by Kiese Laymon
Maybe LaVander Peeler thought I understood we were all being given an unearned birthday party, and that I did what I did on stage to show other chubby black Mississippi boys with contentious demeanors that dignity and pride and keeping it one hundred were more important than being decoration.
But it wasn’t.
That’s what I realized, looking at LaVander Peeler shaking on that stage. In order to be the first Mississippi black boy with a head full of waves to win a national contest in anything, you had to actually win—not make a speech about why the contest wasn’t fair after you lost.
“‘Chitterlings,’” he began. LaVander Peeler paused again and looked behind him, then hard to his right, then turned hard to his left. He looked back into the light, tears finally streaming down his face, and said, “Citoyen’s grandmother couldn’t understand why the young sibling from up north refused to eat the wonderful chitterlings upon finding out they came from the bowels of a big-eyed hog named Charles.”
No bell went off for a good eight seconds. Then, out of nowhere, balloons fell from the top of the stage. Popguns went off! That “Harlem Shake” song played. Blizzards of confetti fell in front of the eye of the camera as Cindy and two of the judges walked onstage with their hands over their heads.
The voice behind the light screamed, “LaVander Peeler, you have done the unbelievable! Times are a-changing and you, you exceptional young Mississippian, are a symbol of the American Progress. The past is the past and today can be tomorrow. LaVander Peeler, do you have anything to say? Would you like to thank your state, your governor, Jesus Christ, or your family for this blessing?”
“… who entered the kitchen like a monster and asked,” LaVander Peeler said, “‘Why are y’all eating all my children?’”
The music completely faded out and the balloons and confetti stopped coming down. Cindy held the trophy right next to LaVander Peeler and he said it all again: “Citoyen’s grandmother couldn’t understand why the young sibling from up north refused to eat the wonderful chitterlings upon finding out they came from the bowels of a big-eyed hog named Charles who entered the kitchen like a monster and asked, ‘Why are y’all eating all my children?’” he said. “I’m saying that ‘chitterlings’ are the children of hogs. All things considered, I’m saying it literally, too, not metaphorically. Chitterlings are the children of hogs.”
“But you already used it correctly, LaVander Peeler,” the voice said. “And you did it quite dynamically, I might add.”
“All things considered, I’m saying that chitterlings are the children of hogs.” With that, he closed his teary eyes and tucked his head into his chest. The crowd gasped. And I did, too.
But now what was going to happen? Would there be a three-way tie? Would the three finalists have to spell again? Cindy slyly did the glide offstage with the trophy. LaVander Peeler went and sat back in his seat. The camera stopped focusing on LaVander Peeler and instead just panned all the competitors.
Then out of the left side of my screen, LaVander Sr. marched out and yanked his son by the crease of the elbow off that stage. A few seconds later, a woman I assumed was Stephanie’s grandma came up onstage and started pointing at Stephanie and telling her to get up and go. Eventually, Stephanie got up on her own, with her arms still folded, her head still tucked in her chest, looking at the ground. She walked off the stage, but not before she threw a finger sign right at the camera.
A few seconds later, the voice behind the light walked right across the front of the camera and onto the stage. The voice bent and whispered something in the ear of the twin from New Orleans who was also in the finals. A few seconds later, one of the twins was holding LaVander Peeler’s trophy over his head with one hand, and the other twin joined him with both of their backs to the crowd. The twins let everyone know that as crazy as the night had been, the trophy was definitely in the hands of its rightful owners, Katrina’s Finest.
I turned the television off and sat on the floor of the garage with one of Mama’s old brushes. I wanted to get nice with myself at the thought of something I knew. But there was too much I didn’t know, like when Mama was coming home, how hard I’d get my back beat, if LaVander Peeler would be my best friend now, how folks would talk to us all around Jackson, what made me say those things to the Mexican brother and sister, and how LaVander Peeler collected the courage to go from Fade Don’t Fade to that adolescent black superhero on stage.
I knew I could never ever hate LaVander Peeler again after that night. And crazy as it sounds, that was enough to make me feel good about throwing the brush under the bed, getting nice with myself like a true champ, and writing my story until Mama came home to tell me why what I did was wrong for me, wrong for black people yet to be born, and wrong for the globe. Mama would tell me this, I figured, while crying and giving me the legendary back beating of my life.
And after the back beating, I’d tell her not to cry. I’d tell her that I understood why I deserved the welts on my arms and back. And when she was quiet and gently rubbing the welts up and down, I’d turn around and say, “Mama, all things considered, I feel like I love LaVander Peeler.”
But when Mama finally came home, none of what I thought would happen really happened. I didn’t get beaten. Mama didn’t even tell me what I did wrong. Quiet as it’s kept, she barely said a word to me. She just folded up in her bed and kept crying on the phone to my grandma, saying, “I’m so sorry, Mama. I’m so, so sorry.” And since Mama didn’t whup my back, I didn’t tell her I felt like I loved LaVander Peeler, not just because it might make her remember that she didn’t whup my back, but because I didn’t actually know what I meant. I didn’t think my body wanted to kiss or even grind up on LaVander Peeler. But I also knew that no one on earth could make me happier or sadder than that boy either.
That felt like love to me.
The phone kept ringing the next morning and Mama told me not to answer it. I wanted to ask her why it was ringing so much and why I couldn’t answer it but I’d made it this far without a back beating and I didn’t want to chance it.
Forty minutes later, we were headed to the bus station. Mama didn’t say a word to me the whole trip. She bought my ticket when we got to the bus station and waited in her car until I got on the bus.
Then, just like that, Mama left.
No “I love you.” No “See you later.” No “Behave yourself.” I was headed to Melahatchie, Mississippi, for four days to stay with Grandma.
I walked all the way to the back of the bus and person after person, no matter whether they were old, young, black, brown, clean, or dusty, was messing with their cell phones and bootleg iPods. Some folks were talking. Some folks were listening. But most were texting. I walked to the back of the bus hating all the sentences I imagined those folks writing, hearing, and reading, and I pulled out Long Division.
Five minutes after the bus took off, I got a tap on my right shoulder. I turned around and one of the girls who had been two seats in front of me was now sitting right next to me, and her friend was sitting in the seat in front of me. Both were looking me dead in my face. They were cute up close, but cute in two different ways.
The cuter one was slightly sleepy-eyed. I liked that. She looked at the cover of Long Division and said, “Who wrote that book?”
“I’m not sure,” I told her.
“We going to Waveland,” she said. “Where you going?”
“Melahatchie, to stay with my grandma.”
“You heard of that girl they call Baize Shephard?” she asked me.
“That’s her real name,” I told her. “They don’t just ‘call’ her that. She lives next to my grandma.”
“You the boy from the game last night, right? The one with the brush who was cutting up on them white folks?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Sleepy Eyes looked at her friend in front of us. “Told you that he was the one with the brush,” she said. “The one from that private school.”
I almost forgot the n
ew brush was in my hand. I started brushing to help me with my nerves. “Fannie Lou Hamer ain’t no private school,” I told her.
“This girl right here,” she pointed to her friend, whose eyes weren’t sleepy at all. Truth be told, her eyeballs were so large and round that when you looked at her you wondered how she could ever sleep. She was wearing this muscle shirt that would’ve fit just right except her pregnant-looking belly made it cut off too soon. The girl had plenty of stretch marks on her stomach, too. As someone who had plenty of stretch marks himself on his biceps and waist, I always liked stretch marks on girls, even if it was on the front of their bellies.
“She told me that she wants you to holler at her,” Sleepy Eyes said. “She tweeted on her phone this morning that she think you was smart and fine, even if you heavy.”
“No, I don’t,” Stretch Marks said laughing. “I’ont think you fine. I don’t even know him. Stop lying, V!”
Sleepy Eyes just looked at Stretch Marks for a full eight seconds without saying a word. Then she looked back at me. “She told me that she wishes she could take a video with you for her Facebook with you saying one of your sentences.”
“Okay,” I told her and got next to Stretch Marks while Sleepy Eyes taped us. “My name is City,” I said into the camera phone, “and meeting these two cute girls right here on the way to Melahatchie made a day that started off sour as warm buttermilk into a day destined to taste something like a banana Slurpee.” I looked at Stretch Marks’s face and she was giggling her ass off.
“Can we touch your brush?” Sleepy Eyes said to me and put her phone in her pocket.
I handed it to her. “That’s a different brush than the one I threw at the contest.” She smelled the brush and she handed it right back.
“I get why you said what you said to that Mexican girl,” she told me. “It was funny. I just don’t think she had nothing to do with it, though. I don’t mean to drop no shade. I’m just wondering how come you didn’t go off on her brother like you went off on her.”
“I don’t even know,” I said. “That’s a good question. I said what I said because she was there, in my row, and I wanted her to feel worse than us. But…”
“But you don’t know what that girl was feeling. You just didn’t even care.”
“That’s true,” I told her. “And after I left, she put in that work.”
“I would never be in one of those games but if they did me like they did you, I would have done the same thing you did,” she told me. “I would have gone off on the brother though. That would be wrong, too, but that’s what I would do. I woulda called him a li’l Mexican bitch.”
“I don’t know about all that,” I told her.
“Why you don’t know. That’s pretty much what you did. You just snapped. I saw it. Would you do anything different if you could do the game over?”
That was one of the best questions anyone ever asked me. “I guess I would have been more prepared for what they were gonna throw at me. And no matter what, I shouldn’t have never left my boy, LaVander Peeler, up there by himself.”
“Shoot. At least you internet famous now,” she said.
“Is he internet famous, too? LaVander Peeler, I’m talking about.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “He was too serious to be internet famous.”
I tried to look smooth and real-life famous as Stretch Marks and Sleepy Eyes walked back to their seats. They kept looking back at me and smiling every few minutes. Sleepy Eyes’s smile made me embarrassed for her, but it also made me want to go in that stanky bus bathroom and get nice with myself.
I picked up Long Division and was reading when three white boys who looked like they were in college came from the front to the back of the bus with their camera phones ready.
One of the boys put his phone in his pocket and sat next to me. “Sorry if we’re bothering you, big guy,” he said. “It’s just that was some funny shit you did last night, man. Could I record you saying, ‘The Ron, I hate you more than LaVander Peeler?’”
“I guess I could say that,” I told the boy, and looked up at Sleepy Eyes and Stretch Marks, who were still watching me.
“Cool,” the white boy said. “And if you wouldn’t mind, could you say your name after you tell me you hate me?”
It felt like a weird thing to do, especially given what I had said about white folks at the contest, but as soon as he got his phone ready, I put my internet-famous arm around his neck, looked right into the phone held by his friend, and said, “The Ron, I hate you more than LaVander Peeler. My name is City.”
I kept looking up from Long Division on the way to Melahatchie, but Sleepy Eyes and Stretch Marks didn’t turn around and smile at me for the rest of the trip. Not even once.
…
Baize…
On Old Ryle Road, folks like to bathe, eat, and put on clean clothes before sitting on the porch. When I woke up, I ate a fried-egg-and-cheese sandwich with some old Miracle Whip. Then I sat out on the porch in some faded cutoff jeans and the Magic Johnson Converse Weapons Mama Lara got me for Christmas. I called my grandma “Mama Lara” because everyone else did. Mama Lara said that boys weren’t supposed to call or knock on girls’ doors until they were seniors in high school, so my plan was to wait on the porch all day if I had to until Shalaya Crump came outside. That’s when I’d drop my new GAME on her.
Mama Lara’s husband was a man named Lerthon Coldson. I never knew him. Shalaya Crump’s granddaddy and Lerthon Coldson were best friends way back in the day. They disappeared 21 years ago in 1964 in this place we called the Shephard house. The Shephard house was in the middle of the Night Time Woods, and it was the only real house on Old Ryle Road. Every other house was a trailer or shotgun house lifted off the ground by some cinder blocks. The Shephard house was built right from the ground up, and it had lots of grass that looked like veins growing up all over the house. The house was huge and it was all one level, but it didn’t just look like a box. It looked kinda like a tic-tac-toe board from the outside, with a huge roof in the middle.
Neither Shalaya Crump or me knew our granddaddies, but sometimes we’d wonder about how two grown men could go inside a house one day, then never come back out. That wonder brought us together in a way. But even if our granddaddies didn’t disappear, we still would’ve been close. We’d been friends ever since I could remember having friends.
When Mama Lara came out to talk to me on the porch, she told me how her girlfriends were mad because they got group-rate tickets to see The Price Is Right and she decided at the last minute not to go. Mama Lara claimed she would’ve gone to California with her friends except she didn’t like driving with church folks in close spaces for more than one state. To tell you the truth, she only liked to travel on the weekend because she hated to miss the stories on CBS during the week. Plus if she would have gone, I wouldn’t have been able to come down for break.
While I was out there on that porch, Mama Lara hugged me and held her hands on my hips. “Jesus, my baby boy is a fat little man who is two points away from that honor roll,” she said. “Your granddaddy would not believe how fast you sprouting out.”
I sat there waiting for her to explain what she meant with my arms folded across the top layer on my stomach.
“Oh,” she said. “Unfold your arms. You ain’t gotta cover them fat breasts. What I’m saying is that your mind, your mouth, and your heart finally working right. You finally sprouting out.”
“You making me feel funny saying I got ‘breasts,’ Mama Lara.”
“All I’m saying is that you ready to move,” she said and looked me right in my eyes. “Yeah, you ready in mind, body, and soul.”
I loved Mama Lara more than any person in my family. She had these scars on her face from an accident when she was younger, and she’d do everything possible to cover them up when she left the house. It was cute to me how she was old and cared so much about a few scars on her face. But Mama Lara was also a little on the shady side, to tel
l you the truth. She was always leaving the house at the strangest times and coming back smelling like outside.
I ignored Mama Lara and looked across the street at Shalaya Crump’s trailer. Shalaya Crump was on spring break just like me, but I knew that she wasn’t going anywhere because her grandma had to work. She had actually never gone anywhere for break. Not once. She blamed it on her parents giving her away to her grandma as soon as she was born. Shalaya Crump never met her real parents, but she thought they would have wanted to at least travel to New Orleans or Alabama if she lived with them. She had only been out of the county one time, and that was for the state science fair finals in Jackson. And even then, her grandma didn’t let her spend the night.
Shalaya Crump looked so happy to see me and I tried hard not to look as happy as I was to see her. I started pulling my dingy Izod up over my mouth and fake yawning. She offered me a saltine and a sip of cold drank. Then she gave me the kind of full body hug that made me taste melted Jell-O Pudding Pops.
I don’t know how to say this without making you hate me, but Shalaya Crump smelled like she’d just come back from about six recesses right on top of one another. And at every recess, she must have been swimming naked in a sea of cube steak gravy. I didn’t mind her gravy funk, though, for three reasons: #1 — I hated the smell of deodorant. #2 — Shalaya Crump’s funk smelled better than most girls’ best stale perfume. #3 — I loved me some cube steak.
