“Then what are they angry at?” She balls her hands into a fist like whenever she gets close to figuring out a spot in her multiplication table but isn’t quite there yet. “Does it have to do with Rodney King?”
Grandma’s foot catches, but then she rights herself. “What you know about Rodney King?”
“I saw some of my teachers watching the video. How the police beat him.”
Grandma says nothing.
Ella tugs on her sleeve. “Grandma, something bad’s gonna happen.”
“God’s will is the only thing that’s gonna happen.”
They round a corner and find a group of boys outside the Pay-Less Liquor on Florence. There’s shouting going on inside and things breaking, and before Ella can get a good look at whether or not anyone’s wearing gang rags, Grandma pulls her the other way.
“But Grandma, home’s that way.”
“It’s not safe,” Grandma says, breathlessly, as she pulls Ella to move faster.
Ella hears the glass of the front door to the liquor store shatter and she hurries ahead of Grandma.
But further down Florence, they stop. All of a sudden, the air grows hot. It’s like the quiet from earlier was hiding something. Ella’s heart sinks. The ground is going to come up and swallow us, she realizes. Already, at Florence and Halldale, two dozen LAPD officers are forcing a boy into the back of a patrol car as a mass of spectators rumbles toward them.
“Seandel!” someone in the surging crowd calls out. They move like a wave toward the cops. “Seandel!” And terror spikes through Ella’s heart. Somebody in the thick of it pulls out a camcorder and hunches his back to start filming.
Ella looks over her shoulder again as she runs with Grandma, and she sees the tsunami of black folks swarm toward the officers, and she wants to be home more than anything else in the world.
Car wheels squeal and rubber burns nearby and a familiar voice shouts from out a window, “Ella! Mrs. Jones!”
Brother Harvey. Sweat beads his brow and darkens the collar of his button-down shirt, and his suspenders are loose and his shirtsleeves rolled up, but something firms up in him at the sight of Ella and the elderly woman walking her home.
“Hey! Get inside!”
And it’s almost as though Grandma whisks Ella away in her arms, and car doors fly open then slam shut and Brother Harvey is speeding off again with Ella in the backseat and Grandma in the front.
“We gotta get to the hospital. It’s Lanie.”
“Oh no, Steven. Please tell me she ain’t get caught in this.” Grandma’s voice loses its straightness, starts to warble.
“No, it’s her contractions. The baby’s coming.”
Ella in the backseat wants to say something, but she’s balled up like the fetus in Mama’s belly, her skin on fire and her head a-thunder, and she can barely speak for the pain, can barely hear anything through it. The smash of glass bottles breaking, the sound of gunshots, the crackle of fire, the honking of horns, the cheers, the wails, all of it comes through muffled by the pain cottoning her ears. The bad thing is happening. It’s happening, because Mama’s gonna have a boy, and she’s gonna have it here, and when Ella starts crying and Grandma reaches back to soothe her, anger wraps itself around her, and she wants to shake off Grandma’s hand and tell her she’s not crying because she’s scared, she’s crying because she’s angry.
“Steven, what happened? What’s going on?”
For a long time, he’s silent. The hurt that has its jaws around Ella’s temples lifts just enough for her to hear him say, “Those cops got off. They ain’t gonna go to jail for what they did,” and for Grandma to whisper, “God in heaven.”
She counts her Mississippis, struggles past four, doesn’t get to six.
She passes out and doesn’t wake until they bring her to Mama’s room at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood.
It’s Monday when they finally leave the hospital, and some of the people leaving with them come out, injured and maimed by what happened, to find what Ella and Mama and Brother Harvey and Grandma and now Kev find. Everything has been burned down.
II
HARLEM
STIFLING, suffocating. Even with the windows open, sweat pours, pools, soaks bedsheets through to the mattress to leave stains that Ella’s gonna say is just me peeing the bed again. A rat scurries. KEEEVVV! KEVIN DUQUAN RAY MOTHERFUCKIN’ JACKSON like an alarm clock. And me stirring on the other side of the room, my fugitive big toe tickling Ella’s ear, and Ella swats me away, and it’s this and not Mama that wakes her. The rat skitches and skitters. I open my eyes, catch a glimpse, and shriek.
“Ella,” I whisper, “the rat.”
Ella knows instantly where to look. Without a frown or a squint or even a smirk, she stands, arms tensed at her sides. Then, the soft puff of an animal head exploding. Trails of red spurt out from the shadows. The door creaks open just as the rat’s brain erupts, so Mama doesn’t hear it; one sound covers the other, but she sees the blood and knows instantly that it’ll be another mess for her to clean up but at least Ella didn’t do her Thing out of the house.
Rats don’t scare Mama, but folks catching Ella doing her Thing scares her, what they’d do if they found out she could do things like make a rat’s head explode without touching, that scares her, so she smacks her upside the back of the head anyway. A just-in-case.
Mama shakes her head back and forth but is relieved at least she didn’t have to deal with the animal herself, that I screamed only the once and didn’t risk waking up the rest of the apartment. Ella catches my look, and conspiracy rides the rails between us. I turn out of habit, so that she can change into her day clothes and I won’t see her shame.
Some of the older kids outside the bodega talk about Regents like it’s some sort of monster they can’t ever hope to beat while the others just shrug it off. And it’s this second group that talks the loudest as me and Malik join them. Malik’s quiet and confident the way a lot of the older kids are, and maybe that’s why Ella likes him so much, and I’m starting to think “quiet” is the most attractive thing in the world, because the girl who sometimes works the counter of the bodega barely says two words to me when everybody’s hanging out in the hallways between classes. Ella doesn’t tell me why she has Malik walk me back from school every day, but I figure it’s because summer’s coming and even though gang shit never really stops the heat starts it back up again, like the motors we learned about in science class. Kinetic energy. Thermodynamics.
Somebody’s blasting “Dipset Anthem” so loud through their speakers that I feel the crackling bass in my sternum.
“Ay, lil nigga,” one of the older cats with Adidas sweats and Tims hollers while the others dap up Malik and talk softly about stuff I’m not supposed to know about. Malik gets me in with this crew, and I don’t mind too much, but my bag’s heavy with homework I gotta get done before dinner.
“Hey,” I say back, wishing my voice wasn’t so small.
“Whatchu learn about today?” Adidas asks me. “See this kid?” he tells the others. “Smartest fuckin’ kid in the hood, yo. He a cyborg or something. Could fix any computer on the block. I’m tellin’ you, this nigga goin’ to Harvard on some shit. That’s facts.”
“In history, we learned about George Washington Carver.”
Adidas holds in his weed smoke. “Word?” Then he looks to the others. “Yo, fam, George Washington Carver woulda been that nigga in jail.”
A chorus of “What!” and “Who. You. Tellin” thickens the air, then they’re all doubled over with laughter, and even Malik’s chuckling.
“Nigga was the chef up north, woulda got left up north,” says a light-skinned cat everyone calls Havoc after the rapper from Mobb Deep.