by Tayari Jones
“I know that boy. He’s in my class.”
“Shh … Don’t talk. Breathe. Get your air.”
Daddy stood over her. Picked her up, carried her toward the back of the house. He was worried. His face near hers. “Breathe,” he told her. “Daddy’s here.”
Tasha put her hand up to intercept his kiss. “You said he wasn’t going to live to be eighteen. I heard you.”
“I didn’t mean— That’s the same boy?” Daddy was looking at the TV. “But he looks like a little fella.”
Mama put her arms around Tasha and she didn’t fight her. “Mama, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“Shh, baby.”
Monica Kaufman said, “The missing boy is thirteen years old.”
When Tasha woke up the next morning there was a sweet moment of nothingness, but knowledge returned like a yoyo snapping itself back hard into the palm of her hand. Jashante was missing. Somebody snatched him. Then the next thought, that Tasha herself had brought it upon him with her hateful words. I hope the man snatches you. Asphyxiated. Decomposed. And she had meant it when she said it. Mad about ruining her coat, stinging from the laughter of her classmates, she had meant it. And Daddy had cursed him too. That boy’ll be lucky to see the other side of eighteen. Jashante wouldn’t get to see the other side of fifth grade. And that was the saddest thought of all.
Recess was postponed indefinitely. No one announced it or made it official. The bell had just rung and nobody moved. Tasha was uneasy in the stillness. She searched her classmates’ faces. Did they remember that she was responsible? All of the kids wore weird expressions, like their eyes had been reversed and they were all staring inside their own heads.
Tasha’s father joined a search party. They all wore white T-shirts trimmed in blue and headed out in the morning dark.
“Where are they going?” Tasha wanted to know.
“They are looking out in the woods,” Mama said.
“Why would those kids be in the woods?” DeShaun asked.
Mama didn’t say anything and Tasha already knew that they were not looking for anyone alive. She opened her mouth to say this when her mother gave her a look and said, “Button it.”
The three of them lay in Mama’s big bed waiting for Daddy to come back. DeShaun complained of a sore throat and fell asleep soon after swallowing a big spoonful of purple medicine. When DeShaun started breathing in quiet snores, Mama spoke.
“How are you feeling, Tasha?”
“I’m okay. My throat’s not sore.”
Mama smoothed Tasha’s hair with her soft palm. “I mean how are you feeling on the inside? That boy from your class, Jashante?”
Mama said his name with uncertainty, like she wasn’t sure how to pronounce it.
“He was my friend,” Tasha said.
“Baby, sometimes things happen and we don’t know why—”
But Tasha knew why. Her need to confess was as fundamental as her need for air. “I know why.”
“You can’t know.”
“Yes, I do,” Tasha said. “It’s not a growing pain.”
“Tell me, then,” Mama said.
“It’s me,” she said. “He pushed me down and I got mad and said that I hoped the man gets him, and now he’s gone.”
It felt good to tell someone, especially Mama, who had the power to punish and the authority to absolve. “I promise to be more careful with my words,” Tasha said solemnly, looking up at her mother expecting to see anger or even revulsion.
“Oh, sweetie,” Mama said. “You don’t think that you— You don’t think that it’s your fault, do you?”
“It is,” Tasha insisted. Her contrition was turning to anger.
“Tasha, I understand that you feel bad about what you said to your friend, but you didn’t kill—” She paused. “You didn’t make this happen. A very sick person is responsible for this. It has nothing to do with you. Do you understand me?”
Tasha pulled fuzz from the blanket, but didn’t speak.
“Listen,” Mama said. “How many times have you wished for something to happen and it didn’t?”
Just last week, she had wished for a pretty pink envelope with a magenta heart.
Mama waited a few seconds before she spoke again. “See, baby, things just happen in spite of our wishes.”
“Well, what about prayers?” Tasha asked.
“Prayers are different.”
But Tasha didn’t think so. After all, what were prayers but wishes addressed directly to God?
Mama suggested that they say a prayer for Jashante. Tasha bowed her head and said “Amen” when Mama stopped talking; but she knew it wasn’t going to work.
Daddy returned that evening different. Dinner was cooling in bowls on the table as the girls and their mother sat waiting for him to come downstairs. They could hear the shower running long after the bowls stopped steaming. He came and sat at his place.
“Let us pray,” he said.
Tasha looked at her mother. They prayed over Sunday and holiday dinners, but ordinary meals like this one usually went unblessed. Instead of the usual grace thanking God for the food we receive for the nourishment of our bodies, Daddy slowly recited The Lord’s Prayer. Tasha listened carefully. Forgive us our trespasses. She moved her lips silently around the words. After they soberly said “Amen,” he said, “Don’t turn that TV on tonight.”
“Where did you go?” Tasha asked quietly. This was as close as she could get to her real question: Did you see my friend? Was he dead?
Daddy spoke to his hands, which were situated in the center of his empty plate. “The group I was with went way north, all the way where white people stay. All of us were packed in a bus like little kids going on a field trip. When we got out there, some of them were ready to help us search. Their wives—churches, or whoever—had fixed sack lunches for us, but I didn’t eat none of it.” He looked at Mama. “I am not prejudiced. Delores, you know that.”
Mama didn’t speak.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.
Tasha carefully set her glass down on the table without a click. She wanted to hear his confession.
“Does a man have to be prejudiced to see what is right in front of his face?”
Mama was still quiet.
“I’m asking,” Daddy said, staring at her.
“All I’m saying is that you don’t know.” She spoke the words slowly, pronouncing each letter.
Yes, you can know; Tasha felt her pulse accelerate. It knocked hard against her temples. Let Daddy talk.
“Well, let me tell you what I do know. I know that a black preschool blew up just six months ago.”
“What happened at Bowen Homes was an accident. The boiler exploded.”
“An accident like Birmingham,” Daddy spat. “Nothing has changed. When they found that little light-skinned boy, the one that was just down here visiting from Ohio, all I could think about was Emmett Till.”
“Who?” DeShaun asked.
Mama looked over at the girls. Before she could send them away, Daddy answered the question.
“Emmett Till was a little brother in Mississippi; white folks killed him for no reason. Hung him and—”
“Charles. Hush now.”
“No,” Daddy said. “Don’t hush me like I’m a child. I won’t hush. That’s the problem. We been hushed up too long. These children don’t know nothing about lynching. They don’t know about white folks burning niggers alive. That’s why we had to go out today—This whole thing is because black kids don’t have sense enough to be scared of a strange white man.”
He was shouting. His voice, losing its richness, was ragged and mean. He punctuated his speech with a fist brought down hard on the glass table, upsetting a blue tumbler of water and ice.
DeShaun’s eyes were filling up. She thought the rage and the hate were directed at her. Tasha touched her sister’s leg under the table. Daddy should know better. Shaun was too little to understand that he was cu
rsing something way older than the girls. Something he had seen. And Mama had seen it too.
“Enough,” Mama said, with one eye on DeShaun. “Alright, Charles?” She spoke quietly. “Enough.”
The air in the kitchen was stretched tight like a rubber band. Daddy set both of his elbows on the table and covered each eye with the heel of a hand. Suddenly, Tasha wanted him to hold her on his lap, kiss her forehead, and say that everything was all right. But he didn’t even look at her. He stared into the cave his hands made like somebody stuck in the middle of a game of peekaboo. Mama sent the girls to their rooms and Daddy didn’t move.
Tasha stood in the darkened hallway. Waiting. There was more. Daddy’s face was weighted in a way that Tasha almost recognized.
“Tasha,” DeShaun whispered.
She had almost forgotten that her little sister was with her. “Shush,” she said gently.
DeShaun moved so close that Tasha could smell the Kool-Aid on her sister’s breath as they watched their parents.
“Delores,” Daddy said, in a small voice.
“Come here,” Mama said, without moving.
Daddy got up slowly, taking careful steps like his feet hurt and stopped in front of Mama’s chair. She smoothed her skirt across her lap and he slowly sank, putting each knee delicately on the yellow linoleum. Their faces were level.
“Sh …” Mama said. She put her hands on the sides of his face. Her nails were clean and white-tipped against his skin.
“Don’t shush me,” he pleaded. “I need to talk.”
He rested his head in her lap like he was horribly tired. She rubbed the story out of his head in gentle circles.
“Out there where we went, is like where I grew up. It’s a trip. Twenty-five miles outside of Atlanta and bam, back in Alabama.” He made a sound that was something like a laugh. “White folks looking at you half mean, half scared. The ones who came out to help us look were decent; I’ll admit that. But most of them didn’t lift a finger. Just stayed in their houses.
“They paired us up. I got put with this white guy named John or Jim. I don’t remember. We didn’t say anything to each other, which was probably for the best. I can’t think of anything that he could have said that wouldn’t have made me want to hit him. I think that he could tell that’s how I felt. Sometimes those decent white folks can understand that we can’t forgive them. Especially not at a time like this.”
In the hall, Tasha wondered about herself, Daddy, and even Monica and Forsythia. Could they be forgiven? Maybe not at a time like this, but ever, at all?
“So me and Jim were in the woods, turning over bunches of leaves with our poles. It was cool and dry out but the leaves underneath were wet and gummed up. Decaying. Nasty. The whole time I was wishing I was home. I even wanted to hurt my feet on those damn jacks Tasha’s always leaving on the floor for me to step on. But I had to keep looking. You know? I watch the TV and I see parents at their own kids’ funerals. So I have to go on looking. I have to help. How can I say I can’t stand to look under a pile of soggy leaves when I know whatever I find can only be so bad because my girls are at home sleep?”
Was it Jashante? Tasha could only picture him like he was in the photo on the news. She imagined him fuzzy, out of focus, and asphyxiated in a garbage bag.
“Shh …” said Mama. “I know. You don’t have to talk about it.” She rocked him like a grumpy baby.
“Mama, let him say it,” Tasha whispered. Only words can undo words. Kids say that to take something back you have to say it backward. Like a filmstrip run the wrong way. Die you hope I. Eighteen of side other. People some to nice be can’t you.
“That’s what I’m talking about. How can I say that I can’t stand to talk about it? And how can you say that you can’t stand to hear it when other people are living it?”
Tasha couldn’t see her father’s face. She heard the strange muffled voice, and for a moment she didn’t believe that it was him. She needed to see his mouth make the words.
“I was turning over the leaves.” Daddy went on. “Shamed, you know, and at the same time thanking God when there was nothing but worms and dirt out there. Then we came across something foul in a hefty bag.”
Mama rubbed his neck until the words came out.
“The bag was about the right size and there was something dead in there, that much I knew. Only one thing smells like that. I wanted to let it alone or call one of the group leaders to come and handle it. But that white boy was looking at me; I could feel it. I took my pole and poked the bag open.
“It was nothing but a dead dog.”
“Was that all you found?” Mama’s voice was steady like when she said Hold still before pulling off a Band-Aid stuck to a wound.
What was out there to see? Pretty envelopes. Red dirt, pink satin. Shiny dimes and M&Ms. Magenta heart, torn open.
“Me?” Daddy said. “Yeah. That’s all I saw. But the other group, they came across that little girl.”
“Lord,” said Mama. “Where?”
“That’s the thing,” Daddy said. “It was right around here. I didn’t realize it at first. Word got around that they found a body, a skeleton really, around a lake.”
“Around here?” Mama said. Her hand stopped its soothing circles.
“I saw a policeman. A brother. He said they found her at Niskey Lake. I said ‘Where the hell is that?’ and he told me. I said, ‘Man, that’s not far from where I stay. I never heard of no lake off of Cascade Road.’ He said, ‘Somebody did.’”
They were silent then. The heater hummed on as her father knelt with his head in her mother’s lap. Tasha pulled DeShaun’s hand and they moved quietly into the black dark of their bedroom.
Tasha pressed her face against her window and saw the dark night through burglar bars. She looked across the lawn; it was too dark to see the trees, naked without their leaves, but she knew they were there. Jashante was out there too, but the night was huge. She saw one star. Tasha closed her eyes but didn’t wish.
“Tasha,” DeShaun said sleepily, “what’s the magic word?”
“Huh?” Tasha said, distracted.
“Remember you said that there was a magic word to keep you safe.”
“Oh, that magic word,” Tasha said, as if there were only one. Words could be magic, but not in the abracadabra way that DeShaun believed. The magic that came from lips could be as cruel as children and as erratic as a rubber ball ricocheting off concrete.
“Shaun,” Tasha said, “there’s no such thing as a magic word.”
“Not at all?”
“Not like you mean.”
“Oh,” DeShaun said, with almost tangible disappointment.
“Well,” Tasha told her, “there is power. But—” She stopped, wanting to comfort her sister with more than flawed, uncontrollable words.
“But what?” DeShaun pressed.
“It’s not a word; it’s a charm.”
Tasha retrieved Jashante’s air freshener from her pillowcase. She pressed it to her lips and was overcome by its green scent as she handed it to her little sister. “Put this under your pillow and you’ll be alright.”
In autumn, oak trees drop acorns on Atlanta lawns and cover them with a quilt of decaying leaves. LaTasha Renee Baxter held her little sister’s hand after school as they walked across their lawn, forcing the acorns under their feet into the red earth. The air stank of leaves burning in barrels, but Tasha recalled the clean outdoor smell of pine.
PART 2
The Direction Opposite of Home
Morning begins the moment Father swings his cracked feet over the side of the bed and stands. With the grace of the blind, he dresses in the dark of his and Mother’s bedroom. You hear a crisp sound like pages turning as he pulls his starched coveralls around himself and fastens the zipper.
You are tense between your Snoopy sheets as he heads to the kitchen. When he pauses before your room, his body blocks the yellow light that arches underneath your door. Is he standing there recalling s
ome criticism he forgot to deliver yesterday? You imagine him making a mental note to berate you tonight, over dinner. He continues down the hallway as you study the ceiling over your bed, wondering who arranged the tiny stalagmites in such an intricate pattern, and wondering why your father hates you.
Father’s small A.M. radio belches out WAOK. The shrieking teakettle cannot muffle Ron Sailor’s funereal report from the newsroom. One of your classmates, Jashante Hamilton, has been missing for two weeks. You do not miss Jashante; he had terrorized you for most of your elementary-school career. But you do not want to know that he has been found murdered, for whoever could kill Jashante, could destroy you effortlessly.
As you chant nursery rhymes to distract yourself from the news report, Father stacks his breakfast dishes in the sink and shuts off the radio. Father rattles the back burglar door, assuring himself that it is as locked now as it was last night when he turned the key and checked it twice. Exiting through the front door, he turns the double dead bolt behind him with a responsible clunk. You close your eyes and stop humming. He’s gone to work. You can dream again.
At daybreak, Mother whisks into your room in a long satin robe, waking you with a contrived coloratura, “Good morning, Rodney.” Ignoring her salutation, you do not stir. “Wake up,” she sings, shaking you with hands that smell faintly of glue. You emit a grunting surrender to discourage her from tickling you or covering your face with cold-creamed kisses. Satisfied that you are awake, she leaves you alone. Her blue robe swishes with inappropriate elegance as she moves to Sister’s room.
As you pull on your favorite pair of Toughskins, you notice the morning air is not heavy with too-crispy bacon and scorched eggs. A long assessing breath detects rubber cement. You take another guilty inhalation, savoring the smell in the same way that you enjoy damp ditto sheets held briefly to your face at school. But intoxicating or not, this is no breakfast smell. You make your way to the kitchen, picking up the odor of paint as well.
