“Warrior? Warrior! There are still fifteen minutes left in this class! Warrior . . .” Her words faded away as Warrior walked into the hallway, the classroom door swinging shut behind him. The cool air brought relief from the sounds of the radiator and of the teacher’s voice.
Warrior walked to his locker. He opened the steel door and took out his jacket. He placed two books that he was reading in his bag, grabbed his hat, and shut the locker. He put on his jacket and zipped it up over his still sweating body. He put one arm through his bag, and hat in hand, he walked down the hallway and out the school door.
As he walked down the steps he saw her coming toward him. Her long legs were quickly covering the ground from the street to the school, desperate to get her out of the cold that she hated. Her wide, thick scarf wrapped around her head and neck, its length keeping her ears and face warm, and her still wet hair unfrozen. From under the dark scarf, Warrior could see her ancient eyes.
“Baby, you’re going the wrong way. You’re supposed to be going into school at this time, not out,” she said as they met on the steps. Warrior just looked at her. She took his hand.
“What’s wrong?” She looked deep into his face. “What’s wrong?” she said, softly this time.
Warrior slowly shook his head. “These people are fools, that’s all. They stressin’ me. We sit in class every day, every year, listening to their story. What about ours? They spend all their time dismissing our experience and then they got the nerve to ask me, ‘Who are you?’ We’ve survived things that no other people have ever seen, and now they want to know how it is that we’ve done that surviving. They wanna know the secrets. They take fifteen minutes of one class to deal with me. They think that they can understand what I have seen in that little time. They think we’re that simple.” Warrior’s jaw tightened as his words ended.
She heard Warrior’s words and responded. “English class, right? She asked you to tell her who you are? Yeah, we had the same class yesterday. They are fools.” She nodded.
“She thinks I’m gonna tell her a damn thing about me, like I’m a damn experiment or somethin’.” Warrior spit in disgust.
She shook her head and closed her eyes. “That’s the most insulting part of it all. That in this place, we’ll read one book about us, have a class about us, and that’s supposed to equal fifteen years of their story. There are more of us in this world than them, and our experience is taught as a supplement. Through one exercise, they think they can understand us, who we are, and where we come from. We’ve had to learn for fifteen years who they are. They don’t understand what it has done to some of us. How it can get inside our minds.” Her eyes remained closed as she stopped speaking.
“And now that I’ve given her just a little taste of who I am, she’ll probably tell me that I’m filled with hate.” Warrior rolled his eyes as he spoke.
“So what does she call it when they’ve been giving us a little taste of who they are since we were five years old? I wanna know what that’s called,” she said.
“They call that ‘education,’” Warrior said softly.
They stood there, the wind blowing around them, her scarf waving in the air. They stood in silence. Words flowed between them that no one else could hear. They passed unsaid descriptions of what they felt, and with her touch and her attentive eyes, she tried to calm him. She knew she loved him, not in a light surface kind of way, but in the way adults always tell teenagers they can’t love. She knew it like she knew her name.
When he had finally, for the first time, come over to her house last year, she had giggled as he walked through the door—knowing the observation and judgment that was coming. Hers was a house of women—strong, independent, beautiful, Caribbean women. Three generations including her. Hues of assorted color, all with high cheekbones, upright carriage, and a constant banter of jokes and comments that filled the air, sometimes biting, but always love. A mother, who worked as a head nurse, survived all that came her way, had learned to expertly navigate a new and foreign land, always provided for her family, and saw everything as she judged quickly and permanently. An auntie, who had become Rastafarian, much to her own mother’s disaproval, was an artist, seduced with a hug and an extra long beat of eye contact, and danced though life more than she walked. And a grandmother, who lived in her daughter’s home and was thankful for her place in it, approved of her daughter’s career as a nurse and the manner in which she ran the home and raised her granddaughter, but disapproved that her daughter did this raising alone, and of her choice in men, each and every one of them since her first, but she said little about this, except with her eyes, for her tone, was just like her—about as gentle as stone.
When Warrior had arrived at his friend’s home, her mother was holding court while cooking a rich curry, potatoes peeking out, wooden spoon in her hand, permanently stained yellow from countless curries before this one, hair curly and tied back. She had welcomed him, her daughter’s often discussed “friend” with a warm hug and searching eyes. She seemed to notice and like his strength immediately—his quiet confidence as well. In the caring way she looked at him she also seemd to notice his sadness. Her aunt immediately took his face in her hands and said his name with a Caribbean lilt, almost sang it, and then smiled and simply said, “Blessed.” Her tiny grandmother looked up from her chair, her feet barely reaching the ottoman in front of her, peered over her glasses, and said, “So . . . ya me gran’dawta’s frien’.” It was not a question. As the assorted watchers watched Warrior, his “friend” ate her afternoon snack of bun and cheese, and when Warrior looked to her for help, she had laughed out loud through bites, her eyes letting him know he was safe to a degree—and entirely on his own. When he left, he realized that they had decided his future.
The cold was now cutting through their layers, and as they stood on the steps, he could feel that now she was thinking of his unique strength, but also how sad he was, even hopeless at times—he knew she was aware that he often woke up with rage. She looked scared. Scared to hold him. Scared not to. She took his hand.
Warrior looked through her eyes and saw within her. He saw how deeply she understood him. He knew she was also filled with pain, but he was uncomfortable that she seemed to be able to handle it so much better than he could—it didn’t seem that it ever took her over, even for a minute. Her strength attracted him, and scared him too. She always seemed at peace. He struggled to keep looking her in the eye. He saw how desperately she always tried to clear the rage from his thoughts, to ease the flow of his blood. She was always with him, reminding him to breathe. And when he had seen too much, her spirit would brush his face, gently, claiming his eyes. He loved her for it—knew she could be like blood. Warrior knew this, he knew he should take her in his arms and let her ease the pain, but not today, today was different. His eyes were his, and they had just begun to see.
CHAPTER 5
As Warrior moved through the streets of his neighborhood, he walked past the shrines without even glancing at their names, haunted by the memories of having been there when they were created. Where he lived, there were artists who specialized in the dead, their masterpieces morbid testimonies to those who had passed on. On many blocks blank walls of white brick were brightly spray-painted with images that told the tales of children who never had the chance to become grown.
Families, crews, and other loved ones would pay the graffiti men to perform their work. Then the artists would paint the image of the dead on the sides of abandoned buildings, creating tombstone portraits of fantasy configurations. Most would be dressed in finer clothes than they had ever worn, with more jewels than they had ever owned, standing in front of cars they had only driven in their dreams.
Other portraits reflected the grand possessions that deceased dealers had in fact owned in life, and the black or silver steel weapons they had used to get them—as they secured their short-lived glory. However, these shrines did not portray that without someone else’s steel leading to their own death, the
ir lives would never have been brought to the artist to paint. The images told of the dead’s exploits in the trade of the white rock, but never the stories of those he had sent to the world to which he was just now arriving. Those who had been sent, victims whose stories ended before their time, innocent bystanders in the war of their generation, children whose lives weren’t gone, yet they waited, anticipating the coming of their executioner, their young minds filled with the same simple question. “Why?” Whether they had sold it, used it, or simply been caught up in the war around it, all those who had passed on were remembered on the walls of names. Painted on the white brick, their different paths in life were woven together by the rock, like a braid. Behind the colorful image was always a tombstone, planted deeply in imaginary grass, sparkling in newness, filled with numbers and years of recent times, followed by the same three words: Rest In Peace. These are the walls that serve as the ledger for the steel, one-eyed god.
At the foot of the painted tombstones, on sidewalks which had served as the final bed before the fallen had passed on, the loved ones who were left maintained a vigil. Fulfilling the practices of long ago times, from a place only some still remembered as home, mutating the tradition for the urban landscape, they placed flowers, wreaths, burning candles and incense in makeshift altars, built in honor of the departed’s name.
Cheap bottles of liquor, their contents consumed or poured out onto the earth called concrete, the glass bottles now serving as grave markers. The mourners placed these items down, knowing that by sunrise they would have to replace them again, for each night, the walking dead roamed the streets. These night walkers who were alive only in name, spent their time kneeling to the reign of the white rock. They would steal the silver fillings out of a sleeping man’s mouth as he rested, and if he did not wake, would return for his ivory. They would take the flowers and wreaths as offerings to their god, and sell the candles for the few dollars that would ensure their return to their beloved and poisonous world. And if the walkers missed an altar, the weather would come, wind blowing away flowers, covering the streets with dirty petals, rains extinguishing candles, washing away chalk-written messages. This is a place where graveyards are found on every street, tombstones painted on brick walls. With so many dead, the space of tombstones are now overflowing, long lists of names flow down entire sides of buildings; but there is no shortage of graveyards in this land of the white rock.
Warrior crossed the street to the bodega to get something to drink. In front of the store, on top of a milk crate, sat Cowboy Johnson, a massive man with hard, calloused hands and an iron grip. He had been a rodeo star in the 1950s and it was rumored he had been one of the best cattle drivers the West had ever seen. He wore his worn brown leather cowboy boots, blue jeans with a leather belt that had a huge gold Texas lone star buckle, a thick canvas blue shirt, a silver and black cowboy string tie, and a five-gallon brown suede cowboy hat. In front of the corner store was Cowboy Johnson’s spot, and he could always be found there, never drunk, but always slowly nursing his whiskey, holding court, telling the children stories about the Old West. As Warrior walked by, he nodded his head. Cowboy Johnson tipped his bottle of whiskey, covered in a brown paper bag, and nodded back.
Warrior walked into the back of the store where the cold drinks were kept. There were four sliding glass doors. Behind the first were juices and soda, behind the second was beer, and behind the other two were countless brands of malt liquor. In other neighborhoods, no malt liquor was sold due to its mind-altering strength and the large forty-ounce bottles it came in. In other neighborhoods, Warrior had not been able to find even one brand. In his neighborhood, the competition was so strong that the companies advertised everywhere; on the radio, on the billboards found on every street, rising high into the sky, and on signs glued to the windows of every corner bodega. In these stores, there was a different brand for every day of the week. Crazy Horse. St. Ides. Power. Dragon. Old E. Colt.45. The Bull. Different names. Same objective—to take the drinker into another world. Quick. Warrior reached behind the first glass door and took hold of a tall can of lemonade. His head pounded as visions of the day flooded his mind, and he put back the juice, sliding shut the door. He moved down the aisle, slid open another glass door, and wrapped his hand around the neck of a forty-ounce bottle of Crazy Horse. As he began to slide shut the glass door, Warrior once again felt the pounding in his head, and seeing the visions, and hearing the words, he reached back in, and grabbed another bottle. Warrior walked to the front of the store, placed the two bottles on the fake wood counter, and slid the cashier four dollars and fifty cents. The cashier put the two bottles into separate brown bags. Warrior placed them in the bag that hung from his shoulder, and walked out the door in the direction of the park.
As Warrior entered the park, he saw that much of the snow had melted since he had brought his sister there to play. Feet had trampled what remained underfoot, packing it down, turning it from a bright white to an off-gray. New garbage had been thrown to the ground, and wrappers, needles, plastic vials, and a few mud-soaked lost mittens, littered the earth as if the snow’s cleaning job had been rebuffed by the city. Warrior felt a descending chill in the air, looked up at the skies and knew that nature’s answer would soon come. Maybe tonight. Warrior walked deeper into the park, past where he and his sister had built their snowman, long since destroyed, and looked for a bench. He was in a desolate area, and Warrior was happy for the peace. Then he heard Weatherman.
“Hey! Young brutha! Hey!”
Warrior stopped walking and turned in the direction of the voice. Weatherman was standing in the snow, sweating. His umbrella was hanging from his exhausted arm, its point wet with snow and mud. Warrior knew that Weatherman had been mastering his thrusts, perfecting his samurai strokes, for hours, probably all day. He was preparing for battle. Weatherman could wield his umbrella with vengeance. In fact, one night Warrior had seen him fighting off some young boys who had been acting foolish. They had tried to mess with Weatherman as he slept, and he had woken, unsheathed his umbrella, and taken to teaching those boys a lesson. Not hurting them mind you, just teaching. Warrior had laughed as Weatherman chased the boys, sticking them in their ass cheeks with the point of the umbrella, expertly smacking them in their backs with its broad side, paying no mind to their swearing that they would never bother him again. Weatherman brought up his umbrella and pointed it at Warrior. “You, young brutha, I’m talkin’ to you!” he said, slightly out of breath.
“What’s up, man?” Warrior asked.
“The sky. And what’s up with you?” replied Weatherman.
“I’m jus’ tryin’ to find a place to sit down. I thought I’d be able to have a little peace in here, you know? Away from the noise,” said Warrior.
“There’s lots a peace to be found in the park. Trees. Ponds. Animals. Birds. Mother Nature brings peace,” Weatherman said, waving his umbrella all around him. “Ya figured out who stole the sun?” Weatherman said, his head leaning to one side, as he peered at Warrior.
“No,” Warrior replied softly as he slowly shook his head and turned, walking deeper into the park. Weatherman’s voice followed after him.
“The wind is callin’ out, young brutha. Put your ear to the air, you can hear it. The wind’s got voice. Can’t ya hear it cryin’? Even the wind wants to be free . . .”
Weatherman’s voice faded away as Warrior walked into a heavily wooded section of the park. He walked for a while and then broke through the dense trees, into a clearing, seeing a pond surrounded by a path that wove around the water’s edge. Warrior walked down the sloped hill that lay between him and the pond, and sat down on one of the green wood benches that lined the winding path. He removed one of the bottles of Crazy Horse from his bag, keeping it within its brown paper confines. As Warrior tapped the bottle in the way he had been taught, he felt the temperature dropping and knew that the alcohol would keep him warm. He broke the seal of the bottle, threw away the cap, and turned the bottle to its
side, pouring out some of its contents. This was custom. Some call it libation. Some call it paying respect. Whatever the name, it means honoring those who are not here, and those who are locked up. Before you drink, you acknowledge the voices who have passed on. Ancestors. Elders. Children. This is the law.
Warrior brought the bottle to his mouth, closed his eyes, and drank deeply. Immediately the alcohol flooded his head, running through his blood, bringing warmth and heavy eyes. He sat there, cradling the neck of the bottle, looking out at the pond. Its dark waters were covered with a thin layer of ice, and in some spots the water had broken through. He placed his earphones on, took his music player out of his pocket, chose the soundtrack for the mood, and pulled his hood up tightly, keeping the warmth in and disturbing sounds outside. He pressed play and let the sounds and the malt liquor take him into another world.
It was dark now. Snow had begun to fall almost an hour before. Whiteness covered the iced layer of the pond, and returned purity to the park. Streetlamps lined the path around the pond, but only one was working, its light straining to erase the shadows. The bench Warrior sat on was far from the rays of the light so he sat in darkness, the dim glow of the moon reflecting slightly off his black hood and black jacket, snow falling around him, flakes building up on his still shoulders. The only part of his body that moved was his head. It nodded, continuously, following the rhythm of the drumbeat. One bottle lay discarded at his feet, another, almost empty, rested in his lap, his hand gently maintaining its balance. Warrior’s jaw tightened, and his lips mouthed the words that flowed through his ears, their sounds long ago memorized. Warrior’s head kept time as he looked out through hooded bloodshot eyes.
The voices of genocide and ignorance had been calling Warrior’s name, trying to reach him, but this night, he was not listening. He felt the rage flowing through his veins, and it felt good. It brought warmth, and clarity to his thoughts.
Passage Page 9
