The Black Kids

by Christina Hammonds Reed

  LaShawn’s mother looks as though she’s already teared up several times in the course of their discussion. The school secretary rises from her desk and passes Principal Jeffries a tissue box, from which she hands LaShawn’s mother several tissues. Ms. Johnson pauses to look up at her before taking them. She wipes her eyes and blows her nose, then looks around for a trash can before Principal Jeffries says, “I’ll take them for you,” at which point LaShawn’s mother drops her boogies into Principal Jeffries’s hand like a small child.

  “Make this right,” LaShawn’s mother says.

  The two of them stare at each other for what feels like an eternity.

  “Ms. Johnson.” Principal Jeffries breaks the uncomfortable silence. “Unfortunately, regardless of the circumstance, he did hit another child… we can’t not do anything about that.”

  “Would you say the same thing if he weren’t a scholarship kid?” Ms. Johnson raises her voice a little, and the school secretary looks up from her computer monitor and over at Principal Jeffries expectantly. “What about if I could donate a new library?”

  “We treat all our students equally,” Principal Jeffries stammers. LaShawn’s mother raises an eyebrow and says nothing as she heads toward the door.

  “Ms. Johnson, wait!”

  LaShawn’s mother turns back to face Principal Jeffries, eyes wary, her hands gripping her purse tight to her body.

  “How about LaShawn helps out around the school as his punishment? Like sweeping, picking up trash, scraping up gum, or whatever, only for this week? And we don’t report any of this to Stanford?”

  “So now you want my child to serve as a janitor for these white kids?” LaShawn’s mother says.

  “Or he can help out at the office, then. I’m sure we can find a project for him here.”

  “And you don’t report the suspension to Stanford?”

  “You have my word,” Principal Jeffries says.

  “Okay, then. That might work. I’ll let him know.” Ms. Johnson pauses. “I’m curious, Principal Jeffries; what would you have done if LaShawn wasn’t LaShawn in this exact same situation? What if my baby wasn’t your star athlete? If he was any other black kid at this school?”

  Principal Jeffries looks at Ms. Johnson long and hard, and, after a moment, slumps her shoulders a bit. “I don’t know, Ms. Johnson, I don’t know.…”

  Ms. Johnson seems satisfied with that bit of honesty and nods like they’ve come to some sort of understanding, then starts back toward the door. There she catches my eye, and for a moment I freeze; maybe she knows I’m the one who’s responsible for all of this.

  Instead she smiles at me and says, “You keep your head up, babygirl, okay?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  I feel awful. Just truly rotten to the core. Like the scum of the earth.

  Principal Jeffries has turned and started back to her office when I call out to her. “Principal Jeffries? Um… I kinda have to talk to you about something.”

  She sighs before gesturing toward her open door. “I guess now’s as good a time as any.”

  Principal Jeffries’s office has been worn down by decades of teen angst. It’s very sparsely decorated but cluttered with books about child development and understanding your teen and educational psychology. There are several photos of her smiling on mountains with a sturdy, busty woman with a gray pixie cut. They look sweaty and happy, in each photo climbing higher and higher still. A peeling birch obscures the view of the school grounds through the office window. Principal Jeffries taps her hiking shoes on the floor nervously as I speak. They squeak.

  When I’m done explaining, she says, “Why would you do that?”

  In the quad last semester, the theater kids performed this whole number from West Side Story about juvenile delinquents. It’s pretty funny. Come to think of it, a lot of the songs the theater kids sing are pretty funny. Anyway, one of my favorite lyrics from the song went, “Hey, I’m depraved on account a I’m deprived.”

  I don’t say this, though. Instead I say, “Honestly? I think I’m kind of an idiot, Principal Jeffries.”

  Principal Jeffries takes a moment to contemplate this. “Do you have any idea what kind of situation you’ve created?”

  “I have a pretty good idea, yes.”

  “Your sister was… difficult too.” She takes a sip of coffee.

  “That’s the consensus,” I say. I should tell her about Jo, but I can’t talk about Jo right now.

  Principal Jeffries reaches her hand across her desk and places it on mine.

  “In a just world, actions should have consequences.” She looks into my eyes intently. I think this is also her nice, liberal, white-lady way of obliquely talking about everything going on in our city.

  “I agree.”

  “You will apologize to LaShawn.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “In writing.”

  “Yes ma’am… Are you still gonna make him stay after school and do whatever around the office?”

  “Unfortunately, he did hit somebody, Ashley.”

  “But you know he’s not like that, normally… I want to take responsibility for my mistakes. They impacted him. And they shouldn’t have. He doesn’t deserve it,” I say.

  “Yes, well… if only more adults would do that, right?”

  “So?”

  “I’ll think about it.” She rubs her temples.

  “Also, I think Lana Haskins might be in trouble.”

  “Is this like how you thought LaShawn was a thief?”

  Lana trusted me with her secrets, and friends are the people who are supposed to swallow your secrets until they belong to you both. But certain secrets you have to tell. Maybe the whole reason Lana told me was so it wouldn’t be a secret anymore. Sometimes you have to speak.

  “No. Look at her arm. Her stomach, too.” I tell Principal Jeffries what Lana said about her mother, about the bruises and the scars.

  She nods her head solemnly. “Thank you for coming to me. I’ll take care of it.”

  I don’t know if I should believe her or not, but I guess I don’t have much of a choice.

  In that same song from West Side Story the choir kids sang, “ ‘There is good! There is untapped good! Like inside the worst of us is good!’ ”

  That’s not how it ends, but that’s the part I like best.

  * * *

  After talking with Principal Jeffries, I feel super nauseous, which I guess is the price my bowels pay for doing the right thing. I rush to the restroom. Once safely inside the stall, I hear a familiar click click across the bathroom tile, and I know she’s right next to me. I know those footsteps almost as well as I know my own. The distance between us is a bathroom stall, which incidentally is entirely too close, given what I’ve done. Then we finish, and the distance between us is less than a foot, but it might as well be the whole wide world.

  Kimberly and I stand at the sink washing our hands, side by side. She looks over at me once, when she thinks I’m not looking. For a moment, we catch each other’s eyes, and then we both look down and get super into washing our hands. We don’t speak. There are some things that, once said, you can’t unsay. There are some things that, once done, you can’t undo.

  We let the weight of our history sit like so many rocks in our mouths, silencing us as we wash ourselves clean.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE ANCHORS POSE in rubble and talk about rebuilding. Some people are now saying that some of the fires have been set on purpose by greedy business owners looking to collect insurance money in the middle of the unrest.

  Repeated like a chorus on every news channel: fire-gutted strip malls, debris-filled streets, emptied shelves, scored to the sound of politicians saying the things they think people want to hear and who or what they think people want to blame, ending with we will be stronger, we will be better. I’m not even a grown-up yet, but even I can see the truth is both swirling around in the middle of all those fancy speeches and somewhere just outside of them.


  Anyway, since it’s an election year, everybody’s coming to see the damage for themselves, to walk their shiny leather shoes among the ruins and proclaim what’s wrong with Los Angeles and how their party’s gonna make it right, or how the other party made it wrong. Governor Bill Clinton is gonna come visit, which should make the Katzes happy.

  The National Guard is withdrawing; the army and Marines, too. It’s like we were in a boxing match and got knocked out, only to come to and have to reorient ourselves. Everybody in the city is wondering how the hell we get back up.

  Sometimes I have nightmares in which I’m looking down the barrel of a gun.

  I ask LaShawn if he has nightmares too, after what happened to us, if he wakes up feeling that kind of fear again. He tells me that wasn’t the first time he’s had a cop pull a gun on him, and it probably won’t be the last.

  “You get used to it.” He sighs. “Or maybe you don’t… but it happens.”

  * * *

  Jo sits across from a judge in a small, wood-paneled room. A janitor squeaks a cart along the linoleum floor outside. My pretty dress is itchy. Jo’s shoes are a tad too big; her feet slide forward in them, and then she readjusts to press them against the heels. Her hair is straightened and pulled up into an elegant ballerina bun that gives her the appearance of having had a face-lift, not that she needed one. It makes her look that much more beautiful, but also more severe.

  Going through security at the courthouse makes you feel a little like a criminal, even if you aren’t one. The inside is various shades of dreary, and the harsh fluorescents make everybody look sallow and vaguely unsure of themselves. We walked through the metal detectors and gathered ourselves, dimmed lights all. I watched the people coming and going while my parents and Jo waited for her lawyer.

  These are the kinds of people I saw: scary-looking. Wary-looking. Harried-looking. Trashy-looking. Douchey-looking. Bored-looking. Scared-looking. There were even a few children clinging to adults in Sunday-school dresses and little-man suits. I don’t want to think about why they might be inside. I tried to picture my aunt Carol walking in and out every day, making decision after decision on some of the worst days of other people’s lives.

  My mother says Auntie Carol is always lording her power over my mother’s head, but I don’t know because we never see Auntie Carol, and I don’t know how somebody can do all that lording if you’re never around to see it. But what Carol said to Jo several days ago was that actually she doesn’t have the power. Not this time.

  Auntie Carol and my cousin Reggie stopped by for a bit to discuss what she called Jo’s options, none of which were very good. Reggie’s slimmed down since the last time I saw him and is now a good-looking boy who carries himself like a newly good-looking boy, preening and flexing while doing things that don’t really require that much flexing. Even as we sat discussing Jo’s fate, out of the corner of my eye I saw him, muscles flexed, glancing at his reflection in the table.

  “This is a really serious offense,” Auntie Carol said, and sighed.

  “But what about what happened with Reggie?” my mother repeated like she was refusing to listen.

  Reggie briefly glanced up from looking at himself at the sound of his name. “That was, like, barely an ounce of coke, and I really was holding it for a friend.”

  Reggie is the kind of boy who likes to brag about fucking up the curve in his classes. I honestly don’t know how he gets invited to parties at all, much less has friends. Auntie Carol glared at him to shut up.

  My aunt paced the room like somebody who didn’t know its edges, only that she was taking tentative steps away and toward her sister, my sister.

  “That was different. This is a big deal. I can’t make this disappear.” My aunt stood across from Jo. “I promise I’ve tried.”

  “So, what does that mean?” Jo said, and Auntie Carol looked away like she didn’t want to be the one to tell her.

  * * *

  This is what happened, according to Jo:

  When Harrison dozed off on the couch, tired from his long shift, Jo snuck out with her spray can. She started walking without knowing where it was she was heading, exactly—just that she was here and she needed to be there. As she walked, she saw a small crowd gathered in the distance in front of a run-down strip mall. An older man walked toward her, a little unsteady on his feet and weighed down by two small grocery bags. He looked her up and down and said, “You’re walking the wrong way, girl. You don’t want no part of that.” But she could feel the crowd pulsing, feel their vibrations from blocks away. Her friends had stopped protesting. It wasn’t productive, they said; it was madness. Fuck that, Jo thought. The rebellion was on its last legs, but it wasn’t dead, not yet. That was exactly where she needed to be, she thought.

  The crowd gathered like a bee swarm, swirling and concentrating, dissipating, and then gathering together again to sting. Jo stayed on the edges, not sure what to do. She suddenly felt very silly with her spray can in her hand, ineffectual. By contrast, several of the young men carried glass bottles. They had torn up an old T-shirt and distributed the strips among themselves, and somebody poured the kerosene. All that was needed was a match or a lighter. They searched between them, and a brown hand emerged victorious, holding a small flame up to the sky like at a concert, or a vigil. The first young man had long, sinewy arms and pants that fell in small puddles at his feet. He lurched forth and nearly tripped over his pants, messing up his momentum. He grabbed up his waistband in one hand while he tossed the bottle with the other. The bottle bounced and landed in a small fire on the concrete parking lot.

  Several of the young men jumped back under a hail of expletives, and a few began to run away. Still others bounced on their toes with energy like Tigger from Winnie-the-Pooh, their sneakers like springs, their swooshes egging them on to Just Do It.

  “Let me do it.” The youngest was clearly somebody’s kid brother, whom they’d barely let tag along.

  “Yo, let him have it.” The boy in charge, as far as Jo could tell, looked almost exactly like the youngest one, but a little lighter and older, with his hair in two French braids that hung to his shoulders, a small but noticeable scar across his left cheek.

  She watched as the younger boy wound his arm back like he was on a baseball field and released, a winning pitch. The bottle burst right through the window, the shattered glass fell like rain, and then there was fire. Jo felt the flame grow warm as the summer sun across her face.

  There were more of them than there were of the police, but it didn’t matter. The police swept through the swarm of people, cracking across backs and limbs and heads with their batons, grabbing limbs, rifles pointed, yelling, “Get down, stay down.”

  Stay down.

  The police dogs barked.

  “But I didn’t do anything,” Jo said as she felt her body thud to the ground, felt the bitter of blood in her mouth, saw most of her front tooth fall onto the sidewalk.

  In the courtroom, Lucia sits next to me, her legs crossed at her ankles, eyes closed like she’s reliving something she’s never told me about. Harrison wears a suit that my parents bought him, navy and tailored and court-respectable. Jo stares straight ahead for most of it.

  My mother grips my hand so tight I think she might sprain a finger as my sister enters a plea: “Not guilty.”

  Then they usher us out and move on to the next case.

  * * *

  We twist and turn our way back home in relative silence, except when we have to pull over for Jo to throw up. When we get inside, Jo goes upstairs to lie down, Harrison has to head out to work, and my father retreats into his office. My parents asked Jo to stay at our house for the duration of the trial, and surprisingly enough, she agreed. Honestly, I think they’re a little afraid of her hurting herself, of her ending up like Grandma Shirley. In any case, my father has now hidden his pellet gun. Harrison goes to his construction jobs, then comes to our house to visit his wife, smelling of sweat, covered in dirt, looking l
ike he’s ready to build or rebuild Jo as needed. Lucia disappears into the kitchen to make dinner, and then it’s me and my mother walking around the living room, kicking off our heels and peeling off our stockings. My mother throws her fancy tweed suit jacket on the couch.

  “Did you know about what happened to Grandma Shirley?”

  My mother pauses for a second. “Not all of it, but some. I thought it was your dad’s story to tell you when he was ready. Not mine.”

  I nod my head. She plops down on the couch next to me and starts to rub her feet. She’s always wearing heels, so the sides of her pinkie toes have little bumps on them where the heels have created little hills. Her toenails are a dark magenta, which matches her fading lipstick. When I was little, I thought she was supertall, like a giant or a superhero; now I know she’s only kinda tall, like a human.

  “It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?” she says.

  “Yeah. I feel so sad for Grandma Shirley. And Daddy…”

  “Your father’s been through a lot…”

  I bend down, take her foot into my hand, and start to rub it. She leans back against the couch and closes her eyes.

  “You don’t tell me anything about your friends or school anymore. You used to tell me all sorts of things…,” she says.

  “I was little. Little kids talk a lot.”

  “Trevor’s parents called the other day.” My mom opens her eyes and looks at me. “They say you stole his car during prom.”

  “I didn’t want to be there anymore,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  She stares at me intently, as though she’s trying to figure me out.

  I could tell her everything, but I don’t think she’d understand, or maybe she would; I don’t know.

  As though she can hear my thoughts, my mother reaches over and brushes my hair out of my face before gently grabbing my face in her hands. “We’re both secrets to each other. But maybe one day we don’t have to be.”