The Boy in the Black Suit

by Jason Reynolds

  “Yeah, I guess,” I replied, fixing my gaze back toward the window.

  The light turned green, and we were on our way to the church again. I could feel fear boiling inside me. I tried to calm down. I thought to myself, Mr. Ray is right, the person in that casket can’t feel nothing. So it won’t be the end of the world if my hand slips and I drop it. No biggie, I’ll just say “do-over” and pick it right back up. Nobody will even care, right? Then I caught a glimpse of myself in the side-view mirror, and it was me who looked dead.

  THE FUNERAL OF NANCY KNIGHT

  “You know her? I mean, you knew her?” I said awkwardly to Robbie. I’m no master of small talk or nothing, but I had enough home training to know that you at least try to spark a conversation with people you’re working with.

  Mr. Ray had run into the church to talk to the pastor about bringing the casket in, and Robbie didn’t seem like he was in the mood for chitchat. At least not with me. I figured that was probably because he was embarrassed about Mr. Ray barking at him in the car with me sitting right there. I guess I could understand that.

  “Nope,” he said, swinging the back door of Mr. Ray’s trunk open. Looking in that trunk was like looking down a hallway. Robbie ran his hand along the casket like he was stroking the face of some pretty woman.

  “Ooh wee! Yo, Benny, we got steel and eighteens on this one!” he shouted like he was talking about a car. Benny was a regular-size, medium-skinned guy, with a thick black beard that looked like carpet covering the whole bottom half of his face. He sat on the passenger side of Robbie’s car with the door open, one leg in and one leg out, puffing a cigarette.

  “Oh yeah?” Benny said. He got out of the car and closed the door, took one more pull from the cigarette, burning it down to the yellow part, then plucked it into the street. “What’s your guess?”

  “Hmmm,” Robbie hummed. “I’m going with business woman?”

  “Man, please. Business woman? Getting buried around here? Doubt it.”

  “What you mean? You don’t think folks from around here can be business people?”

  I was confused about what was going on.

  “Man, you know what I’m saying. It just ain’t likely Ms. Knight, or whatever her name is, or was, or whatever, was some banker down on Wall Street. You know it. I know it. Shit, even little man knows it.” He chin pointed at me.

  “Well, her casket says different.”

  “Man, that casket could’ve been paid for by anybody. Hell, even your broke ass probably gonna have a good casket just ’cause your family in the business.” Benny stung Robbie with that one, but before Robbie could snap back, Mr. Ray came out of the church with two other guys also dressed in black suits.

  “A’ight, I got a few of the brothers from the church to help us out. That makes six of us. Three on each side. Put young blood in the middle. Should be smooth.”

  Benny and Robbie straightened up and stopped talking about the cost of Ms. Knight’s casket. Mr. Ray got respect. I liked that.

  Robbie, Benny, and I got on one side with me in the middle, and Mr. Ray and the other two guys took the other side. Before I knew it, the casket was coming out of the car, and I was holding tight to the steel rails that ran along the sides of it. My hands were slick with sweat, and all I could do was pray that I didn’t drop this dead lady’s expensive casket. I imagined some old woman telling my mother on me up in heaven, shaking her head and wagging her finger.

  Up the steps. One step at a time. Mr. Ray called out each move like a captain in the army. The other four guys grunted with every step, which made me think I wasn’t really carrying much weight. But I wasn’t about to let go and find out.

  Once we got inside the church it was easy. We hauled the casket down the aisle toward the altar. A big wooden cross hung high up on the back wall, surrounded by the usual, big stained-glass windows.

  “Okay, gents. Lift on three,” Mr. Ray ordered. “One, two, up.”

  We hoisted the casket onto what looked like a big table.

  “Jesus, this thing is heavy,” Mr. Ray moaned, using his handkerchief to wipe smudges off the pearl box.

  “Yeah, it’s got copper and eighteen gauge,” Robbie said, stepping back into the aisle to make sure it was centered on the big table. “Expensive.”

  Mr. Ray shot him a look. “Don’t start.” He turned to me and spoke softly. “These fools always trying to guess what kind of money folks got based on their caskets.”

  I wanted to ask if my mother’s casket was heavy. But it probably wasn’t.

  “Mainly, ’cause they ignorant,” he added while unlocking the first half of the casket.

  I took a step back, realizing that he was going to open it up. I wasn’t really afraid of seeing anything, mainly because I had seen my mother in one, but I wasn’t sure who this old lady, Ms. Knight, was, or what she was going to look like. I imagined she would be wrinkly, but pretty in a rich old-lady kind of way. Pearls or diamond earrings. A ring. A fancy dress. Like she was taking a nap before dinner at an expensive restaurant in Manhattan. Something like that.

  Mr. Ray clicked the last lock, and lifted the lid of the casket. I took a peek and was so surprised by what she looked like. Ms. Knight wasn’t old at all. As a matter of fact, she was young.

  “Sad,” Mr. Ray said to me. “Gone too soon.”

  I stared at her face, smooth and round. No wrinkles. Small diamond studs in her ears. A silver necklace around her neck with a little heart charm on it.

  “How old was she?” I asked.

  “Nineteen.”

  Nineteen! Two years older than me. I gulped.

  “What happened to her?”

  “Her mother said it was an asthma attack.”

  “Asthma? How could she die of an asthma attack? I mean, I just never heard of nobody actually dying from that. Like, you just do a few squeezes of your inhaler and you’re fine,” I said. Asthma? Nobody dies from asthma!

  “Yeah, I know. The thing is, no one knew she had asthma. Not even her. So,” Mr. Ray said and shrugged, “no inhaler.” Mr. Ray stared down at the teenager. Then he patted me on the shoulder. “Help me bring in the flowers.”

  The funeral was way different than Mr. Jameson’s. It was packed with tons of teenagers. Some I recognized from the neighborhood, but most I had never seen before. I sat in the back as they came rolling in in jeans and sneakers. Some wore T-shirts with Nancy’s face printed on the front. A lot of the girls came in with their hands covering their mouths, and a lot of the guys would take off their hats, but wouldn’t take off their sunglasses. And even though I thought that was a little rude, I got it.

  I stood in the back with Mr. Ray, Robbie, and Benny and watched as everyone did the funeral march, the same kind they did at my mom’s funeral, when they would look at the body and say some crap about how she looked like herself. But the way the teenagers looked at Nancy was different from the way the old ladies looked at my mother. The young people just looked surprised. Surprised that their homegirl was gone. That all of a sudden they would never talk to Nancy on the phone again. Or in class. Just like that, it was over. I got that, too.

  There was no choir, thank God. Just a skinny girl with braids who got up and blew the roof off the church. She sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” and when I say she sang it, I mean she sang it. She dug deep and belted out notes strong enough to reach Nancy, I swear. Tears streamed down her face, and even though I couldn’t see anybody else’s face, really, I could tell a lot of people were crying by the way folks were thumbing the corners of their eyes. I paid close attention to Nancy’s mother, a pretty, dark-skinned woman, sitting up front in all black. She had dreadlocks wound up in a bun, and she rocked back and forth while another woman wrapped her arm around her and fanned her with one of the church fans.

  I looked at the program. Next was the obituary.

  The preacher step
ped up to the microphone. I’m not sure if he had on a sharp suit, or just jeans and a T-shirt, because he wore a long burgundy robe like the ones you wear when you graduate from high school. I was looking forward to wearing that same kind of robe soon. He had a baby face, but I could tell he was way older than he looked by the creases in his forehead. He stood at the mic for a moment, and then began to read the obituary off the program.

  It was pretty short, I guess because Nancy’s life was only nineteen years long. She barely had time to do anything. I thought about how if I died, my obituary would only be a few sentences.

  Matthew Miller was the son of Daisy Miller and Jackson Miller. His best friend was Chris Hayes. He couldn’t land a date to save his life. So he died. The end. Oh, and there would probably be a picture of me on the front of the program. One of my senior pictures. Robot face number twelve.

  The pastor read. Nancy was the oldest of two. She graduated from Brooklyn Tech with honors. Her favorite subject was English. She loved poetry and music, especially R&B, but her favorite thing to do was run track. She got a full scholarship to the University of Maryland to run and did really well her freshman year, winning her first race a few days before she died. Or, as the pastor read off the program, “before God called his angel back home.” The preacher at my mom’s funeral said something like that too. I guess that’s better than saying “died.” But it still means the same thing. It doesn’t really matter what you call it. It still sucks.

  I thought about Nancy. She was a runner. A winner. She was good at school and at sports, which almost never happens. And judging from all of the teenagers jammed in this church like kids stuffed in a camp van, all on top of each other, sitting in the aisles, standing along the back and side walls, she also was pretty popular. Nancy must’ve been a cool chick. But even though she could run, she couldn’t run fast enough to beat death.

  I also couldn’t help but think about her mother, in the front row, heaving and rocking, and occasionally lifting her hands as if begging God for some kind of help. I now knew what it was like to lose a mother, but I don’t know how my mother would’ve felt if she lost me. She used to always say whenever we’d hear about some kid dying in the street, “Parents ain’t supposed to bury their kids. It just ain’t right.” I knew, and not just because she told me a trillion times, that she loved me like crazy, and that she would’ve been shattered just like Nancy’s mom, begging for God to take her instead, crying, screaming for me to have a second shot at life. There wouldn’t have been a joke in the world funny enough to help her laugh through it. There wouldn’t have been a joke in the world funny anymore, period.

  So I felt for Ms. Knight. Ms. Knight didn’t look like she had a whole lot of money, so I could only imagine how much she spent on that heavy casket. But to her, I bet it was worth it. My mom would’ve done the same thing.

  Nancy’s sister was called up to the podium after the pastor was done with his words. She looked about sixteen and I could tell she was cute, even though black lines streamed down her face from all of the tears mixing with her makeup. Her hair was cut short in a little bush, almost perfectly round, and she stood at the microphone holding a piece of paper, shaking with nerves. Her name was Alicia.

  “This”—she started, her voice vibrating like her hands—“this is a poem for Nancy.”

  Alicia put one hand on her chest and took a deep breath.

  “Nancy

  Remember when we would run

  and see who could beat the moon.

  Remember when we laughed

  and cracked jokes all afternoon.

  Remember when Ma made a cake

  and we fought over the spoon.

  Remember on your birthday

  when I popped the best balloon.

  Remember staying up all night

  singing our favorite tune.”

  She paused and said, “‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,’ by Lauryn Hill.”

  Her mother, now sitting up straight, nodded. Even though I couldn’t see her face, I could tell her mom was sort of smiling.

  Alicia went back to the poem.

  “Remember staying up all night

  singing our favorite tune.

  Remember snowball fights in January

  and water fights in June.

  I never thought—”

  She stopped again, her hands trembling even more, her throat swallowing what we all knew was a lump of emotions.

  Alicia looked up at the crowd, then at her mother, then at her sister Nancy, lying there peacefully. I could feel the churning in my stomach. That feeling. The same one I had the day before at Mr. Jameson’s funeral.

  Alicia continued. “I never thought you’d be gone so soon.” Her voice gave way to the tears, as they rolled down her chocolate cheeks. She folded the paper into a small square and slipped it into the casket on her way back to her seat, where her mother wrapped her up in all the love she had left. Like the preacher at my mother’s service told me, no one could feel the pain like I could. And I knew watching Alicia and Ms. Knight that the same went for them—no one in that church was hurting as much as they were. And again, I was satisfied.

  Mr. Ray started walking toward me, signaling for me to follow. Benny, Robbie, and the other two guys fell in line behind us as we started down the aisle toward the casket. The pastor was giving his final prayer, and the young girl who sang the first song had come back to the microphone to close the funeral with another selection, this time something upbeat that people could sing along to: “This Little Light of Mine.”

  I took my place between Benny and Robbie again. But now I wasn’t as nervous as we all grabbed the metal bar. I turned my head toward where Ms. Knight and her daughter were sitting. They were both singing and wiping a last few tears from their faces. I caught eyes with the both of them and smiled. Ms. Knight smiled back. Then, Robbie elbowed me in the arm. It was time to go. On Mr. Ray’s cue, we lifted and turned, and slowly marched Nancy with all her friends and family behind us singing, into the sunlight. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

  Chapter 5

  WHEN IT RAINS . . .

  “’SUP MAN?” CHRIS WAS WALKING up the block toward me, his giant umbrella now being used as a cane to put some extra cool in his bop. It looked ridiculous, him walking like some potbelly pimp. Like Robbie Ray. Chris’s backpack, loose, stuffed with books, sagged down to his butt.

  “Chillin’,” I said. “Just seeing what you was up to.”

  “Yeah, but ain’t something wrong? Because you was blowing me up like something was wrong.”

  “Man, I ain’t blow you up!”

  “You was blowing me up, Matt!” Chris pulled out his cell phone and counted out all the text messages I sent him. Nine. I was blowing him up. But it was because I was feeling weird. I left the church right after we put Nancy’s casket in the back of the hearse. Instead of hopping in and riding in the parade to the gravesite, I decided to just walk home. Mr. Ray understood, and gave me thirty bucks for the day, and thirty for the day before. Not bad.

  As I’d walked home, I’d started thinking about life, and friends, and how things had just been crazy with Mom being gone, and everything being flipped upside down, and how this just wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. It was all supposed to be smooth. The most uncomfortable thing I was ever planning to experience was picture day. That’s it. Now here I was, by myself, coming back from being a pallbearer at a funeral of a girl around my age who had no idea she was going to go. And to make it worse—oh man, here it is—I liked being at the funeral! Yeah. Weird. But it was like, I felt better there than anywhere else since my mom died. Stuff like that can make you feel crazy, and I just wanted to be around a friend. So, yes, I blew Chris up.

  “Man, whatever,” I said to him now. “Look, I got some money. You trying to get something to eat?”

  I flashed the cash. T
ens and twenties. My mother would’ve tripped if she knew I was showing off like that. Chris tripped too. His eyes bugged out.

  “Man, where you get that from?” he said, as if he expected me to say I was pushing drugs or something, even though he knew me well enough to know that I got it in some legit way. I just wasn’t that type of dude.

  “Work, fool,” I said, folding the bills in half. “So we eating, or what?”

  “Still not cooking?” Chris asked.

  “Forget it, you don’t wanna eat.” I stuffed the wad back into my pocket.

  “I didn’t say that! I’m just not used to you not whipping stuff up in the kitchen. You the only dude I know who knows how to burn.” Chris swung his umbrella at something I didn’t see.

  “I’m just not in the mood,” I said, pushing the sleeves of my suit jacket up. That thing was getting hot. “Y’know, that was something me and Mom used to do. Our thing.”

  Chris looked down, now tapping the stupid umbrella on the sidewalk as if he were smashing an ant. “I got you. It’s cool,” he said, looking up. “So, where we going?”

  I thought for a moment. Chris rubbed his baldy like he was trying to shine it, which he usually did when he was thinking, too. But we both knew what the answer was. It was what it always was. Cluck Bucket.

  We started up the block, our cement world of trash cans blown into the street, stray cats begging, stoop sitters dressed in fresh sneakers smoking blunts in broad daylight, old ladies sweeping the sidewalk, tired nine-to-fivers walking slowly on the final stretch before home. The buses, and cabs, and bicycles, and skateboards. The shop owners hollering out their two-for-one deals. The little girls singing, the older boys laughing, the babies crying, and the two of us moving through it all.

  “Hold up,” I said, patting my pockets as we got to the corner where the bodega is. “I gotta stop in here right quick. I owe Jimmy some cash.”

  “Good to know you’ll pay your debts when you get rich,” Chris said, laughing.

  I pushed the door open. The cat jumped from on top of the soups over to the paper towels.