Our days are unbroken by the intrusion of school or work or schedule. Mom visits all day with her brothers and sisters, processions of relatives driving up from Atlanta or down from Chicago or over from Ward, and the women sit and drink iced tea while the men smoke and drink whiskey. Nobody pays us kids more mind than every now and then pointing out how the heat doesn’t seem to bother us.
Bobby’s one of my favorite cousins. He’s dark skinned with short hair and a squeaky voice. He’s the youngest of four, with two brothers and a sister, so when I visit he likes for me to tag along with him the way he’s always tagging along with his older siblings. But this year, when we play basketball on the dirt court in front of Melvin’s, I can dribble right past Bobby. And I can outjump him.
Bobby takes out a baseball and a bat and says, “Here, I’ll pitch you a few.” I can barely hit the ball out of the driveway and Bobby laughs and says, “See, Junior, you ain’t better than me at everything.”
We get a dollar from Mom and Aunt Lucinda and walk two miles into Batesburg with Freda. We walk past a drugstore and I tell Bobby I want to get a cold Coke and he reminds me we can’t go in there.
“Whites only,” Bobby says.
And Freda and I become real quiet because this doesn’t seem right or fair and then, when some white people come walking down the street, Bobby pulls me by the arm and tells me to cross.
“Why do we have to cross the street?” I ask.
“Don’t want no trouble,” Bobby says.
“What’s the trouble? We’re walking.”
“White people’n black people don’t mix,” Bobby says. “That’s how it is.”
I tell Bobby, “I got white friends in Hempstead. There’s Ray, Richie, John, Miss Pete’s boy.”
“I think white people are devils,” Bobby says. “Don’t mean nothing but evil for colored folks.”
I nod, but I don’t understand.
Freda shrugs. We buy Cokes from a gas station vending machine. A machine can’t tell the difference between black and white.
“Why is it like that?” I ask Mom, but she says, like Bobby, that’s just how it is. “There’s folks trying to change it,” Mom says, “like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
His picture hangs in our hall, over our dining table.
“But that’s why we don’t live here,” she says.
“Bobby says white people are the devil,” I tell her.
“June, all people are the same,” Mom tells me. “Black. White. We’re all the same. There’s good and bad people among white and black. You remember that.”
I tell Bobby what Mom says. “Good and bad. White and black.”
Bobby runs in and hits me on the side of the head and says I’m it and goes running off again, into the woods. I catch him.
My cousins have been bragging about me. Telling their neighbors up and down Batesburg that June from New York is faster than any kid down here. My cousins hatch an idea without telling me. They set a race against this older boy, a running back for the local middle school. He’s built like a man with a big chest and thick arms and he’s got facial hair on his upper lip. They’re calling him the Manimal.
Fifty yards down this trail, Bobby is telling me, that’s all. “I seen you, June. You’re faster than him.”
“He looks like a freight train,” I tell Bobby.
“June, he’s big, not fast.”
We line up. They shout, “Go.”
All I see is dust. The Manimal tears off ahead of me. I don’t even run. I’m just standing there.
“June, what the hell is that?”
I shrug. I’m frightened.
“We set this up because we know you can get him.”
“Get him? I don’t ever wanna see that dude again.”
Bobby loses his money.
5.
Time steals in. One moment, I’m dreaming about playing in the new park and jumping up to see over the sill and the next I can stand flat on my feet and look out the window at the completed park, the basketball court with six hoops so that you can play two small games simultaneously or run one big game the long way. I can jump up four steps, then five, then up the whole half-flight. I leap the benches and my toe catches, tumbling me to the grass. Then I leap again and I clear them. I can barely get a ball up through the top of the round rim in front of the project and then I begin shooting on the new baskets in the park and I never shoot on that strange little rim again.
I like Prospect Elementary. We have a gym where we can play ball and a field where we can play football. And every day, we play. In the fall we play football and in the winter we play basketball and in the spring we play baseball and my best friend is Archie and we try to be on the same team if we can. We talk about how far we can jump and how fast we can run and Archie admits that I’m the fastest runner and highest jumper, but I can’t hit a baseball and Archie can.
Class is all about sitting behind a desk, next to girls like Sharon, and we sometimes share a book if she forgets hers and we sit so close that my leg is against hers and she smiles at me. But I have trouble talking to girls. I can talk to Freda, but the girls in my class, the girls in the projects, I don’t know what to say to them so sometimes I just run past them rather than have to stop and talk. I am embarrassed about my lisp. I don’t raise my hand. But I can sound out every word I read, and the teacher, Mr. Hairston, even tells me, “Julius, I’m sending a note home to your momma,” and I worry about it, but all it says is that I’m doing fine and would it be okay with my mom if I could mow his lawn on Sundays. He says he’ll pay me five bucks.
I do my homework every day. Some kids in the building don’t like school, don’t do their work. Lorenzo Knight, Sonny Boy, doesn’t do his homework. He hollers up to me from the street for help and I fill out the answers on a piece of paper and then toss it down, but the next day in class, he’s still empty handed. While I’m at my desk I can see the kids beginning to play in the park across the street, the first pickup games on the sideways courts, kids lining up to be chosen, a game begins, and from where I sit I can hear the dribble, the bank off the wood, the thunk of ball on rim. I force myself to concentrate on my homework. Mom says if I do my homework first, then I can play. I have to keep quiet in class. I must go to school. I should respect my elders.
I stand by the rules, move with care and respect and wariness, and agree to abide by the penalties of failure and rewards of success. Despite what I have seen in the Jim Crow South, the injustice that makes Bobby hate, and even the violence of our own Parkside Gardens, where even as a child I can get a sense that some lives just aren’t valued as highly as others, I seek shelter in the security of rules, the snugness of being tucked into a line, of being a number in a column rather than a soul out of place, alone.
I enjoy rules, and games have rules. A basketball court has rules and order and laws and requirements; it is regulated. I like that aspect of it: the predictability of a universe, the basketball court, the football field, where we are all set in motion by the same strictures and standards. My basket is worth no more or less than yours.
Finally, my homework completed, I can slide on my sneakers and run out to join my peers, Marky trailing after me. There is Archie and Juanita and Juanita’s brother Rob and Joe and Cleveland and Levi. They’ve already signed out the ball from the park attendant and we line up to choose and I’m one captain and Archie is the other and we pick and I pick Juanita. She’s a girl but she can dribble and cut faster than most of the boys. Archie chooses Levi and then I choose Marky, because otherwise short and wheezy Marky won’t be selected. We play five on five, short court, Juanita bringing the ball up and then, maybe because she’s a girl, she doesn’t shoot but instead passes it and in this game, everyone else shoots as soon as they get the ball. But, and this is astonishing, I notice beneath Juanita’s T-shirt an up-and-down motion, two budding breasts bobbing, the sight mesmerizing and immediately causing every boy who guards Juanita to focus his glare at her chest instead of the ball, a
llowing Juanita to dribble with ease past boys who are slower-footed anyway. And even when I’m playing defense or pushing someone out of the way for a rebound, I can’t get that image of the movement beneath Juanita’s T-shirt out of my mind. It causes me to not only look at her differently, but to see the world differently, as if there were now two worlds: the one all around us and the one bobbing beneath Juanita’s T-shirt.
We play hundreds of games and score thousands of points, we play until balls are worn bald and then the black rubber bladder beneath the leather tumors and bubbles, dribbling so often and furiously that my hands become dirtier than the court and when there is snow on the ground we take shovels to clear the court and when there are puddles we splash through them. We play in winter, spring, summer, fall, in the afternoon and the night and the morning on Saturday and after church on Sunday. I gather millions of rebounds. Launch millions of shots. Block millions of attempts. I am long, but not the longest on the court, strong but not the strongest, but what I have is a powerful and easily observed love for the game. I admire the rules, the ledger of points that add up in my head on each side, the simplicity of makes or misses. I will play by myself, one-on-one, two-on-two, or a million on a million, and I will keep playing until I hold the court and can say, “Next.”
One afternoon, after I’ve been playing, I come inside and Mom tells me to go into my room and pack because we have to drive back down south, now, tonight.
“But it’s not summer,” I say.
“Bobby died,” Momma says.
He slipped down the embankment into the lake where he used to fish. Bobby couldn’t swim.
“Where do people go?” I ask Mom, but I know her answer is heaven. I can’t see that or feel that. All I know are the holes they leave behind.
6.
Basketball is my favorite game, but in the fall we play football. Archie and I will play one-on-one in the sandlot on the other side of the projects from the park, punting to each other and then returning the kick. John Mackey of the Syracuse Orangemen and later the Baltimore Colts went to Hempstead High, he was a Hempstead Tiger, and our dream is to play for Hempstead and be Tigers. We’re evenly matched, Archie and I; we score hundreds of touchdowns.
On cold autumn days the projects empty out and boys and girls troop to the sandlot and we can play five-on-five or nine-on-nine. I’m usually quarterback and Archie is wide receiver and we play until streetlights come on and our parents are shouting our names and then we say, “Next touchdown wins!” and it will be me throwing a high, long one to Archie who runs under it and spikes the ball like John Mackey.
But one afternoon when we’re playing in the sandlot and Archie is playing quarterback and I’m wide receiver, he throws a short pass to me, at the edge of the dirt, where the pavement begins, and I catch it and then my sneakers slide out from under me on the dry dirt covering the pavement and I fall forward, my right knee dragging behind me through broken shards of glass.
I sit up and look at my knee and I can see, through the pulses of blood, something aspirin white.
“You ripped up,” Archie says, bending over me.
I pull off my sneaker and slide off my sock and wrap it around my knee and try to stand and can’t put any weight on it, blood is streaming down my leg, and I hop around across the street and around the building and then up three flights to our apartment where my mom opens the door.
“I fell, I cut it,” I tell her. “I can see into my knee.”
Mom’s eyes get wide and she begins breathing hard and that’s the first time I become frightened because I can see that Mom is scared. “Oh, June.”
She sits me down on a dining room chair and squints at the cut. She goes into the kitchen for rubbing alcohol and comes back and pours it over my knee, trying to dab with a cotton swab, but I jerk so hard and start screaming and knock over a chair. Marky comes running out of his room and now he starts crying. Mom is shaking her head and carries me downstairs and loads me into the 98 to take me to Doc Richards and he takes a look at my knee and says I have to go to Meadowbrook Hospital, where I was born.
“Is it bad?” Mom asks him.
He shrugs. “He’s torn something.”
The hospital smells like soap and alcohol, and while I am sitting in the emergency ward, I pass out waiting for the doctor, and when I wake up, it is with a doctor telling me don’t worry, they’re going to numb my right knee and then they are going to operate. My ligaments have been torn clean through, severed, and I need surgery to put them back together. Otherwise, I won’t even be able to stand up.
“Where’s Mom?” I ask.
“She’s in the waiting room.”
“You have to cut me open?”
“We have to put your knee back together.”
“So I can jump?”
The doctor is now making marks on my knee with a black marker. He tells me to lie down and that I will feel a little prick, and when I wake up my mom will be there.
I wake up stitched. Mom is in the room, and Freda and Marky, and they are all smiles and Mom keeps saying, “Oh, June, we thought you’d lose your leg.”
I look down. My leg is still there.
“But can I jump?”
She shakes her head. “You’re gonna be in a cast. Doctor says you may have a limp for, well, for a long time.”
“Limp?” That can’t be. I’m going to be a Hempstead Tiger, a football and a basketball player. I can’t do that if I’m . . . limping. If I can’t jump. If I can’t run.
“Can I play ball?”
“First you gotta walk,” Mom says.
7.
I am fitted with a cast from my ankle to my hip and when I walk it is with a straight-legged limp so that everyone calls me Peg Leg. I sit with Marky in our room and I watch everyone else playing basketball in Campbell Park and worry that I will never be able to jump or run again. I can see Archie guarding Juanita and Sonny Boy shooting and I want to be on the court running instead of here, with my leg in a cast and the doctors telling me they don’t know if I will ever be able to run again.
“The fastest boy,” I tell the doctor when he checks on my knee. “Only my sister was faster and I was almost catching her.”
He doesn’t respond. “Get some rest, and then when the cast comes off, we’ll see if you can walk.”
Walk? No. I’m going to run.
“Oh, June,” Mom says, hugging me to her when we are back home. “I know you wanna run—”
“Jump!”
“—jump, but maybe it’s not meant for you.”
“What do you mean?”
She turns away. And I can see Freda in the kitchen, spreading peanut butter on bread for Marky and she’s staring down and not looking at me.
“I’m gonna jump,” I tell her.
I’m determined. I limp to my room and lie down. On the dresser across from me are photos—of Tonk, of Bobby, of my grandparents. I want to tell someone that this doesn’t make sense, this isn’t fair. I haven’t done anything wrong, I did my homework, paid attention in school, listened to my mom and big sister, and never stole anything or knocked the heads off parking meters the way I’ve seen some kids in the neighborhood do as they searched for change. I looked out for Marky and younger kids. My life has been orderly. I’ve followed the rules. Yet here, in my knee, is this betrayal.
And there was Bobby, who did no wrong, and he fell in a lake and drowned. I don’t understand.
“June, June.” I hear Marky’s voice and he comes up beside my bed. “June, I think you’ll jump again.”
“Thanks, Marky.”
“Even higher. You’ll jump even higher.” Marky nods. “I know it.”
I smile at Marky. I believe him.
I watch basketball, from the window where in the afternoon I pay more attention to how older kids are playing. In the early evening, the court is taken over by high schoolers and grown men. They run us off the court. Sometimes, when they are short a man or two, they let me and Archie play with them. We’re
the only kids who can occasionally run in the grown-up games, to play under the lights, and I know it’s because I can jump. Could jump.
I watch them from my window and I see how the men play. They sweep the ball down from the rim and begin dribbling up court in one motion. They seldom pass, not on this court, and the action really begins after a shot is put up, with men pushing and banging and leaping for rebounds and loose balls. The game is played primarily from the basket to the foul line, a scrum for the ball from which a player will emerge with the basketball as if he’s starving and it’s a loaf of bread. Then he will turn, launch another shot, and the battle reboots. The game lacks . . . charm, grace. It is a war of attrition, of hard-fought baskets. When there is a player with a good shot or ball-handling skills, the game changes, it opens up as players move away from the basket or leave men open to slow down the fast, skillful dribbler. But I notice something else, in this game where few players pass: those who get the ball more than anyone else are those who can rebound the ball themselves, not those who battle in the scrum for the ball but those who take the ball from the rim. If you can get the ball yourself, I realize, you will always have plenty of shots.
I tune in to watch a young black player in the NBA who starred in college at Seattle University and led his team all the way to the NCAA finals before losing to Adolph Rupp and his all-white Kentucky Wildcats. Elgin Baylor would be drafted by the Minneapolis Lakers and, to an even greater degree than his fellow superstars Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, would give me an idea of how basketball could look effortless and beautiful. Elgin taking the rebound and dribbling through traffic is something that I begin doing in my feverish daydreams as I wait three months for that cast to be removed. I feel myself leaping—and taking the rebound and then dribbling downcourt and leaping—rising!—for a layup. I see the movement, reenact it in my mind, and I can’t explain to anyone, not Marky, not Freda, not Mom why this excites me but I see it somehow as liberating, the black body moving through white bodies, and the self-sufficiency of the act. For the first time, I have this idea that certain ways of playing basketball are more beautiful than other ways. That there is scoring, putting the ball in the basket, but also the artistry of how that scoring is done. This is a new idea, an idea I have never heard spoken aloud: that some basketball players look better than other basketball players because of the way they play.
Dr. J Page 3
