earth.
True/False
8. If you haven’t read or written or listened to something at least three times, you have never really read, written, or listened.
True/False
9. Past, present, and future exist within you and you change them by changing the way you live your life.
True/False
10. You are special.
True/False
*Bonus*
11. You are innocent.
True/False
After I finished the stupid test, Principal Reeves put it on top of a stack of tests she hadn’t graded yet and started going in on me. “Citoyen, do you know who the great Brenda Travis is?” she asked me.
“Umm…”
“No. You do not know. Brenda Travis was a fifteen-year-old high school student from right up the road in McComb,” Principal Reeves said, and popped what looked like some boiled peanuts in her mouth. “That young lady canvassed these same streets with the SNCC voter-registration workers 50 years ago. She led students like you on a sit-in and, for the crime of ordering a hamburger from a white restaurant, the girl was sentenced to a year in the state juvenile prison.”
“Just a regular hamburger?” I asked her. “Not even a fish sandwich or a grilled cheese? That’s crazy.”
“That contraption holding your teeth in place, that’s the problem.” Principal Reeves sat at her desk and started ruffling through papers.
“I don’t get it,” I told her. “What contraption?”
“Your mouth, that contraption. It is going to be the death of you or somebody else,” she said. “Today is the biggest day of your life, Citoyen. You want to waste it calling your brother LaVander Peeler a ‘nigger’ and using a wave brush on school property? You know we don’t bring wave brushes to school at Hamer.”
The problem was that at Hamer, you used to be able to use your wave brush until the second bell at 8:05, but ever since Jerome Wallace beat the bile out of this cock-eyed new kid, Roy Belton, with a Pine wave brush during lunch, you can be suspended for something as simple as having a wave brush on school property.
“LaVander Peeler ain’t my brother,” I told her, “and I didn’t think I was wasting it. I’m ready. You’ll see.”
Principal Reeves just looked at me. I tried to look away toward the bookshelf so I wouldn’t have to look at her face.