by Kiese Laymon
…
Quarter Black…
After Mama Lara disappeared down the road for her morning walk, I went back and brought my new computer and book out onto the porch. I knew Mama Lara would know I’d stolen the computer if she saw it, and she’d think Long Division was something kids shouldn’t be reading since the word “nigga” was on the very first page. As cool as the book was, it still wasn’t as cool as the computer, and I wanted everybody who walked or rode down Old Ryle Road to see that I had something they could never have.
I’d been typing on the computer and waiting on the porch for Shalaya Crump for 30 minutes when I saw a person out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head toward the Night Time Woods and saw the person jump back into the woods. I was never scared of those woods, or of the Shephard Witch, to tell you the truth. I kinda didn’t believe in witches or magic. I figured it was just Shalaya Crump trying to play me for a fool.
When I got all the way into the woods, it felt like one of those dark dreams where you watch yourself get eaten by a bucktooth ghoul before waking up. I pulled my sweat rag out the small of my back, closed the laptop computer, threw the book on the ground, and got ready to pop a bucktooth ghoul in the forehead if one stepped to me.
Anyway, as soon as I took about three steps into the woods, I had to pee. One of the best things about coming down to Melahatchie for spring break was that I got to pee outside. I found a dusty area near the Shephard house where I could try to spell my name.
“Hey, boy,” I heard a deep froggy voice say from behind me. “What you got in your hands?” The voice sounded like it was coming from behind a box fan. I didn’t even plan on turning around, but I did just to see the face that was carrying a voice like that.
The only white boy I’d ever seen with a fro was this old dude on PBS who made you fall asleep and dream about floating while he painted the finest in bushes and clouds. But this white boy had the same kind of fro. He wore a puffy blood-red sweatshirt with bleach stains on it and “Fresh” across the front in green letters. The sweatshirt was way too big for him but he had it tucked in these nice sky-blue pants that were a mix of jeans and slacks.
I angled myself so he wouldn’t see my privacy while I was crossing the T in my name.
“Ain’t trying to see your johnson,” the boy said. “Relax.” I shot my eyes down to his feet and these glowing green fat laces in his All Stars. “What you looking at?” he asked me. “You some kind of queer? If you are, you are. Just like to know what kind of man I’m talking to.”
“Naw, man,” I told him. “Um, I like booties. I like girl booties.”
“Boobies?”
“Naw. Booties,” I told him. “I like booties. Big ol’ girl booties, and boobies too, I guess. But mainly booties. You wouldn’t know nothing about that.”
“You like big ol’ girl booties?” He knelt down, tried to stop himself from laughing and brushed his shoes off. “Where you from, buddy?”
“Chicago, man. I’m down here for spring break because folks stay shooting folks too much in Chicago. I’m in a gang, though.” I was so nervous and being so raggedy with my lies and I had no idea why. “What about you, with that fro? White boys ain’t supposed to have fros like that.
“Ain’t white. From a little bit of everywhere, though,” the boulderhead boy said. He started coughing and eyeing my laptop computer. “Where’d you get that contraption in your grip anyway?” He wiped his mouth.
The white boy’s bottom teeth were so crooked that they zigzagged, and he had the chappiest top lip I’d ever seen in my life. It looked like frozen vanilla frosting was just sleeping on that thing. And his nose was closer to his top lip than it should have been, so it looked like he was constantly smelling his own chappy frosting. The skin on his face was so Saran Wrap tight, too, that the head and jaw bones damn near burst right through his skin. And I hate to gross you out, but there were a few scabbed-up scars on the top-right side of his face that jutted out like raisins. To tell you the truth, I kinda wished I had some scabs like that on my face so I could pick them off before I went to bed.
“This is a laptop computer,” I told him. “What’s your name?”
“Evan,” he told me. “That’s what they tell me.”
“They? What’s your last name?”
“Altshuler. What’s the date?”
“Like aw shucks?” I asked him. “Man, your name, it don’t make a lick of sense. It’s 1985. March. You from the future? 2013?”
“Naw, I ain’t from no future.” He pointed past the Shephard house, toward Belhaven Street. “I’m Jewish.”
Evan’s eyes opened up big after he said that, like he expected me to say something mean. I was kinda surprised, because I never met a person who said they were Jewish before, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t have a clue what it really meant. Since we moved to Chicago from Jackson last year, I heard the word a lot more, but people used the shorter version, “Jew,” and sometimes it was a noun and sometimes it was a verb. In elementary school, I heard about Adolf Hitler torturing Jewish people and how some of them got hanged and drowned in Mississippi back in the 1960s trying to help black folks get the right to vote, read, and pee in the same bathroom as white folks, but that was it. I just didn’t know what to do with this boy saying he was Jewish when he just looked like any slightly deformed white boy to me.
“Can I ask you a question?” I tried to change subjects and come back with a question that might make him stop looking at me so hard. “Is it okay if I ask you why you look so sick? And not even just sick. I’m saying you look crazy dusty. How old are you?”
He looked at the ground and mumbled, “Fifteen. Just told you that I ain’t white.”
“My name is Voltron,” I told him. “Folks call me T-Ron.”
“No it ain’t,” he said. “Citoyen is the name they give you. Folks call you City.”
“What did you just say?” I asked him.
“I know who you are,” he said and stepped closer to me. “Your name is Citoyen Coldson. You was born in Jackson and moved to Chicago two years ago. Your mama dropped you off at your Ma-Maw’s house yesterday. And you lost your granddaddy, your Ma-Maw’s husband, in these woods. Right over yonder.” He pointed toward the Shephard house.
“I gotta go, man,” I told him. “Don’t take it the wrong way. It’s not that you’re Jewish. It’s just that I don’t like the look in your eyes. You can understand that, right?”
“You need my help, City,” the boy said. “Let me show you something.”
“What?”
“The past.”
“The past what?”
“I need to show you the past,” he said. “Listen to me. We can change it.”
I couldn’t figure out how Jewish Evan Altshuler knew anything about my mama, my Mama Lara, or my granddaddy disappearing. It was something that only the truly craziest of white characters on a crazy show like Fantasy Island would say. Shalaya Crump always said that truly-crazy-white-folks talk always came before truly-crazy-white-folks action. And Mama, Mama Lara, and Shalaya Crump always told me that if you popped someone in head who was white and crazy, you could go to jail for life. So I had to be careful with this dusty white boy.
“Oh really,” I said. “The past, huh? I hear that. That’s nice to hear. So nice. And um, I want you to show me that past, but I’m finna go home first and eat me a bologna sandwich. You want me to bring you one?”
I started walking backwards toward Old Ryle Road, but Evan walked toward me. “I’m serious, City. You need to see this. We can stop it. Come back with me. That house,” he pointed to the Shephard house. “It used to be a Freedom School. You know what a Freedom School is?”
“Yeah,” I lied, “I know. It’s a school where they teach freedom.”
“They burned that school down to the ground with our families in it. Yours and mine. They took their bodies over to the—”
“So,” I interrupted him, “you want some Sandwich Spread and mustard on your bol
ogna sandwich, right?” And with that, I turned toward the road and sprinted like Carl Lewis until I was all the way out of the Night Time Woods, away from the craziest white boy I’d ever seen in my life, and back on the porch of my Mama Lara’s house.
I wasn’t on the porch longer than two minutes, wondering how much of what Jewish Evan Altshuler said was true, before Shalaya Crump opened the door to her trailer. She had an unwrapped package of saltines in one hand and a cold drank in the other.
Shalaya Crump walked to the middle of Old Ryle Road and stood across from my porch sipping on cold drank. I thought she’d come over to my porch immediately. Instead, she took a big gulp of cold drank, gobbled up three saltines at once, then walked down the road and hopped in the woods.
I figured Shalaya Crump was gonna go in the woods and wait five minutes for me to follow her. When she saw that I didn’t come after her, she’d shamefully walk up to my porch and we’d talk about my new laptop computer, my new book, and how she was jealous of the girl with the greasy forehead. Or, I figured she’d come out screaming after seeing Jewish Evan Altshuler’s ugly face.
I waited and waited and waited for her to come back to my porch. After 20 minutes, I don’t know why, but I was sure that Shalaya Crump was never coming back out of those woods.
I stood up and got ready to go find Shalaya Crump when the worst thought in the history of thoughts just smacked me in the back of the head: What if Jewish Evan Altshuler and Shalaya Crump travel through time together like superheroes and have lots of babies the color of cheap graham crackers?
That thought stretched out for two minutes and some seconds until I remembered that I’d never ever heard Shalaya Crump say anything sexy about white boys in the seven years I knew her. Even when this one white boy named Parker Vincent who looked like a pudgy Michael J. Fox moved to Melahatchie from Memphis and all the other girls said they’d never mess with a white boy but if they did, they’d mess with Parker Vincent, Shalaya Crump told me, “I wouldn’t mess with Parker Vincent or any white boy on earth, not even if I was white and white boys were the only boys left on earth. I’m serious. I’d start liking girls before I did that.”
I walked back in the woods 20 minutes later with my computer and Long Division to find Shalaya Crump sitting on the ground with her legs crossed. She and Jewish Evan Altshuler were messing around with that calculator-looking thing I’d stolen from Baize.
“That’s a phone,” Shalaya Crump told me as she started pushing more buttons. “I figured it out last night but I can’t get no reception.” She put it up to her ear and kept saying “hello,” but no one answered. “I know it’s a phone,” she said to both of us like we all knew each other.
“That ain’t all that cool,” I told her.
“Better than it is now,” she said. “I’m tired of sneaking to use the phone all the time. You know how big of a deal it is if you have your own phone in your room? Imagine if you had your own phone that you could take with you everywhere you went. I wonder if you gotta pay for long distance with it?”
“Hell yeah! Why wouldn’t you? And who you talking to on the phone long distance anyway, other than me?” I asked her. “I thought—”
Jewish Evan Altshuler interrupted my question and started talking to Shalaya Crump about something called a “bell boy” and “area-to-area calling.” Shalaya Crump tried to explain to the white boy what the buttons were for on a phone, because he’d only used the slow-mo rotary kind. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make him understand how long distance, beepers, buttons, and answering machines worked.
“Show it to me one more time if you don’t mind,” he said. “Just the part about how you can tell someone you ain’t home when you ain’t home. They can leave a message that you can hear on your phone?”
I would’ve been laughing at Jewish Evan Altshuler’s dumb ass, but I wasn’t thinking about him being a country white moron from the 1960s. I was thinking of how I had never seen Shalaya Crump sit like she was sitting. She was leaning back on her hands and when she wasn’t talking about phones, she was just listening to him. Kneeling right next to her on one knee was that sick-looking Evan. I couldn’t figure out how they ended up in that position, with him kneeling and her sitting, in only 30 minutes.
“I reckon I need to see the answering machine working to understand it,” he told Shalaya Crump. “But listen, we can save all three of the folks I told you about. Just gonna need your help for just one day. Y’all can make it back before the sun goes down.” As I walked closer to them with my computer in my arms, Jewish Evan Altshuler looked up at me. “We need you too, City,” Evan said.
“You know that hole we went in yesterday?” Shalaya Crump asked me. “It’s not just a time tunnel to the future, City. He thinks—”
“My name’s Evan,” he interrupted.
“Evan thinks there’s one in 1985, and that there’s one we went to in 2013, and there’s one that we ain’t even seen to 1964.” Shalaya Crump looked over at Jewish Evan Altshuler. “He said he’s been there already. That’s where he’s from.”
“This white boy is lying to you,” I told her.
I was getting tired of Jewish Evan Altshuler. It messed with me that he knew my name and that my granddaddy disappeared in those woods, but that I didn’t know nothing about his life. That’s not even what messed with me most, though. When I looked in Evan’s face and eyes, I couldn’t see fifteen years old. His face was timeless in a terrible way. It looked like a face in a book that I would never read.
When I looked at Shalaya Crump’s face and eyes, I could see how I thought she looked during every year of her life. I swear that I could look at Shalaya Crump and see her as a four-year-old girl straight running all the kids in Head Start. And thinking about it right there, and watching her, I understood that it was Shalaya Crump’s eyes that showed me her age more than the face. Sometimes, Shalaya Crump’s eyes stayed big as dirty silver dollars and they didn’t blink for minutes. When they finally blinked, you would think you were in a tiny bathtub with a ton of hummingbirds ’cause they blinked so fast. Other times, Shalaya Crump’s eyes looked right at me, blinked slow, and made me feel like I was jumping off of a space mountain onto a trampoline of clouds drawn by the baddest artist in the world. It’s hard to explain, but I swear a lot of it had something to do with Shalaya Crump’s eyes and how slow and fast they blinked at the same time.
If I could see all that in Shalaya Crump’s eyes, you’d think it would be pretty easy to see something like that in Jewish Evan Altshuler’s eyes, too. But this dude’s eyes were so tired, so droopy, and so blue that it was hard for me to believe that he was fifteen ever. I mean, he looked thirteen or maybe even ten in the body, but his face looked like it had died a long, long time ago. Jewish Evan Altshuler looked like he had spent all of his years getting punched in the eyes by bucktooth ghouls with the boniest fists you’d ever seen in your life.
And I just couldn’t figure out how a white boy who looked like that could get the attention of someone as magical as Shalaya Crump.
“Ain’t lying,” Jewish Evan Altshuler said. “And I ain’t white. I told you, I’m Jewish. I’m a Jew. Born right here in Melahatchie in 1948. My Uncle Zachariah and his family live right next to us.” He looked at me. “You from Chicago, you said. My cousins go to temple every now and again ’round over at Beth Israel on the West Side. You know where that is?”
“Can you hold on?” Shalaya Crump asked him. “That would make you 36 years old?”
“Fifteen years old. Be sixteen next month,” he said.
Jewish Evan kept talking. He explained that in 1964, his family was one of a few Jewish families from the area who wanted black folks to have the right to vote and go to schools with decent books. He claimed that our granddaddies and his uncle and brother didn’t just disappear. He said that all four of them were run up on in a Freedom School, and they were hanged and burned by “people acting like they were the Klan.”
“Wait,” I said. “Wh
at do you mean by ‘acting like’ they were in the Klan?”
“Folks who got them were dressed like they were in the Klan, but it wasn’t really the Klan,” he said.
“Why?” Shalaya Crump asked him.
“I don’t mean no disrespect. It’s just that in my life, I seen clear as day that there ain’t really no ‘why’ when you dealing with the Ku Klux Klan,” he said.
“Yeah, but you just said we ain’t really dealing with the Klan,” she said.
“Get your lies straight, man,” I told him. “You said we were dealing with folks who dressed up like the Klan.”
“What I know is—”
Shalaya Crump interrupted him again. “There’s always a ‘why,’ Evan, and what you saying don’t make no sense at all.”
“Exactly. I know it sounds crazy as a four-eyed dog,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet. But it’s supposed to happen tomorrow.”
I just stood there waiting and wondering if there was more to his crazy story. “Okay,” I said, “but I still don’t get why we should go back and risk our lives to save folks who we think are dead anyway.” I looked over at Shalaya Crump. “What you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that I don’t wanna wake up in the future and wish we would have done it.”
“But do you want to do it?”
“I mean, City, we’d want someone to come save us today if we knew we were gonna be dead tomorrow. Shoot, that’s a fact, right?”
“But would they?” I asked her. “Would your grandma even do that for you if some white boy who called her a ‘Negro’ was the one telling her to do it?” Shalaya Crump was looking all in my eyes and I was so focused on what I saying that I couldn’t even try to spit game front of her. “We don’t know nothing about them old dudes, and nothing about no Freedom Schools and nothing about no Klan. All we know is the Klan ain’t nothing to mess with. You told me that!”
“It’s not the real Klan,” Evan said.
“Does it matter if they kill black folks the same way the real Klan does?” Shalaya Crump asked him.
