Big Momma rose. Her pudgy fingers folded the paper detailing the meeting's agenda. Slowly, but with intent, she made her way to the center aisle. Diabetes stiffened her movements, but she remained stout and formidable. Her eyes focused on Mr Stern.
"Folks around here call me Big Momma."
"We know who you are, Big Momma. You're a fixture around here," Mr Stern said with a grimace of indigestion.
"Exactly. So I know the neighborhood and its people." She nodded to the reporter as if checking to see if she spelled "Big Momma" correctly in her notes. "Don't pity us. Don't condescend to us. Don't hold us to a lower standard."
"I don't-" Her hand wave cut him off. She would be heard. Mr Stern could just turn beet-red and glower over his glasses until she was through.
"We live in a community. We here every day. We see what's going on because we live here. Here in this community. Where do you live, Mr Stern?"
"I don't think that's-" Another hand wave. Another deepened glower.
"I've always lived in the community. We may not have much, but we have each other. We share what we have, we look out for each other as best we can, and we help each other as much as we can. That's the way folks around here brought me up. My parents had their problems. Abandoned me. But the adults in the neighborhood decided to raise me and hid me from CPS whenever a social worker came around, because they would just have sent me to foster care. The people here moved me from spot to spot so I could stay in the neighborhood and go to the neighborhood school. That's how I finished high school. So I know the value of education and I preach it to everyone I take in. I got married to a man from the neighborhood, God bless his soul. And when he passed, some five years ago, I stayed. In the community. I'm Breton Court through and through.
"You want to make us promises? Fine. You want to talk to folks? Talk. But in the end, we're a community. And we take care of our own."
The room burst into applause.
The reporter kept taking notes.
Near the heart of downtown, on 16th Street just east of Pennsylvania Avenue, one of the major prostitution boulevards in the city, Herron High School provided a classical liberal arts education. With an emphasis on the arts, it steeped their students in great historical thought, the school aimed to prepare them for college. According to the brochures, the school's curriculum was structured around an art history timeline and emphasized the classic art and literature of many cultures.
The five minutes until homeroom bell clanged, sharp and grating. Isabel "Iz" Cornwall closed her locker after slipping her backpack into it. Sunken cheekbones bookended a face with a long nose with a stud, slightly notched where it had been broken in the past. Slim, short, hair dyed black, she had an unadorned face of simple beauty which would rise to gorgeous with the right make-up application. A tattoo of a dragon crawled along the base of her back. This was the third day this week she wore her blue jeans. Her nose was no longer sensitive to her own smell. She pulled a white cardigan over her pink T-shirt, covering her braless, small breasts. The T-shirt was worn yesterday, but she hoped no one would notice under the cardigan. She pressed her books to her chest, eyes downcast, slouching to be unnoticed.
"Damn girl, you wearing those clothes out." A black girl with a thick frame, large breasts, and thighs like oaks, her thick black hair had been processed into straight hair. Blue contact lenses didn't hide a wide nose and full lips which faced her in the mirror, and she took out her self-loathing on the world around her.
"Leave me alone, Andret."
"Just saying, you may want to give your outfit a rest. It's getting ripe enough, I bet them jeans could find their own way to school by now."
Iz lowered her head to push by. Andret hooked her arm in front of her.
"What? You too good to speak to me now?"
"She ain't got nothing to say to you. I might have a word or two though." Tristan Drust spoke with the timbre of command though she chewed a piece of gum with an open-mouthed flourish. Draped in a hoodie, her head crested with a thick nest of braids, most of which were dyed mauve. Big-boned and sturdy, without a trace of fat, anyone who knew anything about posture would have noticed how balanced her stance was. She knew more about fighting than most men. Her amber eyes with gold flecks counted off the girls with military precision. Andret was the mouth, the alpha of the group. Her wing girls could tussle, but if Andret was taken out quickly, they'd lose heart for a fight.
"Enter the dyke," Andret said.
"Now you've gone and hurt my feelings." Tristan squared up against Andret. Her eyes flashed challenge, a silent push. Andret inched forward, a tacit shove back.
In the end, much of life could be reduced to lessons learned on the playground. Random encounters, bullies and bullied, friends and foes, the workplace of life all gathered in the same place. There were those who were simply not meant to get along with one another. Spaces not meant to be inhabited by both parties without rage bristling off each other, ready to jump off. Without boiling up in them, a living fire that needed to lash out and scorch the earth about them just under the surface, a seething they didn't know what to do with; once the veneer was scratched it erupted.
Iz appealed to Tristan's better nature, preaching about finding better ways to respond to hostile situations rather than let them control her. "Blessed are the peacemakers" was a luxury Iz could indulge, but there was a reality she didn't understand: not everyone played by the rules of peace and some people just needed to be knocked on their ass. Folks who believed others infringed onto what was theirs and what the world owed them. Otherwise the world walked over you, the way so many had abused Iz. People like Iz needed people like Tristan.
Moving her weight to her back foot, Tristan knew how to throw a punch. She struck with her shoulder, not her arm. She pivoted her hip into her blow, punching through her target. The jab flew with an angry whisper, not wasting any more time with idle talk or the pantomime of threat. She wasn't one to waste a shot. Andret's neck snapped back, nose exploding on impact. At heart, Tristan was a fighter. The other thing about fighting was knowing how to take a punch. Tristan loved going up against people who sparred against heavy bags or practiced shadow boxing, because no matter how exquisite their technique, a fight was won or lost based on how well they handled having their bell rung. Andret fell into the arms of her compatriots, the group piling onto the floor. Students crowded around them as Tristan loomed over them. She read their eyes: they wanted no part of her.
"You OK?" Tristan asked Iz. Whenever they were together, the rest of the world retreated.
"I'm a full-time student, so I got to lay it off." As a kid, she wanted to study math. She had a head for numbers and loved their patterns and symmetry. Numbers measured the world. Unfortunately, the path of education was discouraged by her father. As far as he was concerned, she was an incubator on legs: he regularly informed her that her duty was to get married and have kids. As her brand of rebellion, she became studious and intense and developed a love of reading.
"You takin' notes?"
"Right here."
"All right then." Tristan took her in her arms and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
"What's going on here?" A teacher popped his head out of his classroom.
"Nothing," Tristan said.
"You know her?" He glanced at Andret, who cradled her face and slinked off with her friends.
"I don't know anyone."
"Go to the office, young lady."
"I don't even go to this school." Tristan flipped her hood over her head, turned on her heel, and flashed two fingers. "Deuces."
Before the teacher could summon security, Tristan was gone.
King couldn't afford to be sensitive. He lived in a hard world, a dangerous world. Pastor Winburn called it a fallen world. Fallen into what King was never sure. A state of disrepair, an invisible "unfinished business" sign lodged on someone's to-do list when they… He… got around to remembering the people left behind. Much like the church he used as a meeting pla
ce.
Out of habit, King grabbed a nearby broom and King swept the floor of the abandoned, burned-out husk of a church, keenly aware of the futile gesture. Vandals would one day break in and loot anything the owners missed. Crackheads would use it as a safe haven from the elements to get high. Prostitutes would throw discarded mattresses in the corners and use it as a flophouse for their johns. But King straightened up anyway because he had to do something, no matter how small or ultimately futile.
"You appear haggard and worn." Merle sat, legs crossed over one another at the ankles. Black cracks veined the surface of the circular table, browned with rain rot.
"Not enough sleep."
"You wear your dreams."
"Something like that."
"Hmm." Merle ran his finger along the top of the makeshift table. He licked the soot from his fingertip. "I won't always be with you."
"You dying?" King stopped sweeping and focused on the man for the first time.
"We're all dying. I know my death will be shameful and ridiculous. If you find my remains and I'm in a closet with a belt tied around my neck, wrists, and my gentleman's gentleman… all I ask is that you cut me down at least."
"So you are dying?"
"My safety word is 'apples.'"
"What are you talking about?"
"You have to be prepared. Events are in motion, some courses set, but we are not Destiny's concubine. We have decisions to make. Choices."
King trusted few people. Yet from the beginning, he knew he could talk to Merle. Perhaps it was just that with his brand of lunacy, anything King said would be forgotten moments later. More in truth, King sensed there was something ancient about their bond. "Can I get your advice on something?"
"Most people don't want advice, only agreement."
"I want your honest opinion."
"I know nothing but half-truths and veiled interpretations, but I'll do my best."
"What do you think of Lady G?"
Merle tapped his lip with his sooty forefinger. "If I should tell you she was a poor choice, young, foolish, and empty-headed, would you believe me?"
"She's not even close to that." King's pulse quickened, as if his heart reared at a threat to be confronted. Something about Lady G stirred an over-protectiveness within him, as if he couldn't stand even the thought of anyone speaking ill of her. "That's not the woman I know."
"A grown man fixed by a girl." Merle etched his finger into the table, drawing pictures only his mind envisioned. "What if the girl was not a girl?"
"A monster? An enchantment?" King's mind raced with possibilities. Anything to explain the… hesitation he felt with her.
"No. A plug."
"What?"
"She stops up the hole in you." Merle adjusted the fit of his cap as if tuning in the proper signal. "Somewhere between birth and burial, people learned to twist the simple longings in their hearts — rest, belonging, affection, validation, peace — and tried to fill them with other things. Food. Drugs. Sex. Yet try as they might, the hole remained."
"Try again."
"I see that's too much for you to get your mind around, O Hesistant Spirit. Let's try this more practically then. What if I was to say she would betray you for another, perhaps one of your closest; would you believe me?"
"I'd say you were way off. She's not that type of girl, Merle."
Merle threw his head back and began to sing. "When a man loves a woman…"
"I haven't said anything about love."
"Here's the thing about love," Merle continued, ignoring him. "It goes against the laws governing the universe. Laws of probability. Laws of nature. Laws of common sense. None of them need apply. Love trumps all."
"It all comes down to the right girl."
"The future is like love: something we don't have the luxury to believe in," Merle sniffed. "I need to attend to the others."
Little more than a fallen museum, a curator preserving theologies no longer relevant to the community it served, a layer of dust settled upon the church like a burial shroud. Three chairs presided on a raised platform behind a toppled altar. Promises of health and wealth reverberated in the empty anteroom, echoing only along the cobwebs strung between the chairs. The choir loft cracked under its own weight, a broken bow on the ship of the church stage; an abandoned stage whose dwindling audience found better speakers, better empty promises, or greener pastures to lose themselves in.
His steps pronounced and precise, a boy entered with the solemnity of a wedding's ring-bearer. Except instead of a ring, he carried a white gun — with a pearl handle grip and white shaft — rested atop a purple pillow. With each footfall, flames erupted from candle stands. Two boys, both with the scrawny physique of angry twigs, trailed him, each holding candelabras with five candles.
Last in the processional was a young girl, short and curvy with engorged breasts. Her arms outstretched before her as she held a cup. Pure gold inlaid with precious stones, the cup produced its own luminescence. The hall filled with a suffuse light, dimming the lights produced by the candles. The girl turned and presented the cup to Percy.
"What do you think it means?" Percy asked, his voice held the slightest hitch of a restrained stammer.
"Means you dream of being a pimp," Merle said.
"Really?" Percy sat up, surprised at himself.
"Simple Percy, pure and true. Simple Percy, purehearted fool."
"I'm not stupid." Percy's eyes turned downward, stung by the words of someone he wanted to be his friend. Merle put his hand on the boy's beefy shoulder.
"No, no you're not. Far from it. You're probably the best of us. Thus a pure fool. And still, here you are yearning for the infinitely desirable, yet unattainable."
"A woman?"
"Her love? See, you aren't so dim."
"Why won't King let me come along when they go out?"
"It's dangerous work." Merle turned from him.
"I ain't scared."
"No you're not. And you're more ready than they realize. Don't worry, your time draws near."
"How do you know?"
"Your dream says so."
A nearing thwack-thwack-thwack interrupted them as Rhianna Perkins padded along the carpet in a pair of flip-flops with an orange band. With good hair, though tender-headed, and fine-boned, she walked with a slight waddle, a stride developed because of the fullness of her pregnancy. Her breasts, swollen and tender, stretched out her black and white striped tank top over a lacy pink bra. Her belly protruded as if she attempted to hide a basketball under her shirt. She bent forward. Percy caught a glimpse of her panties rising above her jean line.
"Boys." She caught him peeking. His eyes retreated and he turned his head.
"Milady." Merle bowed. "I see your most sacred of ovens bears up nicely. May I?" He reached out his hands.
"Sure."
Merle placed his hands on either side of her belly. Then pressed his ear to it. "Oh my. Yes, you are. Be patient."
"What's he saying?" Percy asked.
"What happens in the womb stays in the womb." Merle winked.
Life made her tough, not brave. Sex was a position of surrender, a searching for sorrow, a space to fill the loneliness. There was nothing special between her legs or in her center, and she went to bed with men — boys really — with easy aplomb. The idea of rejection or abandonment or being used never entered her calculations. She was a tabula rasa of femininity. One could write any story onto her and she was happy to oblige for the semblance of a relationship; the presence of a man was all the illusion of a relationship she required. She found it easier to open her legs than her heart: a brash emotional laziness. Her mental efforts focused more on figuring out how to stay alive from day to day.
"He active though." Rhianna grimaced, then pressed her palms into her lower back. "Got no sense. Just like his daddy."
"A hard road, raising a young one alone," Merle said.
"She's not alone," Percy said.
"True." Merle, again, patted th
e young man.
"Anyway, I'm looking for a new man. King's taken." Rhianna toyed with the gangsta set. She believed that she wanted a thug, just not too much of a thug. Enough to be tough, because she definitely didn't want a softie.
"What about Lott?" Merle asked. His voice had the timbre of urgency, a desperate urging.
"I don't do yellow men, but he's nice."
"Love. It never ceases to baffle me."
Sweating in the field, King's back ached, stretched by the day's labor. Little more than a boy stripped from his mother; man enough to do the work and live the life. A bit filled his mouth. With an angular face and tubercular frame, the white overseers had checked his legs and teeth on the auction block, little more than a work horse's inspection. They didn't take full measure of the wildness in his eyes when they put it in his mouth. Chains clanged with his every movement. The twinge of anger burned, a constant fever beneath his sweaty skin. Drawn up and yanked back, his lips parted. He tasted the iron in his mouth. Spit pooled in it but he couldn't swallow. He vomited, choking as it oozed back down his throat with nowhere to escape around the bit. His tongue brutalized, both by the bit and the bile. And the clenched hatred. His eyes untamed, savage and unbroken, yearned to be free. Not letting anything — not the pain, not the humiliation, not the self-hatred — into his personal world.
King snapped awake on the green checked futon in his living room, legs akimbo. The cuff of the chains still bit into his waking flesh, where he rubbed his wrists. Lady G sank between his spread legs and nestled her back into him. His arms wrapped around her and she felt a rare moment of being safe. He shifted slightly, but there was no hiding from the erection her very proximity caused. She didn't mind. She rather enjoyed the effect she had on him, if only because she knew he'd never make a move she wasn't comfortable with, no matter how much he burned. She liked that.
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