Ellie turned then, and for a moment we just stared at each other. The air had left me. I felt ragged suddenly—hollow. I wanted to scream into the yellow light. Yet—it held me . . . up and together.
“He . . . ,” Ellie said again, looking directly at me. “He really did love this light.”
Carlton
SEPTEMBER. THE LEAVES ARE STARTING TO COME DOWN. THE sky—the sky seems like it’s just this much closer to the earth. It’s cool today but still warm enough for me not to wear a jacket. This—this is the kind of day a guy can fall in love with. If I could marry a day, it would be a day in September—the kind of day that makes you feel kind of blue and kind of crazy all at once. But you can’t marry a day. My mother married a night. My father. Carlton Sr. Black man. And me, born a color somewhere between my blue-eyed white mother and dark-skinned dad. What if the color white was a day? And what if my mother had married a day instead of a night? Then I’d be all white. I wouldn’t be walking through this September day, choking up at falling leaves. Would I be alone?
Someone dies and you hold on to everything you can. I think it’s easier if you know they’re gonna die—somebody old who you loved—like a grandmother or a sweet old uncle. You watch them die, you expect their death, and while death is coming, you’re getting stories from them and touching their skin one last time and smiling and telling them how much you love them. But when someone gets killed—the way my homeboy Miah got killed—shot down by cops in a case of mistaken identity—sounds clichéd even to say it. Wish it was a cliché. Wish it was a dream that I could wake up from, shake out of my head and say, Now where did that come from. No. No dream. When someone gets killed, when that someone is this guy you’ve spent just about every day with since you were this high—well, then you don’t see it coming. And all you have to hold on to is what you remember—and the day. The light of it. The weather. You in it. The way everything about it smells and feels and looks. Then you go to bed at night feeling like you lived it, really lived it. Like you walked through the world that day—whole. When somebody dies real quick and unexpectedly like Miah did, you spend every single day, after the news hits you, trying to live. And maybe sometimes you’re living with some big secrets over your head or some big regrets in your heart. But the good part is you’re walking and breathing and waving hello. And as the days go by and turn into weeks and months and years, you realize how much each day you get through matters.
I take a deep breath and keep walking. Still day. Windless day. Day with so much color to it, my head starts to ache. But then the color softens. It feels as though the whole sky is trying to wrap itself around me. I stop, lean against a mailbox and take small breaths. And it feels like the air is trying to breathe with me. Calm Carlton, the air feels like it’s saying. Why you gotta be so high-strung anyway. But it’s not the air—it’s Miah. I hear his voice, feel him grinning. Then I’m grinning too. Headache gone quickly as it came. Why you gotta be so high-strung.
“Miss you, man,” I whisper.
A little boy passing by me stops.
“You talking to me?”
He’s brown like Miah. Clean-cut. Neater than any little boy should be.
I shake my head and he shrugs and keeps on moving.
You ain’t all gone, are you, Miah?
And the wind starts blowing, soft and high as a song.
At the corner of South Oxford and Fulton, a car swerves to miss hitting a small dog. I hear the dog’s owner scream and watch her curse the driver out. Then he’s cursing back and the cars behind him are honking and the day doesn’t seem as beautiful as it did a minute ago.
I keep walking. When I get to Vanderbilt and Fulton, I stop and think about grabbing a cup of coffee. At a red light, some scrub leans out of the passenger side of a beatdown Honda and says Hey, Girl-boy. He winks at me. I hear the other guys in the car laugh.
“You weren’t calling me that last night,” I say. And wink back at him. The guys in the back start howling and the scrub gets so mad, he makes a move to get out of the car, but the light changes and his friend speeds off.
I keep walking. Girl-boy. Fag. Batty-boy. The list goes on. I’ve heard it all before. I remember me and Miah were walking this one time and some guy he knew from somewhere pulled him to the side and whispered, loud enough for me to hear, “What you hanging with the sissies for, Miah-man?”
Miah had his ball in his hand—the way he usually did. He chucked it to me and grinned.
“Take some inventory, man,” Miah said to the guy. “Everything in the world’s just a little bit deeper than you seeing it.”
The guy walked off without saying anything else. I know he didn’t have a clue to what Miah was talking about, but maybe he walked on thinking about it some. I don’t know.
Did me and Miah ever talk about this? About it. About who I really am—you know, way down deep beneath the me that’s part white, part black, a ballplayer, a singer, a pretty-boy?
Nah. We didn’t. We left that stuff alone. We talked about ball and our folks and more ball. And when Miah started falling in love with Ellie, we talked about that—about what it meant to be a black guy who was loving a white girl. And once we got on that subject, it was like—well, it was like that’s all there was, because he and I could spend hours just talking about people’s reactions and his own fears and what it felt like to just be with Ellie. He loved that girl. I’d sit talking with him and then I’d come home to my parents sitting on the couch, watching TV—sometimes my dad would have his arm around my mom’s shoulders. And I’d think, Man, I can’t even hardly imagine it, but these two old people were, like, our age one time and they got some of those same funky stares and comments Miah and Ellie got.
So with all that going on, where was there a place to say, You know, Miah, I don’t think I’m the kind of guy that likes girls.
But now that Miah’s gone, I find myself having all kinds of conversations with him. Telling him when I first started feeling this way, how lonely I’ve been all these years, how all the stuff I don’t say and don’t do goes into ballplaying and that’s probably why I’m on the starting five and one of the best ballplayers in the history of Brooklyn Technical High School. Stupid name for a school that’s supposed to be one of the best in all of New York City. Decent ball team, though, and some smart kids running through it.
I miss Miah so much, it hurts—real deep some days and other days it’s just a hollowness. You’ll get close to someone again like that, my mom said. It was one of those rare moments when we sat down at the table together—her drinking coffee, me eating a piece of leftover pie. But even though I sat at the kitchen table and nodded as she talked, on and on, trying to make me feel less of the sadness, I knew she was wrong—would always be wrong about that.
You won’t always be the beautiful lonely boy you are, Carlton.
Beautiful-lonely—that’s what my mother calls me. She knows even though we never spoke about it. She watches me watching people. Watches me walk and sing and talk. Comes to my games and watches me watching other ballplayers. She knows. Looks at me sideways and smiles a little bit when my father says, “When you gonna bring a girl up in this house for us to look at?”
“That’s Carlton’s business, isn’t it?” my mother says. Because she knows. And she doesn’t want my father to know before I’m ready to tell. Before I’m a hundred percent sure myself. About this. About that. About everything.
I wish I could love a girl the way Miah loved Ellie, but I just don’t think about them that way—girls. I just don’t. I try to force myself to—try to imagine my lips on a girl’s, my arms around her waist, my hands making designs on her back. But the thoughts drip down into nothing. I feel . . . nothing. I am . . . nothing.
Jeremiah
IN A CLASSROOM IN A SCHOOL AROUND THE CORNER FROM where I grew up, a teacher is explaining death to seven-year-olds. Over the summer, the class hamster has died. A girl in the class has lost a beloved grandmother and another, an uncle. One kid remembers m
e and tells the class again how this guy he knows was shot by cops.
And he wasn’t even doing nothing, the kid says. Just running home from his girlfriend’s house.
Death, the teacher says. Death is like sleep.
Maybe there are twenty-five kids in the classroom—they’re all colors because this neighborhood is changing fast. Even in the few months since I’ve died, it’s changed. More white people moving in. Old black folks who’ve been here forever moving back down south or back to the Caribbean. The walls in this classroom are the same, though—painted pale blue. A poster on the wall—a kitten hanging from a bar—and underneath the kitten, the words HANG IN THERE. Another poster with the alphabet written in cursive. I remember being a kid and walking into this room, looking around wide-eyed, holding tight to my mama’s hand. The room still smells like chalk. The chairs have names scratched into them. The desks are new, though, particle board and some kind of wood veneer that adds a new smell to the classroom, an unfamiliar one.
A little boy raises his hand. He could be me. Same dark skin. Same close haircut, shaped up on the sides and across his forehead. He’s wearing a very white T-shirt and new-looking blue pants. His face is scrubbed and shining with oil. Today’s the first day of school. Second grade. Twenty-something second-graders and all of them clean and excited and hungry for whatever is coming.
If death is like sleeping, the little boy says—his name is William, William Carlos—named, yes, for the poet. If death is like sleeping, then how come dead people don’t just wake up?
I stare into his teacher’s eyes. A flicker across them—she is stumped—but she recovers quickly.
It’s a deeper sleep, she says.
Twenty-something pairs of eyes look back at her. Twenty-something children who won’t sleep well tonight.
William Carlos looks at her. The others look at her, their mouths slightly open.
And then death comes, I want to say to them, and you hang on. And for a long time you don’t even know you’re dead and you’re walking around in some strange place, staggering, asking everybody you meet—Where am I? Where am I? Then you see your long-dead grandma . . . and you know.
I want to let go—want to be whole on the other side of living. But life has a river running through it and we’re all of us—dead and otherwise—on it together, linked up to one another. I want to stop looking. But I can’t. I just can’t. So I get up off that poor teacher’s desk. Leave her sitting there with all those eyes on her.
When I was a kid, I learned this poem by Robert Frost and one of the lines in it was something about miles to go before I sleep. . . . Everybody seemed to have some different interpretation for that line. I don’t remember the whole poem anymore, but I understand that line. If death is like sleeping, then I got a long way to go before I’m completely gone.
And that’s what I’m thinking as I move out into the world. I turn and take one more look at William Carlos—his clear brown skin, his wide dark eyes. Future like a big empty trick-or-treat bag at the beginning of Halloween night.
Kennedy
IT TAKES ME AN HOUR AND FIFTEEN MINUTES TO GET HERE from Brownsville. Three trains, then a bit of a hike. But I’ve never been absent and I’ve never been late. My moms says, Each day you go to that school is a gift, Kennedy. She’s never been up here. Says she don’t have the right clothes. I didn’t ask God to make me smart and a good ballplayer. He just did. And then lots of schools was saying, “Come here.” “No, come here!” And then I was at Percy. But my heart’s in Brownsville—with my moms and my boys and the Albany Houses. No matter where I go, I’m always gonna come back there. Ain’t gonna be one of those kids that be leaving where they came from behind and making believe they came from a better place. I know people look at where I live and think all kinds of negative about it. They see people with a lot of kids and guys playing their music loud and smoking spliffs and that kind of stuff. They see us with our hair braided and our pants hanging low and they just think we all bad and whatever. My pops used to get mad when people would say I was “gifted.” He’d say, “Nah—me and his mama the ones who got the gift—God sent us Kennedy.” He used to think that was the funniest thing for some reason. And now some days I think about him saying that and I start grinning. The way my pops saw it, I was just like everybody else in these buildings—only thing is I got a real good game and somebody told me I was smart a long time ago and I believed it and started acting like it on paper—you know—doing my homework and stuff like that. Pulled down good grades. Teachers be surprised to see me with my hair braided, talking junk with my boys, then getting perfect marks on my spelling tests. My pops worked at a dry cleaner—pressing shirts and stuff. He didn’t finish high school and he always wanted to go back or at least get a GED or something. It never happened, though. He used to say, “If somebody would go to each of the peeps up in these houses and say, ‘You’re something real special,’ or something like that, no telling how many brothers and sisters would be jumping out of these doorways into college and probably even graduate school.” I was a little kid then and didn’t really believe him. But I do now. I don’t know about being special or gifted or whatnot. I know I’m lucky, that’s for sure. Ain’t nothing special about luck—especially if you someone who doesn’t have any.
Tuesday morning, I sat on the Percy stairs counting faces—white, white, white, white, white, Asian, Asian, white, black—Yo, what’s up! (slap hands)—white, white, white, mixed kid—smiled at me, he’s cool—white, white. . . . It went like that. When I got tired of counting faces, I took out some math homework and started looking it over, trying to wipe out the thoughts eating up my head. It was cool out—almost the end of September—one of those kinda days where you see a lot of people on blades and bicycles and walking around holding hands. The stairs go across the whole front of the school and even though the headmaster’s always sending us notes about how we shouldn’t be sitting on them because it makes the school look bad, everybody sits on them and nobody gets in trouble for it.
They hired this new math teacher that’s crazy, but I think he’s cool. He started writing all kinds of stuff on the board and I was like, Yo, slow down and explain something, ’cause I’m lost as hot sauce. Then the class laughed and he laughed, but he did slow down.
I sat there trying to figure out some math stuff when Ellie walked up and sat down next to me.
This okay, she said.
Free country, I said back. I don’t really be talking to many peeps at Percy. I keep mostly to myself. Even though I play ball, I don’t really be hanging with the ballplayers much either. When Miah was still living, me and him wasn’t tight, but it wasn’t nothing negative in it. He was different from me. I knew his dad was this famous film producer. And his moms was a writer. It was one of those whisper, whisper things you hear around, so I wasn’t too sure until I looked up Roselind on the Inter-net. And there was a whole lot of stuff—even some old pictures of Miah at the Academy Awards. I was like, Yo, this ain’t your around the way, Brother! And then after he died, all the stuff just started flying. I guess the cops thought it was just gonna be like, Oops, we made a mistake, but people went ballistic! Both those cops went to jail, and that’s something you don’t be seeing in New York—white cops going to jail for shooting a black kid—what?! Uh-uh. Most usually happens is they get desk duty until the hoopla dies down and then it’s all back to how it was. The day those cops got sentenced, I swear, everybody in New York that was over the age of ten stood somewhere with their mouths hanging open. Then a whole lotta people started cheering.
Ellie was Miah’s girl. They was real tight—he’d walk her to class. You’d see him in the hallway, carrying her books—sometimes she’d be carrying his books ’cause she believes in stuff like that, I guess—but still, Miah’d be looking like, Yeah! She’s mine. It wasn’t nothing snobby in it. They were in love and you could just tell it. I ain’t gonna judge him. I mean, I wouldn’t date no white girls, but it’s just ’cause—well, for one t
hing, black girls got it going on, and me and my girl’s tight. That interracial thing—you see it in movies and read it in books—everybody’s doing that thing nowadays. But back in the day, brothers would get hung or get a serious beatdown for even looking at a white girl, so while I don’t mean no disrespect to Miah, I’m not trying to forget the history. But I said What’s up? to Ellie and she said What’s going on? to me and we just sat there like that for a few, watching people go into the school.
“Pretty out,” Ellie said.
“Yeah,” I said back. “It’s all right.”
I took a look at Ellie’s legs. Most of the girls wore their skirts real short, but hers was only kinda short and she had nice legs to go with it, even if they was mad pale.
“You’re a junior this year?” Ellie asked me.
“Nah, I’m outta here. This my last year.”
“You thinking about college and stuff?” Ellie looked at me. I’d never really sat this close to her. The closest I was to her was at Miah’s funeral—and then I was a few rows back. I remember she wasn’t crying. She sat up real straight and I remember thinking, If somebody blinks too hard, that girl’s gonna shatter like a bottle. I tried to keep my eyes kinda open after that. Not ’cause I thought she was gonna break, really—I kept them open because I thought if I blinked too hard, I was gonna start crying and never be able to stop.
But now, sitting up close to Ellie, I could see that her hair wasn’t just dark brown. It had some other kinds of brown in it. And when she looked at me, her eyes had some other colors in them too.
“Gonna go where the good ball teams are. That’s my plan. The schools that got the good ball teams and a lotta money to shake at me. Got a couple I’m thinking about but I ain’t said yes to anybody yet.”
Ellie smiled.
“God, you sound just like Miah when you say—”
Behind You Page 3
