Without meaning to, Kenya gasped at the teacher’s meanness. She looked around to see if anyone had heard. There was L’Tisha, three desks away, smiling.
As Duvall ran out to the bathroom clutching the seat of his pants, Kenya heard quiet singing: “Kenya and Duvall, Duvall and Kenya, doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it…” It was as if the class knew that Kenya was supposed to speak up for Duvall even though she certainly hadn’t and, despite what Brother Camden and her parents said, she certainly never would. It was as if the class was punishing her for being a coward.
The song caught fire and followed Kenya for days. She had to weep in front of Mrs. Preston to make it stop.
* * *
The spring of that year, 1985, brought small victories. Kenya finally eked her way into Charlena’s reading group. But so had a boy with large yellow teeth named Allmon, which dampened the triumph. Kenya did, however, beat them both at the spelling bee. She tried her best to be humble about it, because it seemed that this was the stylish way to win.
Sheila had gotten a promotion and a raise. Her boss, Susan Zabriskie, a white lady who was obsessed with animals but couldn’t even commit to bringing home a hamster, was talking about quitting her job and moving out to the country so she could raise chickens. If this happened, Sheila would practically run the Research Department. For his part, Johnbrown said that he was really “closing in on The Key” and would soon start talking to publishers.
But in May the city gave Johnbrown fire for his fuel. With the blessing of Philadelphia’s first black mayor, the police attacked a row house full of back-to-the-land black people who were aggravating their neighbors in West Philly, about twenty blocks from where Kenya lived. They were part of a group called MOVE, who wore dreadlocks and had all taken the last name Africa.
“I knew that couldn’t go on forever,” Sheila said early in the evening as the news reported the standoff in progress. “This isn’t a holler in Kentucky. You can’t use your backyard as a toilet and build a bunker on your roof.”
“It’s BS the way the city treats those people,” Johnbrown said. “It’s straight-up persecution and it’s Atonist bullshit. I mean, I don’t agree with shitting in your yard, but all they’re trying to do is live like a traditional African family. It makes a lot of sense to share child raising and resources.”
Sheila looked amused. “You want to bring some more Africans up in here?”
Johnbrown shrugged. “Maybe you’d complain less about housework if you had more family to help you out.”
“Any extra Africans coming in here are sleeping in your study. Then we’ll see.”
As the night grew deeper, Sheila lost her ironic demeanor, her eyes growing wide and wet before the television. The police tried to force MOVE out by dropping explosives on their home, but no one came out. The house caught fire, and Kenya and her family, as if pinned to the couch, watched it burn.
“Oh my God,” Sheila whispered. “My God.” Finally Johnbrown got up and began pacing in front of the screen and into the kitchen. Kenya was sent to bed.
When she woke up in the morning, sixty-five houses had been burned to the ground. Eleven of the MOVE people, including five children, were dead. One woman and one boy had escaped.
For weeks after, into the summer, the Days picked the event bone-clean. Strangely, Johnbrown was quieter than usual, even though the others implied that he’d foretold it.
“You tried to warn us,” said Earl. “I knew Goode was bullshit, but genocide?”
“It’s like a war. It was like a war,” said Robert. “Maybe we do need to do more.”
“We need to do something,” said Cindalou. “I mean, getting a piece might not be a bad idea. I mean, last time I checked, it was still Klan members on the city council where I’m from, and there’s been no black people burned there in fifty years.”
“What can we do?” asked Yaya. “They might think we’re doing something wrong over here and come burn us up.”
Despite his powers of prophecy, in the wake of the MOVE attack, no one wanted to hear Johnbrown devote his libations to Julian Carlton.
“I don’t want to step on any toes here,” said Earl, “but maybe we should rethink our reverence of a man who used an ax on children.”
(“Urumph,” said Alfred.)
“I’m not revering that part of it,” said Johnbrown.
“Maybe you should go upstairs, Kenya,” Sheila said.
Kenya was only too glad to take a hiatus from the gloomy meetings of the MOVE days. For a string of Saturday nights, she stayed in her room and read a book called The Little Princess, in which a very rich girl in England became an orphan and could stay at her boarding school only by becoming a servant. She had to clean up after girls who used to be her friends, and they were not very gracious about it.
But as the fire receded into the past, things returned to normal (even for the little girl in The Little Princess, who ended the book rich again). Johnbrown, who had stopped pouring libations to Julian Carlton, began mentioning him again.
“For Julian Carlton,” he said, “and the spirit of true sacrifice.”
(“Mmm,” said Alfred.)
Kenya hadn’t thought much more about the butler than she had Fred Hampton or Charles Drew. But one night she woke with a start to the sight of a man on the chair at the foot of her bed. In the streetlight, which seemed unusually bright, she could see his face glistening with sweat. Then she saw the ax on his lap. She tried to scream; she woke up whispering.
Around the time she had the dream, Kenya came down to breakfast to find her parents looking at her with wide, shifting eyes.
“Babe, do you remember last night?” her mother asked.
Kenya frowned.
Her father said, “You don’t remember?”
“What?” Kenya asked, becoming worried.
Whenever something serious happened, they spoke in tandem. It had been like that when Harriet Tubman the cat needed a four-hundred-dollar operation and therefore had to be put to sleep. (“Harriet is very sick,” said her mother. “She needs more than we can give,” said her father.)
It seemed that Johnbrown and Sheila had been jolted awake to the sound of music around three o’clock in the morning, which at first they thought was coming from the house next door. But Mrs. Osgood, who enjoyed loud music with jug wine, played only gospel. The sound, clearly coming from their own house, was the Funkadelics. The disc jockey was Kenya, who had stood in front of the record player downstairs, staring at the wall above. Kenya could not remember any of it, but now she felt she could hear a nightmarish echo of George Clinton singing.
Because it was sleepwalking, it was hard to say when it had started, but once her parents told her about it, Kenya tried to control it. She couldn’t be sure if she was successful or not. She never woke up outside of her bed, but she would sometimes have odd memories of the cold of the refrigerator, or note that the soles of her feet were especially dirty. Sometimes she tried to get up before her parents to make sure she hadn’t been downstairs in the night and left the television on, or the basement door open. Kenya wondered if she ever played music again and why she had chosen the Parliament Funkadelic record, whose insane and intricate album cover art she had often studied. Here’s a chance to dance our way, out of our constrictions, sang George Clinton.
* * *
In the fifth grade, Duvall, who had been in Kenya’s class since kindergarten, was moved down to Special Ed in the basement. Sometimes Kenya saw him as their lines passed on the way to lunch or recess. It seemed he was popular in his new class, and he was often flanked by admiring classmates as he led the charge against a sad, rotund boy everyone called Jiggles. Kenya tried to put Duvall and anything to do with him in a box in her mind and seal it up tight. Thinking about him made her feel bad, like the vile taste of scrapple in her mouth.
Fifth grade was also the first year Kenya remembered Sheila going on housekeeping strikes, which occurred if Johnbrown was too busy working on The Key to ke
ep up with his negligible household duties. When this happened, Alfred and Yaya would host Seven Days meetings. Then Kenya got to know their son, Commodore, a thin-faced boy in her year at school who made everything he said sound like a joke. For no reason, he called her “Ooga Booga” as soon as their parents left them in the den, where they played Uno. As stupid and luck-based as Uno was, Commodore nearly always lost, because he got bored or distracted, or wanted to change the rules. Then he would forget he changed the rules.
“Commodore, you’re not even trying,” Kenya said. He had laid a green four card on a blue seven.
“Aren’t we doing odd numbers primary colors?”
Sighing, Kenya took the green four and put it next to the blue seven.
“You got me there, Ooga Booga.” Commodore laughed.
Kenya did not “like” Commodore, something her parents teased her about. He was too goofy. And he certainly did not “like” her. But they were friends. One of the first things she’d done when they met was to answer to “Ooga Booga” without getting upset. She was proud of herself for that.
She also liked that Commodore’s favorite show was The Incredible Hulk. It was hers, too, though it was kind of sad. She felt sorry for David Banner, who ended each episode walking along the highway in what looked like searing heat. He had to leave every town he came to—even if he fell in love with someone there. But how thrilling to lose control and demolish a person! Kenya particularly remembered one episode where a crazy man chased David Banner as if he were hunting an animal. The man left taunting tape-recorded messages along a trail. When the Hulk finally materialized eight minutes before the show ended, Kenya almost burst into relieved tears. When she asked Commodore if he’d seen that one, he started laughing.
“What?” said Kenya, getting angry.
“I didn’t really see it,” he said, “because I was hiding behind my hands.”
She just looked at him.
“What? That mess was scary!”
That year, Cindalou, whom Kenya noticed growing fatter and quieter, introduced a woman named Marjorie to the Seven Days. Marjorie and Cindalou had gone to high school together down South and had recently run into each other downtown. Marjorie had come following a man who had left her for a white woman who made her living as an artist’s model.
Marjorie’s dark brown pinched face reminded Kenya of a gerbil. She never wore pants, and, unlike any of the other women in the Seven Days, she straightened her hair.
“So y’all are not doing anything illegal?” Marjorie asked at her first meeting.
“No, ma’am,” said Johnbrown. “Unless getting on white people’s nerves while trying to help black people is illegal. Well, I guess in some states…”
“So nothing illegal, right?”
“Correct.” Reassured that she would not be arrested for having truck with folks who didn’t revere the flag or straighten their hair, Marjorie unveiled her idea.
Having just seen Bush Mama at a film festival, she wanted to stand outside of Planned Parenthood encouraging black women not to kill their babies. She said she could use the mimeograph in the teachers’ lounge where she worked to print up flyers on her break. After Marjorie’s first meeting, Sheila turned to Johnbrown and said, “I can’t believe your informant radar isn’t going off.”
Kenya’s father laughed. “The FBI wouldn’t send somebody that obvious.”
Robert stopped by later that week looking for Johnbrown. While he and Kenya’s mother drank beer and Kenya drank apple juice, Sheila said the same thing about Marjorie being an informant.
He didn’t laugh. “I seriously doubt that. But I was thinking about something. Maybe JB doesn’t need to bring up that gun business for a while,” he said. “Also, where does he keep the thing? Or, maybe more important, the papers for it.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I just think if we’re going to have folk we don’t really know hanging around…”
“Why would Marjorie be down in our basement?” Sheila asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know, okay? But what if he starts talking about guns and his whole ‘burn it all down’ thing in front of her?” His voice moved comically higher as he said the phrase burn it all down.
“Robert, are you making fun of Johnbrown?” Sheila asked.
He looked thoughtful. “Maybe a little.”
That night, and more and more, it seemed, Johnbrown stayed away in the evenings, citing trips to the main library and important meetings about The Key. One morning, Kenya was knocked out of sleep by her parents’ furious voices.
“… just fell asleep there!” she heard her father screech.
“You just fell asleep in the library? What are you, a bum? Do you need someplace to sleep?”
“Look, you know how hard I’ve been working. I was just resting my eyes for one—”
“So you slept there!”
“So what if I did?”
The morning after another one of these fights, Sheila had that concerned look on her face again. “Kenya, I found you in the kitchen last night, with the refrigerator open,” she said. “Do you—?”
“No,” Kenya said. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember!” She loathed the idea that people were talking to her while she was asleep.
“Calm down,” said Sheila.
“I can’t! And I can’t sleep with all of this fighting!”
Just then Johnbrown appeared in the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. “What’s all this yelling about?”
Kenya saw her mother look coldly at her father, her lips tight. Her father stared back.
“What?” he barked.
Kenya burst into tears.
* * *
One warm afternoon toward the end of fifth grade, Kenya’s father arrived to pick her up from school. Outside on the steps, he crushed her to him in a way that embarrassed her. She heard a showy laugh nearby and didn’t have to look up to know that it came from L’Tisha Simmons. She knew L’Tisha was probably not laughing at her father. After all, when L’Tisha’s mother picked her up, they acted as if they’d been sold away from each other that morning. But it didn’t matter what L’Tisha was laughing at; it just hurt that she was laughing. Kenya went stiff in her father’s arms.
“Hey, Monkey,” said Johnbrown.
“Hi, Baba,” Kenya said in a low voice.
“Let me get that for you,” he said now, taking her backpack. He fake-stumbled. “Don’t they use books anymore?”
“Those are my books.”
“These feel like bricks,” he said. “Are you taking up masonry?” Then he worked up a wan smile that Kenya knew as one pasted atop a bleak mood. Her mother referred to it irritably as his “brave” smile.
“What’s wrong?” asked Kenya.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I don’t want you worrying about me.”
“Okay, Baba.”
“That was a very worried-sounding ‘Okay, Baba.’”
“That’s all I got,” Kenya said.
Johnbrown shook his head and laughed. “Oh, that’s all you got, huh?” Then his face began drooping again.
Kenya wasn’t so much worried for her father as she was for herself. She did not want to watch her parents’ act that night: Johnbrown dragging his face on the floor, Sheila feigning sympathy, then moving into cold rage. Once when Kenya had asked, “Why do you hate Baba?” her mother had responded with an open-handed slap. It was not heavy, but so surprising that it made Kenya, who was six at the time, explode into tears. It was the only time either one of them had hit her.
“Feel like going to see your mom at her job?” he asked now. “Or do you have too much homework?”
Kenya loved being on Fortieth Street, near the Penn campus. She loved the trees and the busyness of it, the food trucks, the jewelry vendors, Marty’s Discount, where she sometimes got small toys or a soda, the students playing Frisbee on the lawn behind her mother’s library. Though it was nothing like her block,
all black and fairly quiet, with its aluminum-sided fronts, and nearly a half mile away, she liked to think of it as part of her neighborhood. Sometimes it was fun to walk there with her father when he was in the mood to chatter about his school days or the characters he met painting houses. But heading down there from school and then walking back up to Irving Street could take a long time that would feel even longer on a warm day. It seemed breezier and calmer down by the library, brighter and sourer as they walked deeper into West Philly, especially on days when Johnbrown was silent.
But then Kenya imagined herself trapped in the house, crouched over long division. She opted for the image of her mother in her bright, silken weekday clothes, using her smooth work voice.
When they reached the second floor of the library, Sheila’s boss was at her mom’s desk. She beamed at Johnbrown’s approach.
“Heya, Susan,” he said, with an expression that Kenya couldn’t read.
“What a nice surprise. Hi there, Kenya!”
Susan Zabriskie’s body was a slapdash arrangement of lumps that Kenya found confusing. She had a gold tooth, floppy black hair with gray strands, and green eyes, which became extremely bright when she shined them on Johnbrown. Sheila sometimes teased Johnbrown about her boss’s obvious regard for him. (“Aren’t you the lady-killer?” she would say. “I’m about to be,” he’d answer, mock-waving his fist.)
“Hello, Mrs. Zabriskie,” Kenya said, remembering too late what the woman always said when Kenya called her “Mrs.”
“It’s Miz,” said Susan Zabriskie. “Don’t marry me off yet!” She blushed and Johnbrown made a noise headed for, but not quite arriving at, a laugh. Then he cleared his throat.
“Sheila went home early,” sang Ms. Zabriskie. “She wasn’t feeling well.”
“Is that right?” asked Johnbrown.
“I’m afraid so,” said the boss with a nonsensical laugh.
Kenya found herself looking at her father out of the corner of her eye, for the first time wondering what Susan Zabriskie saw. He was not sloppy or decrepit. He wasn’t much more either, just a slight man in clean clothes, with somewhat sickly-looking skin. The only thing distinctive about him was his beaked nose, of which Kenya’s was a less severe version, that and the fact that due to a peculiarity of his voice, he was sometimes mistaken for a girl on the phone. The question had always been how he’d snared her mother, so stylish and confident.
Disgruntled: A Novel Page 4
