by Richard Dry
“Stay the fuck outta this!” Love yelled to the driver. The boy in the blue cap gave Love the finger through the back window.
The driver opened his door and got out slowly, like he was an old man. He turned toward Love, shielding Li’l Pit, his sunglasses still on.
“What the fuck you want, nigger?” he said.
Love stopped at the back of the car. The boy in the blue cap pushed his way out of the backseat and stood on the passenger’s side.
“Yeah, what the fuck you want?”
“This ain’t your business,” Love said. He held the gun knotted up in his shirt. “Come on, Li’l Pit. Our bus is leaving.”
“Yeah, Li’l Pity,” the boy in the cap yelled, “you got to get on the school bus.”
Li’l Pit didn’t move from behind the driver. Love could see the two girls laughing, staring through the window like they were watching a TV show.
“Give the brother his jacket,” the driver said with indifference.
Love unwrapped his gun and held it down by his thigh.
“You need to shut up,” Love said.
A bus pulled out of the lot behind him, but it turned the opposite direction.
“Let my brother go.”
“I ain’t stoppin him from goin.” The driver spit out his cinnamon stick and reached in his pocket. Love raised the gun, aiming right at his chest.
“Be cool, man.” The driver brought out another stick and put it in his mouth.
“Come on, Li’l Pit,” Love said. “Elise is waitin.”
“Yeah, Pit,” the boy said from across the car, “you got to get to your great-grandmama’s house before she keel over of a heart attack.”
Joyce came into the alley but stopped when she saw Love aiming the gun.
“What are you doing?” she screamed. “Oh my God.”
Love turned and saw the fear in her eyes. She ran back around the wall and disappeared into the lot.
“Come on, man,” the driver said to Li’l Pit and got back into the car. The boy in the wool cap jumped into the backseat, and Li’l Pit ran around the front of the car to the passenger side, smiling like he was playing tag. The driver started the engine.
Love ran to him, the gun still in his hand. He got there before Li’l Pit could close the door.
“Get out,” he yelled at Li’l Pit, aiming the gun at his head, then at the driver. “Turn it off.” The driver turned off the car, and Love aimed the gun back at his brother, directly at his temple.
“Get outta the car. Get out.”
“Ah, that’s cold, blood,” said the boy in the back. “Your own brother gonna cap you.”
“You got to come with me. I promised Nanna. You got to come.”
“Naw,” Li’l Pit said. “You come with me.”
“What you gonna do,” the driver asked, “hold a gun to his head until he get on the bus?”
Love looked at the driver, who faced forward, indifferently, his sunglasses still on.
“You gonna hold a gun to his head the rest a his life?”
The only part of the driver moving was his jaw as he chewed on his cinnamon stick. Love looked at his brother again, who also stared forward, his head tilted slightly away from the gun.
“Stand up, dog,” Love said. “Come on, bro. This ain’t no game. This ain’t funny.” He grabbed Li’l Pit’s shirt with his free hand and pulled him out of the car. Though Li’l Pit didn’t struggle, he didn’t go willingly either. He stepped out and stood where his brother held him, the gun at the side of his head.
The driver started the car again.
“Let me go,” Li’l Pit yelled.
The driver pressed on the gas and the car began to move forward, slowly at first.
“Let me go,” Li’l Pit yelled again. The car moved away with its door open, then stopped for the boy in the cap to jump out of the backseat, hop in the front, and close the door. “Peace out, muther fuckers,” the boy yelled. Then the car sped off and turned the corner without stopping, the screech of the tires echoing off the high buildings.
Love and Li’l Pit stood alone in the alleyway, Love still aiming the gun at his brother’s head. There were sirens a long way off in the distance. They might have been sirens for them or for a different reason—for a bank robbery, or a murder, or for a million other things going on somewhere in the city—but eventually they would be sirens for them.
Li’l Pit slowly turned his eyes toward Love, so the gun pointed directly at his forehead. Love studied Li’l Pit’s face, the sickle part in his hair, his small ears and round head. He could see the muscles clenching and unclenching in Li’l Pit’s jaw. But Li’l Pit’s eyes were not angry or frightened. They were blank, almost empty, just waiting for the next thing to happen, for Love to make the next move.
Love shook his head. There didn’t seem to be any other choice. He lowered the gun to his side. They stood a foot apart, looking directly into each other’s eyes, their chests heaving, but neither of them spoke. Then Love turned, and he walked toward the bus lot, steadily, without looking back. He listened for Li’l Pit’s footsteps. He listened with more of his mind behind him than in front. He kept walking until he reached the driveway and then stopped. He could see into the lot. The people were already in line for his bus, and there was no sign of Joyce or his trunk.
When he turned back to the alley, Li’l Pit was still standing in the same place he’d left him.
“I’m goin, bro,” Love yelled. “For real.” He tossed the gun into a patch of tall grass by the wall. Li’l Pit still didn’t move. Love waited for a second. Li’l Pit’s hands were down by his sides, not a muscle on him moving. Love turned and walked into the lot, closing his eyes briefly in the sun.
When he reached the bus, he checked underneath and made sure the trunk had been loaded. It was there, with the duffel bags and suitcases of the other passengers on top of it. He looked back toward the driveway, but it was empty. He took the first step up onto the bus. It was high off the ground, and he had to pull himself up by the metal handrails. He climbed each step slowly, his thighs straining as he pushed up to the next one. At the top of the stairs, he paused and looked down the aisle at the passengers and rows of seats. He slapped his hand along the top of each empty row until he reached the middle of the bus and swung into a window seat, from which he could see the lot and the platform where Joyce had been.
The driver stood outside smoking a cigarette, his hair flapping in the sudden bursts of wind that just as quickly disappeared. The cigarette was only half smoked when he tossed it onto the ground and stepped on it with the tip of his boot, pressing and twisting with the full weight of his body. He then walked to the door of the bus and adjusted his mirror, looked at himself, rolled his eyes, and stepped up almost as slowly as Love.
“Okay, folks. This bus stops in Longview, then heads into Louisiana, Shreveport, Monroe; Mississippi, Jackson, Meridian; up to Birmingham, Alabama, and to its final resting place in Atlanta, where you may catch another bus to many fine places along our eastern seaboard, to which I will not be driving. If you believe you are on the wrong bus, then this is the time for you to off-board, unload, exit, depart, and abandon ship. I’ll be coming around to take your tickets presently, but please know that you are responsible for getting off at the right stop. You will be charged for any extra mileage you incur. Thank you for traveling with us.”
The driver walked to the back and checked passengers’ tickets, marked them, and placed a small coupon on the luggage rack above. When he came to Love, he opened the ticket jacket and looked in.
“You’ve got somebody else traveling with you today?”
Love shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, you’ve got two tickets. Is your mother on board?”
Love shook his head.
“Your father?”
“No.”
“Anyone?”
“My brother’s sposed to come on.”
“Well, he needs to hurry up. I’ll mark his ticket for him n
ow.”
The driver returned the tickets to Love and finished with the rest of the passengers. He made a head count on his way back up and then sat down in his seat. He started the engine, but didn’t close the doors. He looked back at Love with his eyebrows raised.
“He ain’t comin,” Love yelled up to him. “Let’s just go.”
“All right.” The driver closed the door and reversed the bus out into the center of the lot. Love looked at the platform and half expected Joyce to come out of the building and run after the bus, but the platform was empty.
The driver turned the bus around and then headed for the exit. They stopped at the edge of the driveway, the wall of the station blocking Love’s view of the alley. He got ready to look. The bus jerked into gear with a lurch forward, then a stop, and then forward again. Then it steadied and gained momentum into the turn. For an instant, Love pressed his face against the window, straining to see. But Li’l Pit was not in the alley anymore.
The bus finished its turn and moved slowly past the Dumpsters and fire escapes of the buildings. When it reached the corner, it stopped again. The turn signal slapped loudly within the passenger cabin. Love looked up the sidewalks on both sides of the street. He looked past the stoplights as far as he could see, and between parked cars. The engines revved and the bus moved forward again, slowly pushing out into the middle of the intersection. Love stood up in the space in front of his seat, his hand still on the window. He looked frantically at every person along the sidewalk, at every crevice and shadow, behind trash cans and into doorways, but he didn’t see his brother. The river of cars in the street let up and the driver inched the bus forward.
Then Love saw something move behind a mailbox at the near corner. Li’l Pit’s face stuck out above the curved blue top. Love knocked on the window. He couldn’t be sure Li’l Pit saw him through the tinted glass, but he was staring at the middle of the bus as if he could. Love pushed on the window; he wanted to break through the glass and grab his brother and pull him up onto the bus. It seemed that Li’l Pit could see him, that their eyes met for a second.
“Hey, bro, what you doin?” Love said softly.
The bus moved forward again, farther into the street. Li’l Pit smiled. He lifted his hand, then waved to all the windows. The bus turned, and Love twisted to see behind him, stood on his toes, his face pressed against the window.
“Good luck, li’l man,” he said. He remained standing as the bus drove up the street, past the convention center, the gas station to the highway entrance. The bus climbed the on-ramp, and Love slowly sat back down in his seat.
The bus’s engines strained to gain enough speed to merge into the flow of traffic. The sun was now high above in the winter sky, illuminating the metal and glass buildings of Dallas with a dull glare. Love looked away from the window and faced forward. As the bus drove out of the city, he took his tape player out of his jacket pocket, pulled on his headphones, and pushed play.
SANTA RITA JAIL
WHO AM I to be standing up here pontificating and prognosticating? Who am I, up here every week before you with a book of history and a brown face? Who am I to tell you who you are and from where we came?
I’m not surprised you have to ask, though I have been telling you all along. I’ve been reading to you my arms, I’ve been shouting out my back, I’ve been crying to you my shoulders, and I’ve been laughing to you my eyes. I’ve been showing you the raft I stand on, and I’ve shown you the shore I want to reach, and I’ve shown you the River that surrounds us, that has brought me to this place downstream. I’ve been telling you all along. I’ve been telling me.
So is it clear? Can you see me? Don’t you know me? Would it help if I told you my height, my weight, my crime, my name? Would it help if I told you I was a poet, a singer, a mythmaker, and a storyteller: if I rapped a line, sold a dime, slipped out of time?
It would still be unclear, as unclear as it has been to me all my life. I’m still as invisible to you and to myself as if I’d never looked into the mirror of that muddy River. And now I wish I could just forget it all, pretend that it never happened. I know you do too: you always tell me in the yard that you wish you could just forget that River and move on. You want to drown me in it and leave us behind. You want to forget us and just be. And I say: I want to forget it too! I swear, I wish I could forget it more than I wish anything in the world; but it rushes by my feet every day and sprays upon my face every morning.
I’m done reading to you, but I still have one more story to tell before I get out. It’s not from one of these books in the library, but it begins where the books leave off. It’s the last log of my raft, the one that didn’t seem to fit until just now, until I’d finished laying the other ones down. It’s a story my grandmother told me more than twenty years ago. It ends with me and passes to you, but it begins before I was born, before my older brother was born. It begins on June 19, 1959, when my grandmother, Ruby Washington, traveled through Texas on a bus from Norma, South Carolina, to Oakland, California, with her thirteen-year-old half brother, Love Easton Childers.
WORKS CITED
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Grant, Joanne, ed. Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses 1619 to the Present. New York: Fawcett Premier, 1968.
———. “Mississippi Law of 1864.” Rptd. in Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses 1619 to the Present. New York: Fawcett Premier, 1968.
Holt, Hamilton, ed. “Hell Itself.” The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves. 1906. Rptd. in Black Americans: History in Their Own Words, ed. Milton Meltzer. New York: HarperCollins, 1984.
Mannix, Daniel, and Malcolm Cowley. “The Middle Passage.” Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade. 1962. Rptd. in Justice Denied, eds. William M. Chace and Peter Collier. New York: Harcourt, 1970.
Meier, August, and Elliot M. Rudwick. From Plantation to Ghetto: An Interpretive History of American Negroes. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966.
Parsons, C. G. Inside View of Slavery. 1853. “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery,” Journal of Negro History XXVII. Raymond A. Bauer and Alice H. Bauer. 1942. Rptd. in Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses 1619 to the Present, ed. Joanne Grant. New York: Fawcett Premier, 1968.
Pennington, James W. C. “The Fugitive Blacksmith or Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington.” 1849. Great Slave Narratives, ed. Arna Bontemps. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Phillips, Ulrich B. American Negro Slavery. Rptd. in “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery,” Journal of Negro History XXVII. Raymond A. Bauer and Alice H. Bauer. 1942. Rptd. in Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses 1619 to the Present, ed. Joanne Grant. New York: Fawcett Premier, 1968.
Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. New York: Government Printing Office and The New York Times Company, 1968.
Stampp, Kenneth. “Troublesome Property.” The Peculiar Institution. New York: Vintage, 1956. Rptd. in Justice Denied, eds. William M. Chace and Peter Collier. New York: Harcourt, 1970.
Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1901.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES
Baldwin, James. The Price of the Ticket. New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1985.
Bing, Léon. Do or Die. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992.
Blauner, Bob. Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Brown, Elaine. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Frazier, E. Franklin. “Hagar and Her Children.” Rptd. in Justice Denied, eds. William M. Chace and Peter Collier. New York: Harcourt, 1970.
Gaines, Ernest J. A Gathering of Old Men. New York: Knopf, 1983.
Hilliard, David, and Lewis Cole. This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party. New York: Little, Brown, 1993.
Lacy, Dan. The White Use of Blacks in America. New York: Atheneum Books, 1972.
Lemann, Nicholas. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Mfume, Kweisi, et al. No Free Ride: From the Mean Streets to the Mainstream. New York: Ballantine, 1997.
Praetzellis, Mary, ed. West Oakland—A Place to Start From: Research Design and Treatment Plan Cypress 1-880 Replacement Project. Vol. 1: Historical Archaeology. Oakland: California Department of Transportation, 1994.
Spalding, Henry D., ed. Encyclopedia of Black Folklore and Humor. Middle Village, N.Y.: Jonathan David Publishers, 1990.
Wolters, Raymond. Negroes and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1970.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
X, Malcolm, and Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told to Alex Haley. New York: Grove Press, 1964.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank all of the people who contributed their time and energy to helping me research, revise, and publish this work.
A special thank-you to Orson Bean and Alley Mills for your encouragement and support.
To Robert Loomis, David Blastband, Bill Henderson, and Theresa Parks: Thank you for helping me navigate the waters. Thank you to the family of Ruby Lott for opening your homes to me and giving me a taste of Saluda; to Dennis and Mary Johnson for your stories and your warmth; and to Phyllis Burke for believing in me and telling me so.
