Playing Hard To Get

by Grace Octavia

  “Really?” Troy asked.

  “This is just stupid,” Myrtle said. “So, you support this? You all want her to be your president? Troy?”

  “Why not?” someone said. “Let’s try it. I like her. She’s a good person. I move that we vote on the First Lady being the new president.”

  “I second!” someone said quickly.

  “What?” Myrtle looked to all of the faces in the group that she thought supported her, but they looked away—even Elizabeth.

  “Great! So all those in favor of the First Lady being our new president, raise your hands,” Kiona said and without counting, it was clear the vote was in Troy’s favor.

  “I can’t have this,” Myrtle said. “I can’t let you all make this crazy decision. She’s not fit. And as president I can’t allow you to make this mistake. I won’t and I am sure the pastor will back me on this.”

  “You’re out of the group,” Troy’s heart said and her lips vocalized it before her brain could stop her. Then she was on her feet and walking toward Myrtle. “You’re out of the Virtuous Women, so there’s no need for you to worry about me being president.”

  “You can’t kick me out,” Myrtle said, laughing nervously.

  “I just did,” Troy said. “What you’re doing, the way you’re behaving, simply isn’t a part of the image we support in this organization—the image you taught me about.” Troy stood before Myrtle. “So, as the new president, I have to ask you, in a Christian way, of course, to leave.”

  “You can’t do this,” Myrtle said. “Pastor Hall won’t have it.”

  “My husband will support me,” Troy said confidently. “I know that.”

  Myrtle stammered across the floor and out the door like a weary two-year-old trudging out of the sandbox without her shovel. No one followed. The attention of excited eyes and lips curled up at the edges was focused on Troy.

  NOW THAT WAS A COMEBACK a text read.

  YEAH, SHE DID THAT!

  4

  She must have been unprepared/

  to accept freedom as a process/

  a precious thing/

  that needs to be nurtured.

  —Pamela Sneed

  The Freedom Project—this was plainly written in thick black ink on a sign, which looked like a stretched-out piece of loose-leaf paper. It was literally tacked above the new doorway of an old building at the middle of a slender street a few blocks south of the Apollo Theatre.

  Stepping out of a gypsy cab she had to get at the foot of the Harlem River Bridge after the yellow and black she’d rode through midtown refused to go any farther, Tamia looked from the words above the doorway to those on the card she was holding to confirm that this was the place. She stepped back and looked again, this time at the entire building and then back at the card. THE FREEDOM PROJECT.

  While she hadn’t really thought of what the place might look like, somehow the haphazard sign and dated brick exterior seemed like less than they should be. The name made it sound like it would be tall and slender like an arrow headed toward heaven, demanding freedom, but it was actually shorter and wider than the other buildings on the street. Sunk between two brownstones, it looked like a pudgy child standing with its parents.

  A thick brown-skinned girl with a short, fire-red Afro walked out of the door and held it open.

  “You going inside, sister?” she asked and Tamia looked to see that the girl, who might’ve been fifteen or sixteen years old, was wearing a too-tight black T-shirt that read DAUGHTER OF A FIELD SLAVE in bold white letters.

  “Yes,” Tamia said, reading the words a second and then third time before the girl passed off the open door to her.

  “It’s hot, right?” the girl said, smiling as the sets of wooden hoops in her ears clacked together.

  “What?”

  “My T-shirt.” The girl held out the bottom of her shirt. “I want people to know who I am. No joke. Right?”

  “Sure. It’s no joke.” Tamia smiled, but really she was thinking the shirt was maybe two sizes too small and the words just too…much. Distasteful. Everybody knew her ancestors were slaves; why did she need to remind them as she walked down the street?

  “Peace, my sister,” the girl said brightly, walking to the curb to cross the street.

  “Goodbye,” Tamia responded.

  Inside, Tamia found what was set up as a front room or maybe a gift shop, empty of everyone, but full of everything possible. A recording of a woman singing in a different language above African drums provided a soundtrack for a dizzying mishmash of African face masks and statues, books with red, black, and green spines, dashikis, koffis, a vat of shea butter, and racks of incense and vials of Muslim oils. Toward the back, Tamia saw that the girl outside must’ve gotten her T-shirt inside, because tacked to a wall was black fabric reading in white letters SON OF A FIELD SLAVE, DAUGHTER OF A HOUSE SLAVE, WARNING: EDUCATED BLACK MAN, and 1/10 OF THE TALENTED. There was even one with a picture of Malcolm X standing at a window and one of two black men Tamia didn’t know were Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising gloved Black-Power fists on the podium of the 1968 Olympics. A sign revealed that the shirts were $10 apiece and Tamia thought the whole bunch of them were cheaper than her purse. If only midtown fashion was so simple. And either everyone inside of the Freedom Project was wearing Malik’s cologne or wherever he was in the building, it was just that strong that Tamia could smell it where she was standing. The scent of frankincense and myrrh was so heavy, Tamia now thought it smelled more like a piece of wood burning in a stove.

  “Can I help you, sister?” Tamia heard and she turned from the shirts to a woman who’d appeared behind a makeshift counter that was really a jewelry case. While she might’ve been lighter than Troy, her hair was just as red as the girl’s outside, but it was locked and long; the edges brushed against her elbows. Tamia never cared for natural hair; to her it always looked dirty, wild, and just unkempt. But she was in awe of how long black women’s hair grew when it was locked. No matter what she did, hers simply wouldn’t go past her shoulders without an additional Indian track, but she’d seen locked hair dangling at ankles and tied up in massive buns.

  “I’m looking for Richard Holder.”

  “Richard Holder? Ain’t no Richard Holder here…” The woman looked vacant, as if she hadn’t heard the name before and maybe Tamia was speaking another language. She adjusted the fitted red and yellow African dress she was wearing.

  “He’s the director—the…” Tamia looked down at the card and then at the same time the woman said, “Malik?!

  “Oh, you mean Brother Malik. Why didn’t you say that? He’s upstairs teaching.”

  “Well, his name is,” Tamia started as the woman, who was maybe ten or twelve years her senior, stepped from behind the counter, presenting shoeless feet, “Richard—”

  “I’m Sister Kali,” she said, shooing the card away and extending her arms.

  Tamia thought she was trying to shake her hand, so she put her hand out, but Kali’s arms went wider and pulled Tamia into her.

  “I’m…Tamia…Tamia Dinkins,” she said awkwardly with her arms at her sides in Kali’s tight embrace. She looked at Kali’s ear and beneath it was a tattoo of a cross with a loop at the top. Later, Tamia would notice that a golden earring of the same symbol was in her nose.

  “Welcome, Sister Tamia. I can take you to him.”

  By the time Kali managed to lead Tamia to where Malik was finishing teaching a capoeira class to a room full of bony, brown-skinned boys, Tamia was carrying a cup of organic carrot and ginseng juice she originally had turned down and was wearing a tiny bracelet of crimson and cream beads Kali told her came from Ghana. Her hand held tight as they walked through the people-filled hallways of the building, Tamia thought of how familiar Kali seemed with her. They’d met less than fifteen minutes ago, but she’d called Tamia “sister” at least a dozen times and smiled so pointedly that Tamia saw in her eyes a reflection of herself that looked like an old friend, a neighbor. Her ener
gy was intrusive and annoying, almost like an old lady’s, but in her voice Tamia heard kindness, a well-meaning she almost never heard beyond the 3Ts.

  “Look at the king,” Kali said. They were standing in the doorway of Malik’s classroom. In the middle of a circle of topless boys, who were wearing white martial arts trousers, was Malik, wielding a long oak stick so slowly, it seemed as if he was dancing with it. He crouched down to the floor and flipped it over his shoulders, jabbing it into the air so forcefully, Tamia could see every muscle in his arm puckering out in submission to the movement. As he came up slowly, like moving pictures stapled together, the sweat puddled at his brown throat ran down his chest. And while Tamia looked most dignified in her dignity-filled suit, her thoughts were far from it. Her open mouth and hardened nipples told her that she shared the thoughts that every woman who ever stood in that doorway thought of the capoeira teacher.

  The excitement Tamia was ignoring for professional purposes was thwarted when two students who’d been excused to carry a set of books they’d been reading before class to the library in the basement pushed past her and Kali. She smiled at them before hearing a bang that pulled her attention back to the center of the room.

  Malik had clacked his stick against the floor and everyone was looking back at the doorway. Quickly, the boys stopped and turned back around.

  “Excuse us, queens,” they said to Tamia and Kali before bowing.

  “You’re excused,” Kali said and they backed away carefully.

  

  “Who made you come here?” Malik asked after offering Tamia a seat in his office. While the room seemed much bigger on the outside, most of the wall space was taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Even the tiny windowsill was burdened with makeshift shelves and books. Sitting down, Tamia thought there was no way Malik could’ve read each of the titles—she was wrong.

  “What was that in there—what you were teaching those boys?” she asked, unconsciously ignoring his question as he slid on a black, sleeveless T-shirt bearing the image of Marcus Garvey.

  Malik didn’t hear her question either. He sat in his seat and continued his thought. “—because I know a woman like you probably hasn’t been to Harlem since Obama was elected.”

  “I want to call it karate, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t—tai chi maybe? Tae kwon do?”

  “—maybe not even before that…maybe never.”

  Suddenly, face to face, it was as if the two strangers could finally hear each other, and at the same time they answered above each other:

  “Capoeira. It’s an Afro-Brazilian art form—just people having conversations with their bodies.”

  “Why would you think someone had to force me to come here? You’re my client.”

  Realizing she was getting nowhere quickly, Tamia put her purse on the chair beside her and smiled politely.

  “Maybe we should start again,” she said. “I’m Tamia Dinkins.”

  “I’m guilty,” was all Malik replied.

  “We’ve already established that, and now we can move forward with trying to gather more information for your hearing. Now, as I told you, the more I know about this place—and you—the better.” She pulled a legal pad from her bag.

  “What about what I need to know about you?”

  “About me?” Tamia laughed a bit. Never once had a client asked her anything about herself. On their first meeting, most everything they needed to know about her was posted on the wall behind her desk. “Oh, you mean my history? I went to NYU Law. The firm recruited me before graduation.” Married to this announcement was Tamia’s pride at her achievements. A top law school. A top firm. It put her at the head of the very elite in America. It impressed most everyone when they heard it, and that expectation was clear in her tone.

  “Excuse me, sister, but I don’t care about any of that,” Malik said. “What…” He paused and looked along the spines of the books on his desk—Molefi Asante, Cheikh Diop, Clarke, Sertima, hooks. “What do you know about the Afrocentric community?”

  “The what?” Tamia asked, looking up from her pad.

  “The Afrocentric community.”

  “You mean like black people? The black community?”

  “No, the Afrocentric community.”

  “I’m not sure where you’re going,” Tamia said. “I’m black. I’ve been black all of my life, so of course I know about African American people.”

  “Okay,” Malik said, “let me start somewhere else—have you read The Souls of Black Folks?”

  “Yeah, of course.” Tamia nodded, happy she had found somewhere to connect with Malik. She couldn’t understand why his tone was so indicting, almost smug in the way Charleston’s voice was when he realized someone he knew hadn’t gone to a tier-one law school or any one of her girlfriends spotted a fake Gucci. “W. E. B. DuBois—the Talented Tenth.”

  “You would remember that.” Malik laughed heartily. “What about The Mis-Education of the Negro?”

  “Carter G. Woodson,” Tamia shot back, still trying to figure out what he meant by his comment about the Talented Tenth.

  “Ashay Ashay.” Malik smiled and Tamia was sure it was the first time she’d seen his teeth. Nice.

  “Okay, look, I don’t understand the purpose of your questions. What do a bunch of books I read at Howard have to do with your case?”

  “Sister, what I do…what we do here is about the Afrocentric community. About helping African people displaced in America find some semblance of freedom, understand who they were, who they are, what they could be, and who wants to stop that from happening,” he said with as much pride in his voice as Tamia had when she listed her accomplishment. “And if you don’t understand that, if you don’t believe in that, if you’re just another one of these blind niggas walking around on the plantation, thinking slavery is over, I don’t think you can help me. See, I’m not interested in participating in some exercise in the American Injustice system, so they can just lock my African ass up. If that’s what those devils want to do, they’ll do it. It don’t matter what ‘case’ we present. The devils run the system, the judge, the lawyers, the verdict. To them, a nigga selling five keys of crack is the same as a brother educating fifty former niggas—that’s fifty years. But what they don’t know is that I’m going to keep doing what I do out here in there.”

  “So, you don’t believe in the criminal justice system?”

  “Well, it’s called the criminal justice system—not the people’s justice system. And no, I don’t. I don’t see how any African could.”

  “You’re one of those militant brothers,” Tamia said.

  “Militant involves the military. I’m a warrior,” Malik responded. “I don’t take orders. I deliver results. Every African man has to do his own part if we’re going to get back to Akebulan.”

  Tamia didn’t know what Akebulan meant and at that point, she didn’t care. Malik’s logic was smothering her thoughts. How could he virtually sign up to go to prison? He was correct. Black people, some of the best, went to prison every day for a number of reasons that had nothing to do with them. But most of those people simply had poor representation. The verdict was a reflection of their lack of control of their image. A guilty person with a lawyer who was in control wasn’t guilty anymore. She’d seen it. She’d done it.

  “So…” Tamia tried to put words into the silent space in the conversation. Once again, he’d shared nothing about the actual case. “You want to go to prison?”

  “What?” Malik shook his head and leaned over the desk to hand Tamia a piece of paper he’d written on. There was an address.

  “What’s this?”

  “The Royal Ankh,” he said. “I’ll be there tonight. Come out and see what we do. There’ll be a lot of sisters from the community there.”

  “Oh, I don’t do that—I’m not a—”

  “It’s not like that.” Malik laughed and again there were his teeth. Later that night Tamia would think of how much she liked hearing his laugh and
seeing his teeth. It would be great to find ways to make that happen more often. “Just come.”

  “I can’t. I promised a friend I’d meet her at this party…and…” Tamia had been invited to countless events by countless clients and turned them down countless times. But somehow this one seemed different. Saying no made her uneasy. The way Malik had written the address on the sheet of paper—for her—wasn’t like any other offer from a client to an attorney, hoping to get an edge, to build a relationship. He didn’t seem like he was trying to get anything.

  “Well, you have the address. Use it if you can.”

  5

  There are no good girls gone wrong, just bad girls found out.

  —Mae West

  Venus Jenkins-Hottentoten-Hoverslagen-Jackson, a black woman with the most ridiculous last name of any woman in the city on account of two failed marriages to Swedish bankers and one mediocre, yet standing, marriage to a Knicks starting player, was scanning a crowd of beautiful people for the most beautiful victim her eye could spy. Only, to Venus Jenkins-Hottentoten-Hoverslagen-Jackson this beautiful somebody was not a victim. In her mind, they were all friends, who unfortunately fell beneath her social knife from time to time. While the Southern society snob fancied herself a socialite with friends abounding everywhere, the only thing she was truly good at abounding was husbands.

  Staring through a crowd of these beautiful friends and possible future husbands (if the Knicks thing didn’t work out) at the annual cover party for ESPN magazine’s body issue in Gramercy Park, Venus spotted a familiar face she hadn’t seen in a while.

  “Look what the cat dragged in here!” Venus happily exclaimed as if she was greeting a best friend. People around her looked on as she sat down her glass of wine and pushed past a few couples to wrap her arms around the new find.

  “Oh, Venus,” Tasha cheerfully countered in the middle of the tight, overperfumed embrace. “My favorite frenemy.”