Dear Lili,
Today we got a new teacher and she’s not even a little bit like Ms. Cooper. The first thing she said when she called on me was I heard lots about you. Aren’t you the young man who likes writing poetry? And I had to smile real big. I asked her if Ms. Cooper told her that and she said no—that she was good friends with Lucy Marcus. (I didn’t even know that was Ms. Marcus’s first name!) She said all summer long, Ms. Marcus had talked about Lonnie Collins Motion—how people should keep an eye out for me. The other kids in the class started making jealous sounds but I didn’t care. I’d gone a whole three months with that old Ms. Cooper and now here was this new teacher. I sat up real straight in my chair. Angel said, “It’s true, that boy can write!” and then some other kids agreed with him. Maybe they were just trying to get on her good side but I didn’t care. I’m going to try to do real good in all my other subjects for the rest of the year—not just in writing.
Love,
Locomotion
Dear Lili,
I can’t write a real lot tonight. We got news that Jenkins is missing from the war. Something bad happened and nobody knows where he’s at. Miss Edna’s been praying all day and Rodney’s been on the phone trying to get some information. Miss Edna sat down hard on the couch and let out deep, shaky breaths. Rodney sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulder. He kept saying, It’s gonna be all right, Mama. Everything’s gonna be all right. I said that maybe we should turn on the news and Rodney thought that was a good idea. I turned on the television and sat down on the other side of Miss Edna and held her hand. She kept saying over and over—Lord, please bring my baby back home. We watched the CNN channel that has news all the time. The newscaster lady kept talking about insurgents and a car bomb and missing soldiers. I waited to see Jenkins’s face on the screen. For some reason, I thought I’d see him there smiling and holding those rabbit ears up behind someone’s head—but it didn’t happen. Miss Edna finally got up and went into her room. I made me and Rodney some peanut butter sandwiches and we turned the news off and just sat there for a while, chewing and not saying nothing. Rodney said that his mama was probably in her room praying and I asked what he thought we should be praying for.
“Peace, man,” he said. “Pray for peace.”
I’d almost finished my sandwich but Rodney still had a whole half of his to go. I asked him, didn’t he want to pray for Jenkins being okay? Because that’s what I was thinking about praying for. Rodney was about to put some sandwich in his mouth, but he put it back down on his plate. We were sitting on the couch kind of facing each other and he leaned a little bit closer to me.
“The way I see it,” he said. “You pray for peace, all the rest of the stuff comes. If there was peace, nobody would be getting hurt or killed or jacked up in a war, right?”
I nodded.
“Peace covers everything, Little Brother. Everything.”
So now I’m in my room and the lamp is on so that I can finish writing you this letter. From now on, I’m gonna be doing everything about peace, Lili. I’m going to be praying for it and thinking about it and trying to make it a part of every single thing.
Peace, Lili.
Love, your brother forever,
Lonnie
Dear Lili,
Today my new teacher said something that got me thinking. She said every day you should try to write or think about or talk about one true thing. Her name’s Miss Alina and that’s her first name. She said we don’t have to even use the “Ms.” if we don’t want to. That we could just call her Alina. Clyde didn’t like that one bit. It’s not respectful, he said, and some of the new kids who didn’t know Clyde before laughed at him because he still has that accent and all. But Clyde—it’s like he doesn’t even hear when people are laughing at him. It’s like there’s this shield around him and the laughter doesn’t even get inside him. Even if somebody just laughed a tiny bit at something I said, I’d feel real bad about it. I guess that’s why I like Clyde—’cause he’s the opposite of me in a lot of ways. He’s real smart and I’m not real smart. He talks country and I hardly remember down south since it’s been such a long time since we been there. He’s tall—like if he really wanted to, he could play pro ball and as you know, I’m not real tall (yet), so even though I’d love to play some pro ball one day, I can’t be seriously believing it the way Clyde can because he’s already half there—I mean, like with his height but not with his game. Anyway, me and Clyde are real good friends now, so when the kids started laughing about the way he talks, I turned around in my seat and gave a mean stare to the ones I knew was laughing. Most kids don’t mess with me. Not because they real scared of me. I know they don’t mess with me because they know about Mama and Daddy and how they died and all. Sometimes I see the old ones whispering to the new ones and then the new ones look at me all pitiful. And that’s when I wish I had more of Clyde in me—so I could make that invisible shield and their pitiful looks couldn’t get through.
“You a grown person,” Clyde said to the teacher. “It’s respectful to call grown people by Mr. or Miss or Mrs.”
Miss Alina—Alina—smiled. I didn’t know any grown-ups I called by their first name and I liked the idea of it, so I wanted Clyde to not be reminding her that that’s something kids aren’t supposed to do.
Miss Alina is not real tall and she’s brown like Mama. Her hair is always in braids and then she pulls the braids back in a ponytail. And guess what, Lili. Her eyebrow is pierced and there’s a little gold ring coming out of it. The first day she came to our class, LaTenya asked her, Did that hurt? Miss Alina touched her eyebrow ringthingie and smiled and told us that it hurt when she first got it done but now she doesn’t even know it’s there most of the time. LaTenya wanted to know how she plucked her eyebrows. Alina just smiled and said she didn’t. Then LaTenya looked all confused because she thought all grown-up ladies plucked their eyebrows. And Alina said, Depends on the grown-up lady. And personally, I like bushy eyebrows. LaTenya ran her fingers over her own eyebrows and stared at Alina with all this . . . wonder.
I snuck my hand up and touched my own eyebrows. They’re kinda bushy, right? I still call her Miss Alina to her face, but when I’m thinking about her after school and stuff, I think of her as Alina. That’s the one true thing for today, Lili. Mama didn’t pluck her eyebrows and Alina doesn’t pluck hers. Grown-ups come in all kinds of ways.
One other true thing—Peace.
Lonnie
Dear Lili,
It’s Saturday. I’m supposed to be seeing you but nobody, even me, wants to leave the house in case the phone rings. I called Miss Jamison myself to say I wasn’t coming. Later on, I’m gonna call you at your foster mama’s house, okay? But right now, I’m just sitting in my room and writing. Sometimes, when I’m writing—even if it’s not something like poetry or a comic-strip story, even if it’s a letter to you—it makes me feel better inside. It’s makes things more . . . more . . . clear.
They found Jenkins last night. He’s still alive but he’s not good. Rodney said I shouldn’t tell you too much because it would just make you have bad dreams at night.
Peace, Lili.
Locomotion
Dear Lili,
I’m sitting on my bed. It’s real gray out and raining a little bit. I can hear Miss Edna in her room. Just crying and crying. Right on the table beside me is the picture of Jenkins with those fingers behind his head. I look at it and try to smile with him being so goofy and all. But no smile comes out of me. Just some of Miss Edna’s tears.
Crazy crying for somebody you never met, right? But I guess since I’ve been living with Miss Edna for two years now and I’ve been knowing Rodney and hearing about Jenkins and seeing his pictures since day one, it’s kind of like he’s already a brother to me. A faraway brother.
Lili, I was thinking. This war’s been going on a real long time. Eric said when he grows up he’s going to join the army. Then Clyde looked at him real crazy and told him that he wasn’t g
oing to have to join because they were going to draft him. Even Eric got quiet. He didn’t even make fun of the way Clyde talks, just shrugged and kept staring out at the school yard. But Angel said Clyde was wrong—that you have to go to a war on your own, that they can’t be making you go. But Clyde just shook his head and looked at all of us like we were crazy. Clyde moved from down south when we were all in the fifth grade last year. At first everybody thought he was kind of slow but it was just the way he talked. Turned out, Clyde was smarter than most of us. Once we all figured that out, we started paying more attention to him and not making fun of him and stuff. Before Clyde came, I hadn’t really had a best friend—just the guys I hung out with all the time. But now it’s different. A best friend is a cool thing to have. “Y’all don’t get it,” Clyde said, looking around at each of us. “They almost all run out of guys who want to be going to fight in some war.”
Clyde was wearing jeans that looked real old. All his clothes looked like they’d been worn by a hundred other boys before they got to him. Clyde folded his arms and leaned back against the fence. He told us that once the guys that want to be fighting get all used up, they’re going to come after the ones that don’t want to be fighting. He said, It’s called a draft, fools.
Eric said, What you talking about, son? Used up. You act like we talking about toilet paper.
We all laughed. Except Clyde. He looked like he felt sorry for us. He let us go on laughing a little while, then he started talking again, his voice real low. Used up. Broke down. Shot up. Dead. That’s the used up I’m talking about. I thought about Jenkins. I told them they found him and everybody wanted to know if he was still alive. I said yeah and then I told them the other stuff. Clyde said it’s messed up. He said there ain’t one person over there who don’t have a nice heart. I thought about Jenkins’s heart. If it was anything like Rodney’s and Miss Edna’s, then it was real nice.
“I ain’t going out like that,” Eric said. “No way, son.”
Angel nodded but he didn’t say anything. He put his hand in his pocket and took out a Hershey bar, then broke it in four pieces and gave us each some. Then he broke off a little bit of his piece and dropped it on the ground.
“For Lonnie’s brother Jenkins,” Angel said. “And for the guys that ain’t here no more.” We all did the same thing. Even Eric said, For the brothers that are gone.
Peace, Lili. Pray for Peace.
Locomotion
Dear Lili,
The one true thing for today—sometimes people say something about you and no matter how hard you try not to believe it, you still do. Every time I tried to write a poem about Jenkins today, Ms. Cooper’s voice was in my head telling me I wasn’t a real poet. So the poem never came.
Love,
Lonnie
Dear Lili,
I’m glad you got a hundred percent on your math test. It’s good to know somebody in our family can do math. Miss Edna said your foster mama said you’re one of the smartest kids she’s ever met in her life. Said everybody at church always talking about what a smart and pretty girl you are. Even though I wish I had some of your smartness, I still feel real proud to know you’re doing so good in school. Wish I could say the same for me! But today after school while I was trying to do my science homework, Rodney came into the kitchen and sat down across from me. He said, You know I’m gonna be a teacher one day, so why don’t you let me help you with that, Li’l Brother? I looked at him and said, Your mama says you didn’t do good in school so—a: how you gonna be a teacher and b: how you gonna help me? Rodney just threw his head back and laughed. He really does have the best laugh of anybody. Then he grabbed my notebook from me and looked at my work. This stuff’s easy, he said. You just using the wrong part of your brain. You trying to think all deep about something that’s really simple. Then real carefully he explained to me about photosynthesis. He said it’s like plants breathing—that just like we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, plants take in carbon dioxide and then produce oxygen through their leaves. Then real slow, Rodney explained all about carbohydrates and chlorophyll and even talked about how the sun worked. We sat at that table for a whole hour, but it felt like only a little bit of time had passed. Then Rodney asked me to explain parts back to him and his smile got so big, I knew I was telling it right! You got a brain, Li’l Brother, he said to me. I said—Nah, man. You’re the one with the brain. I thought you didn’t like school and stuff though. Rodney took a pack of gum out of his pocket and gave me a piece. Then we both just sat there chewing for a minute. When I was living upstate, I had all this time to think about things. My mind’s always going and going. Been like that since I was a little kid. But it wasn’t going like teachers wanted it to be so they always tried to get me to do things different. Rodney looked at me and smiled. When I was a kid and even when I was a teenager, I always thought it was me. But when I got older, I started realizing that I just got stuck with some lame teachers, he said. And they made me think I wasn’t a good student, so I just wasn’t. I thought about Ms. Cooper. Upstate, I just got mad about it. I was mad somebody had made me feel stupid for so much of my life. I asked him if that’s when he decided he wanted to be a teacher and he said yeah. It would be cool, Rodney said, to make some of those kids who think they’re not smart suddenly see how smart they really are. Then he looked at me and winked. I thought about Ms. Cooper again. And then I thought about Ms. Marcus, my teacher from last year who said I was a good poet. I sure did miss her. I wanted to tell Rodney that I thought he was going to be a real good teacher, but I didn’t say anything. We just sat there chewing our gum. When I see you, Lili, I’m gonna explain this photosynthesis thing to you.
Peace,
Locomotion
Dear Lili,
You make me laugh. When I told you about Miss Alina today and you asked me if I was in love with her, I had to crack up because only you would say something that crazy. You can’t fall in love with your teacher, girl. Plus, Miss Alina is like twenty years older than me! I could tell you didn’t believe me because you started doing that mmm-hmmm thing Mama used to do when she knew I was lying and I could imagine you standing in your foster mama’s kitchen with the phone to your ear and your lips pulled to the side, rolling your eyes just like Mama would. Some days you look so much like Mama and you act so much like Mama, I feel like I’m your child. Now I’m sitting here writing and all I can remember is you saying “Sounds like you in love, Big Brother” in that know-it-all voice you’re starting to have all the time these days.
It’s strange watching you grow up, Lili. You used to be so tiny. I’d sit at the window and hold you in my arms and we’d both look out at our old block. Sometimes you’d jump for no reason like you’d heard a loud noise or something and I’d have to grab you real fast before you fell off my lap. And sometimes you’d just start laughing at something you saw out the window, but I could never see the thing that was so funny to you. And now you’re getting tall and have your ears pierced and your nails polished and laugh like Mama used to laugh and be figuring I’m lying through the phone lines.
It’s strange growing up away from you like this. But each day, it seems to get a little bit more familiar.
Love,
Locomotion
Dear Lili,
Today in class, LaTenya passed me a note that said, Dear Lonnie. Remember last year when we used to hang out sometimes? LaTenya. Lili, here’s the one true thing for today—I think LaTenya is the prettiest girl in the whole sixth-grade class. Sometimes, when I see her with her friends and she’s smiling, my whole body feels like it’s lifting right up into the sky to hang out with the pigeons. Isn’t that crazy? I can’t tell anybody that because my boys would just laugh at me. But when I got that note from LaTenya, I got that body-lifting feeling and my hand was shaking when I wrote her back. I wrote, Yeah, I remember. Then at lunchtime, she was standing by the fence all by herself and I went over to her and we just started talking about stuff. She said her parents were t
aking them all to Puerto Rico for Christmas and I asked her why were they going to Puerto Rico since they weren’t Puerto Rican. LaTenya smiled that pretty smile of hers and said, We’re going for a vacation, Lo. Don’t you ever go on vacation? I felt kind of bad then because it’s been a real long time since I been on a vacation. I remember the time we all went to Disneyland and you were too small for most of the rides. I got on a whole bunch without you but you didn’t cry. You just kept calling my name every time the ride came by you. And it was real sunny in Disneyland and Mama and Daddy bought us every single thing we asked for. I told LaTenya about that time and she said she always wanted to go to Disneyland but both her sisters wanted to go to Puerto Rico and in their house majority rules. We talked until the bell rang and as I was walking inside, Clyde ran up on me and looked at me and looked at LaTenya, then nodded real slow like he understood everything in the world. And you know what? Sometimes I think my boy does.
Peace, Lili.
Locomotion
Dear Lili,
Here’s the poem I wrote today.
Sometimes,
You can think
About life
And everything that makes your life
Your life.
Today I am thinking about living
Peace, Locomotion Page 3
