Long Division

by Kiese Laymon

  If you didn’t want to read books at the Melahatchie library, you could read magazines or get in line for one of their two computers. The only problem was that the computers were usually used by dusty oldheads sneaking looks at big-booty porn sites.

  I sat down at one of the computers and saw that someone had been googling “long division.”

  “Can you come here?” I asked Uncle Relle.

  There was nothing about the book I’d been reading for the past two days, so I typed a sentence from Long Division and googled it: I still have no proof that I ever made Shalaya Crump feel anything other than guilty for leaving me with Baize Shephard.

  There was still nothing on the screen that had to do with the book.

  “What you doing copying sentences out of that book?” Uncle Relle said. “Thought you wanted to find out about yourself. You messing around?”

  “You think it’s possible to have a book and not have it appear anywhere on the internet?” I asked Uncle Relle.

  “Who wrote the book?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What you mean you ‘don’t know’? Who wrote the shit? Look up his last name.”

  “For real,” I told him. “I don’t know who wrote it. It could have been a boy or a girl.”

  “Well,” he sat next to me and poked me in the chest with his nubs. “If it ain’t no author, it ain’t no gotdamn book, is it? Unless it’s one of them pamphlets that niggas be calling a book. That shit be embarrassing to me. And even some of them pamphlets be on the internet, City. Now, can you please look up that other shit so we can go? I got a meeting in 20 minutes.”

  I knew Uncle Relle didn’t have a meeting, but I went to YouTube and typed, “City, Can You Use That Word in a Sentence” anyway. The YouTube clip of my speech already had four million hits. It was called “The Wave Brush Rant.” It had been linked to by over 80,000 people on Facebook. Another clip, the one of me trying to understand the word “niggardly,” had two million hits and was called “City Spells Niggardly.” The clip of me telling that white boy on the bus that I hated him only had 24,000 hits. On the right side you could see LaVander Peeler’s link, too. His only had 300,000 hits and it was called “Chitterlings are Chitlins.” Right below that was a still picture of me from a distance throwing rocks toward Pot Belly’s truck called “City, the Nigger, running.”

  Everything that had happened to me the past three days, except the whupping from Grandma and catching her making out, had made it onto the internet.

  “City Be Busting Heads” had over 200,000 views and “City, the Nigger” had 90,000 in less than a day.

  Uncle Relle showed me how someone had added the T-Pain voice coder to my voice when I was talking to the Mexicans from Arizona. Folks were selling T-shirts online with a picture of me brushing my waves and underneath, in deep black, was the word “niggardly” with a question mark.

  I turned the volume down on the computer so only I could hear the sound and I pushed play on the video from the contest. I’d made YouTube videos before but they always had other people in them and really none of the videos I’d made were just about me. But this was so different. For example, when I was going off on that stage at the contest, on the computer, I looked like I wanted to kill that Mexican girl from Arizona when really I didn’t even know her. I was just desperate to find something to make them feel pain and be sad and embarrassed like I’d been embarrassed on national TV. But when I saw the video, there were so many white kids around that I could have said mean things about and I didn’t say hardly anything directly to them. Also, I never thought I was super cute but I didn’t realize how much my thighs rubbed together and how the back of my head was bigger than every other head in all the videos. Even though I felt all of that strange stuff, I can’t even lie: the thing I still felt the most was famous.

  The first comment under the contest clip was, “dis my nigga right here. crackers mad city stay keeping it real. flav ain’t got nothing on city. fuck white folks just like he said.” It was posted by someone called “LockNess.”

  Beneath that, someone called “CawCuss” commented, “Note to Niggers: Niggardly is a word that has nothing to do with Niggers. Learn to read before complaining Niggers.”

  Uncle Relle said we had to go but after reading CawCuss’s comment, I really had to look up “niggardly” and see what it actually meant.

  “Uncle Relle, did you see a tape of the contest?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, I watched your part ’bout a hundred times.” He put his hand on my head and started laughing. “Why?”

  “I’m saying, do you think ‘niggardly’ is, you know, about us?”

  “City, you can’t ever put anything past the white man. They knew that word had ‘nigga’ in it. That’s all I’m—”

  “But, you know, do you think maybe it just like, happen to have ‘nigga’ in it and anyone would have gotten that word?”

  Uncle Relle actually paused and took his hand off my shoulder. He bent down and started twirling the threads that were coming out of his hem with his nubs, then looked back at me. “Look,” he said, “they knew what they was doing. You shouldn’t have had nothing to do with that word if you were on TV. That’s all I know. Look how they did your friend. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Naw,” I told him. “Hold on.”

  Uncle Relle watched me open Microsoft Word on the computer and type “niggardly” in a new document. I highlighted it and dragged the mouse to Tools where the thesaurus was. Before clicking on Thesaurus, I just held my finger there and imagined what I’d see.

  “If you gon’ click it, click it,” Uncle Relle said. “What you wasting drama for? You supposed to save all this drama for the show.”

  I looked right at Uncle Relle and begged him to shut the fuck up without even moving my lips.

  “Ungenerous (adv.)” is what popped up under “meanings.” Under “synonyms” were the words “stingy” and “meager” and “miserable” and “miserly” and “measly.” Under “antonyms” was the word “generous.”

  The actual definitions confused me even more.

  “Come on, City,” Uncle Relle told me. “We gotta get it moving.”

  Uncle Relle was pissing me off. I looked at him in a way I’d never looked before. And he did something I’d only seen him do with Grandma. He looked down at his fingers, picked up a folded newspaper that was right between the computers, and said, “Okay, favorite nephew. Just hurry up.”

  In a huge color photo on the cover of the paper was a picture of Baize Shephard. The photo must have been one of those yearbook pictures, because Baize had a look on her face I’d never imagined her having in real life. The left side of her mouth was smiling and the right side had a little bit of her tongue sticking out. I figured the photographer probably told her not to make faces and she did the goofiest face she could get away with. Plus, she had this thick fake rope chain around her neck that she always wore.

  The headline said, “Investigators Have New Lead in Disappearance of Honor Student, Baize Shephard.”

  I typed “niggardly” in the Google finder and clicked on the mouse.

  Uncle Relle didn’t say a word to me the first five minutes of the ride home.

  “Look, City,” he said as he pulled in the driveway of Alcee Mayes, his weed man, “just ’cause you the face of…”

  “The face of what?” I asked him.

  Uncle Relle looked down. “Sometimes the glass is way more than empty,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying. Sometimes the glass is way fuller than a motherfucker, even if you can’t see it. You better drink.”

  Uncle Relle ran into Alcee Mayes’s trailer and left me in his van. I knew he was thinking I should be happy that millions of people around the world were looking at me and typing my name on the internet, but seeing my picture pop up when I googled “niggardly” broke my heart. I just couldn’t figure out how I had become the face of “niggardly” in less than three days. If I could have stayed at the library longer, I wo
uld have responded to every messed-up comment on YouTube and I would have typed my own response to the fake @MyNameIsCity Twitter feed someone made up.

  Instead, I stayed in Uncle Relle’s van and continued reading Long Division, a book that, according to the internet at the Melahatchie local library, didn’t exist at all.

  A few minutes after we walked in the house, Grandma pulled the screen door open and whispered something in Uncle Relle’s ear. Next thing I knew, I was in the bedroom and was told not to come out until she or Uncle Relle came to get me.

  I pulled out my book and wrote:

  It was like she wasn’t even Grandma anymore. I never heard my grandma say “ma’am” to someone who was younger than her. And I heard that my grandma brought the Jheri not “Gary” curl to Melahatchie from Milwaukee back in the early ’80s. Now here she was acting like she couldn’t even pronounce “Jheri” right.

  Under the revving of box fans and the hum of crickets, I heard about 20 minutes of loud cuss words coming from mashed-up voices. Slowly though, the yelling and cussing slid from the trailer park to the back of Grandma’s house, where the railroad tracks were.

  And after a while, there were no voices at all.

  When Grandma finally came in the house two hours later, she made me sit on the toilet in the bathroom while she took a bath. The suds in the tub were brownish and pink from the dirt and blood on Grandma’s hands. I tried to only look at this little pinkish-brown moat of suds near the back of the tub the whole time she bathed, but I kept catching her long nipples out of the corner of my eye.

  We didn’t say one word to each other until I asked her, “What happened today, Grandma?”

  “Nothing, City. That man, he gone far away from here.”

  “What man? Gone where?”

  “Ain’t nothing in that work shed for you, you hear me?”

  “Did somebody mess with you? ’Cause I never seen you just …”

  “That man is gone home, I reckon,” Grandma interrupted. “You got to be a special kind of evil to spend your whole life getting more than you deserve, then turn right around and hate on folks for getting half of what you was born into. Just evil.”

  “Who is a special kind of evil?” I asked her.

  “Listen.” She reached out of the bathtub and her hands touched my knee. “That man, that truck, this day, ain’t none of it even real as you think. Treat it like it never happened, you hear me? You are a smart child, an educated young man. You try to act grown in front of them cameras? Well, grown black folks forget what they need to forget. That’s what grown black folks do. Can you do that for Grandma?”

  “Yeah, I can do that, Grandma, but you might want to ease up talking to me like this is fifth-grade special ed.”

  Grandma’s eyes got to twitching. I looked at the ground, trying my hardest not to get whupped again. “Can you do what I asked you, City?”

  “Yeah, Grandma.” I had no choice. “I can do what you asked me.”

  “Okay,” Grandma said, and got out of the bathtub. She dried off while I looked at the floor. While she was looking at herself in the mirror, she said, “They always expecting us to forget. I’m tired of forgetting. You and that baby didn’t do nothing to nobody.”

  I couldn’t completely understand how Grandma could go from telling me that grown folks forget what they need, to saying she was tired of forgetting. I knew not to ask any more questions but, in a way, it was all starting to make a little more sense.

  TENDER TESTICLES.

  After all that weirdness with Grandma earlier, I just wanted to run down Old Morton Road and never stop until I was back in our garage in Jackson. Since I didn’t have either the wind or the guts to do that, I called my friend Shay and asked her to come over.

  Shay was the junior queen of Melahatchie and raiser of way more hell than a little bit. She walked in Grandma’s yard wearing a pea-green muscle shirt and some Memphis Grizzlies shorts. Usually her Afro puffs were the same size but today the left one was way bigger than the right.

  “I don’t know what you was thinking,” she said, with a voice that came directly from her nose. “Nasal” actually isn’t the word for Shay’s voice. Shay’s nose was damn near wider than her lips, and it stayed clogged up so she only breathed through her mouth. Shay spoke fast, too, but it wasn’t like she said certain words fast. It was more that she moved from word to word fast. “I knew you was crazy,” she said, “but I ain’t know you was that crazy.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Wow!” she said. “On national TV, too? In front of all them dubs?” Shay called white folks “dubs,” which was short for “W’s.”

  “Listen,” I tried to change subjects. “Have you ever heard of this book called Long Division? It’s about Melahatchie.”

  “Quit changing subjects, boy,” she said. “If there was a book about Melahatchie, don’t you think I would have heard of it? Is it a book for dubs or a book for us?”

  “Us mostly,” I told her. “But it’s complicated. It’s a book for us and a few dubs, I guess. There’s this one boy and he’s in love with this girl named Shalaya Crump, and they travel through time and find this girl who lives in Melahatchie. The girl’s name is Baize.” Shay looked up at me. “Baize Shephard. You heard of it?”

  Shay rolled her eyes at me and told me to shut my lying ass up without even opening her mouth. Every time I saw Shay, it was like seeing someone you haven’t seen in forever, and it was like seeing a star of a good show and it was like seeing someone you wanted to see every day. Shay never acted too excited to see me ever since I told her this secret when we were playing The Secret Game. The first time I had a wet dream, she was there—in the dream, I mean—and I told her that, and I also told her what we were doing with our hands and mouths.

  We jumped the creek and went into this little path leading into the Magic Woods. After stomping through the woods and trying to dodge sticker bushes, we ended up in this dusty opening between pine trees and tree stumps. We were about 50 feet from the Melahatchie Community Center.

  Shay walked deeper in the woods. “Keep talking,” she said. “I’m listening.” She wasn’t really listening. I heard all kinds of sticks and leaves breaking before she came out with this huge stick. Right in the same spot where Shay found hers, I found the perfect stick. Not really perfect, but perfect if I was gonna be fighting her with the stick she had.

  I was always scared to hit Shay’s stick hard unless she hit my hand or my stomach with her stick. Sometimes you could hold your stick out and the person you were playing against would swing wildly at yours and theirs would get stuck in the dusty-ass ground, or the soft mud if it had been raining. It would be stuck just long enough so you had the perfect angle to smash that joker. If you did that technique to Shay, she got so mad that she’d quit or catch fade with her praying-mantis technique.

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” I told her.

  “When?”

  “At that contest,” I told her. “I swear I wanted to win it for all these people. Like you and Gunn and fat boys with waves like me, too.” She started laughing. “You laughing, but I’m serious. I wanted to win it for all of us.”

  “You messed up before beginning, then,” she said. “You should’ve been trying to win it for you. We wanted you to win, but if you ain’t win, we would’ve been happy just ’cause you were in it. You didn’t have to shout out Melahatchie like that either. You made us look like losers.” She paused and looked like she was thinking of what to say. “I just feel as though you should’ve just sat down when you got it wrong. But whatever. That’s you. Come on and play, City,” she said. Shay hated if you held your stick away from hers. “Play, boy!”

  “I am a playboy, ain’t I?”

  “More like a gay boy,” she said and started laughing.

  “Why you call me a gay boy? I ain’t gay.”

  I swung my stick and tagged the mess out of hers, but it didn’t break.

  My hand bones were vibrating. “Dang, I
hit that mug hard, too.”

  We were both happy as hell to see a stick that hard. It’s hard to explain. The stick was a monument in itself and we just stood there smiling in the stick’s direction for about fourteen seconds. Then, guess what I started thinking about? I started thinking about my mother. I wondered if she was in our garage missing me and if she had any clue what was happening in Melahatchie.

  “Does this feel like déjà vu to you?”

  Shay sucked on her teeth. “Boy,” she said, “Quit trying to switch subjects, talking about déjà vu. Naw, this don’t feel like déjà vu.”

  Shay started laughing and walked deeper behind some baby sticker bushes. “Come over here.”

  “For what?”

  Time slowed down, I swear it did. When Shay walked her Afro-puffed self over in front of me, the sun coming through the woods hit her face perfectly. She had the color and the shine of a brand new genuine leather football. Shay rarely sweated so the Vaseline all over her face and shoulders never dripped. It just stuck to her and made whatever was surrounding her look pretty dull and blurry.

  Shay took the pointing finger of her left hand, and joined it with her thumb, making the symbol that white folks on dumb television commercials used to say that everything is okay. Then she took her middle finger and her index finger of her right hand and pushed them in and out of the hole made by her left-hand fingers.