Long Division

by Kiese Laymon

  “Why?”

  “Never seen one up close,” he said. “Just wanna look at it.”

  “Naw,” I told him. “I’m good.”

  “You don’t wanna race. You don’t wanna share your brush. What you wanna do, Situation? Use some sentences. How you practice for something like that?”

  “My name is City,” I told him again. “Not no Situation.”

  All the men in the truck were laughing so hard at this point. One of them said, “Situation, you wanna use ‘brush’ in a sentence?”

  “I can do that,” I told him and started walking toward them. “The next funky-ass white boy to ask me for my brush is going to get knocked out Deebo-style, and if his friends jump in and try to help, they might get a few licks off, but I’m gonna get my revenge with my Jackson army one way or another. Let’s go, MyMy.” I grabbed her hand.

  “Here,” the man said, and threw a comb on the ground. “You are so talented, Situation. I’ll let you see mine if you let me see yours.”

  The comb wasn’t like the heavy plastic black combs Mama and them used sometimes. It had smaller edges and a thin handle. I reached down to pick it up and hand it to him, when out of nowhere, I felt a heavy foot in the center of my back. My solar plexus smashed into the ground and my lips kissed the asphalt right as my brush popped out of my hand. Then I felt another kick in my ass.

  I looked up. One of the men picked up my brush and threw it to Pot Belly, and they all jumped in the truck. I spit the little rocks, dirt, and blood from my lips and looked at the eyes of the other men in the car. “Use that in a sentence, you nigger son of a bitch,” Pot Belly yelled. Red dirt started pouring out of the back of that truck and they slowly rolled away. I sat there on the ground swallowing the taste of rocks. It felt like someone was tickling the back of my tongue with one of those square batteries.

  I went in my pockets, grabbed those right-heavy rocks, and tried to break out their back windows. MyMy ran with me. She was beside me throwing rocks. Pot Belly’s voice was still back there laughing, pointing, teasing, watching me. The young boy that he had called a man was recording it all, too, on a cell phone. “Hey girl, hey,” Pot Belly yelled as the boy recorded it all. “You best don’t grow to be no nigger-lover. Leave Situation alone.”

  I turned around in the middle of the road, wiped the dirt off my face, and walked back into the woods. “Move, MyMy,” I told her, and spit a bloody piece of the inside of my bottom lip on some sticker bushes.

  My mother had beaten me probably over a hundred times in Jackson, but no man and no white person had ever put their hands on me. Ever. I had lost some battles at school with LaVander Peeler and felt like I had lost on that stage a few days earlier, but in those situations, I always thought I could fight back. Even if I lost, I knew that the other person or other people fighting me knew that they had been in a fight.

  This was completely different.

  All I could do after getting my chest smashed into the ground and being called a “nigger” by those white men was hope it all stopped hurting. That was it.

  MyMy started trying to wipe the dirt off my face. “Don’t get dirt all on your clothes,” I told her and wiped my face again with my own shirt.

  “They called me ‘nigga’ too, City.”

  “MyMy, you ain’t no nigga,” I told her. “And don’t say it again.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it hurts when you say that word.” I turned back toward the road behind us. “And I know it doesn’t really hurt you when you hear the word. You feel me? It’s because no one can treat you like a nigga.”

  “It does hurt me,” she said and kept trying to look me in the face. “I didn’t like it when they said it.”

  “It didn’t really hurt you, though. It’s like the word ‘bitch.’ My principal said boys shouldn’t ever say that word because we never have to deal with being treated like a bitch. She’s right, too. Or…” I started thinking about how I treated that Mexican girl at the contest. The only bad word I knew to call Mexicans was “spic.” Really, I should have just called Stephanie a “spic bitch” because that’s how I treated her and that’s how I wanted her to feel.

  “But you just said it,” MyMy interrupted my thought. “You said ‘bitch.’”

  “I was making a point,” I told her. “Don’t say that word either. You too young to say words like that.”

  “City,” MyMy tugged on my shirt. “What does that word really mean?”

  “Which word?”

  “‘Nigga.’”

  “Damn, girl. Didn’t I just tell you not to say that word? Look. I know that I’m a nigga. I mean…I know I’m black and—” I thought for a few seconds of what Mama told me the word meant when I was in Jackson— “but ‘nigga’ means below human to some folks and it means superhuman to some other folks. Do you even know what I’m saying? And sometimes it means both to the same person at different times. And, I don’t know. I think ‘nigga’ can be like the word ‘bad.’ You know how bad mean a lot of things? And sometimes, ‘bad’ means ‘super good.’ Well, sometimes being called a ‘nigga’ by another person who gets treated like a ‘nigga’ is one of the top seven or eight feelings in the world. And other times, it’s in the top two or three worst feelings. Or, maybe…shoot. I don’t know. I couldn’t even use the word in a sentence, MyMy. Ask someone else. Shoot. I don’t even know.”

  “City,” MyMy interrupted me. She kept moving side to side, tearing leaves off of little lilac clovers. “I think we can kill them. They made you sound crazy on TV.”

  “Naw, girl. We could try to kill a few, but they had rifles in the back of their truck and they were taller than us and they could kill us a lot quicker than we could kill them. Plus, if I kill a white person, they would throw everyone in my family under the jail,” I told her. “Me and you can do bad things, hood-rat things, but we can’t ever kill white folks. How do you not know that?”

  We started walking out of the woods when MyMy stopped and looked at me with those crazy eyes. “City, I have a brown thing on my hand. See?” MyMy held out her left hand and showed me a little brown dot in the middle of her palm. Looked like a big freckle. “I wish this thing was white and the rest of me was the color of my birthmark.”

  “Don’t be dumb. Just be happy that you are whatever you are,” I told her. “At least the way you are, ain’t nobody kicking you in the back and making you use ‘niggardly’ in a sentence. It’s not that you’re dumb, MyMy, but you’re kinda dumb compared to me. You feel me?”

  “City?” MyMy said.

  “What?” I could tell she was flipping subjects again.

  “I don’t know what n-i-g-g-a is,” MyMy was talking her ass off now. “And you do not know what n-i-g-g-a is, but we can say I’m not n-i-g-g-a and you’re not n-i-g-g-a and Baize is not n-i-g-g-a.”

  “MyMy, we can say that if you really want us to, but I’m pretty sure I’m a nigga for life,” I told her. “And you might wanna stop talking about Baize since you didn’t even know her. Because I’m almost positive Baize would tell you that she was a nigga for life, too.” We started walking again. “I swear that white folks need to just shut the hell up sometimes. Y’all make it hard for everybody.”

  We started walking out of the woods. “MyMy, watch out for them sticker bushes,” I said.

  I had Long Division in my lap when Grandma came out on the porch and asked me what was wrong. I told her that I was sad because I didn’t want to get baptized and I wished she had internet so I could see what people were saying about me.

  “What happened to your lip, baby?” she asked me.

  “I just fell in the woods. Why?”

  Grandma went in the house and came back out on the porch with some peroxide and a washcloth. “Don’t ask me why,” she said. “Tell me what happened to your lip, City.”

  “Grandma, do white folks like watermelon?”

  “I reckon they do.”

  “More than black folks?”

  “I don’t
reckon they do.” She started laughing.

  “Well, Coach Stroud didn’t want me to buy a watermelon in front of white folks. That’s what he said.

  “Baby, Coach Stroud was just trying to protect you.”

  “From what, Grandma?”

  “From life, City,” she said. “Stroud ain’t all the way right, but he just want you to survive. Keep your guard up, because you don’t never know.”

  “Never know what, Grandma?” I was getting anxious and a little mad at the goofy answers Grandma was giving. “How far they go to get you? That’s what you said when I got off the bus. But what if I do know how far they’ll go? I know. I do!”

  Grandma didn’t say a word.

  “Well,” I said, “if someone was tired of hearing about white folks, do you think they should say, ‘Forget white folks,’ or ‘Forget what white folks think’?”

  Grandma looked at me harder. “I think the fool probably ought to ask himself why and what it is they want to forget. I ain’t forgetting nothing they did to us. Nothing! I spent my whole life forgetting. Shit.” Grandma started rubbing her wrist really hard. “City, what ain’t you telling me?”

  “I’m telling you everything,” I told her, when her phone rang. I could tell it was Uncle Relle by the way Grandma’s face dropped and her eyes starting twitching. Grandma handed me the phone and walked out to give me privacy. She was really good about doing that.

  “You did it, li’l nigga,” Uncle Relle said over the phone.

  “Did what?”

  “You made that move.”

  “What move?”

  “You got folks playing what you did on the internet everywhere. Now you ’bout to make that TV money. They ain’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Listen,” he said, sounding way too giddy, like Funkmaster Flex. “Don’t tell Mama I told you this, but they want you to be on a reality show.”

  “Who?”

  “You, City. Your mother don’t want you to do it but we got to find a way to make it work.”

  “Me?” I asked him. “Why?”

  “Because of what you did,” he said. “You got over two million hits on YouTube, damn near a million views on Worldstar, and it ain’t even been 24 hours since it happen. They know that they can make some money off you. I’ma tell you all about it tomorrow. BET and VH1 trying to do a Black Reality Stars of YouTube.”

  “Stop lying.”

  “I ain’t bullshitting you, baby boy,” he said, sounding completely sincere. “They want you, and that corny tall one who won.”

  “LaVander Peeler?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But he didn’t win.”

  “That’s what I say, but don’t hate,” he said. “Look, I’ma be there tomorrow morning. I gotta record you going through your day. Shit might be worth something someday.”

  “But you don’t have a camera.”

  “City, I got about six phones with cameras. Don’t worry ’bout me. Just do you. And don’t say nothing to Mama.”

  “Uncle Relle?”

  “What?”

  I didn’t want to say what I felt but I needed to tell someone. “I don’t believe you,” I told him. “Bad things are happening to me too fast. You know what I mean? Everything is happening too fast. I’m reading this book called Long Division and there’s a character in it from the ’80s named City. It’s hard…”

  “It is what it is,” he interrupted me. “Fuck a book. Ain’t no one reading no books in 2013 unless you already a star or talking about some damn vampires and wolfmen. Like Jigga said, every day a star is born. Not a writer. A star, nigga! Today that star is you.”

  “Bye, Uncle Relle,” I said, not really understanding how much of what he said was truth but knowing Jigga didn’t really have anything to do with it. I went out on the porch and looked across Old Morton Road at the Magic Woods. They didn’t seem nearly as magical as the woods I’d been reading about in Long Division.

  BOOM BOOM BOOM.

  Grandma’s screen screeched open around 8 p.m. Boom Boom Boom. Grandma looked at me and grinned. I grinned back so she wouldn’t feel as stupid as she looked. Boom Boom Boom. After knock number three or six, depending on how you count, Grandma’s door opened and, in slow motion, in walked our boy, Ufa D, in a head-to-toe camouflage outfit with two DVD collections under his arms.

  Ufa sat his big self on the couch next to Grandma. They half-smiled, touched feet, and tossed goofiness at each other like grown folk did on good cable after they got done doing it.

  Ufa looked over at me on the floor and just started laughing his ass off. I would’ve been more pissed but Ufa had a burning sweet tobacco smell about him. The smell had its root in his mouth, but somehow it spread all over his body.

  Ufa always brought one episode of The Dukes of Hazzard and one episode of Dallas over to Grandma’s on Friday nights. Ufa and Grandma realized a year ago that you could buy the box sets of old shows at Walmart. Ever since then, Friday was Dallas and Dukes of Hazzard night just like I guess it was for them way back in the 1980s. After bringing in the box sets, they would go back out to his truck and get the fried fish or chicken platters and cold drank that he left there.

  When folks came to Grandma’s house, they parked in this little rocky sand patch to the right of the porch. But Ufa D went way past the patch and parked on the grass next to the work shed, damn near in the back of Grandma’s house, under a magnolia. We walked back and looked in the back of his orangey-red pickup. On top of lots of dry pine needles and lots of long stalks of sugar cane were three big burlap sacks filled with orange drank, donuts, fried chicken parts, and potato logs from Jr. Food Mart. Even though my chest still hurt from what happened earlier with Pot Belly, and even though my insides felt super sour, I couldn’t wait to eat as much greasy food as soon as possible. For a second, I thought about this skinny speaker they brought to Hamer to talk mainly to the girls in my grade. This skinny dude kept talking about how black girls loved to eat their feelings when things were sad for them. I acted like I wasn’t paying attention, but I really wanted to ask that skinny dude so many questions. Anyway, I wondered if I was trying to eat my feelings after what had happened to me over the past two days.

  By the time we got in the house, I didn’t wonder about anything except how much greasy food I could force down my mouth in the shortest amount of time. If I was eating my feelings, it felt so good while it was happening.

  I was hours into a chicken-fat-and-orange-drank-induced coma when Grandma tapped me on the booty.

  “Get up, baby,” she said. “Time to go to bed.”

  I waddled back into Grandma’s bedroom and lumped myself into her bed. I still had chicken crumbs and cold drank stains all over my shirt.

  A little while later, Grandma came in our room. She took off her clothes and put on her gown, but kept on her wig. As long as I knew Grandma, before she went to bed, she’d turn on that damn Mahalia Jackson song, “Precious Lord.” Then she’d start humming and writing in a tablet. Usually, I’d be in the bed reading some book or something and Grandma would be on the floor humming.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  I was in that bed for about four minutes thinking about all kinds of stuff, and then I heard the screen door open.

  I kept listening for the door to close. I didn’t hear anything else except the chunky buzz of bullfrogs. I tiptoed over to the door of our bedroom, put my greasy hands on the edge of the door, and peeked around the corner.

  Layers of Grandma’s booty were spilling over the fingers of Ufa’s paws. And Grandma had her arm wrapped around him, too. Their arms made a long, off-center X on the side of their bodies.

  All I could think about was Grandma’s hand behind Ufa’s back, probably cupping his tobacco-smelling booty, too. It’s one thing to think of your Grandma’s booty being cupped, but when you think of her cupping someone else’s booty it makes your insides rot and tangle, especially if that someone is probably married and named Ufa D
. It makes you think that the person who fed you and talked to you and listened to you and laughed with you and bathed you when you were young was really some super freak you didn’t even know.

  Ufa’s head was to the side and he and Grandma were standing in the doorway, kissing and hunching like some young white fools on wemakexxxvideos.com. Ufa had his hat off so I could see his face and raggedy eyebrows pretty good. As soon as I saw the white of his eyes, I ran my ass back to the bed, covered my head with the covers, and faced the fan in Grandma’s window.

  The screen door closed and Grandma stomped back into the bedroom.

  “City, you meddling in grown-folk business again, ain’t you?” I didn’t say a damn word. I figured my best bet was to fake sleep until Grandma tapped me on the booty.

  “I know you woke,” she said.

  I didn’t move an inch. Didn’t shake. Didn’t even smile like I usually did when I fake slept. Even with my greasy head under the covers, I felt the heat of Grandma coming near me. I thought she was going to try to kiss me, so I made sure my face was tucked tight. But even under the covers, I could still smell Ufa on her.

  I needed to throw up.

  “Know that I love you, baby,” Grandma said, rubbing my back with her fingertips. “You gotta wake up early to go to the library with Relle. G’night.”

  When Uncle Relle and I walked into the library Saturday morning, I was surprised at the shampooed-carpet-and-cornbread smell of the place, especially since the floor was linoleum. Looking at all the slightly wack books in the library made me grab Long Division tighter. I hadn’t been in a real library for so long and this one didn’t really feel real either. It was more like a mobile home with a lot of bookshelves in it. Every bookshelf in the library was its own section. You had your colorful kids’ books section, your Bible section, your John Grisham and William Faulkner sections, and then you had a Classic section filled with books that were thick, dark, and spinach-green and had that rich gluey smell.

  I was too old for the kids’ books and to tell you the truth, all the Bible stuff I’d heard didn’t seem interesting for too long. For less than two pages, you’d get something interesting about naked Adam and Eve eating on apple cores and grabbing snakes by the throat, and then three hundred pages later, you’d get some boring stuff about jokers named Isaac and Ham. But the Bible was better than those other spinach-colored Classic books that spent most of their time flossing with long sentences about pastures and fake sunsets and white dudes named Spencer. I didn’t hate on spinach, fake sunsets, or white dudes named Spencer, but you could just tell that whoever wrote the sentences in those books never imagined they’d be read by Grandma, Uncle Relle, LaVander Peeler, my cousins, or anyone I’d ever met.