by Tayari Jones
“Daddy,” said DeShaun, “you’re not supposed to say bad words.”
Her little voice broke her parents’ intensity. They both looked across the table at the girls as if they had forgotten that they even had children.
Tasha wanted to thump DeShaun right in the middle of her shiny little forehead. She never could just shut up and listen. Tasha would have gone ahead and crunched on her crackers and slurped her milk like a regular person if she had known DeShaun was going to butt into the conversation, demonstrating beyond a doubt that little pitchers have big ears.
“Girls,” said Mama, noticing their empty plates, “go to your rooms and finish your homework.”
“We already finished,” Tasha said, although she knew the situation was hopeless.
“Go and look it over. I’ll be up in a minute to see if you know all your spelling words.”
Tasha gave her sister a look-what-you-did look and walked out of the room. As soon as they had crossed the threshold, Daddy started talking again. Tasha paused, just out of sight, and listened.
“Think about it, Delores,” he said. “Charles Manson, Son of Sam, all of that stuff. White folks.”
“I’ve known some black folks to do some ugly things,” said Mama.
“I ain’t saying that niggers are harmless. I know a black man will cut you in a minute on a Saturday night over his money or his woman, something like that.”
“Yeah, a real good reason like that.”
“Delores, I am not saying that it’s all right to stab somebody for two dollars. I’m saying that we gotta have a reason for killing someone. White folks just kill for the hell of it.”
“Hold on, Charles,” Mama said, holding up her hand. “Tasha, I know you are not in that hallway.”
Now how did she know that? Tasha had not made a single sound. She even breathed half as fast as she regularly did.
“We weren’t doing anything,” Tasha protested, heading to her room. She wanted to hear more about the white killers. What were their names again? Daddy said them easily, like he was saying the name of somebody famous like Michael Jackson or El Debarge. Tasha wished she could recall the names, but asking Daddy to repeat himself was entirely out of the question. She thumped DeShaun behind the ear as they headed down the dark hallway. She’d just have to make do with the information she had.
At recess, the fifth-graders had formed a kind of ad hoc discussion group. They clustered under shady trees sitting cross-legged on the pine needles. A breeze, cold but heavy with baking bread, blew over from the Sunbeam factory and made their stomachs growl and reminded them that lunchtime was only thirty minutes away.
Tasha was sitting between Monica and Forsythia. The two of them were best friends, but sometimes they were nice to Tasha. As a matter of fact, she had been with the two of them all day. She was dying to tell them what Daddy had said, but she waited. Some information was too juicy to be wasted on mere small talk. The words were inside her and trying to get out. She adjusted her weight from side to side as if she had to go to the bathroom.
“Stop wiggling,” Monica said, too loud, and everyone laughed.
“I was just getting comfortable,” Tasha mumbled. “And I was getting ready to say something.”
“Well say it then.” Monica had a way of making everything sound like a invitation to fight.
“I was just fixing to say that it has to be somebody white that’s doing it.”
Some of the kids nodded. “That’s what my mama says too,” said Roderick Palmer.
Tasha, encouraged, went on. “Because black people don’t do stuff like that.”
“Black folks do too kill people. My uncle …”
Tasha tried to sound like Daddy: patient, authoritative, but a little annoyed. “I’m not talking about people killing people over money or their woman.”
Jashante broke in: “I’d cut somebody for my lady.” He looked meaningfully at Tasha and turned a piece of candy over in his mouth.
Monica touched Tasha with that pointy elbow of hers. She must have done the same thing on the other side because Forsythia let out a low giggle.
“Well, who do we know that’s white?” Roderick addressed the group.
“Miss Russell,” volunteered someone behind Tasha.
Miss Russell was the art teacher who came to their class on Tuesdays. Her hair, the color of acorns, was so long she could sit on it.
“Miss Russell is a lady, fool,” Jashante said. “Ladies don’t be killing people.”
“A lady can’t kill a man; they not big enough, but she could get a little ol’ third-grader.”
“Even when I was just a third-grader, I wouldn’t let no white lady come and kill me.”
Tasha imagined that he wouldn’t.
The conversation deteriorated into fifth-grade macho, with the boys illustrating in competing detail how they would handle a homicidal white woman.
Tasha was bored. The only white woman she could think of was skinny Miss Russell with her paint and clay, and any idiot could see that she wasn’t about to try and kill anyone. As a matter of fact, Tasha thought that she was really nice and even liked her. She felt guilty listening to the boys discuss hypothetical acts of violence toward the art teacher, even if it was in hypothetical self-defense. The recess bell finally rang and the sound of tennis shoes rustling pine needles drowned out Roderick’s insistence on the ferocity of his karate chop.
Tasha walked about a pace and a half behind her companions.
“What you waiting for?” Monica asked.
“I’m not waiting,” Tasha said, hoping to sound casual.
“Her boyfriend,” Forsythia said. “I saw you looking at Jashante the whole time.”
Tasha stared at the pretty girl incredulously. It was unspoken but accepted that Monica would be the one to initiate all teasing or ridicule. This was unprecedented; Tasha was unprepared.
“I was not looking at that boy.” She shoved her hands into her fur muff.
“And he was looking right back at her.”
“No he wasn’t,” Monica said. “Jashante wasn’t studying Tasha.”
Now Tasha was unsure if Monica was coming to her defense (also unprecedented) or if she was implying that Tasha wasn’t cute enough for a boy to look at, even one like Jashante. Because of this double possibility, Tasha was unsure how to respond.
Monica continued. “Tasha wouldn’t talk to somebody like that anyway. He been kept back so many times that even he don’t know what grade he supposed to be in. And”—she lowered her voice—“he lives in the projects.”
“So,” Forsythia said. “She was still looking at him. You saw it too; that’s why you elbowed me.”
“Looking isn’t the same as talking.”
“She was smiling too.”
“I was just trying to be nice,” Tasha said.
Forsythia said, “My mama says you just can’t be nice to some people.”
Now what did that mean? There were some people that kids weren’t nice to, like Octavia Fuller, who they called the Watusi; but Tasha figured that everyone could be nice to her if they felt like it. Maybe there were some people that you just couldn’t be kind to, but she was pretty sure that she hadn’t met any of them.
DeShaun wasn’t scared anymore. She could eat an entire plate of spaghetti while the newscaster talked about the Missing and Murdered Children. Tasha watched her sucking the noodles into her figure-eight mouth; the end of each pasta string slapped her gently under her nose.
“You’re not supposed to eat like that,” Tasha told her. “You can choke like that.”
“For real?”
“And when you choke, your lips turn blue. You’ll be trying to call somebody to help you but you won’t even have enough air to talk with—”
“Tasha, cut that out,” Daddy said.
As soon as Daddy started paying attention, DeShaun started acting like she was really worried about choking.
“Do kids really choke on their spaghetti and die, Daddy?�
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Daddy gave Tasha a long look that said that he was mad. She would have given DeShaun a hard pinch under the table if she thought she could get away with it. But there was nothing that she could do with Mama and Daddy both sitting right there.
At night, in their canopy beds, Tasha said to her sister, “I wonder what’s happening to all those boys.” There was no noise from DeShaun’s side of the room. “Someone, or some thing, is hunting them.”
“Some thing?” DeShaun said. “What do you mean by that?”
Tasha smiled in the gentle orange glow of the night-light. “I mean that whatever is killing those kids might not be a person. It could be a creature or something.”
“What kind of creature?”
“Oh, any kind of creature. There are a lot of different kinds. Especially around here. The only thing keeping the creature from getting us is Daddy.”
“For real?”
“Think about it,” Tasha said knowingly. “When somebody gets killed, they show just the mama crying on the TV. Those kids that got snatched, not one single one of them has a daddy.”
“For real?”
“Um-hum. That’s why Daddy came back. Remember he said ‘Nobody will hurt you as long as I’m around’? That’s what he was talking about. I’m just telling you what I know.”
The girls lay uneasily in the darkness and almost quiet. The story she had told DeShaun was only half real, like chocolate Easter candy with just air in the middle. Little snuffly sounds made their way across the room.
“What’s the matter?” Tasha said like she didn’t know.
“Scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“The creature.”
Tasha felt cruel like that time she had poured salt on a snail and it had dissolved into a shell full of blood.
“That creature is not going to mess with you. Remember I said that it only bothers kids without dads.”
“But Daddy left us that time. When they were separated.”
DeShaun was getting smarter.
“Well,” Tasha said, “if the creature tries to get you, all you have to do is say a magic word.”
“What is it?”
Tasha started to make something up, run some syllables together, but she changed her mind. “I don’t know yet.”
“You could tell me. I won’t tell anybody.” DeShaun’s voice collapsed like a house made out of Popsicle sticks falling in on itself.
“You can come over here if you want to,” Tasha said, scooting against the wall to make space in her narrow bed.
October was dry and cool; the pine needles, brittle and sharp, blew across the playground, tumbling end over end, erasing footprints. Tasha leaned carefully against a dull silver pole and watched the boys run races. They crouched like the runners in the Olympics two years past. One knee on the ground, between their hands, the other leg stretched behind. Each boy looked straight ahead at the line scuffed in the red dirt with the toe of a sneaker. The winner would be the one who crossed this line first.
Monica said, “On your marks, get set, GO!” and the boys pushed themselves forward and ran. They beat the air with their tight fists and turned their faces upward as they struggled to get to the line, where Forsythia would declare the winner. Jashante was in front. He moved more freely than the other boys because no one forced him to wear a cumbersome jacket. His arms pumped powerfully in a thin pullover sweater as they kept time with his legs.
Tasha watched him propelling himself forward, sweating though coatless; she wondered with envy what it felt like to be fast and to be a boy.
“Let’s do relay races,” Monica suggested.
“Mixed teams,” Forsythia added. “Girls and boys.”
The two of them had on blue jeans and tennis shoes too. They had planned this. Tasha was wearing a navy blue jumper and her good coat. Why did Ayana have to go to private school? She and Tasha had been friends ever since kindergarten. Tasha looked down. She couldn’t run in the shoes she had on, nice leather ones with side buckles. And mixed teams? What boy would want to run with her? Roderick had already made his way over to Forsythia. Tasha saw him pull on one of her long straightened braids.
She turned her back to the kids who were milling about trying to find partners. She saw Rodney Green, the weirdest kid in her class, maybe in the whole school even. He was the only person not watching the races. Some kids pretended not to watch, but Tasha knew they monitored the proceedings covertly. But Rodney was locked inside his own head. He sat alone on the cool red dirt with his back against the school building, pouring Alexander the Grapes into his mouth. Rodney had even fewer friends than Tasha, but he was so weird that he didn’t even care. Maybe that was better.
She turned in response to a tap on her shoulder and saw Jashante standing there. “You want to be my partner, Fancy Girl?” he asked, reminding her of their walkway encounter.
He smiled, showing a chipped front tooth. He reached for her hand as if she had already agreed. “Come on.”
“Oooh,” Monica sang out omnisciently from somewhere. “Tasha and Jashante sitting in a tree—”
Tasha pulled her hand away. Jashante’s sweat-and-grass smell was suddenly suffocating and she wanted to be away from him. “Somebody already asked me.”
“Who?” The cute smile was gone.
Tasha couldn’t answer.
“Ain’t nobody ask you,” he said, “ugly as you is.” He put both of his hands on her shoulders, amplifying his green odor.
“You better get back from me,” she said, hitting at him.
Jashante held her fists tightly and pulled her close to his chest. The buttons on his sweater pressed her face. “Why you don’t want to be my partner? You think you too good to be my partner; that’s what it is.”
Tasha was pulling away from him with all of her strength and suddenly, he released her, causing her to fall backward in the red dirt. There was a rip as the pink thread underneath her arms gave way. She was aware of people laughing at her. She looked behind her and saw Roderick laughing so hard that fat tears sat on his pretty-as-a-girl lashes. Jashante was cracking up too. “You not too good now,” he said.
Tasha got up and pushed her chest into Jashante’s. The pressure of his body mashed the zipper on her shirt painfully into the space between her small breasts. While their faces were close she said, “I hope you die. I hope the man snatches you and …” She searched her mind for the word she had heard on the news. “I hope you get asphyxiated and when they find you you are going to be …” What was the other word? “Decomposed.”
Jashante stepped back. His smile was gone and he looked at her with something that might have been hurt feelings. Then the sad expression vanished and he pushed her down easily with a swift thrust of his arms. “Forget you, then.”
“What’d she say?” Tasha heard the students ask. “What happened?” The laughter was over. Tasha heard a few uneasy titters like the last drops of water trickling from the faucet as they put together the ugly words she had said with what they had seen on the news.
“She put a curse on him!” Roderick spat out.
The entire fifth grade was shocked into silence until Monica spoke. “I never did like her anyway,” she said.
“Me either,” agreed Forsythia. “We were just trying to be nice to her, but my mama says that you just can’t be nice to some people.”
Tasha wished that she had gone ahead and run the relay race with Jashante like she wanted to in the first place. Being teased about going with a project boy wouldn’t be as bad as being the one that nobody liked. Even Rodney Green had turned his attention away from his candy to stare at her in openmouthed horror, his tongue and teeth stained blue with candy. Tasha caught sight of the red stain of Georgia clay on the sleeve of her pretty coat. She twisted her arm around for a better look. Hot tears came. She should have just told him that she didn’t want to run a relay race in her good coat. She sat crying and sweating on the concrete when the bell rang calling everyone back into th
e building.
Tasha was the last one into the cafeteria. She stood at the end of the line behind two girls that she didn’t know very well. Their names were Tracie and Demetria, but she had never jumped rope with them or played jacks.
Tracie said, “That’s the one.”
“Her?” Demetria said. “I can’t believe Shante was trying to talk to her in the first place.”
Project girls were the only ones who shortened Jashante’s name like that.
“He wasn’t trying to talk to her. He was just asking her to run with him in the race.”
“And then she said that to him?”
Tracie nodded, one hand on her hip.
“See, that’s why I don’t fool with siditty girls.”
“If I was Shante I would’ve slapped her right there.”
Tasha endured the abuse silently. She didn’t know what to say to these girls who moved their necks when they spoke and chewed gum brazenly, even popping it, although it was against the rules to bring gum to school.
“Who she think she is, anyway?”
“I didn’t mean it,” Tasha managed to say.
Demetria spun around. “Excuse you.”
Tracie followed suit, swiveling her neck with each syllable. “It is rude to get into other people’s conversations.”
Tasha took her tray and looked for a place to sit. She would have liked to have sat alone, but all of the tables were occupied. There was no choice but to share. She surveyed the scene. Monica was sitting by Jashante and was even eating French fries from his plate. He was sitting where she normally sat. Where to sit? Tracie and Demetria had an empty seat at the table where they were but that was out of the question. Rodney Green had a table all to himself. His blue book satchel occupied one of the empty chairs like a companion. She thought about sitting with him, but even he hated her now.
“Miss Baxter, please find a seat,” Mr. Harrell ordered.
Little bubbles of laughter popped all over the room.
“You can sit with me.”
