“There go Dennis,” Mikey yelled.
“I’m going to get me something, Mike. Come on. I’m going to get me something. I’m going to get me something,” Dennis sang.
“Can I go, Daddy?” Mikey asked.
“No, boy. You crazy? Them people stealing. Somebody going to get killed up there. Mark my word.”
Dennis joined the rest of the crowd, and before it could go and come back again, flames could be seen rising to the north. Sirens could be heard, and the sound of breaking glass.
“They shooting,” someone said. “It sound like shooting.”
“Come on inside, ya’ll,” Mr. Taylor said. “When bullets come flying out a gun, they ain’t got nobody’s name on them.” He saw his family inside and locked the door. He and his wife returned to the television, and they sent the children to bed. But they did not sleep.
Mikey went into his sisters’ room. Dorene had her head under the blanket. “What you hiding from?” Mikey said.
Dorene said nothing until she heard the sound again. It was a helicopter flying overhead. “It’s a war. It’s just like on TV,” Dorene said, and she began crying.
“Stop acting like a baby. You don’t see Mary or Olivia crying. How can it be a war here?” Mikey asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Get out from under that blanket. It ain’t no war. I’m telling you, see?”
“It’s Christmas,” Mary said.
“It’s not no Christmas,” Dorene said. “What is it, Mikey?”
“I don’t know. It sound like a fight.”
He crawled into bed with his sisters, and they listened to voices in the night. And when the voices were silenced, there was the wailing.
Their ancestors were waking up. They were standing inside the walls, and they were wailing from the other side. Their sorrow shook the bedroom walls. Their sorrow lulled the children to sleep.
In the morning there was silence. The war was over. The wailing had stopped. Mr. Taylor was not going to work, and there was no school. He walked his family to Ridge Road. He wanted his children to see what had happened, and to remember this day. Mary was on his shoulders and Dorene clasped his hand. Mikey walked with his mother, and she pushed Olivia in a stroller.
On their way up Steelawanna Avenue, they saw a pack of dogs eating a roast the looters had dropped. There was broken glass everywhere. It sparkled in the morning sun.
“Pick me up, Daddy,” Dorene begged.
“You too big for me to be picking up. Why you always want to be the baby? Just watch your step.”
As the family made its way through the street, they saw mismatched shoes and skates scattered, a new radio smashed, dresses and pants trampled, skeletons of cars still smoking.
“This a shame,” Mrs. Taylor said. “Just a excuse to steal. If he was alive, he would be sick.”
“If who was alive?” Dorene asked.
“Dr. King,” her father said. “He not even cold yet, and see what we done.”
As they approached Ridge Road, they could see the damage. The A & P, the cleaners, the Jubilee Theatre, the roller rink, the laundry, the five-and-dime, the drugstore, the barbershop, and even Dulski’s—all looted and burned. Only the churches had been spared.
At the corner of Steelawanna and Ridge Road there were white soldiers in green, carrying rifles. They formed a wall blocking the street, standing shoulder to shoulder, protecting spoiled meats, singed clothes, charred buildings.
The northern sections of the plant could be clearly seen through the remains of the buildings. “Damn,” Mr. Taylor said. “You can see all the way to the coke ovens.” He pointed. “That’s where I work, kids.” Mary and Dorene and Olivia looked, but Mikey didn’t. He wasn’t interested.
Before the wall of soldiers a small crowd had gathered, a crowd that was sullen and angry. Their faces were ashen masks carved by sorrow. And from the collection of dun masks there rose a tired voice.
“They killed him.”
“Who, Daddy?” Dorene asked from behind her father’s pant leg.
“Martin Luther King, stupid. Daddy already told you that,” Mikey said.
“Ya’ll ain’t heard the news?” a voice asked. “It was on the radio this morning.”
A mask separated itself from the crowd, and behind it was a tall and thin yellow man. He walked over to Mr. Taylor and whispered in his ear.
Mr. Taylor put Mary down and took his wife by the hand. “Mikey, you stay here with the girls. Don’t ya’ll move.” He and his wife walked closer to the wall and looked over it.
“There he is,” the man said. “See him there.”
A small figure flanked by wings of dried blood was lying in front of the A & P. Next to the blanketed form was a canned ham, and a mounted policeman was standing guard.
“That’s Dennis. They ain’t say his name on the radio ’cause they ain’t found his mama yet. He was hit by a stray ’fore them guards or cops even showed up last night. I’m telling you, it’s a shame. They left his body laying there all night.”
Mikey and Mary played in the grass while Dorene sat on a curb next to the stroller and peeked through the legs of the wall, not wanting to look, not wanting to see, but there was something moving on the other side, back and forth, back and forth, there were things moving, and before she realized it, she was staring at the face of a white man that had drifted down below the wall, a face she recognized from television, a newsman, whose face passed in and out of her sight quickly, but Dorene knew why it was here.
“Come on now, Kate. I told you, you can’t change the world,” Mr. Taylor said, and Dorene looked up to see her parents standing over her. Her mother was crying and her father’s arm was around her mother’s shoulders. Mikey and Mary gathered around them.
“Get on up from there, girl. Let’s go.”
Dorene jumped from the curb and followed her parents. She and Mikey walked together, and their father had put Mary in the stroller with Olivia.
“Ain’t no telling where his mama is.”
“Who mama?” Mikey asked.
“Maybe some good will come of this,” Mr. Taylor said.
“Who mama?” Mikey asked.
“Shut up,” Dorene said. “You so stupid.”
14
Jesús
JESÚS WAS a black man with nappy hair. Around his eyes there was a hint of something. Around his tiny black eyes, somewhere in the curve of his brow, were the lies of white men. Inside his eyes, lost somewhere in the well of their blackness, were the promises made to an Indian woman. All the blacks called him Jesus, just like it was meant to be.
They could not figure out Puerto Ricans anyway. They didn’t know what category to put them in. They were not quite black and not quite white, but exactly what they were was not clear. But Jesús ruined things. It was clear that he was black, even if around his eyes there were whispers of other worlds. Around many of the blacks’ eyes the same thing whispered.
You could knock on almost any door in All-Bright Court and find someone to repeat it. “Yeah, my grandma was a Crow.” “My great-grandaddy was Cherokee.” True or not, it was something to brag on, a place to locate the wave in someone’s hair, a place that held the origin of the blush of redness in one’s skin, a place to touch the hardness and highness of a cheekbone. Even if it was a white man they saw in the flame of their faces, even if it was the whisper of a lie some white man had breathed into their grandmother’s breasts, still caught up in the tangles of their hair, it was easier to believe they were seeing an Indian. It was exotic, untraceable, a way of putting down roots, of pushing their toes right through the slabs of stone under their feet and staking claim to an entire continent. They were the doubly dispossessed.
But the Puerto Ricans could also lay claim to dispossession. Their wealth amounted to no more than a handful of dried beans. If their lives had meant more to white men, if the copper in their skin could have been spun into gold, they would not have been living in All-Bright Court.
Jesús’s fami
ly was like the other families coming from Puerto Rico, only he was different. He was nothing like his brother César or his sister Gloria or his parents.
Mrs. Taylor had said to her neighbor Billie Hines, “Maybe Jesús the milkman son.”
“Naw. They ain’t got no coloreds down there. You seen any of them that was colored?” Billie asked.
“No,” Mrs. Taylor said. “But girl, they some good-looking people, got that pretty hair and smooth skin. There more and more of them. Every time you turn around, another bunch of them moving in.”
Billie said, “I tell you this. I don’t like them. How can you stand a whole family living in back of you?”
“They don’t bother nobody. Isaac be over there in that house.”
“That figure, though, that he would be with them. Them people stink. They loud and nasty, they do nothing but bring roaches. And they taking away jobs in the plant, jobs from our men,” Billie said.
“They just trying to live,” Mrs. Taylor said.
“And the names they give they kids. There a girl in my child class name Conception, and look at them boys behind you, Jesus and Caesar. What the hell kind of names them?”
Mrs. Taylor said, “Yeah, it seem like they would know that Jesus and Caesar was enemies.”
“That boy so black because God done cursed him for his mama throwing His child name on him.”
When Jesús’s family had moved in, they had two skinny chickens that walked around in a small circle of wire. Sometimes, when it was quiet late at night, Mikey would wake up because he was too hot, or too cold, or he needed a drink of water, and he would hear the chickens out there, the beating of their wings. He would get up and watch them pecking at each other and rising in the air.
But before anyone could call the rent office about the chickens, they disappeared. It was said that Greene took them. “It must of been her,” it was said. “There was a full moon last night.”
Isaac and his friend Rick could be seen passing through this dusty yard where the chickens once were. Isaac had met César during Isaac’s last year in O.E. When César came home from school, Rick and Isaac would go over to his house and sit in the living room. They drank Iroquois beer and waited for Gloria to walk through on her way to get ice water, or on her way to the store, or on her way to nowhere, just walking through, her pants a second skin, her short hair a raven’s wings. She was always on her way to somewhere else, but she had winked at Rick. For months she had been in flight, and someday she would land. Rick wanted to fly away with her, to be a blackbird flying over All-Bright Court. He was leaving anyway. He had joined the army.
“I’m going before they come for me. I got the feeling my number coming up. You lucky you went to O.E.,” Rick said to Isaac. “You lucky too, Caesar. Uncle Sam don’t bother with O.E. people.”
“I don’t want to go noway,” Isaac said. “Them gooks ain’t playing games. Look at Halloween. Looking at him some scary shit. Let them gooks and white boys fight the Commies. If they come over here, I’ll get my daddy’s piece and ice a few. You should go to Canada, Rick. Shit, you could walk there from here.”
“I would fight,” César said. “Go to war for me country.”
“This ain’t none of your goddamn country,” Rick said. “You crazy if you think this your country. White people care less about ya’ll than they do about us.”
“This is me country, but I would no fight for white people. I would fight for democracy,” César said.
“Fuck democracy,” Rick said. “I’m going in Uncle Sam’s army ’cause I ain’t got nowhere else to go. And what’s a nigger going to do in Canada?”
“Same thing a nigger do here,” Isaac said. “Go on up there and get a job in a plant. They got steel plants up there too.”
“We live across the street from a steel plant here. That don’t mean I got a job,” Rick said. “I been laid off almost a year. I’m telling you, Canada for white boys. You got to have money, know somebody, blend in. I ain’t got no money, don’t know nobody, and where a nigger going to hide in Canada?”
The one thing Rick had to look forward to was Gloria. He kept hoping she would stop and wink at him again, and one day she did stop. She called to him from the kitchen. “Ricky,” she said. “Ven acá.”
Rick did not move.
“¡Mira! Come here. Ven acá.”
The beer lifted him from the sofa and carried him into the kitchen.
“Dance with me,” Gloria said, and she grabbed his two hands, big and useless, and held them in hers.
He danced an awkward salsa with her, to a song playing on the radio. To him the beat was foreign.
“Tú bailas bien,” Gloria said, and Rick smiled. In the sallowness of the kitchen, the pace of his life changed. As Gloria began to cha-cha, Rick could not keep up with her, and she let go of his hands.
Her feet moved faster. One, two, one two three. One two one two three. Onetwoonetwothree. Onetwoonetwothree-onetwoonetwothree. Gloria spun around the chairs as if they were couples on a dance floor, and when she flashed around the table Rick saw her, just for an instant, rise off the linoleum and fly toward him.
He reached for her, reached out for dear life, and he grabbed her by the waist as his lips sought the heat of her neck.
It was just then that Jesús appeared at the back door and leaned on the doorjamb. The wells of his eyes were bottomless. He began spitting out words in Spanish, and so did Gloria, and around Rick’s head spun a room of o’s and a’s, spinning and singing like big and angry tops.
César jumped up as Jesús was pushing Gloria toward the living room, but before he could get there, Rick had jumped on Jesús’s back and had ridden him to the floor. That was all Rick could do. Jesús flipped him over his head and dragged him into the back yard. Gloria, César, and Isaac ran out after them.
“Peleá,” Jesús yelled, and he circled Rick, his two fists knotty rocks.
“¡Levantate!” Jesús said, and a crowd was beginning to form. The less brave stood on their porches, inside their back doors, or peeked from behind curtains.
Mikey watched from his back door, eating a Fluffernutter on Wonder bread, but when the braver spectators came and made themselves a circle, he ran upstairs and watched from his bedroom window.
The crowd closed the circle in the yard at 50 All-Bright Court, leaving only Rick and Jesús in the center, and the only way Rick could get out was to fight.
Rick stood up. He began circling, looking for a way out, for a way to drop Jesús and just get away, but his head was humming from the beer. While he listened to the hum, Jesús dropped him with a right.
“Get ’em. Get ’em,” Mikey said, jumping up and down. He dropped his sandwich and began throwing punches before the window.
Rick lay on the ground, blood dripping from his nose.
“¡Levantate!” Jesús taunted.
“¡Basta!” Gloria screamed. “¡Basta, Jesús!”
“Did you hear that?” someone said. “She calling her brother a bastard. Did you hear that? She calling her brother a bastard in the yard.”
“I always thought he was,” someone else whispered.
“That’s a shame, telling all they business in the street. But you know them people.”
Rick did not get up, and Jesús strutted around him, kicking his feet through the dirt and puffing out his chest. “Negro,” he spat at Rick, and he grabbed Gloria by the arm and pulled her into the house. The crowd parted before him. In a moment only César and Isaac remained in the clearing yard.
César was left to explain Jesús, to pull some reasons out of the cloud of dust he had kicked up. But it was hard to find even one. Whatever reason there was seemed to be dissipating, settling back down in the earth, and as César knelt over Rick, all he could say was, “He alway want to be the boss. He don’t boss nobody. Don’t pay no attention to him.”
Jesús’s actions only helped confirm what people suspected. He was not his father’s son. He was not the son of the man who spoke English,
broken and hard like pieces of brick, a man who, like Gloria, and César too, had the hair of a raven, a man who had a gold tooth in the front of his mouth, a man who sold shaved ice from his back door in summer, and in the winter sold “ron o vino” from under the counter of his cousin’s store, a man who held the breasts of the blackest of women in his eyes. Jesús was not the son of the man who had been seen leaving Greene’s house singing Spanish songs to the night winds.
Jesús surrounded himself with every Puerto Rican he could find, and spoke Spanish loudly. Rick was the first black person Jesús had ever talked to, and he used his words as weapons, sprayed Spanish into Rick’s face, shot it into his back. Jesús made it clear he was not one of them.
That night Rick and Isaac stood in front of the Red Store pitching pennies under a street lamp. It was after nine, and the store was closed. The warmth that had been held in its bricks was gone.
The wind, the Hawk from the lakefront, was blowing. Somehow it managed to get by the plant, to climb around the monster. Once the sun went down, the Hawk seemed to seek out the land, to come looking for something it had lost, something that it could never find in the darkness. Instead, it punished all it found there. It swooped and rose and turned corners on a wing.
As Rick and Isaac stood there in the night wind, it cut them to the bone. Isaac said, “Let’s split, Rick. It’s cold as hell out here.”
“You just saying that ’cause you losing. I ain’t going in. I’m waiting for Jesús,” Rick said.
“Forget about it, man. Caesar cool. He hip.”
“I’m not talking about Caesar. I’m talking about his brother. The nappy-head Puerto Rican bean-eating crazy-ass black nigger. Who he think he is? Calling me a Negro. Who he think he is?”
Isaac did not know what to say. He looked into Rick’s eyes, searching for what he should say. “I don’t know who he thinks he is.”
“I’ll tell you who he is. He ain’t nothing. He ain’t shit. I’m going to show him that. I saw him heading up Ridge Road way earlier. He be back. He got to come back,” Rick said.
“You going to basic next week. Let it slide,” Isaac said.
All-Bright Court Page 11
