Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  “Lonny, what’s going on? Who are these guys?”

  Cuddles touches him, his hand gliding down Metro’s open shirt. Metro’s eyes get round.

  “Lonny, I don’t know these guys.”

  “That’s all right,” says Maxie. “We’re Lonny’s friends. Ain’t that right, Lonny?”

  I say nothing. Lou kicks me square in the shins. “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.” But nothing more.

  “And when Lonny tells us you go under, man, you give it up nice and easy, don’t you?” says Cuddles.

  Metro reaches into his pockets and pulls out a raggedy leather wallet. “I don’t have much money.” He shows the wallet around so we see the single ten-spot inside. “That’s all there is. You want it? It’s all I have.”

  “No, baby,” says Cuddles. “Keep your money. Right, fellahs?”

  “Right.”

  Metro looks worried. “My watch? I don’t have anything else. Nothing, honest. You can check if you want.”

  “We don’t want your watch,” says Lou. His hand falls to Metro’s ass, feeling it. Then to the front, gathering Metro’s balls into a hump and slowly releasing them.

  “Lonny says you been after him.”

  “After him? I don’t understand. What are they saying, Lonny?”

  I don’t say nothing, but I want to say something. When I step closer, I feel metal pointing in my side, a blade tearing my shirt. Cold on my skin.

  “Yeah,” I say. “You been after me.”

  Cuddles steps up. “You wanted to suck his cock? Take it up the ass?” “Hold it, Cuddles,” I say.

  “Naw, you hold it,” says Maxie. “You could be like that too, for all we know. Ain’t that right, fellahs?”

  “Shit, man. You tell him, Cuddles. Tell him he’s crazy to think that. You seen me with that girl.”

  “Naw, man. You show us,” Cuddles says.

  They hustle me and Metro to an alley near the abandoned building and stoop. Maxie and Lou hold Metro by the armpits. Cuddles twists my arm behind my back, and from his open breath I know he’s grinning ear to ear. “Aw, man,” he whispers to me. “We just having fun. Gonna shake him up a little.”

  “What about me?”

  Cuddles says nothing more. He looks at the others.

  Maxie pushes Metro to the ground. The alley carries his voice. “You wanted to suck him, huh? Well, suck him.”

  Cuddles unzips my pants.

  “I didn’t touch you, Lonny. I never touched you.”

  “You lying, subway man,” says Cuddles.

  “Ask him,” says Metro. “Did I touch you, Lonny? Ever? You can tell them. Please, Lonny. I never touched you.”

  All eyes are on me now, and even in the dark I can see the glimmer of Metro’s eyes looking up from the ground. From the sound of his voice I can tell he’s about to cry. Suddenly, the click of knives: Lou’s and Maxie’s. Metro faces away from them and can’t see. I see them, but I say nothing. Cuddles twists my arm further. The pain grabs my voice. His blade against my skin. “I told you I’d get back at you, shithead.”

  Pain all in me. Metro jerks forward. “Ouch,” he says feeling a blade, too. Then Metro’s mouth in my pants. Lips cold on my cock. Then warmer. Smoother. Teeth, saliva, gums. I can’t say nothing, even if I want to.

  It don’t take me long. I open my eyes. Metro’s head is still pumping at my limp cock, but his pants are down in the back, and Lou is fucking him in the ass. Lou gets up quickly, zips up his pants. Maxie moves to take his place. I move out of Metro’s mouth, open in a frown this time or a cry. Maxie wets his cock and sticks it in. Cuddles pumps Metro’s face where I was. Metro gags. Cuddles slaps his head back to his cock, and I hear another slap. This one against Metro’s ass, and Lou and Maxie slap his ass while Maxie fucks him. Lou has the knife at Metro’s back and hips. He traces the shape of his body with the blade. Metro winces. “Keep still, you bastard. Keep still,” Lou says.

  I try to make it to the street, but Cuddles yanks me back. He hands me a knife and I hold it, looking meaner than I am. You ain’t never had a chance, I’m thinking and realizing it’s for Metro, not for me. Cuddles finishes and pulls out of Metro’s dripping mouth. His fist lands against Metro’s jaw, slamming it shut. I hear the crack of bone and a weak cry. The next thing I know, Maxie, still pumping Metro’s ass and slapping the cheeks with the blade broadside, draws blood, and once he finishes he shoots the blade in, then gets up quick, pulling the knife after him. Lou’s hand follows. Then a flash of metal and fists.

  “Shit, man. Hold it,” I yell. “I thought we was only gonna fuck him. What the hell you guys doing?”

  “Fucking him good,” says Lou.

  “Stop. For God’s sake, stop.”

  But they don’t stop.

  “Oh my God. Oh my fucking God.” It’s all I can say, damn it. And I hear my name.

  “Lonny?”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Lonny?” Metro’s voice is weak, his words slurring on wet red leaves. “Help me.”

  Lou and Maxie jump together. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

  “Yeah,” says Cuddles. He kicks Metro back to the ground where his arms and legs spread like the gray limbs of a tree.

  “Oh my fucking God.” I keep saying it, crying it. But it’s too late. The guys scatter into the street like roaches surprised by light. Running.

  They’re running. I look back at Metro and he rolls toward me. His still eyes cut me like a blade. “Never touched you,” the eyes say. “Never touched you.”

  I hold my breath until my ears start to pound. I hold my head. I run, stop, run again. The knife drops somewhere. I run again. Don’t know where the fuck I’m going, just getting the hell out of there. Don’t see anybody on the street and not for the rest of the night. Not Lou, not Cuddles. Not anybody else at all.

  October is red, man. Mean and red. Nobody came back there but me, see. And Metro was gone, by then. Somebody had raked the leaves into a clean pile. I ran through it and scattered the leaves again. Once you get leaves and shit sticking all on you, you can never get them off. And when you start hearing the scratchy, hurt voices coming from them, the leaves I mean, not patches of skin or a body cut with knives, or a palm of broken fingers, you’ll start talking back, like I do. You stop hanging out at the meat-packing warehouses on West 12th or walking the loading platform mushy with animal fat and slime where your sneaks slip—not Adidas, but cheaper ones just as good.

  When I found Cuddles and told him about the talking red leaves, he said to get the fuck away from him, stop coming around if I was gonna talk crazy and dance out of fear like a punk. But I wasn’t dancing. My feet was trying to hold steady on the loading platform, but my sneaks wouldn’t let me. You ever hear the scratchy voices of leaves? You ever try to hold steady on slippery ground?

  They had the body marked out in chalk on the ground behind some blue sawhorses that said “Police Line—Do Not Cross.” It was right where we left him. I saw it glowing. “Here’s Metro,” I told myself. Here’s anybody, even me. A chalk outline and nothing inside. A fat white line of head, arms, body, and legs. A body curled into a heap to hold itself. Like a leaf or a dead bird, something dropped out of the sky or from a guy’s stretched-out hand. It was amazing. But it was also the figure of somebody. A man. Any man. So I walked around the outline, seeing it from different angles. How funny to see something that fixed, protected from people or from falling leaves or from the slimy drippings from sides of beef. The outline wasn’t Metro. It was somebody like me. Once I saw the chalk figure I couldn’t get enough of it. I kept coming back and walking slower and slower around it, measuring how far it was from the police barricade and from where I stood looking down at it, sprawled where we left him. But I figured out a way to keep looking at it and not step in the garbage scattered nearby. You know, leaves, rags, torn newspapers, bits of dog hair, blood maybe, and lots more leaves. I went three steps this way and three steps that way, keeping the chalk outline in sight and missing the garbage a
nd dogshit. One-two-three, one-two-three. Up-two-three, down-two-three. When I saw one of the neighbors watching from a window, I cut out of there. By then I knew what I had to do.

  I came back that night. The chalk shape was glowing like crushed jewels under the streetlights. I took off my shirt and pants and didn’t even feel cold. I crossed the barricade and sat inside the chalk. The glow was on me now. It was me. I lay down in the shape of the dead man, fitting my head, arms, and legs in place. I was warm all over.

  The police came and got me up. Their voices were soft and mine was soft. They pulled a white jacket over me like some old lady’s shawl. I shrugged a little to get it off, but my arms wouldn’t move. When I looked for my hands, I couldn’t find them. The police didn’t ask many questions, and I didn’t say nothing the whole time. At the precinct, a doctor talked to me real quiet-like and said the leaves would go away forever if I told him everything that happened to the dead man and to me. But they didn’t call him Metro, they called him some other name with an accent in it. A name I didn’t even know. I asked the doctor again about the red leaves. He promised they would go away. “What about the blood?” I asked. “Will I step in the blood?”

  “Not if you come clean,” he said.

  “What about my sneaks?” I asked him. “Will they get dirty?

  DONNA ALLEGRA

  [1953–]

  POET, SHORT STORY WRITER, AND DANCER DONNA ALLEGRA was born in Brooklyn in 1953. She studied dramatic literature, theater, and history at both Bennington College and New York University. Allegra is the author of a collection of short fiction, Witness to the League of Blond Hip Hop Dancers (2000), which was nominated for the 2001 Violet Quill Award by Inside/Out Books. Her poems and stories have been published in numerous journals and magazines, such as Essence, Sinister Wisdom, and Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, as well as in several anthologies, among them Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology and Best Lesbian Erotica. She has won the Pat Parker Memorial Poetry Prize and was runner-up for the Audre Lorde Poetry Prize in 1994. The author’s dance, music, theater, book, and film reviews have appeared in Colorlife!, The Lesbian Review of Books, Sojourner, and several other publications. Allegra credits Jemima, one of the first African American lesbian writing groups, as an especially vital influence on her literary career.

  As with much of her work, Allegra’s short story “Dance of the Cranes” focuses on women coming together culturally—in this instance, in African dance—to confront and overcome a myriad of social oppressions, including the sexism associated with all-male environments and the homophobia sometimes encountered in communities of color.

  Dance of the Cranes

  [1997]

  “It’s my mother’s favorite dance,” had become Lenjen’s automatic answer. She didn’t fidget while the security guard eyed her, his arms stitched across his chest. She was an old hand at facing the scowls that accompanied, “What kind of name is that? What’s it mean?”

  The guard continued to block the entrance, frowning over the new names kids had these days, baptisms he could barely pronounce, much less spell. Without waiting for further interrogation, Lenjen explained, “It comes from a West African dance.”

  Finally he hmphed, dismissing her while giving her body another squint from the corners of his eyes, then sat back to his copy of The Watchtower. She took that as permission to enter the court yard and join her mother in the dance class beyond the gate. It was only then that she saw Cayenne, waving her to hurry.

  “You didn’t have to start a war with him, honey.”

  “I didn’t start it, Mama. I’m always patient when I tell people my name, but he was acting stupid,” Lamban protested, then cringed. She hated sounding like a kid.

  “The brother was probably just showing an interest in you,” her mother said, as if explaining simple addition, but for Lenjen, edgy from the delay, the math didn’t add up.

  She’d spent a large part of her childhood traveling to West African classes where Cayenne’s passion for Senegambian dance from the Old Mali Empire could be satisfied. As a baby, Lenjen would lay quietly in her bunting, absorbed by the hypnotic drum rhythms. The growing girl ran and played with other small children whose mothers had also brought them to the studio. Lenjen would watch with a smoldering interest when the adults danced their way across the studio floor, their bodies elastic with extravagant motions. She stared as if snake-charmed into the circle these women formed at the end of class when everyone had a chance to do a solo within the volcanic ring of dancers.

  Eventually she joined the children’s line, and the fire for West African dance caught her in its grip, first as a playful tickling at her toes, then consuming her in its wake.

  At 13, Lenjen stood tall, awkward, elegant in her long limbs fitted for the dance of the cranes—a bird known more for wading in the water than paddling its wings through the sky. She never understood the full extent of her name until the Wednesday evening Senegalese dance class when Sulaiman, fiddling with one of the cowrie shells braided into a crown across his forehead, explained that the movements for lenjen mimicked a crane in a marsh. This made sense. She’d already concluded that African people liked animals, particularly birds, to shape their dances.

  Lenjen had turned 14 six months after she and Cayenne moved from Newark to Harlem, primarily because it’d then be easier for the two of them to revel in African dance. Mother and child duly went everywhere in Harlem, Brooklyn, and Greenwich Village where Cayenne could find a class.

  Lenjen was by then a solid folkloric dancer, though not always obedient to styles that American Blacks took up as the traditional African way. “Some of those supposed-to-be-traditions are dead for a reason, Ma,” Lenjen said. More often than not, she would refuse to wear a lapa in dance class, aggravating Cayenne.

  Cayenne had specially bought fabric made in Senegal from one of the merchants who sold jewelry wares, lapa outfits, and American-style dresses sewn in African fabrics. The woman had even shown Lenjen how to wrap the fabric around her waist for a lapa, a staple in any African woman’s wardrobe. “Like this,” the market woman demonstrated with the two edges of cloth she pulled first across her backside, then around the front of her waist to tie a knot, “so the extra cloth won’t get in your way when you kick up those long legs.”

  Cayenne noted the sweatpants and T-shirt Lenjen placed into a Capezio dance bag and fumed over how, once again, Lenjen completely disregarded yet another womanly way.

  But Lenjen knew she didn’t want to end up as some man’s woman. Somehow she couldn’t convince her mother that she wasn’t like the sisters so eager to have babies. Even so, it pained her to go against the grain of right and proper African womanhood—that is, in the ways that the grown-ups she was most familiar with would have right and proper African womanhood be.

  To soothe her mother’s irritation, Lenjen tried telling Cayenne, “Ma, I hate it when the drummers hoot and holler like their brains fell out when I dance.”

  Cayenne rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “They’re paying you a compliment, honey. You should be glad the men like you.” Lenjen sucked her teeth with ingratitude.

  “I know I can shake a tail feather, and I’m fast on my feet, but I’m showing off for the other dancers, and the fellas just make it into something stupid.” Lenjen stopped short of saying how eagerly she looked to the grown women for approval. She longed for their encouraging attention as the dancing circle at the end of class settled down from a boiling caldron to a simmering stew.

  “You won’t feel that way much longer, missy. I’ll bet my bottom dollar on that.” Cayenne spoke with finality, certain she knew the last word to this story.

  “I’m not like that, Mommy.” She hated the pleading tone trailing her words, but Cayenne had already left the room.

  Lenjen wanted her mother to understand how she drank from the current of energy that flowed from the dancing women, that they were the ones who enriched her blood. She wasn’t putting her passion on the floor for some mating game
. But Cayenne’s mind was set, and Lenjen didn’t want to whine after her to explain. When Cayenne returned with her own dance outfit in hand, mother and daughter let the matter rest so they wouldn’t be late to class. They kept the peace on the common ground they held around the dance and music from the 14th-century Mali empire and other regions of the Senegambia in West Africa.

  “You have your bus money?” Cayenne prompted.

  Lenjen sent her mother a scolding look.

  “Don’t give me those eyes. We don’t want to be late,” Cayenne exaggerated her defensiveness.

  “Hurry up, Ma. I’m waiting, and you’re the one who’s not ready.” “All right, old lady. Fourteen going on 40,” Cayenne grumbled as the bus lumbered into their stop.

  They always arrived before the rest of the Sunday flock who regularly gathered at the armory in Brooklyn or at the Sounds in Motion studio on Tuesdays on 125th Street. On Saturdays the community of dancers converged on a recreation center in Newark, and this evening they’d join the dance congregation at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

  As the bus rumbled down Amsterdam Avenue, its buildings maintaining a ruined majesty, Lenjen relaxed into a reverie. She missed people when they didn’t come to class; even women she didn’t particularly like pained her with their absence. When a woman with the slightly sad and dreamy face had started showing up to Wednesday night classes, Lenjen pegged her as a newcomer. This woman too had a name taken from a West African dance. She’d heard a woman with three gold teeth call out in surprise, “Lamban!”

  Lenjen had always favored lamban, the social celebration dance for rites of passage—birth, puberty, marriage—but now that dance took on new meaning for her. She felt pulled toward the woman, allured by the way Lamban carried herself and would be a part of the group but somehow kept to the sidelines.