The Black Kids

by Christina Hammonds Reed

  Then he takes out his keys and opens the door.

  Inside, the house feels like a cave. Moonlight streams in small slivers across the tile floor.

  He grabs my hand. “Careful.”

  Along the wall, on the floor, there are candles melted down like in an abandoned haunted house.

  “Mama!” he yells into the house. No response.

  School photos of LaShawn, of his sister, Kaitlyn, with her hair like fire, and others line the wall. The photos fade as we go deeper into the house and farther into the past, like a photographic origin story that begins with what I assume are LaShawn’s grandparents, posing in front of a house—this house, before the metal was added—looking like they’re ready to start their young lives.

  In the kitchen, LaShawn goes through a drawer looking for a flashlight, or matches. It smells ever so faintly like the trash that hasn’t been collected this week. There are plants everywhere, some invisible tenderness making things grow beautiful in unassuming corners.

  “Maybe they left you a letter.”

  There’s an intimacy in being in somebody else’s house. Sometimes when I’m in my friends’ houses, I think, Who would I be if I grew up here? Would I be me, or someone very different if I’d grown up in LaShawn’s neighborhood, and he mine?

  There are so many sirens outside, coming, going. Wee-oooh-wee-oooh closer, beeep boop beep beep. And also there’s the whir of helicopters. Voices on bullhorns. We’re less than ten miles away from my house, but the sounds of this neighborhood are so different. The city vibrates around us. I close my eyes and hear the layers.

  One of the windows in the living room is broken. A piece of cardboard covers it.

  “What happened there?”

  “Miss Violet’s grandkids next door were playing catch. Mama hasn’t been able to fix it yet.”

  The kitchen wall by the telephone is covered in phone numbers etched into the faded paint in pencil. Plumbers’ numbers, handymen, friends, and relatives. Next to the numbers are childhood doodles, presumably made by LaShawn and his sister over the years. LaShawn runs his fingers along the wall like he’s searching for braille secrets.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “My aunt’s number. She’ll know where they are.”

  My favorite of the drawings on the wall is of a princess wearing a poofy dress and a crown, holding a bloodied knife with somebody’s phone number impaled on it. Little kids are so weird.

  LaShawn raises the receiver and dials the number. It rings and rings, but nobody picks up. He places it back down in the cradle.

  “Fuck.”

  He reaches into one of the drawers and takes out a pen, then snatches an envelope from the mail piled on the counter to write the number down. Then he opens the envelope, glances at its contents, and pins them to the refrigerator with a magnet. A slightly past-due electric bill. I look at the number on the bill. I never knew electricity costs so much. But I guess I’ve never had to know or worry about what anything costs, really.

  Then LaShawn pockets the envelope with the scribbled number and walks toward the front of the house.

  In the middle of their living room, a cardboard Nike shoebox sits, probably exactly where LaShawn left it. Partially open, tissue paper on the ground.

  He picks it up off the floor, places it on the worn leather couch, and sits down next to it. I sit down on the other side of the shoebox.

  Why did I say what I did about him and the shoes? Jealousy? Yes. I want to be this boy, but also, I think… I want this boy. To be in his skin, to wear my brown confident and easy, and to have the weight of his golden skin on mine.

  He sinks his head into his hands and starts to cry. It’s kind of like seeing Mr. Holmes tear up in front of the whole class, or my father sobbing after his mother died all those years ago. He tries to twist himself from me, hiding his tears, because boys don’t cry—certainly not black boys. Except when they do. Then he does that awkward thing where your sad makes your whole body quake. I place my hand on his back, but he shrugs it away.

  “I’m really sorry,” I say.

  The smell of him is so familiar, cocoa butter and something else I can’t place, but he smells like home.

  “We could stay here and wait for them,” I whisper.

  I don’t know why I’m whispering all of a sudden.

  He looks up at me from under his huge wet lashes.

  “No.” He awkwardly lifts his head up and wipes his eyes with the backs of his hands. “Maybe Miss Violet knows where they went.”

  * * *

  We exit out the front door. LaShawn has already pulled the door behind us, we’ve already walked through the metal gate, it has already clicked into place, when he realizes that he left his keys in the back door.

  “Aww shit,” he says. “Stay here.”

  He’s about to hoist himself back over the metal gate to go get the keys when a flashlight shines on us.

  “Are you trying to break into that house?” a female voice says.

  Like we would say yes if we were?

  The policewoman approaches us with her hand by her hip. She’s smaller than we are, her dirty-blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Her eyes dart around as though at any moment more of us might come, a roving gang of wayward black kids in expensive formalwear.

  “No ma’am… uh… officer. I live here,” LaShawn says.

  “We were trying to see if…” I walk toward her, but she draws her gun and I freeze.

  “Don’t come any closer!”

  The barrel is the size of a girl’s index finger.

  I think of Uncle Ronnie and the Parkers. What he must have felt standing across from two barrels who saw only his black in the wrong place and not Ronnie, son of Shirley, brother of Craig, father of Tonya and Morgan, a good and fair store owner, an above-average ex-husband. I think about my friends and what they’re doing right now, still bouncing around on hormones and expectations, awkwardly gyrating to “It Takes Two” or something like it. I wonder if they’ve noticed I’ve gone, or if they even care. I think about my two mothers, Mom and Lucia, and how if this woman shoots me, the bullets would probably rip through the dress my mother chose, but not the one I liked best. I think about Daddy and Morgan floating around the house in mourning for Grandma Shirley’s looted dream. Mostly, I think about Jo, somewhere out there. She needs me and I need her. If I die here, they’ll probably all be wondering why I was so far from home.

  “This city is our home. All of it,” Jo said.

  People will probably think LaShawn and I came here to bone. I imagine our bodies in awkward angles, bleeding out on a fading front lawn. I think of all the things I’d never get to do, the people I’d never get to meet, the places I’d never get to go, the things I’d never get to be. I’ve never been in love. I don’t want to die, not yet. I’m think I’m only starting to figure out who I am.

  Then I think of those three little black boys who belonged to each other, afraid outside the 7-Eleven near Jo’s, that cop’s knee in the baby’s back. “But we didn’t do nothing.”

  My mother and I should’ve done something.

  “When I think of home, I think of a place…,” I think.

  “Down! Now!” the cop screams.

  * * *

  We sink down to our knees. Chemical smoke from the burning insulation and rubber sticks to our lungs whenever we inhale. Our knees grind into the gravel.

  Little bits of ash fall around us like snow and land on our clothes like polka dots. We’re so close, we can almost feel the fire on our faces.

  CHAPTER 18

  ON THE NEWS, they showed the arrested rioters laid out across bits of lawn and parking lots with plastic zip ties around their wrists, their bodies lined up like one of those drawings of slaves crammed into slave ships.

  LaShawn and I are down in the grass, spread like stars, the police officer’s flashlight bright in our faces. To anyone walking by, we look like criminals.

  I’m very afraid, and also very angr
y. Both of these feelings dig their knees into my heart and slam against my lungs so I can barely breathe. Whenever a black or brown person gets shot or hurt by police, people say, “Well, but what did they do to deserve it?” The assumption is that it’s always deserved, somehow. Or “They should’ve listened.” We don’t get the benefit of the doubt—we, they, you, even me, with my fancy school and my fancy house and my fancy clothes.

  Here I am, to quote Kimberly, “blackity black.”

  This is what Jo meant when she said, “It’s not just about Rodney. It’s about all of us.”

  I get it now. I get it.

  I want to live. I’m not even a whole-ass person yet. I want to be.

  If I get to be an adult, I already know that I will carry this with me, a barely scabbed-over wound of being facedown, black, and helpless at the hands of a white cop, my gray matter inches from the barrel of a gun.

  “Where is your driver’s license?” the woman asks LaShawn. He begins to reach toward his pocket to retrieve it when she yells at him not to move again.

  LaShawn doesn’t have a driver’s license. Because he doesn’t drive. Before he can finish telling her that he has his school ID on him, in his left front pocket, a very elderly woman in a faded yellow duster eases her way down her front steps. “What are you doing to them kids?”

  The blue and red of the cop car’s lights flash across the deep lines in her brown face.

  The cop looks over at her. “Ma’am, I don’t want any trouble.”

  The elderly lady keeps coming closer, unsteady in her steps but steady in her resolve. “I know that boy ain’t done nothing wrong. He’s a good kid.”

  “Ma’am,” the cop says, “step back.”

  “She’s hard of hearing,” LaShawn says to the cop.

  The cop looks around like she’s trying to decide what to do.

  “Miss Violet, you know where my family went?” LaShawn yells at Miss Violet, who cups her ear toward him.

  Miss Violet yells, “What?”

  Another neighbor, a middle-aged man in a white tank top and denim shorts down to his knees, walks to his front gate in his white socks, shining one of those big yellow flashlights out into the dark at the officer. “What’s this here about?”

  “Sir, please turn your flashlight off,” the officer says.

  “With all due respect, ma’am, the lights are out,” Tank Top says. “Can’t see nothing otherwise.”

  LaShawn’s neighbors don’t just see us on the ground, they do something.

  “This man lives here?” the cop asks Miss Violet.

  “What man?” Miss Violet shouts. As she turns, I get a glimpse of a big-ass “nude-colored” hearing aid.

  “Ain’t no man. That’s a kid. They kids. Look at ’em,” Tank Top says. “And yes. He lives there. That’s his home.”

  “Get up,” the officer says to us.

  Miss Violet and Tank Top don’t move from where they’re standing. The police officer keeps her weapon pointed at us as we slowly get up off the ground. Blades of grass stick in the tulle of my dress.

  The officer puts her gun back in its holster. She straightens her ponytail.

  Tank Top and Miss Violet stare at her.

  “You alright, baby?” Miss Violet says to me or LaShawn.

  We both nod.

  The officer says, “You kids shouldn’t be out right now. It’s not safe.”

  We say nothing in response.

  “You’re very lucky it was me and not another officer,” she says, and waits for us to respond.

  Lucky.

  I think about what Kimberly said about my being black and getting into colleges: “You’ve got it made, Ash.”

  The officer looks around as though she’s trying to figure out her exit. The lights from her car are bright across our faces now, blue and red, like two moods in quick flashes, sad, then angry.

  “Have a good night,” she says finally as she gets into her car and rolls the window down a little bit. “Just doing my job.”

  I wrap my arms around my body. I can feel the goose bumps along them, the fear still under my skin.

  “If they did they job, we wouldn’t be in the middle of all this right now,” Tank Top mutters under his breath after the cop car turns the corner back into the night.

  “Thank you, Mr. Freeman,” LaShawn says to Tank Top.

  He grunts an acknowledgment in our direction and heads back inside his house.

  Miss Violet looks like she’s about to topple over, and LaShawn rushes to her side to steady her.

  “Do you know where my family went?” he yells into her ear.

  Miss Violet grabs hold of his arm, and the two of them walk up her front steps while I trail behind. “To your auntie’s, I think. She the one out in Covina or wherever?”

  “Yes ma’am,” LaShawn says.

  “Y’all can stay here if you want,” Miss Violet says. “I can make you hotcakes in the morning! You like hotcakes? Everybody likes hotcakes.”

  She reminds me a little of Miss Doris from the nursing home, eager for the company. I wonder what it must be like to get that old and have friends, family, everyone you care about pass away or move on. I kinda want to take her up on the offer.

  LaShawn considers it for a moment and then shakes his head no. “Thank you, Miss Violet, but I gotta get her back home safe. Take you up on those hotcakes another day?”

  “Mi casa es su casa, as they say,” Miss Violet says before her security door slams shut with a loud metal clang.

  Uneasy palm trees loom over us as we walk quietly back to Trevor’s dad’s car. Palm trees belong to the ghetto as much as anywhere else in the city, maybe more so. They peek their heads up over the top of the 110 same as they hover over the mansions on Rossmore. Everybody thinks they’re native to LA, but they’re not. Missionaries started putting them in around the same time they started taking out the natives. Then rich people got in on it. Then the city thought, Well, hell, that looks good, why not? and used palm-tree planting as a way of making work for the unemployed during the Great Depression and before the 1936 Olympics. We studied it in our section on California history last year. They’re starting to die off now, those palm trees planted by that generation before the greatest one. Every so often you’ll hear about a dead one falling onto a car, or a building, or a nice man out on his morning walk. I don’t want to die by palm tree, but maybe I’d deserve it. LaShawn grabs my hand; both of us are still trembling.

  “Breathe,” LaShawn says.

  I open my mouth in a wide O like a fish and swallow the night.

  * * *

  We don’t talk the entire way back to Trevor’s dad’s car. When we finally get there, I look down to see that it’s been keyed, like somebody ran their house keys along the length of it in a series of uneven stripes. I guess I’m lucky in the grand scheme of things. It could’ve been stolen.

  “Fuck,” I say.

  LaShawn looks back in the direction of his grandmama’s house, worry keyed across his face.

  “I’m sure they’re okay,” I say. “We can try calling again in a little bit.”

  Above us helicopters whir, suspended in a cluster in the sky. Watchful floating eyes.

  I get into Trevor’s dad’s car and start the engine. The car begins to move, but barely. It sounds kinda like a fork in a garbage disposal. I get out of the car again to inspect it. The front tire on the passenger side puckers with several deep, intentional gashes, wounds that can’t be patched.

  When I finally look up from inspecting the tire, I notice for the first time the fresh graffiti on the wall across from us, maybe even written by my sister or somebody like her, a call to revolution in big defiant loops across the brick.

  LA REVOLUCION ES LA ESPERANZA DE LOS DESPERADOS.

  Revolution is the hope of the hopeless.

  And then I start to laugh.

  CHAPTER 19

  ACROSS THE PAY phone windows, letters are scratched and marked with intent and occasionally with flouris
h, letting people know somebody was here, that this place belongs to somebody or somebodies.

  Nobody is home. Not Lucia, not my parents, not Jo. My friends are at prom, and, let’s be honest, they’d probably leave me stranded here, anyway. I stand inside the phone booth and flip through the white pages while LaShawn stands outside, alert, watching.

  * * *

  Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver, the other is gold. Except sometimes it’s the new friends who are gold.

  “What happened to you two?” Lana says.

  I look down at my dress, slightly torn and covered in grass and mud. LaShawn’s suit hasn’t fared much better. We look like the kids who only barely survive a horror movie.

  Pham flings open the car door, sparkling in a purple feather boa. He kisses me on both cheeks. His breath smells of whiskey.

  “Little troublemaker,” he says.

  LaShawn steps forward to shake Pham’s hand. “Hi, I’m LaShawn. I go to school with Ashley and Lana.”

  “So tall! Handsome boy!”

  Pham throws the boa around LaShawn’s neck. He kinda has to jump to do so, since he’s so short and LaShawn is six-foot-three and still growing. LaShawn laughs. Then Pham goes to the back of his car and retrieves a donut tire.

  “Where’s Brad?” I ask.

  “Brad can’t fix shit.” Pham laughs.

  “I thought Trevor was your date,” Lana whispers.

  “It’s been a very long night.”

  “Hold the flashlight,” Pham says to whoever’s listening. I walk over and shine the light on the slashed tire. He crouches down and removes the hubcap, then begins to crank the lug nuts loose. He tumbles back a little before righting himself.

  “Is he sober?” I ask.

  “Nope. Definitely not. But I drove,” Lana says. “We just got back from a party when you called.”

  He places the jack under the car and raises the wheel up, up, up. He works quickly, like somebody who’s done this many times before, like he could do it in his sleep, humming to himself as he removes and replaces and tweaks and lowers and replaces again before standing up and wiping his hands clean on his party pants.