by Tayari Jones
“We got some toast left.” She puts two slices on a plate.
You do not reach for it.
“What? Ain’t nothing wrong with that toast.” She’s looking at your loafers again.
You cry. Hard, shoulder-shaking sobs bring her from behind the serving bar. She kneels before you. Her uniform smells of fried food and fabric softener.
“What’s wrong, baby?” She lifts your chin and dabs your face with a clean corner of apron. “What you crying for? You sick? You need to call your mama?”
You shake your head vigorously from side to side.
“It’s alright,” she says. “We don’t have to call her.” She hugs you, and you allow yourself to sink into the space between her arms. This is a guilty pleasure you have not enjoyed since before Sister was born. The cafeteria lady’s body is as firm and comfortable as a good mattress. She rubs your hair in wide spirals. “Shh.” Her kiss on the top of your head is as gentle as music.
Finally, you struggle in her embrace. You should tell her that you will be late for class. Embarrassment tangles your words like twine and you cannot speak.
“Better?” she asks, as if she has just adjusted the brakes on your bicycle.
You nod, glad to avoid words.
“Hold on,” she says, disappearing momentarily behind a metal door. She returns and presses a banana into your hand. “You can’t go all day without something on your stomach.”
At recess you sit under the sliding board and carefully pull back the yellow peel. The banana inside is the clean color of eggshells and soft as a kiss. You hug your knees to warm yourself after you eat. The slanted metal above you blocks the wind. You pretend to be in a cozy attic room and fall asleep.
You are shaken awake by a seventh-grader, Lumumba Jones. His sister is in your class.
“You alright?” he asks.
You nod.
“He’s okay,” Lumumba says to Delvis Watson, another older boy. “You in the fifth, right?”
Another nod.
“Man, you must have stayed up late last night to be sleep all this time out here on the cold ground.” He pulls you up. “You got dirt all over your pants.”
Delvis starts to laugh. “His name need to be Black Van Winkle.”
“Leave him alone,” Lumumba says; he turns his head to one side. “You sure you okay? You want us to take you to the nurse?”
“Where’s my class?” you croak.
“They just getting out of lunch. If you hurry up, you might get to class before they notice you cut.”
You thank him and run toward the building. You hear Lumumba say to Delvis, “Little man sho do run flickted.”
You are able to fall in with the rest of your class as they leave the cafeteria. You file into the classroom and slide into your desk. “Mr. Green,” says Mr. Harrell. “Please step outside.”
What does he want? Is he angry that you missed lunch? You stand before his desk, waiting for him to rise and follow you beyond the trailer door.
“You have a question, Mr. Green?”
You shake your head no and leave the trailer alone.
Father stands on the covered walkway. His filthy coveralls stink of oil and anger.
“Sir?” You draw your cold hands up into the sleeves of your sweater.
He looks at you for a long appraising moment and then glances around as if searching for someplace to spit. “Virginia Lewis called me on my job today.”
Your heart falls hard in your stomach like a missed pop fly tumbling past your glove to the ground.
“I don’t know what your problem is.” Father shakes his head in what seems to be genuine bewilderment.
“Did you hear one word I said to you this morning?” The outdoor air coaxes a thin transparent trickle from his nostril. “Do you think I take the time to tell you things just because I want to exercise my face?”
“No sir.” But you have no idea why he says what he does.
“Virginia told me you been hanging with the wrong crowd. Coming in her store and stealing candy.” He pauses.
“I didn’t,” you begin.
“Don’t lie to me, boy. I didn’t come way out here to listen to you lie. I came out here for you to listen.” He takes a breath. “Then I call up to the school and they tell me you ain’t where you supposed to be. I come running up here and then you seem to have found your way back.” His voice rises in the damp air.
“But—”
“You can hang out with your friends when you supposed to be in school. You can hang out with the crowd and steal from Virginia. But let me tell you this, the crowd ain’t going to be there for you when it matters. When you have to make something of yourself, you stand alone. You hear me?” His stained index finger grazes your nose.
“Yes sir.” But you have never been part of a crowd. It is even difficult for you to recall being in the presence of more than one kid at a time. “Can I—”
“What I just tell you?” Father says. “I didn’t come here to hear you lie. I came here to show you that I am your father and you do what I say do. Not what your friends want you to do.”
Now you notice the belt rolled tight and stashed in his palm.
“We going to go in that classroom and I am going to beat your behind. And you’ll see that the crowd can’t do nothing to help you.”
You are required to stand before Mr. Harrell’s desk, which he has cleared to accommodate the impending ritual of humiliation. The room is silent as death when you lean over the oak desk and grip its opposite edge with your quivering fingers. You are not the first child to be humiliated before his peers. Twice already this year, mothers on lunch breaks have snatched unsuspecting youngsters from their chairs, flogged them briefly, apologized to Mr. Harrell for disrupting math lessons, and dashed off to work again while the children sobbed and sucked snot.
But there had been no preamble to the other beatings. No agonizing suspense. The mothers were not their own bosses and would hardly waste hired minutes announcing what would soon be apparent anyway. But Father has plenty of time.
“I’m sorry, sir, for disrupting your class,” he says to Mr. Harrell. “But Rodney has got to learn not to go running off without no one knowing where’s he’s at. These days are too dangerous for that.”
The class behind you emits a sudden murmur of comprehension. The tension in the room snaps in two like a pencil as the full import of Father’s words settles. Everyone understands that he is punishing you for putting yourself in harm’s way. You know this is a lie. You release the edge of the desk and fill your lungs to scream, “I stole!” but Father has begun swinging his belt.
The licks are not as hard as the ones last night, but the leather against your behind smarts. You open your mouth wide to shout above the whisk of the belt and Father’s grunts, “I STOLE!”
“I,” you say as loud as you have ever said anything.
Father interprets this utterance as a cry of pain or an admission of defeat. He stops whipping you.
“Stole,” you finish, but Father speaks louder than you and the word is lost.
“Mr. Harrell, I hope this takes care of the problem. If there is any more trouble, just call me.”
You walk back to your chair on legs as unsteady as spaghetti. Your classmates look at you with faces splashed with horror. “What he do?” someone asked. “He went off by hisself and almost got snatched.” There were no clucks of sympathy. No one said, “He didn’t have to whip him like that, all in front of everybody,” like they had when the tired mothers invaded the classroom with their violence and fury.
You put your head on your desk and wrap your face with your bony forearms.
“Mr. Green, do you need to excuse yourself to the lavatory?”
You don’t answer.
“He said no,” Octavia says. “I heard him.”
You are grateful but do not lift your head. With closed eyes you try to trace memory to its origin, to the instant you were born. And then maybe you could take your recollecti
ons back a single moment earlier to the place before. To the time when you weren’t even thought about.
You are awakened by the final bell.
“Wake up, Rodney.” Octavia pats your arms with hands that smell like lemons. “You alright?”
You open your eyes. Her face is dark as pencil lead and shiny as a new penny.
“I stole.”
“You told?” she says. “Told what to who?”
“Never mind.” You reach into your pockets and give her the two cherry lollipops.
You are cold without your tweed coat. You should return to the classroom and retrieve it from the coat rack. No one will be there. All the kids are gone. Sister will be ready to walk home now. You must turn back. Nothing you know is in the direction you’re heading. Home is the other way. You keep moving, ignoring the blistering rub of your sock, which is twisted inside your loafer. There is the sting of rain in the air that beats you around the ears. You would be much warmer wearing your good tweed coat.
At Martin Luther King Drive, you dart across four lanes of traffic against the blinking warning of the cross signal. Car horns scream, but the drivers accelerate when you find yourself alive and disappointed on the north side of the road. Carillon bells sing from the college campus nearby and you walk toward downtown. Home is the other way.
A blue sedan pulls up beside you.
“Excuse me,” says the driver, lowering the passenger-side window. “I’m a police officer. There has been a bank robbery in this area. We need to get all the civilians off the street.” A tree-shaped air freshener swings back and forth from his mirror.
“You’re not a real policeman.”
“What did I just say? Hurry up, kid, and get in the car. I don’t have all day.” He produces a U-shaped piece of metal. You run your finger across the metal. It is as smooth as chocolate and fake as a glass eye.
The car burps sour exhaust onto the November day. You inhale deeply, tasting the gray poison. “Which way are you going?”
He points toward downtown. Against the overcast sky, you make out the lights rimming the Peachtree Plaza Hotel. When you enter the car, you press your eyelids against your eyes until you see only dancing spots the color of marigolds. The door shuts and the sedan vaults away in the direction opposite of home.
PART 3
Sweet Pea
My mother tells lies.
She tells them all the time. For all kinds of reasons. Some of them make sense and other times it’s like she lies just to hear herself talk. It gets tricky because she can mix a lie and the truth together so it ends up like Kool-Aid, and you can’t really separate what’s water, what’s mix, and what’s sugar. Like she told me there wasn’t no such thing as a Easter Bunny, which is true. But then she turned around and told me that my daddy had sent me my Easter basket, which wasn’t. She went out and bought the thing and put his name on it. I know this because I found out that my daddy doesn’t go to church or celebrate any holidays that got to do with God. And also she told me the truth about Santa right up front. I heard her explaining to her best friend, Miss Darlene, my friend Delvis’s mother. “I told Sweet Pea right up front that there wasn’t a Santa Claus. Why should she think some white man sneaking in here to give her presents? I’m the one that working double shifts. And the sooner she know ain’t no white man ever gonna give her nothing, the better.” So that makes sense. But a whole bunch of other times, she told lies that I still can’t understand why.
Like the time she told me that dope needles was the same as doctor needles. That was a lie she didn’t have no reason to tell. I was little then, about six maybe seven. We were walking to the bus stop when I saw a needle hiding in the grass. I thought that it was a quarter at first so I bent down to get it.
“Don’t touch that,” Mama said.
I pulled my hand back. “I was just looking at it.” It looked like a toy except that there was blood in the part where the medicine go.
“A doctor must’ve dropped it out of his bag on his way to the bus stop.”
I believed her. Back then, I didn’t have sense enough to know that doctors don’t catch the bus. They ride around in big blue Cadillacs.
And she’s a hypocrite. Tells me all the time to tell her the “whole truth.” If she asks me if I did my homework and I say “yes” when I only did half of it, she has a fit and won’t let me watch TV for a whole week.
“You didn’t ask me if I did all of it,” I said. “You said did I do it.” She looked at me and said, “Octavia, you ain’t crazy. You knew that was a lie as soon as you told it.”
But when I came home from school today, what was she doing? Stomping on the electric bill to make it look like it got lost in the mail. I bet they go and cut our lights off anyway.
I opened the fridge to see what she had left out for my snack. On a little saucer was a plate of cheese squares and crackers. It’s a good thing that I like cheese because we always have a lot of it.
I ate three or four crackers and went into the fridge again for juice.
“Stop opening the fridge. Decide what you want and get it.” Evidently, she had put too many footprints on the bill because now she was trying to smooth it out.
“We don’t have no juice?” I had already had a bad day at school and I didn’t need to add thirst to the list of things on my mind.
“Drink water. It’s good for you.”
Now, did I ask her what was good for me? All she had to say was that we were all out. “You’ll go to the store tomorrow?”
“Friday.” That’s when she gets her check.
The phone rang and she picked it up on the first ring. “Hi, Mama,” she said. It was Granny calling from Macon. Mama can be psychic like that. It’s like she know the way Granny rings.
“Mama, I know what you saw on the news. How many times do I have to tell you that is not happening around here.”
She was talking about the Missing and Murdered Children. That’s all anybody want to talk about when they call long distance. But that right there that Mama said was a straight lie. It was happening all around here. Jashante Hamilton, who stay right next door, went to play basketball last October and never came back. His mama went and put extra locks on her doors but that’s closing the barn after the cow done got out. The boy dead now. They ain’t found a body yet but everybody know that’s what happened to him. Last time anybody saw him, he was selling car air fresheners at the West End Mall.
I started chewing the crackers with my mouth open because I didn’t want to hear her conversation. I don’t like to think about nobody being dead. But she was getting mad at Granny and I could hear her over my crunching.
“I don’t care what Kenny told you. We do not live in the projects.”
Uncle Kenny is something else I didn’t want to go into. I started to leave the room, but Mama motioned for me to stay. I don’t know why she needs a witness for everything.
“Listen, Mama,” she said. “Sweet Pea is safe. Atlanta is a very big city you know. Those kids getting killed are way on the other side of town.”
Mama rolled her eyes and reached into her pocket for her cigarettes. She snapped her fingers at me and I handed her the lighter. She took a deep pull of her cig and then she blew it out hard so Granny could hear she was smoking. “Mama, you act like no black boy ever got killed in Macon, Georgia. At least here it’s considered a crime.”
I could hear Granny voice squawking out the phone like a hit dog. I don’t know why Granny call so much if all the two of them do is fight. They get to talking about Atlanta and Macon like two kids saying who can run the fastest. If Granny saw on the news that we getting rain in the city, Mama will look out the window at the water dripping off the glass and say it’s sunny. And then she’ll turn around and tell Granny that a tornado is headed right for Macon City Hall.
All of a sudden Mama changed the subject. “Sweet Pea just got in from school. She brought her report card yesterday. All As again.”
Now that there was a ball-face
lie. I brought home my six-week assessment two days ago. I didn’t make all As. I made some As but some Bs and Cs too. Now she made it seem like me and her was a lying tag team. Then she shoved the phone in my hand so I could talk to Granny. My mama is a trip.
“What’s wrong with you?” Mama said, as soon as I had put the phone on the hook.
“Why you say that to Granny? About my grades?” I said.
She waved her hand at me like she was fanning my mad away with the smoke. “You know how Mama is.” She smiled like we were sharing a secret joke. But I refused to show her tooth the first.
I didn’t say nothing else about it. My mama don’t believe in beating kids, but she got other ways of showing that she don’t appreciate back talk. She don’t tolerate eye-rolling either, so I squeezed them almost shut and gave her my evil eye.
“Why you sitting looking at me with your face all balled up?” Mama scooped up her cigarettes on her way to the table where I was sitting picking at my snack. “Something must have happened at school today.”
Something did happen at school but I really didn’t feel like telling her about it so I said, “Didn’t nothing happen.” I got up and opened the fridge like I thought some juice grew in there while I was on the phone.
“Sweet Pea, shut that fridge. Electric bill is high enough without you trying to cool the whole kitchen.”
I closed it and sat down at the kitchen table. Mama had put a wad of paper under one leg to make it more steady, but it wobbled anyway. I rocked it back and forth like a loose tooth.
Mama took a couple of puffs. She had her eyes clamped on me like two clothespins. She hates it when I have something on my mind and don’t tell her about it. I think if we had the money she would go buy a X-ray machine so she could look inside my head a couple times a day and make sure I’m not thinking anything that she don’t like.
“Did you get in trouble?” she asked. “Tell me the truth. I don’t want no surprise phone calls.”
She’s always bringing that up. And it’s not fair. Only one time did a teacher call over here to report me. And that wasn’t really my fault. Somebody stole my spelling book.
