by Sapphire
“From 1800 to 1899,” Imena answers, but the girl still looks confused.
“So yes, it was in the 1800s, I’m pretty sure, late 1800s. Wood objects are now known to have a much longer life than we thought. But what you see here is not the original sculpture. A lot has been added to it since it was first created. Each nail was driven in by a member of the community, or ‘tribe’ as you like to call it here. Beads, bits of birds’ nests, feathers, and scraps of folks’ clothing were added during the time the object was residing with the tribe. Each nail driven in or scrap added speaks to some moment in the life of the owner or owners—some of these objects were owned collectively.”
“How does the Nkisi speak?” Imena asks.
“Well, some of this is conjecture. But I imagine that the power of the Nkisi is one of transformation. Think of Jesus on the cross, his suffering for the people. Instead of them dying for their sins, he died for them. Nkisi absorbed and transmuted the pain and suffering of the tribe. So when starvation or the suffering and dislocation that came as members of the society were either attacked or put on the run by slave traders, the people drove a nail into Nkisi, because Nkisi could take what they no longer could.”
Dope! Dope! Dope! I believe it! But, “What’s ‘transmute’?” I ask. Mrs Washington say ask questions, even if you feel like a fool asking ’em. Don’t ask and you’ll be a fool! Ha! Ha!
“‘Transmute’ means to change from one form to another,” Imena answers me.
The African dude looks like he’s getting ready to cry. He leans over and hugs Imena. “This class has been like a refuge for me while I was studying with those depraved people. Every day was a psychological genocide. You think you can imagine that shit down there, but it’s unimaginable how they hate us. They have projected their evil onto us and institutionalized it. What’s worse than white people?”
What the fuck is he talking about! It feels like the shot is getting stronger in my body, not weaker. I got to move! Imena looks like she don’t know what to do—the guy is crying now. He gives her the thing. “I leave Nkisi with you. It means what you make it mean.” Then he stand up over it. “It can’t take any more real nails, so I drive in a metaphoric nail.” He raises his hands like he got a hammer in one hand and a nail in the other. “I won!” He comes down with the hammer. “NYU, you didn’t kill me. I won!” He comes down again and again. “This nail is for all the crazy shit, four fucking years of it, then the internship and the residency! Nkisi!”
“Well, let’s thank Brother Abubakar and wish him strength on his journey.” Everybody claps except me. I just wish he would get his crying ass out of here so we can dance. What kind of kid wants to see a grown-up cry? I look at Nkisi. Imena is looking at me, at the side of my face. I look at the piece of glass in the creature’s center, the mirror. He’s scary. I blink at the faded mirror in his chest, think of my kaleidoscope revolving, the picture changing. An illusion Brother John said was created by mirrors at right angles. Fuck it! Fuck it! FUCK IT! NYU, Nkisi too! Forget all that shit! I came here to dance. I get up, take off my jacket. Lay it casual against the wall, put my bag from the hospital next to it, and like nothing has happened begin stretching out. I look up from the floor where I’m spread out in second position and Imena is staring at me again. I look down at my T-shirt, spattered with blood. I pull it over my head, ball it up, and throw it in the corner with the rest of my stuff. A lot of guys dance without shirts. Imena is saying something to the drummers, meaning we’re gonna start in a minute. I get up, roll up the legs of my pants, and go get in the back line with the rest of the men.
“This is a dance for Xango,” Imena says. She raises her arm. “He got the oshe, that double-headed ax. He’s the Orisha of lightning, dance, and passion.” She looks at us. “That’s what a dancer does. We’re like lightning rods, channels, for God. African dance ain’t about kicking up your leg, African dance is about spirit!”
I listen to the beat, bah dah dah DAH! One two three FOUR! I don’t care what it’s about, I just wanna do it! I start to move across the floor, the drums seem like my own heart beating. A guy has a long string instrument, it’s pure fire! The music rocks, my body turns into an ear hearing it. My body is not a stranger, not a traitor tricked by white homos in black robes, not a little boy in a hospital bed, not a man—big, shiny, and black that makes the brothers look at him. Here my body is my own, here I am a Crazy Horse dude who never gave up. Here I am like that dude Brother John told us the Schomburg got started by, here I am music, I never been to no police station for lies about little kids, here I got a mother and she ain’t no ho die of AIDS. Here in the beat is my life. The flute shrieks and I come again and again and can’t nobody stop me.
Sweat is pouring down my bare back. I could do this forever. Some of the niggers here is professional. What’s that? They do they shit for money that’s supposed to be better? Shit, I rob if I have to, beg too, as long as I can do this. Sound wreck me it’s so beautiful!
“Shit, man, what the fuck is that?” I ask the dude next to me.
“Oh, man, that’s a Brazilian instrument, the berimbau! It’s out there, ain’t it?”
I never heard a sound like that before in my life. It gets me open. I want to get the fuck out of these jeans. MOVE. Shit, I’m dressed, it ain’t like I ain’t got on no drawers. The sound cause me to float. My head opens up, and I go with my heart. I feel so sad I could cry, but I don’t. I just listen harder to the music, the sound between the one, try to move my body more better like the professionals, like some of the big sisters who ain’t professionals but dance better than them dance like . . . like Crazy Horse LIGHTNING! I am too gonna get a tattoo across my cheek like zigzag lightning. A picture like of a finger with a gold ring, no hand, just a little finger, a gold ring on it, bleeding, floats through my brain. Why that? That shit Blondie spray me with ain’t no joke! What it be like to stick someone like Blondie, lick Wang boy’s tattoos? What I’m gonna get pierced? I seen a picture of this dude what got his joint pierced once. The berimbau music is slowing down even more strange and beautiful. And I feel like Cinderella one minute to fucking midnight, except it’s my head gonna come off, not no fucking glass shoe, and instead of a mean stepmother I’m gonna have a psycho slave walking around talking about, Boy! Whar you was at! Or I’ll be fucking homeless. January I’ll be fourteen years old. A man if I wanna be. Who’s to tell me different? Before I hear the last drumbeat, I know it’s gonna happen—that when I hear the last drumbeat, I’m gonna collapse. That all of a sudden my body will feel like it’s been arrested, jumped on, arm twisted, run all over Harlem twice, chemical sprayed, sewed up, and drugged up—that when the music stops, the room will go round and round and I’ll fall like broken glass.
“My jacket!” I point, falling.
“Get his jacket!” I hear Imena say. “Is that bag yours too, J.J.?” I nod. I want to get up, run away, but can’t, I’m tired, real tired. I feel my heart beating. My head is beating too—bong! bong! Shit it hurts! I turn my head—Jaime! He looks away from me and runs out the door.
“Where you live, man?” one of the drummers asks me. I think of the roaches crawling out the cracks in the green and black linoleum, sigh, think, just for the night, just for the night.
“805 St Nicholas Avenue, man.”
“Avenue or Place?”
“Avenue.” I guess. My head is going BONG! BONG! now. My arm feels like it had a thousand little needles in it that was asleep, that’s starting to wake up and prick me. I feel like shit, but I feel OK too. Yeah, I hurt, I got to go back to the roach motel, but I danced! I never danced before like I did tonight. Brother Samuel, pit bull police, my mother checking out, my father dying in the war, none of that, nothing, nobody, no-fucking-body can take that away from me. Fuck Jaime! Fuck everybody! I take my jacket and bag from Imena, let the drummer put his arm around me and help me up.
I follow him and Imena, who I assume is his girlfriend by how she’s acting, out the gym and down the stairs. I’
m holding on to the railing as I go down. Fifteen minutes ago I was like a god, my body was under my control, like Jaime. I was like . . . like Xango throwing lightning bolts or Crazy Horse at the top of the hill. Now my knees fucking Jell-O.
Of course I realize when I get in the car Imena done made her boyfriend give me a ride. I get ready for the third degree. And sure enough—
“What happened to you?” she starts to grill me.
“Nothing.”
“Come on, J.J., that shit on top of your head and on the side of your face is ‘nothing’?”
“It’s OK,” I say.
“Tell me what happened, J.J.”
Boyfriend gotta put his two cents in. “How long you been coming to class now?”
“A few months.” What’s that got to do with anything?
“Well, you wanna keep coming to class, you gotta talk to Imena here.”
“Don’t tell him that, Ibrahim. He doesn’t have to tell me anything, and he can keep coming to class. Have you been messing around with drugs, J.J.?” She looks at Ibrahim. “Where you going? It’s only around the corner, at the Boys’ Home.”
“He said St Nicholas Avenue.”
“You moved, J.J.? You not at St Ailanthus anymore?”
I feel seasick even though I’m not in a boat. I’m too tired to cry. I just want to be left alone.
“J.J.! Did those freaks do this to you? Answer me!” Imena is really upset.
“Look, man, we just wanna help you. Imena is not gonna call the pigs or nothing. We . . . well, look at you, man, you had blood on your T-shirt, stitches on the top of your head, the side of your face sliced open. You was dancing all . . . all erratic and shit, man, and then you fall out! We brothers and sisters, man! You wanna be an African dancer, then you wanna be part of a community.”
“Artists stick together, J.J. If you can’t tell us, who can you tell?”
Nobody.
“How old are you, man? Believe me, the ball is in your court. We ain’t gonna say nothing to those Catholic freaks or nobody else. Them homos make a move on you? Them freaks beat you up?” Ibrahim is all beside himself now.
“How old are you, J.J.?” Imena asks.
“Thirteen.”
“Whew! You know you look older, man? Way older!”
“It’s true, J.J., you look older than thirteen. If . . . people . . . I don’t know. So what happened with the Catholics? They move on you and then kick you out or something?”
“Something like that,” I tell her. “I fought back, they fucked me up and brought me to Harlem Hospital. Then from there to my relatives, who is real old.”
“Real old? Where’s your mother and father, J.J.?”
“My mother died in a car accident, and my father got killed in the war.”
“Uh, what war?” Ibrahim asks.
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, who are these old relatives?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
I wish Ibrahim would shut up and not ask me no more questions.
“Well, J.J., just tell us who these old people are before we take you there,” Imena pleads.
“Imena, take it from me, we ain’t getting the whole story. I don’t know what it is, but we ain’t getting it,” Ibrahim says.
“Well, for God’s sake.”
They’re talking about me like I’m not here or three years old.
“Look at him, it’s obvious he’s been traumatized. It’s not his fault. J.J., please tell us, to the best of your ability, who these old people are.” Imena sounds like in the soaps or something.
“Well, after my mom and dad died, I got took to St Ailanthus ’cause my only living relatives couldn’t be found. Then after I got kicked out of St Ailanthus, they found ’em, ’cause they had to have somewhere for me to go.”
“Imena, we ain’t hearing the full story.”
“And we’re not gonna tonight. Let’s just take the boy home.”
It’s dark already. We pass everything again, the school, the Y, police station.
“This is it? You said 805?” Ibrahim asks.
“Yeah,” I say before I even look. I was starting to fall asleep.
“Want us to come with you?” Imena asks.
No, I want you to leave me alone. I can handle this. “No thank you.” It’s just a ol’ slave, weird stink. Ain’t being whatever St Ailanthus was. A lie is what it was. “St Ailanthus Home for Boys”! Ain’t no fucking “home.” I’m sleepy, I’m tired, I’m cold.
“See you Saturday. Don’t worry about money, hear? Just come to class. I don’t want you to stop coming to class, OK? OK?”
“OK.”
“Good night, J.J.”
“Good night.”
“Lil’ bastard didn’t even say thank you,” I hear Ibrahim saying as the car pulls out.
“For God’s sake—” Imena says. I don’t hear the rest of what she says.
Well, if I’m gonna stay here, I gotta have a key. I can’t believe—Oh, fuck it! I got kicked out of St Ailanthus for knocking one of the brothers out when the faggot moved on me. So big deal, here I am. It happened. Next!
She—I guess her—somebody’s cleaned up the glass when I get back in the room. I ain’t gonna say nothing to her, just keep it like it is, like when I came in the house, I didn’t say nothing. She ain’t my mother or nothing. I ain’t staying here too long. No use in getting all buddy-buddy when my being here is just a mistake. I’ll soon be outta here. Soon.
Some towels on the bed. What’s that spozed to be, a hint? Can’t be, the way she look and how this place stink. But I take ’em and walk down the hall to the bathroom. I need to shit, but I’m all constipated. Laugh, think maybe ain’t none in me, maybe the police scared it all outta me at the station. Be good to take a shower or bath.
All I got in the world is in that suitcase back in the room and that bag what I got from Blondie, leather pants, watch. I know I got a couple or at least one pair of pajamas in my suitcase. I go sit on the toilet, grunt, groan a little, feel like at first I’m full of the glass I broke earlier. Then finally whoosh, I shit, shit. Feels good, like the past twenty-four hours is coming out my asshole. Like it’s over, outta me. Smells horrible, though. Open the window, night sky black computer stars dots of light. The night air smells clean. I never felt so old in my life. Shit, actually, I guess I never been so old in my life.
I turn on the water, all the way hot. Even though I got all these cuts and scratches, I want it hot. The washcloth is soft dark pink, the new bar of soap sitting in the soap dish say Camay. It’s pink, a girl’s soap. I wanna be disgusted, but I’m not. It smells nice. St Ailanthus, Irish Spring, is that a man’s soap? Or the House of Faggots soap. Do they fuck each other or only us? Not do, did, ’cause I’m gone, past tense. Here now, a free motherfucking kid. If they fuck each other, they homos, if they only fuck us, they dudes. The water is hot. I stick my foot in. Burns almost. I plunge my body in. I wanna be clean. Like after confession. Brother John says you’re in a state of grace, if you die right after confession with no sins on your soul, you go straight to heaven.
The opposite of grace is disgrace, dirt, polices, lies, sperms. I want it off my body. Off my body, my body of a free boy, felt good to shit. My body of dance, felt good to dance. Fuck them! Fuck all that shit ’cept dance. The water feels good now. I feel my lips on Jaime’s neck. I feel so warm, like on ganja or some shit. Don’t make no difference if I had one leg, then I be a one-leg dancer, if I was two feet tall, then I be a midget dancer like at the circus, but I’m not a midget dancer, I’m more like God. God see through walls, eyes big and dark pools like Brother Samuel’s. I see outside the walls now, a door is opening, the elevator door is opening and a big, fucking lion is walking out the door, spraying shit from his dick like territorial markings. Lion roar AAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!! I’m there, feel scared. Shit, I must be fucking bugging, for a minute I think this shit is real, forgot I’m sitting here tripping. Ain’t no lion o
ut there. So why do I think wack shit like that? Shit, ’cause I’m wild! A wild child! A free fucking baby! I’m black! I love to be black. I’m a boy, I love to be a boy! I’m strong six-pack all that! The hot water feels good, burns my scratches, but feel good on my shoulder. I wash like Crazy Horse rode, don’t care if it hurt, I like to hurt. I wash my face, splash water on top my head, easy now on them stitches Wang Wang give me.
I wanna be loved. I want someone to open me up like I did the kids and Jaime. Ram me up with love like useta be Brother John and me? Love, not like fucking dickhead stupid Brother Samuel. But warm like water. How come don’t nobody like me? That’s stupid! A lot of people like me. A lot. I’m rubbing the pink soap all over me, thinking about love and jamming and what it be like being a dancer, a professional, what it takes, and the water is good and fucking hot, we only take showers at St Ailanthus. I ain’t there no more, thinking that, I get to feeling all creepy, all alone, and it’s more than I can deal with, long stupid I don’t know. What the fuck, shit, what the fuck I’m thinking is stupid, I got to do something. I don’t think but see myself like a movie slicing my dick off. Then I’m burying my own body, but it’s not me, it’s a girl, little storybook girl golden. Rape her. Something. I should be in a house getting everything I need, getting good clothes, good food and things and places to go, and I should have a mother and a pops, I should have good shit, I should not be coming apart inside. It should not feel like the cracks in the plaster is me going crack eeek errrecch down the wall driving me stupid. When I put my feet on the ground, the ground should not move I should not feel this way I don’t understand how a good kid like me could have a mother die of AIDS. Why my mother. Why my mother. Turn on the hot water hot that makes me feel good yeah I feel good the hotter the better water feels so good I want to go to sleep I want to dream, call Imena and her drummer-ass boyfriend to come back back back and save me like on TV a parachute outta burning plane getting ready to explode open in rainbow colors. I wanna fall down slide down down deeper in the tub into the warmness of the water and feel how good it feel to have Jaime kiss me there kill me there my dick dick dick penis penis how it’s a fire a big fire that don’t burn you but freak you. I got that feeling, those feelings, let me love you let me love you let me love you I can hear drums break like waves along my balls down low down low it’s aching me aching me I need together a place a suitcase pack pack pack a car is waiting a car is waiting to take me away like I was never there never there like I never was there like I never was.
