“Archie, please! Please!”
“You’d better teach that boy something before I kill him!” he said.
I could hear his breathing, short raspy breaths as he let my shirt go, giving me one final push before he stormed out of the room.
“Jesse, I heard you talking back to him, and what is …” She lifted my face and saw my eye was closed and turned away. She was crying as she leaned against my dresser.
The eye was throbbing and I couldn’t get it open. The sound of the radio drifted in from the kitchen, and I imagined him sitting at the table, in his old man shirt, his neck still puffed from being mad. Mom took several deep breaths and started to say something but couldn’t. Then she stood, sniffed, and rubbed her face in her palms.
“I think you should not have spoken …” She looked at my face again and told me to open my eye.
I tried, but it wouldn’t open and she pulled the lid up. “Put your shirt on,” she said, her voice cracking as she spoke. “We’d better have that eye looked at. Get dressed.”
“It’s all right,” I answered.
“Jesse, this is already too hard for me.” Mom’s voice rose and cracked against the pale-blue walls of my room. “This is too hard for me! Please don’t make it harder!”
She left, and I put my shirt on and a light jacket. The eye hurt like crazy, and I imagined myself going through life with one eye. Mom came back into the room and asked if I could see well enough to walk by myself.
“Do you want your father to help you?” she asked.
“What do you think?” I said.
It was pretty easy to see out of one eye, even though my good eye was a little closed, too. As we went through the kitchen, I saw him sitting at the end of the table, just where I thought he would be, his eyes closed, his hand curled around a coffee cup.
We took a gypsy cab to Harlem Hospital and sat in the waiting room with some old people and a young guy who was nodding out on something. A doctor came out—he looked foreign, but black foreign—and shook the guy nodding out. The nodder opened his eyes, saw that it was a doctor standing in front of him, and started complaining about a pain in his back.
“I can’t even tell you how bad it is,” he slurred. “That’s how bad it is.”
The doctor told him he’d be with him in a minute. Mom stood and asked if there was an eye specialist around. “My son hurt his eye,” she said, pointing toward me.
The doctor came over, pulled my eyelid open, and asked how it happened.
In the treatment room I had to lie on a bench until they could find someone to come look at my eye. The woman doctor who came asked me how old I was, and I told her.
She opened my eye and told me that the examination was going to hurt, and that I should try not to blink.
“I don’t know why I say that, because I think you’re either a blinker or not a blinker,” she said as she shone a light into the eye. “It’s a reflex.”
I was a blinker. She had me look in as many directions as I could, and then to try and follow the light.
Finally she announced that there was bleeding under the cornea but it probably wasn’t permanently damaged. “You’ll keep it covered for twenty-four hours, and keep yourself calm,” she said. “Then have it checked again, just to make sure. No excitement, no basketball. You don’t want too much pressure in your eyes. And don’t read, even with the good eye, because the eyes work together even when you’re not seeing out of one of them.”
A nurse put a gauze patch over the eye and told me to keep my hands off it.
On the street the sunlight seemed a thousand times brighter than it had been before.
“Every day of our lives your father works for you,” Mom said. “And every day of my life I pray for you and hope with all my heart that you’ll be all right. That a cab won’t hit you and a stray bullet won’t hit you and that you’ll get a decent education and that no gang will get you and no dope will find its way into you. And are you just too damned dumb to understand that? Are you just too dumb to understand that?”
“No.”
“Then read the papers, Jesse,” she said, “and figure out what it takes to raise a boy in this neighborhood.”
The gypsy cabdriver saw Mom crying and made sure we had the money to pay the fare before he took us home. When we got to the stoop, where Calvin and Benny were sitting, I said I was going to hang out for a while. Mom said no, for me to come up and rest, and I said I didn’t want to and sat on the stoop. Mom sat down next to Benny, which surprised the heck out of him.
“Hello, Mrs. Givens,” Benny said. “I see you’re hanging with the homeboys today.”
“Just chillin’,” Mom answered.
Nobody asked about my eye, or why Mom was crying, although I knew they were wondering. They didn’t talk much either, and I knew they wouldn’t as long as my mother was sitting there. When Calvin stood up and stretched and said he had to leave, Benny jumped up and stretched, too. A moment later they were both gone.
“You think it was something I said?” Mom asked.
I didn’t answer. We sat there for a while longer, with me wondering what I would say to my father.
“When you were being examined, one of the policemen came over and asked me if I wanted to file an abuse report on your father,” Mom said. “I said no, but my heart was really in my mouth as I was saying it. I know that if he had wanted to, he could have said that it didn’t matter what I wanted, that he was supposed to file a police report any time a woman or a child is injured by a husband. But you know what I think convinced him not to file a report?”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“I think he was impressed when I asked him not to make us just another family of abusive black people who didn’t know how to treat each other,” she said. “He was white, but he was wearing a wedding ring, so he probably had a family of his own.”
“Yo, Mom, check it out—he hit me because he’s scared about something he read in the newspaper,” I said. “I didn’t doanything. I can’t be responsible for what he’s thinking.”
“Jesse, I’m sorry we’re just humans,” she said, her voice trembling. “You’re free to blame us for not being perfect. Any time you want me to admit to it, just let me know. I’ll stand up and bow my head for you. Okay?”
There were some things I didn’t want to say to Mom. I didn’t want her to know how confused I felt and how I wasn’t sure of what the right thing was to do anymore. I didn’t want to tell her that I hadn’t known that Mason was nineteen, not seventeen like he had told us. Or how we were all so busy trying to be down with the program that we hadn’t peeped him scamming us.
She stood and went into the building, and I felt stupid. My eye was hurting; I was mad at Dad for being afraid for me, even though in my heart I knew I was afraid, too. Where the heck were the easy answers?
Chapter 18
Sunday. The eye was all right, just a little sore where the back of his nail had hit it, but I didn’t like being anybody’s punching bag, even if they thought they were right, which Dad did. I had read all the bits about black men not being able to express themselves and turning to violence to show their anger, but it didn’t mean boo to me when it was me being hit.
Mom was all right, doing her neutral thing, and I hoped she was giving him a hard time when I wasn’t around. He didn’t say much to me, and I didn’t say much to him, either.
“Are you going to church with us,” Mom asked, standing in my doorway, “or are you mad with me, too?”
“Just don’t feel like going,” I said.
“I’m sorry you can’t forgive us,” she said. “So I guess we’ll just have to wait until you do.”
“I don’t remember you hitting me,” I said, looking at the hole in my sweat sock.
“My husband, your father, hit you, and I’m a hundred percent on his side.”
“Even if he’s wrong?”
“There’s food in the refrigerator if you want breakfast.”
I felt bad about not g
oing to church. Maybe I was even working at staying mad. It wasn’t that he had hit me the one time but the fact that if he wanted, he could do it again. We weren’t that kind of family, and he had to hold up his end.
I took a shower, put on some clean underwear, and tried to figure out what I was going to do for the day. C.J. hadn’t called for a few days, and I thought about calling him or Tania. She had called again, saying she just wanted to say hello. She told me she had bought me a Chinese pen made of bamboo on 42nd Street. A guy down there was writing people’s names in fancy letters, and she had bought one of his brushes, too.
I was thinking about doing someone’s name in fancy letters. The Chinese artists who did them on the street were good, and fast. The way they controlled the brushes, never making mistakes, always keeping a steady pressure on the pad—that was way cool. I thought about writing Tania’s name, maybe writing our names together. Tania and Jesse, or just our initials, J & T. I’d do it so that it looked like flowers coming out of a vase. I imagined how Tania would smile when she figured out it was our initials.
The phone rang, and it was Detective Rock.
“How are things going?” he asked.
“You have to work on Sundays, too?”
“I don’t have to, really,” he said. “But I figure if I don’t work on Sundays sometimes, I end up working overtime during the week trying to clean up the mess I could have prevented on Sunday. How come you didn’t go to church today?”
“You were at church today?”
“No, but when I called and you answered, I knew you weren’t at church either.”
“Sherlock Holmes.”
“Jesse, I hear there’s going to be a big confrontation between the Counts and the Diablos,” Detective Rock said. “It’s not the kind of thing I want to hear. The Counts are not that kind of a club. The Diablos are a bunch of guys who aren’t going anywhere and don’t have a thing to lose.”
“That’s why you called? To keep me from going down with the Diablos?” I asked.
“It doesn’t sound real to me,” Sidney said. “But sometimes I miss things. You know what I mean?”
“I guess I missed it too,” I said.
“You know, you can still get most of the sermon if you hurry,” Sidney said.
“Yeah, well, okay, I’m going to have to see about that,” I said. “When are you getting there?”
“Jesse, you are a hard man,” he said. “A hard man.”
What I thought, after I had hung up, was that everybody was getting excited about the piece in the paper. Mason was running his mouth about his gang, and naturally the papers were printing it. Dad said that it used to be only the white papers that ran all the garbage news about black people; now it was the white and the black papers.
My eye was still sore and I tried to get my mad going again, but it was hard. I thought if I ever had a kid, I would never hit him. Even if he was wrong big-time, I would just sit down and talk to him. I figured if he was my kid, he would probably be boss anyway because I would be such a great parent.
My paints were in a box I kept on the dresser and I took them out, thinking I was going to practice painting Tania’s name. But then I figured I didn’t want to clean the brushes afterward, so I put them back into the box and called Tania’s house. It excited me to think of us kissing or doing what Calvin called the grope-a-dope.
My sunglasses were cool, because everybody on the block knew I had hurt my eye and that’s why I was wearing my shades. I also looked good in shades, so when I busted on down onto the stoop and White Clara was there, I could see her checking me out. She was probably interested but she wasn’t really my type.
“So where you going?” she asked.
“Just checking out the happenings,” I said. “You seen anybody around?”
“I’m around,” she said.
“You think all I’m interested in is beautiful women?” I asked White Clara.
“Get out of here, boy.” She sucked her teeth and looked away. “What’s his name just passed by a little while ago—C.J.”
I checked my watch and saw that church must be over. White Clara asked me if I wanted to use her cell to call him and I said yes.
C.J.’s mom answered the phone and, soon as she knew it was me, asked me how my eye was. I told her it was still painful, and she said she had wondered why I hadn’t been in church. I covered the mouthpiece with my hand as a bus passed so she wouldn’t know I was in the street. She said that C.J. had come home and gone right out again.
“That boy loves the streets more than he loves himself,” she said.
“Will you ask him to give me a call when he gets home?”
She said that she would. I thought about going to a movie, checked my pockets, and found out that I didn’t have any money. When I gave White Clara back her telephone, she asked me if I had a girlfriend.
“Sure,” I said.
“Now that shows you how many desperate women there are in the world,” she said.
Okay, she scored on that, but I remembered the line I had when I said did she think “all I’m interested in is beautiful women?” That was a line I was going to use again if I could remember it.
I went back inside. Upstairs, I searched my room for money. Nada. Into the clothes in my closet. Nada. I knew I could cop from Mom on a regular day, but now that she was showing large for Dad, she might want to make me go to him for money. I figured I’d get back with him, but I didn’t want it to look like I was copping a humble, so I had to let a minute go by.
I was in my room when my folks got home.
The telephone rang. Mom got it and headed toward my room. I figured it was C.J. When Mom came to the door and said that it was Rise, I was surprised. She didn’t say it funny or anything, just that Rise was on the phone.
“How was church?” I asked.
“Everybody asked about you,” she said, smiling. “I told them your eye was bothering you and you were having trouble seeing the light.”
“Thanks.”
I got the phone and asked Rise what was up.
“Running late, my man,” Rise said. “Look, there’s going to be a meeting at Earl’s Antiques tomorrow evening at six thirty. He’s going to let us use his back room. We’re going to be meeting with some of the Diablos to talk about turf. You know where Earl’s is?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, try to be on time so we can show the Diablos we’re correct even though it really ain’t no big thing, just some mouth running. See you tomorrow.”
My mouth was dry and my heart was pounding when I hung up the phone. I hadn’t said anything about what Sidney had told me. Maybe it was just talk.
“What’s Rise up to these days?” Mom asked.
“Running around,” I said. “In a big hurry, as usual.”
Chapter 19
I was thinking about C.J. and how he liked to play the piano or organ. It’s great to just sit and watch him at the keyboard, his eyes closed, his body swaying, all into his music. When nobody’s around, he takes off his shoes and works the pedals with his bare feet. Sometimes I feel that way when my drawing is going good. It’s as if when I’m putting marks on paper, even when I’m not drawing anything in particular, something is being created. Some space is being surrounded by a line and comes alive. Or a color, deep and rich, spreads itself across the page. Once in a while I surprise myself with a line or an image and I have to study the paper to see just what I’ve got. When that happens it feels so good. So good.
The brush I was holding felt heavy. I had dipped it into an almost empty jar of Nile green watercolor paint and brought it to the center of my drawing pad. My hand, fingers slightly extended the way I like to hold my brush, didn’t move. I put it down. I was thinking too much. Images of Rise came up in my mind. Not the old Rise but the new one, with the lean and all the business he was getting into. I knew a meeting with the Diablos couldn’t be a good thing. I wasn’t down for no gang-banging, but it was as if we were being sucked into i
t.
The point was that I needed to do something to pull back. The easy thing was to start dropping dimes. I didn’t want to call Sidney, but I thought I might deal with my father. Get his butt upset enough and he would either kill me to keep me safe or come up with something. But that meant I had to rat out Rise and look like I was just punking out. In a way I didn’t mind backing down or looking like a punk—I just didn’t want to be the first to take the step.
Mom called through the door, asking if I wanted anything to eat. I said no.
“You want some eggs?” she asked.
“No.”
Her head appeared in the doorway. “Tuna on toast?”
I said okay and she thanked me with a smile.
What was I going to do? I hadn’t said that I would meet Rise at the store, but I hadn’t told him I wouldn’t either. When he was talking, I was listening to him and searching for something to say back. I knew what C.J. meant at the church. I didn’t want to show lame all the time, but I didn’t know what style I should be wearing.
Dad and Mom and Sidney had that distant thing going on. THE RIGHT THING FOR YOU TO DO IS …STAY AWAY FROM THE MEETING … HIDE UNDER THE BED … LISTEN TO YOUR PARENTS … WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?
But I was right in the middle of the joint, and it wasn’t a hundred percent clear what the action was. If I started dropping dimes and nothing was shaking, I would really look like a punk.
I narrowed my people-to-talk-to list down to Tania and C.J. Tania would probably have wanted to go kick the crap out of the Diablos, so she slipped off the list. Mom brought in the tuna sandwich just as I was picking up the phone to call C.J.
“That was quick,” I said.
“And my fingers never left my hands,” she said. “Don’t leave the crumbs in your room. Roaches love tuna on toast.”
The phone rang five times and I was just ready to hang up when C.J. answered. I asked him if he had heard there was a meeting tomorrow night.
“Yeah, I’ll see you there,” he said, sounding like he wanted to get off the phone.
“You going?”
Autobiography of My Dead Brother Page 9
