I sit on his bed now with the quilt across my knees, hoping to catch Mama’s smell in the stitches, adding small tears to the patchwork.
Bitter’s still not back. Probably he’s doing what he always does when I’m not around, buying food, hanging out with his friends, living his life, but his health’s got me so flummoxed, his every absence feels chancy. I fold the clean clothes, sweep and dust, straighten the sofa. The Angela Davis Reader sits, heat-curled, on the coffee table. I remember Reggie mentioning the other night he had meetings each morning this week, “lovefests with potential donors,” but he’d be in his office at the Row Houses in the afternoons. In a couple of hours, then, I’ll return his damn book to him.
I fix a cup of tea, then stroll past the Magnolia Blossom, along a low stone wall where Ariyeh and I used to capture frogs after rain. I recall this neighborhood, in the early seventies, as lazy and quiet, buzzing with cicadas, the low purring of mourning doves, mockingbirds’ sneers. Doors remained open, always, offering odors of bacon and eggs, or ribs and potatoes in the evening; through them, you’d glimpse Bruce Lee posters on living room walls, platform shoes lined up in long hallways, people in dashikis sitting on the floor bobbing their heads to Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, or the hi hat hiss of Isaac Hayes’s “Shaft.” Now, every other door is boarded up, weeds choke windows. The air trembles to hip-hop.
Am I romanticizing, or were men more polite back then? They’d lean over and spit in the street gutters instead of directly on the sidewalk where people had to step. They’d look you in the eye and say hello. “Hi there, sister,” or “A salaam alaikum.”
But then, there were those, like the b-boys this morning—“Hey, big legs!” “Boo-tay!‘ “Look to me like she with the itty-bitty titty committee.” “Well fuck you, bitch, won’t talk to me. You ain’t shit, nohow.” It is easy—too easy, of course—to airbrush the past. Did Mama ever look back with longing, even for a moment? Did she ever regret stealing away? Worry about losing the accuracy of her memories?
The propped-up Caddy down the street, rusting on cinder blocks, is one of a handful of altars for preachers of the dozens. You ain’t got game, Lame, watch me, watch me work. I went to your house to ask for money, your mama rip off her drawers, say, “Fuck me, honey.”
Your mama eat shit.
Your mama eat dogyummies.
Word!
Some of the boys wear wool caps and hooded sweatshirts, despite the late-morning broil, or shuffle about in heavy winter boots. They wear dungaree jackets turned inside out. Others high-style it in black and silver L.A. Raiders shirts, Kangor caps, and Tommy Hilfiger jeans—which nearly slide off their butts. Even from a distance, their capped teeth gleam in the sun; knuckle rings, neck chains sizzle and flash. These are the fellows missing from Etta’s on Sunday nights.
Every other corner’s got a clocker with a beeper, every vacant lot a lost soul ready to beam up to Scotty. The old winos, the King Cobras I remember trying to avoid as a girl, seem quaint and harmless next to the freebasers and skeezers screaming to themselves, weaving through fields of broken glass. As I turn back toward Bitter’s, a lanky kid in Kani’s and Tims stumbles into me out of the boneyard, marble-eyed, drooling, haranguing the trees. Our collision knocks the cup from my hand, and it shatters on the wall.
“Miss Thang!” I turn to see a Beamer take the corner. The man Reggie called Rue Morgue. “Well well. We out cool chilling. You with that, babe?”
“Excuse me,” I mumble, stepping around the car. It tails me. Rue waves and grins, hanging out the passenger window. An insignia on his baseball cap shows a guy caught in crosshairs. “Come chill wit’ us, aight?”
I keep my head down. I remember overhearing a colleague of mine in Social Services say one morning, to a bruised young girl, “There’s no type of woman who gets hit. We could all get hit, okay?”
Trailing us, the lanky kid calls, “Yo! Right chere!”
Rue laughs at him. “Yeah? And how I know you ain’t some knocko, G?”
“Come on, man, look at me.” He holds out a twenty dollar bill.
“Fucking pipehead. Go change it for singles. We meet you ‘round the corner in five.”
The kid ambles off. The driver mutters something to the Man in Charge. “Yeah yeah, aight,” Rue says, mock-serious. “We got mo’ business now,” he tells me. “My crew is in effect. But later, cakes, hm?” He aims a gun-barrel finger my way. “Maybe we knock boots, Jiggy. Lay us some pipe.” He cackles. The driver glides them down the street.
On my car radio, a woman says Houston has surpassed L.A. as the nation’s smog capital. A caller says, “I agree with Governor Bush. It’s not that I’m against clean air. I just don’t think the federales should tell Texans what to do with their cars.”
I park next to an abandoned taco stand and a boxing gym rumbling with youthful energy. My hands have been trembling ever since the Beamer. Reggie’s office is open, but no one’s around. He’s got a new picture on his wall: an Emerge magazine sketch—Clarence Thomas as a lawn jockey. The place smells of tuna fish and potato salad. A desk fan stirs warm air.
A hip-hop groove drills through the back wall, from Natalie’s apartment. In the open doorway, her boy, Michael, in a red Houston Rockets jersey, gyres and slashes the sunlight—Listen up, suckers! I step outside. He sees me and stops. “What’s the haps?” he says, looking braver than he sounds.
“Reggie around?”
“Hang. He be here. Holding a meet for the ‘hood.”
“Looks like you’re helping him get organized.”
“Yeah. He axed me to grab him some records—wantsa talk up the talk. You cruising or what? I seen you here before.”
“I’m Ariyeh’s cousin.”
“That right?” He looks skeptical. He turns back inside and stacks CDs: Puff Daddy, Low G, Rasheed.
“Your mom?”
“Down at the U. Economics class.”
“Tupac?” I ask, a wild guess, nodding at his boom box.
“Wu-Tang Clan,” he sneers, but his face perks up. “You like this shit?”
“Sure.”
“A ‘bout it ‘bout it chick, eh? You a wigger? Flipping the script?”
“What do you mean?”
“White person wantsa be a niggah, know’m say’n?”
I laugh. “Show me. Who do you like?”
“All right. Really?”
“Really.”
Seems he’s a young performer, waiting for an audience, or maybe he’s just happy to have someone listen to him talk about anything. “Here it is, then. In all the o-fficial talk, in the papers and shit, ‘Fifth Ward’ is what they say when they want to say ‘niggah’ ‘thout really saying it,” he says, lowering his voice like a DJ. “So these here the original voices of Fifth Ward, Texas: Bushwick Bill, Scarface, Willie D—the Geto Boys.”
For a year, Willie D and Scarface had a falling-out, he tells me—Willie’s name shit in Southside, and a few niggahs died—but things are cool again, and the music’s as dope as ever. He plays me some cuts on the boom box: “Mind of a Lunatic,” “No Nuts No Glory,” “Murder after Midnight.” Fifth Ward, Texas.
“Yeah,” Michael says, watching my face. “This ain’t no Cristal-sipping, Versace-wearing shit. Boys keeping it real.”
As I listen I realize, more forcefully than before, that I’m stuck in the early seventies: civil rights / street agitation / black is beautiful: Uncle Bitter’s world. Reggie is right—I feel it now in my gut. The world has moved beyond the mere low-down of the blues and into a bloody mess. Crack-capitalism rules the streets, not protest marches. Needles, not Ripple. I glance at Michael. Kids like him don’t expect to live past twenty-five. I think of the boys disappearing from Ariyeh’s school … a sacrifice of children, forfeiture of the future, but why?…
Suddenly, Bushwick is dwarfed by a louder beat from the street. Michael runs to the door. “Motherfucker,” he says. Over his shoulder I glimpse the Beamer.
“Little rag! Little bitch-boy! Yo
u got that twinkie for me yet?”
“Fuck you, motherfucker! You dealing with a niggah that’s greater than you!”
Rue Morgue removes his baseball cap. He’s got a wide bald head. Shades, small mouth. He doesn’t smile. “Got a body bag waiting for you, little rag.” He waves to me. “Miss Ann! You everywhere, boogee. I’s thinking you just a tourist, enjoying our fine vacation grounds. You living here now?”
“Michael, come back inside.”
“Wants to hang with a Big Willie, Miss Thang? See how it’s done? I’m your man. Come on over here, hm?” My palm trembles on Michael’s shoulder. He shrugs me away.
“Come on, baby, slide on over here now.”
“No, thank you.”
“Damn, she a polite dime piece,” the driver says. Rue coos, “I know you want it, sugar.”
Michael’s shivering with fury. Just as I’m certain he’s about to make a move, the car spins away. “I be looking for you, Ann! You too, little rag! The Lord gon’ be harvesting you soon.”
I turn. Reggie’s standing, arms crossed, in front of his office. He offers me a grim smile, but says only, “Michael, you got those records for me? The meeting’s about to start.”
We move slowly, as if a spell has been snapped. Rue’s expression, it occurs to me, was like the shut-in boy’s years ago, gazing at me as if he knew me better than I did …
Boys Michael’s age and a few years older gather in Reggie’s office. They’re wearing basketball jerseys and colorful, roomy shorts. One’s T-shirt reads, “The bitch set me up.” Quo Vadis and fade haircuts, old-fashioned baldie beans. Some of the boys sip noisily from 7-Eleven cups or sports drink bottles. Everyone defers to the two or three kids with knuckle rings.
Reggie’s finishing up some business with a man in a gray suit, slender and tall, wearing a small silver earring. Dark. Patient smile. “Amazing stuff out there,” he tells Reggie. “The other day I clicked onto a site about the brain—its reactions to skin color. Believe it or not, some researchers have found that glucose activity kicks in heavily, in a certain part of the brain, whenever a person sees someone of a different race.”
“So … we’re hard-wired for hate?”
The man grins. “Well, it’s the kind of subject your boys here can debate once they’re on-line.”
“Right. I’m sorry I’ve got this meeting here—”
“I need to run, anyway. I’ll hit you back later.”
“See you over at the gallery tonight? We’ll talk more then?”
“You got it.” They shake hands. The man steps out the door.
Reggie swigs water from a plastic bottle. The boys are getting settled, laughing loudly in groups. I pull Angela Davis from my purse. My hands are jittery. “You disagree with Sister Davis?” Reggie says. He screws the cap onto his bottle, which hisses and pops.
“‘The myth of the black rapist has been conjured up when recurrent waves of terror against the black community required a convincing explanation’?”
“Just thought you’d be interested.”
“So any time a black man is accused of assault, the accuser is ‘perpetuating a racial stereotype’?”
“She’s a provocative writer, isn’t she?”
“Talk about stereotyped—”
“I’ve got a meeting here.” He taps the bottle on his knee. “Stick around.”
“No thanks.” I brush a hand across my eyes.
“Really. Hang for a while.” Before I can slip away, he claps his hands and calls the meeting to order. The boys sit still, their faces wide with admiration, animation, curiosity. The neighborhood can’t afford to lose them, I think, the way it lost me, or I lost hold of it…
Reggie tells Michael to play a record; Michael punches a button on the boom box. The Geto Boys rap about white cops in coffins. “These your homies, right?” Reggie says, smiling at the boys.
“You got it, you got it.”
“Keeping it real.”
“Word, man.”
They juke their shoulders, dip their heads.
“But see, I listen this shit,” Reggie says, “and—whether it’s just words or not—what I hear is a black man telling other brothers they got to eighty-six each other. Prove who’s king.”
“Tha’s the way it is, G. Get the niggah ‘fore he get you.”
“Ever hear of minstrel shows? ‘Jasper Jack’? ‘Zip Coon’?” Reggie asks. “You think Scarface something new?”
The boys look confused.
“He the same ol’ imbecile Negro been entertaining white folks for centuries. ‘Cause you know who’s buying these records? I know y’all ain’t losing money on them. You copping them from the stores.”
Uneasy grins.
“It’s the white kids in the ‘burbs buying this shit. It’s like, ‘It’s cool to be black,’ but underneath that, it’s ‘Look at that imbecile Negro dance. Entertain me, boy’ Stone, you ain’t with that?” He points to a tall, bald boy in the back of the room who looks at the floor, scratches his thigh. “Yeah, but … yeah, but …”
“Speak up, Stone. You ain’t no dumb nigger, are you?”
“Fuck, no.”
“Then talk like a man.”
The boy stiffens his back. “Reggie, man, Scarface talking the talk. What it’s like on the street. Not in no suburb.”
“What it’s like, or what some E-light record producer on his fat Beverly Hills ass tells you it’s like?”
I’m with the boys on this one. How many Rue Morgues are out there cruising right now?
“What sells in the ‘burbs is the thrill of black danger. White kids thinking they getting close to something scary, something real, just by listening to the music, without having to risk anything.” He glances at me, then paces the room. “You think the smart record producers don’t know that? You think Scarface out thugging all the time? Hell, he probably in some swank business office somewhere, in a strategy session, planning his next marketing campaign.”
Michael crouches by the boom box, tight-lipped and still.
“Besides, you think you learning street life from these tunes? What you learning? Guns kill people? That’s news?”
Despite my tiff with him, it’s a pleasure watching a man take intellectual responsibility in front of other males, instead of playing dumb just to hang with the crowd. That’s an act I’ve seen all too often in the mayor’s office.
“But yo, Reggie, we valid when we respected.”
“That’s wack, guys. Real messed up.”
“You was living large. You did bids.”
“That I did, slick. And when I got out I was a fucking hero.”
“Word.”
“You’da thought I’d won an Academy Award. But I’m telling you, man, a felony rap, you done. Ass out. I’m lucky I savvied in time. Turn up the volume, flash your rings, you might get noticed for a while. But it’s like shooting from the outside without a good inside game. Pretty soon, the world’ll figure your ass out and shut you down. You got no extra moves, you nailed. And Wilson, what’s this shit?” He plucks a green sports drink bottle from a pudgy boy’s grip, whips off the top, and dumps a slushy, sour apple-smelling mixture onto the floor. “Tequila? Gin-and-something? You freeze it in the morning, let it melt all day till it’s good and lethal? Who you think you fooling? You want to kill yourself, boy? That what you after?”
“Sorry, Reggie.”
“You’re going to clean up my floor when we’re done here.” He tosses the bottle onto the slush.
Michael stands up and jams his hands into his pockets. “Reggie, I thought you liked rap, man.”
“I like it fine. All I’m saying is, it’s just music, packaged to make a profit. It ain’t a way of life, all right?”
The boys mumble.
“Let me leave you with this. What’s gonna happen when all these white kids, these image chameleons, lose their hip-hop jones and go to work for Merrill Lynch, hm? Where you gonna be? You down with that? Stone? You down?”
“Yeah
. Fuck yeah. I’m down wit’ that.”
“All right, then.” Reggie tells them they’ll meet again next week to learn why Clyde Drexler is the exception that proves the rule.
“What rule?” Stone asks.
“Hoops ain’t your way out the ‘hood.”
“Shit, G, you spoiling all our fun.”
“Better find a new jones,” Reggie says, checking his watch. “Wilson, mop’s in the closet over there.”
“Aw, Reggie—”
“Go get it, now. And don’t bring that shit into my house no more.” To me he says, “Telisha, I’ve got another meeting in half an hour, downtown. Sorry. I’m afraid I haven’t organized my afternoon very well. Here’s what I’m thinking. Come to this gallery tonight.” He hands me a card. Brazos Fine Art. “We’ll discuss Sister Davis.”
“Wait—”
“It’s a fund-raising party for the Row Houses. A few of our regular donors—”
“I don’t think so, Reggie. Do your business, and—”
“Ariyeh will be there. Wine and cheese, very relaxed.” He chugs water from his bottle. “And I promise I’ll give you a chance to tell me what a prick I am. Seven o’clock. Check you then.”
“Reggie—”
“Seven. Ariyeh’ll be glad to see you.” A quick wave and he’s gone. Making me wait because he can. Arrogant bastard. But I have to smile. He’s smooth.
I find the keys in my purse. Several of the boys are bouncing and passing a basketball outside, laughing and taunting one another. I’m nervous, watching them scatter down the street. What’s waiting for them just around the corner? Behind Reggie’s desk, beneath the list of donors on the wall, Michael, sullen, packs away his tunes.
Bitter and his friend Grady sit in the grass in front of the mud-dauber shack, picking dandelions. Grady looks like he’s on a short furlough from the boneyard and is due back any minute.
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