You know I will,Miss Irene said. And they stood there, holding each other. Miss Irene was tall. She was too skinny but she was pretty anyway. Most people looked surprised when they found out how many kids she had, but she’d just laugh and say, You know black don’t crack. I’m older than I look.
When they let go of each other, Miss Irene wiped her eyes and whispered, Lord, give me just a little piece of strength more.
Me and Neeka were up before the sun even rose helping Miss Irene get the little ones dressed. Neeka’s twin sisters were almost four and acting like fools—screaming, spinning in circles and doing everything except what Neeka told them to do. I had to tell them to put on their shoes five times before Miss Irene came into the room, pulling her belt out from her pants and swearing she’d use it. After that, the twins jumped to it, crying like their mama had already beat their behinds.
“Y’all don’t ever want to listen to nobody,” Neeka said. She’d woke up in a bad mood and her pinched-up face stayed that way all through breakfast.
“I can’t stand oatmeal,” Neeka said, pushing the bowl away.
I didn’t like oatmeal either, but I knew it’d be hours before we ate again and I wasn’t trying to be hungry on a long bus ride. Miss Irene had made a ton of food, but we weren’t going to get to eat it until we were sitting down with Tash.
Neeka’s twin brothers, Albert and Emmett, were reading comic books and shoveling oatmeal into their mouths like someone was gonna steal it if they didn’t get it down their throats.
Neeka turned her evil mood on them.
“You two need to stop acting like there ain’t no food up in this house. I know you didn’t wake up that hungry.”
“I know I didn’t hear you say ‘ain’t,’ ” Miss Irene called from her bedroom.
Neeka’s face got so evil, she looked about ready to explode.
“Mind your business,” Emmett said. “You not the boss of nobody. If I feel like eating this stuff standing on my head, you can’t do anything about it.”
“Me too,” Albert said.
They were ten and close to being taller than Neeka. She made a face at them but didn’t say anything else.
The girls giggled and went back to feeding each other oatmeal and saying, “Good, baby. You such a good baby.”
Tash’s prison was a three-hour bus ride from where we lived. But to get to the bus that went there once a month, we had to take two trains. In the subway, I held the girls’ hands. Neeka was supposed to be keeping an eye on Albert and Emmett and Miss Irene and Jayjones carried the food and stuff we were taking up to Tash.
Once we got on the first subway, Neeka took a seat far away from everybody and pulled a book out of her bag. She stuck her face in it and didn’t look up again until our stop came and Miss Irene said, “Girl, you better get your behind up and help us get these kids off this train!”
While we waited for the next train, Miss Irene fussed with Neeka.
“You can wake up in a bad mood if you want to, but you better act like you’re part of this family.”
“Can’t standthis family,” Neeka mumbled, turning her head away from her moms to cut her eyes.
“Well, that’s too bad, because you’re stuck with us now,” her mama said.
“Nobody told you to have all these kids.”
I took a breath. Neeka was about to get slapped right out in public. But Miss Irene just smiled.
“I guess I should have stopped before I got to you, huh?”
The train came and Neeka pushed the boys ahead of her into it. It was an East Side train, which meant it was filled with white people. I watched them trying not to look at our loud, raggedy bunch, but they couldn’t seem to help themselves. Neeka glared at whoever she could make eye contact with until it was time to get off again.
“Why you so evil?” I asked when we were all settled on the bus and surrounded by mostly black people again.
Neeka had taken the window seat. I was in the aisle seat and the girls were across from us, losing their minds over not having to sit with any big kids. I knew before the end of the bus ride Miss Irene would be over that and have separated them. But for now, me and Neeka had some halfway private, halfway quiet time.
Neeka leaned her head against the window. The bus was a Trailways, so the seats were soft but it smelled like the blue liquid they put in the toilet bowls. I’d only been up with them to see Tash two times, and both times we’d sat in the front, away from the bathroom so it didn’t smell as bad.
“You can’t even find your Big Purpose up in this family. Can’t get your head straight.”
“Your head looks fine to me, Neek. You look nice today.”
She did. Her hair was greased and braided so that it looked clean and shiny. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt with a light brown jacket over it. She’d never even had one pimple and I looked at her skin, surprised all over again by how beautifully brown it was.
“Not my outside head. My insidehead. D’s already close to knowing what her Big Purpose is—she’s up in her house with just Flo and got all that time to think and stuff. And you get to be just with your mama or by yourself or whatever. But I wake up and there’s kids and noise and my mama telling me to do this and do that. These ain’t even my kids!” She glared over at the twins. They were looking at us and both stuck their tongue out at her.
“There’s like no place where it could be empty and quiet. It’s all this noise. All the time.”
She leaned her head back against the window. The city was disappearing and outside I could see trees and patches of grass.
“You should come stay at my house more,” I said. But I didn’t really want that. I loved the noise and craziness of Neeka’s house. Most days, I wished we could switch places.
“It’s not the same,” Neeka said to the window. “Sometimes I think maybe I should just do something wrong—get sent to some juvie place where they lock you down alone in your room.”
“Yeah, but then no matter how much planning you did, you wouldn’t be able to do nothing about it. ’Cause you’d be on lockdown.”
“I know,” Neeka said, her voice so soft and sad, I didn’t even know what else to say.
She blew a breath on the window, then wrote a D in it. I watched her stare at the D for a few minutes until it faded. It was July and outside the sun was just beginning to come up. The sky was blue and pink and beautiful. The air-conditioning was on hard and I wished I’d brought a jacket for the bus.
“You ever wonder if people gonna remember your name?” Neeka said.
“Like how?”
“Like my name’s Daneeka L. Jones. But everybody calls me Neeka and most people don’t even know that my real name begins with a D. Or what the L is for.”
“Lucy,” I said. “Because your daddy used to watch Charlie Brown a lot and his favorite person was Lucy.”
I saw Neeka smile a bit. “Yeah. You know it. And some teachersknow it. And the kids at school and some people on the block. And my family. But that’s it.”
“That’s kinda a lot, Neeka. I mean—that’s like fifty people already and you’re not even grown yet. You figure fifty people, say every couple of years, by the time you die, it’s gonna be in the thousands or something, right?”
“There’s millions of people in the world, though. And more getting born every day. And some of them blow up—like Tupac did. I think that’s why he’s so cool by me, because he didn’t come from any rich people like a lot of those celebrities be coming from—with their mamas or their daddies already movie stars.” Neeka leaned her head against the window. “I mean his parents were out there being Black Panthers and whatnot, but they was struggling too. Didn’t always have money. Didn’t always have food.”
Neeka looked at me. “I want to blow up. Have people knowing my name. I want to walk inside a subway car and have white people be giving me big respect instead of looking at me and my family like we some kind of circus act or something.”
Some
one was eating something good—I could smell the flavors drifting through the bus. I could hear wax paper crinkling and an old lady’s voice saying, Take a piece of this, honey. I know you hungry.
“I want people to see me,” Neeka said. “And know I’m somebody.”
“Too bad you can’t sing,” I said.
“I can sing.”
“Not good, though.”
Neeka jabbed me in the side but she was smiling.
“You know what I want to do,” she said, her voice getting real low. “I been thinking about it lots.”
“What?” I leaned a little closer to her.
“You can’t laugh at me.”
“Do I look like I’m gonna laugh, Neek?”
“I want to teach at a college. I want to be a college professor.”
I felt myself starting to laugh, but Neeka’s face got real serious, like she was daring me to.
“What are you gonna teach?”
Neeka turned back to the window and shrugged. “Maybe like math or law or something. I want to be in one of those big lecture rooms like you see in the colleges on TV. Where there’s all these kids and they’re listening to every single word the professor is saying. And the professor has those little half glasses that make him look real smart and every time a student asks him a question, he knows the answer.”
“Don’t you have to go to law school or something to teach law?”
Neeka shrugged. “I don’t care.”
“You’d be good at it, Neek. You’re always arguing with Jayjones. And usually you be winning.”
Neeka smiled. Then, real fast, her smile went away.
“If I was a lawyer already,” she said, “Tash wouldn’t be in jail probably. That lawyer didn’t even know what he was doing because my brother didn’t do nothing wrong. That’s what’s so messed up.”
“I know.”
“Tash didn’t know that guy was gonna rob anybody. Else he wouldn’t have been with him.”
“I know.”
Tash was doing time for an assault crime he didn’t commit. Neeka always said he was doing time for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everybody—except the judge and the jury—knew Tash wasn’t the kind of guy to assault anybody, unless they were messing with us. He always threatened, since we were tiny, to slice in half anybody that tried to mess with me and Neeka. And even though I’d never even seen him with a knife, I believed him. But he wasn’t in jail for slicing somebody who was messing with us.
“We all know,” Neeka said. “But we ain’t the ones that need to be knowing. Us knowing don’t do anybody any good.”
I started to say I knowagain but didn’t. Knew I didn’t have to.
Outside, the sun was up now. There were trees everywhere and the big green leaves on them looked heavy, like they wanted to pull the branches down. Every now and then, we passed a farm. I’d learned in school that the high dome-looking things were called silos. There was something so beautiful about the way they looked with the sun rising up over them and the farm looking all quiet and the cows barely moving—it felt like somebody somewhere was making the world a promise, a promise that there’d be a new day and that we’d have milk to drink. Always.
Seemed wrong to be seeing all that beauty outside with Neeka feeling sad and us going to see Tash in jail. Where Tash was, the walls were all painted the same sorry gray and there was always the sound of somebody yelling. The windows were real small and had bars on them. I couldn’t even imagine how it felt to look out on a beautiful new day through some bars.
I put my head on Neeka’s bony shoulder and we stared out the window, watching the farms move by us. Someone had put on some music—oldies songs. Behind me, Albert was still sitting next to Emmett and both of them were reading Emmett’s comic books. The girls had fallen asleep on each other. Behind them, Jayjones and Miss Irene were sitting together. Miss Irene was doing a crossword puzzle and Jayjones was listening to his Walkman and staring out the window.
“It’s all quiet now,” I said to Neeka. “You can start working on planning your Big Purpose.”
Neeka stared out the window. And nodded.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The loudest sound in the world is the soft click of prison gates locking behind you.
Maybe it’s how final it is—the loud slam of the gate, then the quick, gentle click. Then the scary feeling of it all being forever.
So many gates slamming shut. So many locks clicking. One after the other until you’re all the way inside.
And the only way out is at the hands of a prison guard, who has to press a button. And turn a key. Then press another button and turn another key. All the while staring at each of you. And you know what he’s thinking:
Remember this place good, y’all. We got a spot waiting for you.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Shoes and belts off,” the guards yelled.
We moved down the line slowly, waiting while the guards went through Miss Irene’s bag, searched inside the girls’ shoes, glared at Emmett and Albert and Jayjones. Albert wore wire-frame glasses and the guards made him take them off and put them through the metal detector. Albert looked tiny and a little afraid without his glasses on. He looked around the room real quick, then rubbed his eyes. His glasses were kinda thick, so I knew without them he couldn’t see much. When the guard handed them back, Albert whispered, Thank you, wiped them off on his shirt and put them back on.
Then when we were all signed in, the final gate slammed behind us and we joined a bunch of other families in a big room as we waited for Tash to be brought down.
All around us, people were hugging and kissing each other. I watched one old-looking woman hold a young guy like she’d never let him go, her eyes closed tight but the tears pushing through anyway. I heard him say, Ma, don’t cry. Ma, please don’t cry. But the tears kept falling like they never planned to stop.
A young couple across from us pressed their foreheads together, a boy about three years old dancing circles around them.
The room was crowded and hot and loud. I stared at the door where Tash would come through.
The first thing I noticed about him this time was how skinny he’d gotten. Tash wasn’t a big guy to begin with, but in the months since I’d last seen him, the tiny bit of meat beneath his cheekbones had disappeared and his beige uniform hung all big on him. But when he saw us, he let go of that big Tash smile and inside that skinny face I could see the Tash I’d known forever.
“Girl, you are notstepping up in here looking like Miss Thang now, is you?” Tash grinned and gave Neeka a big hug. “All tall and almost-grown. Come here and let Tash spin you around.”
Then he was hugging everyone and everyone was hugging him back and I felt the same old stupid huge stone rise up in my throat and the same stupid tears coming down. Neeka was crying too. So was Miss Irene. I saw Jayjones pull his hands across his eyes.
“Don’t even,” Tash said, waving his skinny finger at us. “You know this girl is getting out of here soon. Don’t come up in here crying now. I ain’t having it.”
We found a place at a long table in the back and Miss Irene started pulling food from the shopping bags. There was roasted chicken, mac and cheese, corn bread, potato salad, salad and corn. She’d brought paper plates and plastic spoons because they wouldn’t allow plastic forks for some dumb reason. After we’d all filled up our plates, Tash started telling us, between tiny girlie bites, how he was getting out soon.
Jayjones was sitting directly across from him. He just kept looking at Tash and grinning, like he couldn’t believe he was getting to be right across from his big brother.
“Mama, when you talked to the lawyer, he ain’t tell you about them reversing it?”
Miss Irene chewed her chicken slowly and swallowed. “Tash, you know I don’t understand half the things that man be saying. Only thing he seems to know how to say so real people can understand is how much to write his check for!”
Tash smiled, lowering his e
yes slowly and waving his hand at Miss Irene. “Hush, girl!” he said. “Don’t we know that for a fact.”
Miss Irene nodded. She glanced over at Emmett and Albert, then back at Tash. Miss Irene didn’t like Tash acting sissyish around the boys. Tash saw her look and tried to sit up a little bit straighter. Emmett and Albert didn’t seem to care, though. Mostly they grinned when Tash talked.
“Well, it’s all working out,” he said.“And the way I’m thinking, I should be out of here by the end of summer. But you know we won’t know till we get there. And when I get out of here, first thing I’m gonna be working on is finding a way to pay you and Daddy back for all these . . . these legalfees.”
This time, Miss Irene waved her hand. “Just work on coming home, Tash.”
“I’m for real, Mama. You know how many more rich Negroes there’d be if we wasn’t all the time trying to pay off some lawyer or bailing a brother out. That’s one thing I’m truly guilty of—giving hard-earned money to the man.One person mess up, legal system got the whole family on lockdown.”
Tash looked around the room and rolled his eyes.
“Ain’t just black folks either,” he said. “Look at us.”
We all looked. There were people everywhere.
“Puerto Ricans and white guys,” Tash said. “Indian brothers over there and some Chinese guys over in the corner there. Most people stick with they own kind, but we all in the same place—doing the same thing—time. And I’m telling you, time is a bee-atch.”
“You really coming home, man?” Jayjones asked. He shook Tash’s arm and made him turn back toward us.
“Yeah, man!” Tash said, deepening his voice to imitate Jayjones. “I’m really coming home, man.”
Jayjones grinned and took a big bite of his mac and cheese.
After Tupac & D Foster Page 6
