The Black Kids

by Christina Hammonds Reed

  “Just your stuff,” I say, and sit down next to her. “They want another guest room. They have Morgan in there now.”

  “We already have a guest room.”

  I shrug.

  “I should call Harrison and tell him I’m safe. I’ll have him come pick me up, I guess.”

  I grab her hand. “Please don’t go, Jo. Stay. You owe me that much.”

  She squeezes my hand back and it’s an answer, but I don’t know which one. Then she disappears upstairs. I hear the shower turn on, then I hear her yelp, and I laugh, because that shit’s always too cold until it’s too hot. It takes forever to find normal.

  * * *

  While Jo is on the phone with Harrison, Lucia and I collapse onto the couch. I kick my shoes across the room, where they narrowly miss the TV stand. Lucia takes hers off and places her feet on my lap. I pick up a foot and begin to rub it for her, and she moans like people do in the movies when they’re having sex; then I guess I hit a pocket of pain, because then she yelps like people do in the movies when they’re being killed.

  “I like Jose. You like him?” I say.

  “Yes. A lot. He’s a very nice man.” She sighs. “Too nice.”

  “How can he be too nice?”

  “When you get used to bad men, you start not believing in good men. Even when they’re right in front of your face. You think maybe he’s hiding the bad for later, like the last one.”

  “If he’s too nice, why’d somebody wanna break both his arms?”

  “People from complicated places sometimes have complicated pasts. Or maybe he was a little wicked then.”

  She laughs, and I switch feet. Then she leans back and closes her eyes like the day’s finally caught up to her.

  Lucia never talks to me like I’m just a dumb kid. My parents sometimes seem like they don’t know what to say to me, like they think their words don’t translate to teenager.

  “I bet your sons are good men.”

  “I hope so,” she says, eyes still closed. “Do you like that boy you were with? The basketball boy?”

  “ ‘Basketball boy’? Jesus, Lucia.”

  “You still didn’t answer me.”

  “He’s nice.” My voice rises several octaves, and I feel the heat burning through my entire body.

  “He’s nice!” Lucia squeaks, and laughs. “Ay, babygirl…”

  Jo comes down the stairs wearing a familiar dress that’s as pale blue as a summer sky. Not the kind of thing I’d think she’d normally pick for herself, but I guess I’m not sure exactly who she is these days. Neither is she, it seems.

  With her in the pale of her blue and me in my red, we look elemental, fire and air. In chemistry we learned that they need each other to thrive. They keep each other going.

  “Thank you,” Jo says, and kisses Lucia on the cheek. Then Jo pats me on my knee.

  “That’s my dress,” I say, and she shrugs.

  Jo sniffs at the air around me, then takes a piece of tulle and raises it to her nose.

  “Why do you smell like smoke?”

  Before I can answer, we’re interrupted by the opening of the front door.

  “Lucy, I’m home,” Morgan shouts into the house like Ricky Ricardo.

  She skips into the living room and freezes awkwardly when she sees Jo. My parents aren’t too far behind her.

  “You’re here,” my mother says. “You came home!”

  She runs over to Jo and hugs her, and the force of her love takes them both by surprise, so much so that Jo loses her mind and chooses that exact moment to tell our mother that she’s been arrested.

  “Are you okay?” my father says, and Jo nods.

  “It was totally not a big deal, really.”

  “What were you thinking?” My mother pulls away and looks at Jo like she has two heads.

  “What the hell happened to your teeth?” Morgan says.

  Before Jo can answer, my mother sighs. “I’ll have to call your aunt.”

  Auntie Carol’s a judge, which means she knows judge-y things and court things and law people, and maybe she can be Jo’s ruby slippers and with a click of her heels keep her out of prison, bring her back home.

  “I’m sorry,” Jo says.

  My mom and her sister aren’t close, and when I was a kid, I didn’t understand why. How do you go from seeing each other every day for eighteen years to not even visiting each other when you live only a handful of miles away? I thought. But now I understand it, I think. Sometimes the act of growing up cleaves you apart, and even though you walk through the world made of the same stuff, you can’t quite make your way back to the start. There’s too much matter between you. I don’t want Jo and me to be like Mom and Carol—only Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter siblings. Pass-the-turkey sisters. Somebody’s died, let’s reminisce and then go our separate ways family.

  Or, in this case, my daughter committed a felony, can you help a sister out?

  “What is it you’re trying to prove?” my mother yells at Jo. “There are better ways to find yourself than getting married and setting things on fire.”

  “But I didn’t even set anything on fire!”

  “I mean, honestly, Josephine, we would’ve paid for you to study abroad!”

  “Where is he?” my father says.

  “On his way,” Jo says quietly.

  “He left you to get arrested by yourself?”

  “He didn’t come with me.”

  I sense that things are about to blow. As always, best to provide a distraction.

  “I nearly got shot,” I say.

  “You?” Jo says.

  “At prom?” my mother says. “How?”

  “I left with a friend.… We didn’t do anything wrong. I mean, he wanted to check on his family, and…”

  “Jesus Christ. Have you girls gone mad?”

  “The whole city is mad,” Jo says.

  “You don’t go rushing into chaos. You’re girls. Pretty girls. Spoiled girls. We made you that way. You act like you know everything, but you have zero street smarts. You could’ve been hurt, or killed.”

  “We’re already hurt.” Jo sighs.

  People glorify protest when white kids do it, when it’s chic, frustrated Parisian kids or British coal miners or suffragettes smashing windows and throwing firebombs at inequality. If white kids can run around wearing their bodies like they’re invincible, what do the rest of us do? Those of us who are breakable? Those of us who feel hopeless and frustrated and tired and sick of feeling this way again and again? Sometimes, we just go ahead and break ourselves.

  Morgan, who I’ve forgotten is in the room right now, speaks up slowly, measured, like she’s pushing each word through a strainer: “My daddy just lost everything in his shop. Our shop. The shop our grandma worked really, really hard for. That y’all never even visit. And you go to some neighborhood that isn’t even yours to set other people’s shops on fire?”

  “What are we supposed to do?” Jo whispers.

  “Not that!” Morgan explodes. “What the hell is wrong with you? How could you even do that after what happened to Grandma Shirley?”

  “Exactly because of what happened to Grandma Shirley! It’s not right. They can’t keep doing this to us. They can’t. We can’t forget, or pretend that stuff didn’t happen. We have to do something!”

  Jo starts to blubber hysterically, body shuddering, snot running down her face. She looks to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  “Did you tell her?” my father says to Uncle Ronnie.

  “I didn’t know you hadn’t. How could you not tell the girls?”

  “When did you tell her?”

  “She came over to visit the store about a year ago. Said she was doing a class project about family or whatever. She said you were too busy, so she figured she’d ask me for help.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me she’d been over there?”

  “You don’t talk to me, Craig! When’s the last time we had a full-ass conversation before this w
hole thing went down? Besides, I figured she’d told you she was coming over.”

  “Jesus Christ, Ronnie. I didn’t want the girls living with that. Not like we did. Not if they didn’t have to. I wanted them to have a new start. To be the new start.”

  “Ain’t no new starts, Craig. It’s their history. It’s in their bones.”

  “The hell with that!” my father yells. “I wanted a new start!”

  Jo keeps repeating until she runs out of air, “We can’t just do nothing. We can’t just do nothing! We can’t just do nothing?”

  Then she turns around and goes up to her room, taking with her all of the air. Her crying is so loud that you can hear it downstairs. Nobody yells at her to stop crying, or that we don’t have the blues in the house or whatever, because whatever it is she’s feeling, we feel it too.

  “Um…,” I say. “So, what happened to Grandma Shirley?”

  Uncle Ronnie and my father look at each other.

  “You might as well tell this one too,” my father says to Uncle Ronnie. Uncle Ronnie walks over to the couch, looks at me, and pats the cushion next to him.

  “Your great-grandfather was a lawyer. His mama had been born a slave, but he worked and he studied and he scratched his way through school, even when his mama could barely read herself. He made it all the way through college and law school to become a lawyer. In college, your great-grandfather Elroy met your great-grandmother Ida, who, according to your grandma Shirley, was even smarter than her husband. But they got married as soon as they graduated, and he went on to more school and she got started making a home for them. Blacks and Indians had got rich on oil land, this oil land that the white folks didn’t know had oil, outside Tulsa in this place called Greenwood, which folks got to calling Black Wall Street. All these black folks up from nothing, not even sixty years after slavery ended. So Grandma Shirley’s mama and daddy got it into their heads to go out west and open up a practice there. And it was good for a while. Real good.”

  Uncle Ronnie pauses and looks at my father, who nods at him to keep going.

  “Anyway, the trouble started the way these things usually do—a white woman accused a black man, and the white folks got riled up. It was at the height of the lynching season between the world wars. A bunch of the black men, World War I vets, decided to go protect the black kid from being lynched, so instead of lynching the one boy, the white folks decided to lynch the entire goddamn city. They used planes—fucking warplanes—to fly over the neighborhood and drop bombs on all the black people and their houses and businesses, to burn those uppity black folks to the ground. You know they had a machine gun mounted on a truck to fire at people? A fucking machine gun. They did drive-bys through the neighborhood, even the church—the goddamned house of the Lord.” Ronnie raises his voice and spits a little as he speaks.

  My dad stands up from where he was sitting and starts to pace the living room. Then he stops abruptly and turns to face me, his voice cracking as he speaks. “When your grandmother described the machine gun, she shook and rat-a-tat-tat-tat-ed on the table. Told us about choking on the smoke in the air. Everything was black, she said, ‘I couldn’t breathe.’ When she said it, even all those years later, it was like she was still choking.”

  My mother walks over to my father and wraps her arms around his waist, and even though he’s way taller than her, in her arms he looks like a little boy.

  “Your great-grandfather had a gun and tried to defend his family, but they shot him in his own entryway. They called it a riot, but it was more of a massacre. Or like what they did to one of those Jewish areas in the old country.” Ronnie pauses for a moment, searching for the word.

  “A pogrom,” my father interjects.

  “Yes. That! The whole neighborhood was gone. Bunch of black bodies dumped into a mass grave. Your grandma said it was even in the New York Times. And then everybody forgot about it, like it never happened.” Ronnie pauses again.

  Across the room, my mother keeps her arms around my father, closing her eyes and rocking him back and forth. Morgan has tears in her eyes.

  “She only ever told us the once, and even then, not till we were teenagers. I think she was kinda like those Vietnam vets you hear about who aren’t quite right afterwards, who still rattle the war in their heads years later. Except it was right here in the United States, and your grandmother wasn’t nothing but a little-bitty girl carrying that in her heart her whole life.” My father chokes on the words, like all that heavy’s too much even for his vocal box. He turns around and buries himself in my mother’s arms.

  Lucia speaks quietly, almost as if to herself, “Como los indios in the village next door. The disappeared.”

  “Yes,” my father says. “Very much so.”

  “You know your grandma Shirley’s brothers died in World War II? Enlisted soon as they could. Never did understand how they could do that after what their country had done to them,” Uncle Ronnie says.

  I think whatever sadness I thought I knew, whatever I’ve felt before, hasn’t fully prepared me for this. Uncle Ronnie was right—it’s in my very marrow itself. It’s like when we first really learned about slavery in history class. It’s not that I hadn’t known; my parents introduced the concept to us when we were very young, bought us age-appropriate books, and told us we were from Africa. For Country Day at school during Spirit Week, I’d even dressed in ankara bought from a boutique in Leimert Park. But this was different. Our teacher put a series of photos up on the projector. Men and women, dark, glistening, and folded over fields, the stooped body of a kid around our age in the foreground. A famous photo that I’ve seen many times since of a man with stripes of flesh carved out of his back, a topographical map of scars, of evil. A series of black male and female bodies strung by broken necks from southern trees. The white folds of the dangling woman’s skirt reminded me of the black angel ornaments we stuck on our fir come Christmas. Enough! I wanted to scream. Enough! This is not where I begin! The classroom grew so quiet that not even the smart-asses said a word. I could feel several pairs of eyes on the back of my head. I bit my tongue hard to hold in the tears until I could feel the metallic taste of blood pooling in my mouth. I would not allow my classmates to see me cry, so I waited until lunchtime to hide and eat and process what I’d seen in the handicapped stall. There I gasped, struggling for air, feeling the ropes tight around my neck every time I tried to swallow.

  Right now, I can feel the black smoke in seven-year-old Grandma Shirley’s lungs, the ash, the unbearable sadness of breathing.

  * * *

  A knock on the door startles us. It’s followed by the ring-ding of the doorbell.

  Morgan runs to answer it.

  “Who are you?” she says, holding the door open only a crack.

  “I’m Jo’s husband.”

  Morgan opens the door just a bit more, still uncertain.

  “Are you a giant?” I hear her say.

  Harrison looks around bleary-eyed, like he didn’t sleep. Under this lighting, his hair looks more brown than red, his eyes more blue than green. His pimples are gone, and what’s left is smooth and ruddy. He’s barely even able to grow enough stubble for two days’ stress. What must it be like to look at yourself in the mirror and see something a little different every time? To have such an indecisive head? It’s startling to see his whiteness after a story like that, like a ghost at the door.

  “Where is she?” he asks.

  Jo rushes down the stairs and practically throws herself into Harrison’s arms as though none of the rest of us are here, and even if nothing else makes sense right now, the two of them fit together in each other’s arms like the halves of a locket. It seems to me that’s love, but what the hell do I know?

  “You were supposed to keep her safe,” my father says to Harrison.

  “I was sleeping, and when I woke up, she was just gone.” Harrison looks to be almost on the verge of tears. He awkwardly holds out his hand to shake my father’s and my father doesn’t shake it b
ack, but sighs and heads back to the living room, Jo and Harrison following behind.

  After hearing about Grandma Shirley, we’re drained and full of so much sad that we don’t have the space to argue, so instead we order pizza. We eat on paper plates in front of the television, watching a helicopter fly over South Central. The fires are almost out. Now, instead of Vietnam, it looks a little like the pictures in the history books of London after the Blitz. The newscasters bemoan the fate of several architecturally significant buildings that perished or were damaged in the flames like the Bullocks Wilshire, which people care about ’cause it used to serve famous people back in the day and it’s in movies and stuff, but honestly it’s kinda ugly.

  After dinner, Jo and Harrison perform one of their songs for us with a guitar that Jo had in the garage from exactly two years of lessons, and Uncle Ronnie finds the harmony and joins in. Morgan rests her heavy-ass head against me so that her stray curls tickle my cheek and go up my nose. Across the room, my dad reaches over to grab my mother’s hand while they listen.

  * * *

  It’s decided that Harrison will sleep in the actual guest room, which is way on the other side of the house. Uncle Ronnie’s gonna sleep in Jo’s room so he can call out to one of us for assistance if he needs it. Jo tries to argue that since they’re married, she and Harrison should stay in the same bedroom, but my parents say that Jo and Harrison are very lucky that they even let Harrison in the house given the situation, much less stay the night, and it’s their house, their rules, which is how they shut down anything and everything—including marital bed-sharing, apparently. It’s also decided that Jo, Morgan, and I are gonna share my bed. I am not consulted on any of these decisions.

  Morgan says, “But I’m a guest.”

  “You’re not a guest, you’re a cousin,” Jo says with a pout, and it’s settled.

  While Jo brushes her teeth, Morgan and I tumble into my bed. My cousin and I haven’t shared a bed in forever, not since that first time she and Tonya came to visit and we had the fight that resulted in the unfortunate biting. Her feet are freezing. I tell her so, and she places them on my calves until I yelp and she giggles.