As for Dad, of course he was always more complicated than what I allowed myself to see. He wore no cape and had his own questions to grapple with. This I was coming to know.
Months earlier I’d seen him sitting outside the office with Jovett in her maroon Saturn. It was dark winter, and I was coming home from school. I approached and was greeted without nervousness or alarm. But I knew my father, and could feel that, in the way they were sitting there, that evening, there was something that I had not been told.
CHAPTER 7. Bamboo earrings, at least two pair
You may note that all my references to girls have been brief, and mostly touched by failure. My catalog was comic.
Page one: I sat on a fence in early June 1985, my last years of boyhood drawing to dark. I was waiting on Brenda Neil, who I knew had to walk this way to make it home. Soon, she’d be off to Fallstaff, or one of those boarding schools way out with horses and fencing teams. Of course, she was brown and lovely, her eyes were great planets, but what I remember most was how the world would pause and come to her, how she spoke and walked easily, like fifth grade, with all its giant uncertainties, was just her personal ballet. When she laughed, her voice lightly cracked, and with it something inside me, too, took days to set right. She would tap her number two pencil against a desk and look up and away for an answer, and even that dumb look thrilled me. Then I knew how the damned dinosaurs died, that even here, in Miss Boone’s ordinary classroom, cataclysm awaits.
I was on the fence at Cold Spring and Callaway, a block away from the 7-Eleven where I saw my first gat, across the street from where the highwaymen of Wabash snatched my black skullie, sat there nursing my last chance. I don’t remember what I said, but in response she walked past and would have smiled and said something nice, because she was not the type to get loud on you, and for now had rejected the seductive venom and back talk that is the birthright of all black girls. What I know is that I did not say what was needed, what ached beneath every rib, that I watched her walk away with, at best, good-bye and good luck.
I was born under a lame sign. Big Bill could make them yell, Go, William, and do the whop. Dad had his flock and thus direct evidence that, in these matters, his was the arm of Thor. But I had taken a wrong exit, picked up a manual written in French, because, in truth, my greatest disaster was that I just did not understand. Jennifer would clip me in the hallway, pull my shirt, punch me in the shoulder, grab at my chair while I reared back on two legs, mash an index finger in my face, then an hour later smile and ask what I was reading. But it never got through.
Page 7: There I am at my seventh-grade locker, halfway through the year of all hell. Teyanda whispers in my ear, Ta-Nehisi, I have a crush on you. I turn and she’s running off, only to turn back for a second, unsmiling through her glasses, and say, It’s true. I am overcome, but still I demand parted clouds and a booming voice. A glad-to-see-you grin would have helped, and furthermore I am not sure what I am supposed to do next. I could walk her home, but Teyanda lives down near Longwood where legionnaires carry war hammers and long daggers in their dip. I am my own quagmire, and so at the end of the week Teyanda extends her right hand to mush my face and sucks her teeth. Ta-Nehisi, I don’t have a crush on you.
I should have known — all of us were damaged goods, and if I missed something it was this: My greatest perils were sudden and defined — a Timberland boot to the dome, the talking end of a three-eighty, a cop looking to make his night. But on the other side, the pitfalls were bottomless. This was the era of high schools fitted with nurseries; HIV was the air. Nigger, that year at Woodlawn, I had a mother or an expecting in every class. And still fools had the nerve to yell, You got a phat ass! from the passenger seat — always the passenger seat — of speeding cars, to sidle up and ask why you never smile. Who knew what this dude was holding behind those cold hazel eyes? Girls of Knowledge would shoot a nigger down without so much as eye contact, because they knew every smile, every infatuated act compromised security and handed us a weapon that we would only deploy for selfish use. So they made themselves into fortresses, and demanded you drop your arms before they even thought about the drawbridge. They had so much more to lose.
Page 12: It is 1992, and I am doing what I have mastered at Woodlawn — sleeping through health class, my head resting on folded arms, folded arms resting on my desk, next to one of Dad’s latest reprints, which, needless to say, was not the text of the class. Ebony Kelly walked by with a stack of papers and tapped and tapped my desk until I came out of the haze. I was an exile then from Poly, banished from the crystal city and denied even the rep of a West Baltimore public school. What karmic poetry — I had spent all those years wrestling with the Knowledge only to become a county boy. I had disgraced my parents, and exhausted by the rigors of it all, they simply threw up their hands and backed off.
You do what you want, boy, Dad told me one day in the car. But at the end of this school year, you will leave my house. You can go into the army, I don’t care. But you will not be here next year.
Dad and Ma believed seventeen was an internship to manhood, that at that point, the child would be what he was. This was my senior year, the first time no one checked my homework, asked if I had studied, or requested progress reports from school. I came in with a 1.8 GPA. College would require a series of awesome labors. I would have to start with the invention of time travel. Still, I was blessed with some understanding of standardized tests, and thus SAT scores that, at least in Baltimore, stood out. And my advanced classes at Poly had softened my landing here in my senior year at Woodlawn. I had three classes after lunch — health, Spanish I, applied math. I showed my respect by sleeping as much as I could and pulling Bs on pop quizzes. The classrooms were crowded and tight. The last thing a teacher wanted was to make me into an issue. They left me to my afternoon nap. I left them to their restless kids.
Ebony had not been informed of the arrangement. She sat at the front of the class, knew all the answers, and was first pick for class errands. She tapped on the desk until I looked up, handed me some inane ditto, then picked up the thin book lying next to my arm.
What are you reading?
David Walker’s Appeal. It’s written by a black guy from the slavery days. He predicted a lot of the stuff they said in the ’60s. They killed him, of course.
She stood there for a few moments, asking more about the book, then gave her impressions of Malcolm’s memoirs and carelessly smiled. That was when I noticed her.
I came to Woodlawn not sure of what was next. Half of me saw myself fulfilling the destiny of those my mother called out as If-I-hadda-had-my-gun niggers. They stood on their corners, their brains otherwise correct, spewing tales of life-altering moments, conflicts which it all hinged on. But they come out losers, and the frame was always the same — If I hadda had my gun, that nigger wouldn’t have said shit or If I hadda had my gun, that bitch would have let me see my kids.
It was taxonomy for losers, brothers who wasted their minds. That possibility, membership in a garbage heap of lost men, hung over me, clouding even my most primal impulses.
But she was black and beautiful like her name, and, wrong as it was, this made her prominent to me. Years ago I had embarrassed my mother. We were sitting with one of her girlfriends in a living room, and now came that predictable moment that I hated. Why do women care so much about the budding romances of young boys?