Authors: Kiese Laymon
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Back home, we…uh, we say that reading, it’s…umm…it’s fun-da-mental. You know, like it’s fun and mental, duh. There’s a lot of violence in Jackson but it ain’t a shark tank. I’m serious. If kids had more programs and our parents had more money, I don’t think it would be that violent at all.” Everyone was quiet. I guess they expected more, but I was done playing a role in this dumb Spell-Off. I needed to go find Shalaya Crump. “I’m sorry, but, um, I have to go home. My stomach hurts. I feel like I’m about to lose my manners, to tell you the truth. Listen though,” I said into the mic. “Be nice to Baize, okay? Let her do her bio like you let me do mine.”
No one said a word, so I looked down at my feet as they slid off that stage, and tried not to imagine the looks on folks’ faces as I headed out the door of what used to be a Freedom School.
I wanted it all to be a dream.
I wasn’t out the door more than 20 seconds before Baize came running after me. When she caught me, we didn’t say a word. We just walked toward the hole. During the first minute of our walk, Baize was quiet and I watched my feet miss most of the thin branches that had fallen in the woods. Every time I stepped an inch from a branch, I thought about how I couldn’t wait to tell Shalaya Crump that I had been on a stage in 2013 talking about stuff I knew nothing about.
During the second minute of our walk, every time we passed an ant bed, I thought of all the folks in 1985 who would have been shamed if they had seen how I represented them. I had looked like a complete fool in front of folks I didn’t even know. I could feel Baize looking at my face too hard while I was thinking. “Don’t worry about it, Voltron,” she said. “How you feel?”
“Why you even asking me that?” I asked her. “I’m fine.”
“I mean, you caught an L,” she said. “No doubt about that. That was a fail and a half back there, but you had your heart in the right place.” She put her hand on my shoulder as we walked. “We should have never come anyway. It was more important that we went back and saved your friend.”
“You didn’t have to come, though. You should have stayed.”
“Naw, I’m good. I just really wanted to say that ‘This is Baize Against the World, not
Akeelah and the Bee
’ line on stage. I thought they were gonna let me say it in my own voice. I think it could have gone viral.”
It was weird, because up until that point, I hated any folks who were skinnier than me and taller than me and smarter than me and funnier than me and sweated less than me. And I hated folks from different states and folks who had shinier penny loafers and folks
who had rounder heads than me, and folks who didn’t like as much tartar sauce and hot sauce on their catfish as me. But right then, I didn’t even hate those folks. I did, however, hate this future—I mean, Klan-hate. After I saved Shalaya Crump, I wanted to do everything I could to come back to the future and make it suffer for helping me embarrass myself.
With all my hate bubbling, we walked to the hole. Out of nowhere, Baize fell to her knees right outside the hole and told me to hold on a second.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
“What’s it look like?”
“Looks like you praying. But why?”
“The question is, why ain’t you praying,” she said. “My parents and great-grandma told me that every knee must bend, especially when you have no idea what’s gonna happen next. You should probably pray with me.”
I looked down at her. “I pray before I go to bed like two times a week.”
“That’s on you,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”
And with that, Baize brought her hands together, closed her eyes, and actually started praying right outside the hole. After a minute or so, I started breathing heavy wondering how much longer this prayer was going to take. Near the end, she touched my calf and said, “Amen.”
Baize got in the hole first and I followed her. While we were in the hole, deep in the dark, Baize grabbed both of my wrists and made her way down to the palms of my hands.
“Baize.” It was the first time I’d called her by her name. “You were scared to stay back here by yourself, weren’t you?” I asked her. “Your eyes open?”
“Yeah, Voltron. They’re open, and yeah, I was scared to be there alone. Are you scared right now?”
That was the new best question anyone had ever asked me. The thing is, I was never scared of what I should have been scared of. For example, I wasn’t scared of people finding out I stole those Bibles for Shalaya Crump. I wasn’t really even scared of the Klan. I was only scared of knowing that Shalaya Crump could love someone else. Nothing else scared me. And if nothing really scared me, I wondered if anything else really even mattered. Everything else just made me mad or made me embarrassed or made me nervous. But all of those feelings had to do with Shalaya Crump in some way or another.
“Ain’t no reason to be scared,” I told her and took my hands back. “What can people do to you, really?”
“They can make you disappear,” she said.
“Yeah, but then you’re gone. I ain’t afraid of disappearing. I bet disappearing doesn’t even hurt, to tell you the truth.”
“People can mash your heart in your chest, Voltron, while you’re still alive. They can take people from you. That’s something to be afraid of. Stop fronting like you’re ’bout that life, boy.”
I said okay, but I knew people could hurt people way more than Baize would ever know. Shalaya Crump and I had this friend named Rozier. I liked to think about big ol’ JET-centerfold booties for as long as Rozier knew me, and Rozier liked to think about big ol’ boy booties for as long as I knew him. That’s just how he was. The thing about Rozier was that he was the kind of guy who you met and 29 minutes later, you knew he would be better than Eddie Murphy when he grew up. Rozier invented farting out loud in homeroom. He also invented calling people “ol’ blank-blank-blank-ass
nigga.” Like if you ate an apple too fast, Rozier would call you an “ol’ eating-apples-like-they-plums-ass nigga,” or if you failed a test, he’d call you an “ol’ watching-
Three’s Company-when-you-
shoulda-been-studying-ass nigga.”
If you called Rozier a name he didn’t like, Rozier could slap you in the face better than any kid in Melahatchie, except for maybe Shalaya Crump. The summer of ’84, Rozier got jumped by some dudes from Waveland. Rozier had embarrassed one of the dudes in front of his family earlier at the arcade. After the boy called Rozier a faggot, Rozier said he’d never met a boy who smelled like sack and dookie through his church clothes. He called him an “ol’ wiping-your-ass-forward-instead-of-backward-so-the-dookie-get-caked-up-under-your-sack-ass nigga.” He said the boy needed Mr. Miyagi to teach him to correctly “wipe on, wipe off.” Even his friends started laughing, and when the dude got in Rozier’s face, Rozier slapped the boy across his mouth twice with both hands. That’s four slaps right in front of his family. Then he ran.
The boy who got slapped four times got three of his older cock-strong friends to help find Rozier when he was by himself in the Night Time Woods the next day. Rozier slapped the best he could, but they ended up calling him a faggot and beating him down with T-ball bats. They didn’t ever hit him directly in the head, but they crushed his larynx. He was in the woods by himself for a whole day before we found him. Rozier ended up in a coma, and one week later, he was dead. Shalaya Crump and I didn’t speak a word about revenge until the night after the funeral.
That night we planned how we were going to kill the boys, and we planned for the whole rest of the summer. I came up with a
good plan, too. But that’s the strange thing about planning to kill boys from Waveland with someone like Shalaya Crump. She had the worst temper of anyone I knew, but she was also the smartest person I knew. At some point, Shalaya Crump realized that we didn’t really want to kill the boys from Waveland.
“We just want them to hurt like we hurt,” she said. Shalaya Crump claimed that in order to hurt the boys, we’d have to “kill some little boy they loved, but not kill them.” And neither of us really had it in us to kill some little Waveland boy we didn’t know. By the end of the summer, all four of the boys involved got sent to juvenile detention centers for five years.
Anyway, I didn’t feel like explaining to Baize how I’d seen Rozier disappear, too, so I just said, “I hear you. You’re right. I should be afraid.”
I opened the door to the hole slowly so we wouldn’t be slapped across the face by the 1964 Klan. I sniffed as I opened the door to the hole and knew we were where we needed to be.
“It’s so dark,” Baize said. She was bent over coughing under a magnolia tree. “Everything is so green here, too. You know why?” I didn’t answer her. I was busy looking around for the Klan. She kept coughing.
“Look,” I told her, “we can’t play in this place the way we could in 2013. We gotta be quiet and we gotta always keep our head up, you hear me?” I was trying to make my nostrils flare and make lines form in my forehead. “You got folks around here who will slap the taste out of your little mouth if they think you did something small, like farted in a way that don’t smell right.”
“You got people like that back in 2013,” she said and kept coughing. “I’m talking about straight goons.” Baize’s nose was bleeding. She wiped it on her shirt. “You okay?” I asked her.
“Yeah, I just feel a little weird.”
I was starting to feel a little weird too, but not in my body. It was more in my head. I guess there were all kinds of ways to say it, but the easiest way was that I liked Baize more and more the longer we were together. And she liked me, too. It didn’t hit me until we got out of the hole that instead of just wanting to get her computer back, maybe she really just wanted to come back with me. I didn’t want to like her too much, though, because of Shalaya Crump. I could never like her as much as I liked Shalaya Crump, but still, if I liked Baize too much, I knew Shalaya Crump would be able to tell, and then everything would be ruined.
“Get all that sickness out of you,” I told her. “They got these Red Naval cats around here. And those things will come after you and start talking if you don’t watch it. And these folks here, they don’t even dress like real people.” I picked up a few acorns and tossed them at the base of tree. “All you can see is their eyes, and if you joke with them, they love to make you suffer.”
“That’s better than it is back home, where them goons look just like you. I’m serious. Female goons get to hating on you, too. The most basic of bitches wanna fight you for being glamorous and focused.”
“Did you really just say that?” I asked her. “Hard head makes a soft glamorous ass. You gonna be begging to get stomped out by a female goon after the Klan get ahold of you and throw you up in that colored bathroom with one of them Red Naval cats.” I threw an acorn at her forehead. “You laughing now, but when they start choking you out, don’t say I didn’t tell you.”
“Damn, Voltron,” she said, “can you not hate for like the next five minutes? Damn!”
We walked toward the Freedom School and peeked in the window. There was this slim, light-skinned lady talking to a tired, greasy-looking black man. The lady was walking around pointing and yelling and holding some paper with her back to us. The man was facing her, sitting at a desk and laughing.
“Who are those people?” Baize asked me.
“I don’t know. Be quiet.” I looked harder. “Is something wrong with that lady’s face?…I can’t tell. Just stay behind me.”
We decided to go in the Freedom School, since the people looked nice enough. They didn’t look rich at all, but the hair on both of their heads was so shaped up and neat that I started brushing my own hair.
“Whose babies y’all is?” the lady turned around and asked when we opened the door. I’m not sure how to describe her face, but the skin beneath her eyes and all over her forehead looked like it had been burned really bad and it was maybe just starting to heal. The craziest thing was that her eyes looked normal and they were huge and shiny.
“We ain’t babies,” I told her. I looked at Baize and she looked back at me.
“I’m City and Shalaya’s baby,” Baize said, stepping forward. “But I stay with my great-grandmama.”
I dropped
Long Division
.
After reading the craziest chapters yet of
Long Division
and sitting there with Pot Belly, I started to understand the sad that he was feeling. There were some red, green, yellow, white, or orange sprinkles in the sad I felt, but mostly, the sad was all just layers and layers of the thickest blue you’d ever seen in your life. Whenever I’d come close to feeling that blue before, I’d pick scabs, or I’d turn off the light and get nice with myself, or I’d come up with a plan about how to get some shine in homeroom at Hamer, or I’d troll the internet with the screen name Megatroneezy, or I’d post something inspirational or something extremely ratchet on Facebook, or I’d eat bowls of off-brand Lucky Charms until I got severe bubble guts. For some reason, I didn’t want to do any of that since I had lost at the contest.
I started thinking about Grandma, Uncle Relle, LaVander Peeler, Baize Shephard, and Mama. And when I really thought about all of them, I just felt so much bluer than ever. Yeah, all those folks tried to mask their different blues, but after the praying, smoking, rapping, thinking, drinking, and running, there just seemed to be nothing else left but blue rooms with people who were really even lonelier and bluer than Octavia Whittington, the bluest girl I ever knew.