I stay right where I am as she bounds over to me. Everyone outside grows silent. And then Kimberly is up in my face, her blue eyes glowering.
“What is wrong with you?”
What is wrong with me? I think. The question plays in repeat on a turntable in my head as Kimberly yells. I don’t actually hear most of what she says until the very end. She doesn’t yell this. This she whispers.
What she whispers is: “You stupid nigger.”
Then she pushes me into the pool.
My dress billows up around me as I sink to the bottom. It’s red and looks like flames, or blood, and it’s actually a really pretty disaster, like something that should be in Vogue. I’m so embarrassed that I don’t want to get out. I want to stay here at the very bottom of the pool, next to these dead flies, thinking about how I got here.
Nigger: A Brief Personal History by Ashley Bennett
Age 6. Somebody scrawls it across our front gate in black spray paint. My mother refuses to tell me what it means, not yet.
Age 7. A woman lets it slip while she’s complaining to her friend at the grocery store until she notices Jo and me standing behind her and turns bright red.
Age 9. Some boy says it to Jo at school, and she punches him in the gut. They both have to serve detention together, and my parents threaten to pull her out of the school but don’t. Late that night, she comes into my room and tells me she wishes she’d punched him harder.
Age 10. Three men yell it at me from their peeling Nissan while I’m pumping my mom’s gas in a gas station by the water on our way home from visiting Hearst Castle.
Age 11. There’s the Special-Ed kid hiding in the clothing racks in the kids’ section at the mall. He whispers it at me as I walk past and giggles when I turn my head. I’m too tall for most of the stuff in the kids’ section but too skinny for most of the juniors’ section. He keeps repeating it so that it’s like a chant or a mantra.
Age 15. Boys like Michael and Trevor sing along with songs at house parties. All these white boys raise their pale hands in the air and shout it like it’s theirs. I drink until everything, including their voices, is a dull blur.
Age 17. This.
Nèi-ge—Um…
Nigger. The word is like a stone I want to pin me down.
* * *
When I finally float back up to the surface, everyone is staring at me. Michael and Kimberly have gone who knows where. Nobody helps me as I struggle to hoist my body onto the deck. The hair Morgan spent hours doing has lost any pretense of straightness and is getting larger by the minute. My dress is heavy on me, and the weight of it pulls me down. My mascara stings my eyes; I’m not crying, but I might as well be.
As I begin to walk back toward the ballroom, this kid yells out, “Can’t we all just get along?” and the entire yard erupts in laughter.
CHAPTER 17
LASHAWN SITS BY the fire near the double doors, waiting. He looks angry, like something deep inside is waiting to burst out of his chest.
“Are you okay?” he says.
“What?”
“You’re drenched! Come with me,” he says.
I’m too tired not to. I walk with him silently through the ballroom.
“Yo, Brian, can I get the key?”
White Brian hands it over to him without question. The black kids look over at me. Candace says, “Damn, sweetie, you okay?”
I shake my head. The news hasn’t yet made its way to them. It will eventually, as these things do.
I follow LaShawn through the hotel lobby. Everybody stares at us as we pass. He takes out a key card and swipes it, and soon we’re on an elevator.
“That’s messed up, what she did to you,” he says. His voice is smooth like honey and comforting, and his fingers are long and thin and elegant. I’ve never noticed that about him before.
“I deserved it,” I say.
“No, you didn’t,” he says.
* * *
We exit on the tenth floor. The suite is probably like the one Michael’s family has rented for us. There’s a sitting area, a dining area, and a separate bedroom. For a moment, it feels as though we’re in our own little house, and I realize I don’t know why he’s brought me here.
“There’s a robe inside the closet,” he says. “Change in the bathroom, and we can try to use the blow-dryer on your dress.”
When I walk out, LaShawn has the news on. It’s the fourth night of rioting and things are crazy, but not as crazy as they were. He motions for me to sit down next to him.
“That’s two blocks from my house right there.” He points to a building in flames on the screen. “My sister, my mama, and my grandmama, they right there. And I’m here. Dancing. What kind of man does that make me?”
He looks at me as though expecting an answer. I wish I had one, but I don’t. Nothing worth saying, anyway.
“Do you want me to fix your hair?” he says, and points to the bird’s nest of shame atop my scalp.
“Okay.”
I sit down between his legs. It’s kind of sexual, being between a boy’s legs like this, my head gently resting against his crotch, but also really comforting. It reminds me of when I was younger and Lucia used to French braid my hair before school.
“I do my sister’s hair ’fore she goes to school,” he says, as though he’s in my head.
“You know how to braid?”
“Didn’t I just tell you I do my sister’s hair?” He laughs.
“Can you do two French braids for me and then pin them together in the back, please?”
“Just you wait, I’ma hook you up!”
His is an easy laugh, and it makes me wish we’d been close all these years. He takes off his tuxedo jacket and neatly drapes it across the chair. His cummerbund is the color of a robin’s egg. He gets up and disappears into the bathroom. I hear him rustle through the drawers until he’s located the dryer.
“Got it!” he shouts.
He starts to blow-dry my hair. I can’t hear anything above the dryer, so for a while it’s just flashes of fire and newscasters and shots of the soldiers in a line. It looks like Vietnam or something, but it’s only the ghetto.
“You know, more black folks are out there right now helping and tryna do good than riot, but the media don’t show none of that.”
He turns the dryer off and begins to braid.
“I need to tell you something,” I say to him. “Something important.”
“Aight.”
I turn around to face him. “I don’t know how to say it.”
I’m afraid that as soon as I say what needs to be said, he’ll leave. I don’t want to be left alone with my thoughts in this room, but it’s time to do the right thing. I think about what Lana said yesterday: “Just make it right.”
“I started the rumor about you looting. About the sneakers. I didn’t mean to. It just happened. And I’m sorry. On Monday, I promise I’ll go to Principal Jeffries and tell her everything. I would understand if you left right now.”
He looks at me. “If I was you, I’d a waited until my hair was finished to tell me that.”
* * *
We don’t talk while he finishes the next braid and pins it down. Then he moves from his perch on the bed down to the floor. He sits with his knees tucked under his arms. We’re almost close enough to kiss. In a different world, he could be the Dwayne to my Whitley, I think.
“Say something,” I say. “Please.”
“I honestly don’t even know what to say to you right now, Ashley.”
“Just… something.”
“Okay… well… I thought you was better than them girls you hang around, but you’re just like them. I thought maybe…” He trails off and stares at some point in the corner. “Anyway, you’re an asshole like all the other kids in this stupid school.”
I know I deserve it, but when it comes out of his mouth, it’s like being pushed into the pool all over again. I hear myself whimper, “I’m sorry.”
“You know I cou
ld lose my scholarship?”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that!”
“What do you want me to do? How do I make things right? Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
This is not how this was supposed to go. Although I guess there’s no other way it really could’ve gone, given the circumstances. He goes quiet for a long time, retreating somewhere into his head.
He places his chin atop his knees.
“I didn’t steal those sneakers,” he says finally. “My mama got them for me for getting into Stanford.”
“I know you didn’t steal them.”
“But I ain’t gon’ pretend like I don’t want to be at home tearing something up. So, I don’t know, maybe I would’ve stolen them. We got a right to be angry. Our lives don’t mean anything to them. Doesn’t matter if Rodney was an ass; he didn’t deserve to get beat like that. And Latasha Harlins didn’t deserve to die over some damn juice. And nobody cares, ’cause we don’t matter. They treat us like we’re goddamned animals.” His voice cracks like he’s about to cry.
“Isn’t it kinda stupid to steal and set your own neighborhood on fire?”
“Maybe. But maybe it’s the right kind of stupid.”
I think of my sister out there doing God knows what in the name of rebellion and progress, and Uncle Ronnie laid out on the couch, and Morgan and my father’s sad filling the whole house today, along with the ghost of Grandma Shirley’s American dream.
“I don’t know. I just wanna be home,” LaShawn says.
“I have an idea.”
* * *
We’re going to LaShawn’s house. We’re black kids in a car that isn’t ours, and there’s a riot going on, and this is reckless behavior on both our parts, but Trevor is rolling on E, and his car won’t be reported. Plus, LaShawn wants to check on his family, and I kinda owe him big-time.
“Do you want to listen to the radio?” I say.
My dress drips on the seat all around me, still kinda wet from the pool. It’s uncomfortable, but I figure it’s better than running around the city half-naked in a bathrobe.
“No,” LaShawn says.
“We could listen to the news, or KJLH. They’ve been—”
“I said I don’t want to listen to anything.”
“So you have a little sister?” I say after we’ve been driving in silence for what feels like forever.
“Yeah. Kaitlyn. She’s fifteen,” he says.
“Your mom didn’t want to send you guys to the same school?”
“Only reason I’m going is ’cause of the scholarship. We couldn’t afford this shit otherwise.” He sighs.
I think I’ve seen Kaitlyn before in the stands at LaShawn’s games. A husky girl with glasses and bright-red braids atop her head like a girl on fire.
“Do you guys get along?”
“We used to. She’s really, really smart. Smarter than I am. And funny. And she’s damn near as good as I am at basketball. But she stopped applying herself. She’s starting to talk back to my mama and acting like she’s grown. I think it’s ’cause of the girls she’s running around with at her school. She’s pissed that my mama drags her to my games and spends all this money on me for basketball, and I get to go to this fancy-ass school. Meanwhile, she’s at the school around the corner where they don’t even got books half the time.”
“I’d be mad too, I guess.”
“Yeah. But my mama’s trying her best.”
“Maybe she feels like your mama doesn’t care as much about her ’cause she’s a girl.”
“I don’t think that’s it. But what do I know? I’ve never been a girl.”
LaShawn’s sister is only two years younger than he is. I imagine what it must be like to grow up playing, wanting the same things. Her brother says I want the world, and her mother does everything in her power to give it to him. She says I want the world, and everyone—including her own mother—tells her that’s too much.
Sometimes it’s hard being a girl, and it’s hard being black. Being both is like carrying a double load, but you’re not supposed to complain about it. There are so many things you have to remember about how to be.
First things first: be pretty. Never take up too much space; your breasts, arms, lips, hips, thighs, and even your nose should always be just so. If your body should spill over just so or not quite fill it up, well, honestly, I don’t know what to tell you. Just don’t. Be a good girl, but not too good; nobody likes that girl. Laugh, but not too loud; you’ll make them nervous. No, don’t be sour, never that, even if you’re having a bad day, month, year, life. They’ll think you’re angry. Make sure you smile so they can see your teeth. Be smart, but never smarter than; or they’ll think you’re uppity. Be more. Yes, that’s it! Practice! Dream! Rise! Wait, not so high, girl! Those stars, they aren’t meant for you.
I open my mouth to try to tell LaShawn what it feels like to move through the world with that in your head, all these things Kaitlyn and I have pinned to our thoughts like paperweights. At times, all those paperweights heavy in your head make it so you have trouble telling left from right—the right friends, the right people to give yourself to, the right thing.
“I’m sorry,” I say to LaShawn.
“I know.… Ashley, I don’t want to be an asshole or nothing, but, like, I still don’t really want to talk to you right now,” LaShawn says as he stares out the window. Then he adds, because he’s polite, “No offense.”
“Right. Okay… I’m sorry.” I shut up and drive.
We follow several detours around road barriers and through emptying or emptied streets, before we end up in a part of town that scares me. At the nearest red light, I roll the windows up and lock the doors. LaShawn softens a little bit, then finally opens his mouth and says, “This was a bad idea. Let’s go back.”
So instead, I keep going.
There are a number of ways we could die right now, ways I’ve never even thought about. Here we are in our city, but we’re also in a war zone. The smoke is already beginning to stick to my skin.
We park Trevor’s dad’s car near an empty squad car and start to walk.
LaShawn grabs my hand. “Stay close to me. Keep moving, okay?”
“Okay.”
A man talks very animatedly to himself as he pushes a shopping cart across the street. I pause for a half second to take him in.
“Keep moving,” LaShawn says.
LaShawn leads me through streets I’ve heard of but never been to. We keep pace with each other, our steps in sync over broken sidewalks.
In front of us, the firemen in their yellow unfurl their hoses and spray. Their smudged faces look like Ash Wednesday. They look weary. Firefighters have been getting shot at. One of the first few people to die in the riot was a firefighter.
It looks like an apocalypse, like we’ve found our way into some Arnold Schwarzenegger film, or a disaster movie where we need a hero in a helicopter to rescue us in the nick of time and carry us up and away. Papers blow down the street like urban tumbleweeds. There are lots of abandoned shoes.
A woman wanders past us, frail and glassy-eyed, her eyes ancient and her body almost childlike.
“Hello,” she whispers.
We’re only two blocks away from his grandmama’s, but a huge National Guard tank and a line of guardsmen block the way. Most of them don’t look too much older than we are. A National Guardsman’s glasses slip down his freckled nose, and he pushes them back up again.
Here, it’s so clearly us versus them. And, for once in my life, it doesn’t seem so blurry who is the us and who is the them.
* * *
LaShawn pulls me around a corner and down an alleyway. He looks down the length of it, darting his head back and forth. Halfway down, a man is slumped over like a rag doll, and I think he might look over at us or head toward us, but it’s as though we’re not even there.
“Can you hop a fence in those?”
He points down at my heels.
“I’m not a comic-book character,” I say. I expect him to chuckle, but I guess he’s still kinda mad at me ’cause he doesn’t.
“Okay, you’ll have to take them off.”
I nod.
“You first.” I step my bare foot into his hand, and he lifts me and propels me into the sky. As I straddle the fence, I hear something in my dress rip; I think maybe the lining, but it’s a layer of tulle. It hangs down behind me like a blood trail.
“Hurry up over,” LaShawn says. It’s a long way down, and I take the landing wrong. My ankle hurts as soon as it hits the concrete.
“Ouch,” I say.
LaShawn’s dress shoes slip-slide against the wall as he climbs. He launches himself over the wall quickly.
“Are you okay?” he says.
“Yeah.”
I hobble down a quiet, tree-lined block. The street itself is dark. The streetlights are out.
“We’re almost there.”
LaShawn’s house is small and gray, with white siding, a metal gate, metal on the windows, and a metal security door. It looks like a face with braces. He opens the front gate and we walk up the concrete steps to the front door, past the fat planters with roses in bloom. It doesn’t look like anybody’s there to me, but he rings the doorbell, then knocks on the metal door, which rattles with a clang-a-lang.
“Are you sure somebody’s home?” I say.
“The power’s out, remember? They’re probably in the back of the house,” he says.
He pounds on the door louder. Clang-a-lang-a-lang. No answer.
“The front door’s lock is a little janky,” he explains. “Follow me.”
He heads toward the back, and I follow.
The back of LaShawn’s house looks as though whatever used to be there has been paved over in favor of a mini makeshift basketball court. A partially deflated ball sits in a plastic lawn chair off to the side next to an old grill. More potted plants line the area.
LaShawn pounds on the back door. No answer.
The Black Kids Page 20
