by Kiese Laymon
Uncle Relle put Grandma’s keys on the stove next to all this German chocolate cake she’d made. He told me he had some phone calls to make so he was about to walk down the road and try to find a signal. That was his way of saying he was going to buy some more weed from Alcee Mayes.
When Uncle Relle walked down the road, I decided to go look in the work shed again. Before I went out to the work shed, I found this little battery-operated CD player that Grandma took outside with her whenever she hung up the clothes out on the clothesline. The only song Grandma listened to while she was hanging up clothes was this Halona King song called “Monsters in the Night.” I had no idea what other songs were on that CD because “Monsters in the Night” was the only song Grandma ever listened to or liked that wasn’t gospel. She’d play it on repeat over and over and over. Pot Belly didn’t seem like the kind of white dude who would like Halona King, but I figured he might want to hear something other than squeaky mice and bullfrogs since he was chained up in that work shed all by himself.
Pot Belly was lying face down in the sawdust of the work shed. He had these bloody welts up and down the top of his butt cheeks. Lying next to him was a half-empty bottle of pepper sauce.
“My uncle came in here and beat you down?” I asked him and turned on the CD player. “I thought maybe you’d wanna to listen to something. You like Halona King?”
Pot Belly’s chest was heaving in and out. “You okay? Look, I might decide to save you tomorrow. For real. I mean, if I don’t die at my baptism. I’m serious. You want anything?”
He started trying to turn over. To the left of his hips, on the floor of the work shed, were the words “So sad…” written in the sawdust on the floor. It looked like he’d used his finger to write those two words and three dots.
“Damn man, you wrote that? Why did you add the dot-dot-dot? They use that a lot in that book. I can’t even lie to you, that’s one of the saddest things I ever seen in my life. I guess I’m sorry my uncle beat you, but you shouldn’t have called me names and kicked me. At last not in the back.”
He started trying to talk but you couldn’t hear anything thing but muffle since his mouth was filled with that rag. “Shut up and listen,” I told him. “If it helps, I’ve seen him be mean to folks who wasn’t even white. For real. Well, don’t think I’m gay, but I’ma pull your pants up and leave. It’s too sad up in here.”
I turned my head so I wouldn’t smell him too much. “Kindly pause,” I said and pulled his underwear up all the way on his butt with the tips of my fingers.
“Look, man.” I picked up the copy of Long Division that was still right where I’d left it on the floor. “I know you gotta be bored as shit up in here. I’d be bored and sad, too, if all I had to look forward to everyday was sweating and breathing in sawdust and having someone like my uncle beating my ass.”
I thought about those two words: “So sad.”
“You know that I never told anyone on earth that I’m so sad?” I told him. “I’m serious. Even after all that stuff happened on TV the other day, I never thought to tell someone that it all made me feel so sad. But that’s the truth. That’s what I felt.” For the first time since I’d been in the work shed, I thought about Baize Shephard and whether she was chained up in someone else’s work shed. I didn’t think she was, but you just never could tell. “I wonder how sad Baize Shephard is right now.”
He actually turned his eyes toward me when I said that.
“This book is crazy,” I told him. “You want me to read you a little of it? It might help you feel less sad. Is it wack for me to read to you while that music is playing?”
Pot Belly didn’t move.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” I told him. “Remember that. Sometimes the glass is full as hell, white boy. You better drink. I’m trying to help you out.”
It might sound weird to you, but even though I hoped that I would never do anything that could lead to my being chained up in a work shed, if I was chained up in a work shed, feeling so sad, I would have wanted someone to read a chapter of a book like Long Division to me with Halona King playing in the background.
So that’s what I did.
…
Eyes Have It…
In the movies or a dumb book, I knew that I could look down at the ground and follow footprints to see where Shalaya Crump and Jewish Evan Altshuler had gone to, but the problem was that I’d never even seen a real footprint. There wasn’t much sand or even dirt in Chicago or Jackson, and when there was, I can’t say that I spent even a second looking for somebody’s footprints.
I walked over to what Evan called the Freedom School. To the left of the door was a tilted black cardboard sign with white letters, a dot-dot-dot, and an exclamation point.
Be a FIRST CLASS Citizen
REGISTER…VOTE!
I peeked in the window at three people covered in sheets. They were walking around the inside of what looked like an old-fashioned classroom. There were three desks in the middle of the room. The ceiling was super high and you could see bird’s nests all at the top. The floor was part carpet, part wood, part tile and all around the corners of the room were wooden sculptures and saws and pictures. The men in sheets weren’t wrecking the room or trying to set anything on fire. They were just walking around, looking at the walls, talking to each other. I was zoning out when all of a sudden, I felt a shot to the back of my knees.
I turned around and another man in a white sheet was poking me in the kidney with a T-ball bat. I still didn’t drop the laptop computer or the book. I’d seen plenty of movies about people in the Klan. In the movies, they always talked in those rough country voices that are only ever used by Northern white men actors playing Southern white men. But in real life, the men weren’t saying a word. They didn’t even grunt. They didn’t even breathe loud. I never really understood before that Klan sheets didn’t have mouth-holes. You would think that they had to breathe heavy unless they wanted to suffocate under those sheets.
When they pulled me into the school, they sat me in an old-fashioned desk I could barely fit in. The men walked around and circled me. One of them reached down for the computer, but I didn’t let it go.
“I ain’t letting this go,” I told him. “I’ll give you this book, but I can’t give you this computer, man.” He pulled his sheet up and showed me the barrel of his rifle. “Oh, but you know what? I’ma show you how to turn it on,” I told him. “Did any of y’all see this pretty black girl and this other white boy with a fro who looked… he looked…um, not good. His name was Evan. He was your color and…”
Before I could finish, one of the men slapped me right across my mouth and looked me right in the eyes. I couldn’t see his eyes because he had on glasses. I looked at all the men’s eyes for the first time and realized that they all had on glasses under their sheets.
“Just so you know,” I told them, “that’s the first time I ever let someone hit me in my mouth. I’m serious. And if you didn’t have that gun, I’d probably pop that old ass right in the jaw. I’m serious.”
Another man slapped me right across the mouth after I said my piece. My problem was that I’d seen so many pictures of Klansmen. The pictures made you know that the men under the sheets were real men with real stinky breath, real rotten teeth, real pot bellies. I figured it was like football. As soon as you put on your helmet and shoulder pads and your jersey, you were like everyone else on your team, especially to people watching. Our football coach, Coach Foots, wouldn’t even let us have our names on the back of our jerseys because he said the team is more important than the player.
But even dressed in the same uniform and with no name on the back of your jersey, the GAME was filled with seconds where it was up to you to make a play. Not your teammate.
You.
I knew that each of the Klansmen was feeling fear and trying to figure out a way to seem less afraid than he was to the other teammates on his Klan squad. But when you’re getting the taste slapped out of your mout
h for no reason, it doesn’t matter if the person doing the taste-slapping is probably just as scared as you. And it makes you feel weird that no matter what, the taste-slappers never talk…they just breathe like new asthmatics and watch you. It made it easier to believe they lived their whole lives behind those white sheets, slapping black kids up and never breathing right.
“I wanna be honest with you,” I told them.
One of the men was looking at the laptop computer and playing with the keys. He tapped the shoulder of the one who was standing over me and he bent down and started looking at the laptop computer, too.
“Look, I wanna be honest. You know what that is? That’s a computer.”
They didn’t say a word. “A laptop. I can get you three of them, but first, you gotta let me go and you gotta let me take that one with me.”
One of the men stood up after I said my speech and stood over me. “I’m serious. I can get you whatever you want. I’m good at stealing. Computers, telephones, color televisions, tape players, penny loafers, Bibles, tickets to Fresh Fest. I know y’all lackin’ in 1964. Just tell me what you need.”
I held my hand out. “Look, let’s go ahead and shake on it. I’m serious. This book…how about I give you this book, and you let me go?”
The Klansman who slapped me in mouth a second earlier looked at the book and actually reached for it. I pulled it away from him and, without lingering at all, he reared back and hit me in my head so hard that the blood in my mouth tasted like canned spinach. “Nigger,” one of the them said, “you talk too damn much…” I couldn’t hear anything except the crunch of his work boots stomping my legs to mush and the echo of nigger.
Everybody I knew, at one point or another, had called someone “nigger,” but I never heard the “er” when we said it to each other. It was just something that all of us said. We didn’t mean it to hurt each other and we didn’t mean it to make someone feel lucky. It was like the only word that meant lucky, cool, and cursed at the same time. But when that white man behind that sheet called me “nigger,” I heard all the “er” and I knew when he said it, he thought I was not just less than him, but less than a human. Or at least, he was trying to really convince himself.
Either way, it made sense to me in that second, while that white man was stomping my legs into rubber bands, why Mama Lara would whup me so hard when I acted up in front of white folks. In 1985, every little thing we did in front of white folks had to be perfect, according to Mama Lara. And if I acted like I wasn’t perfect around them, Mama Lara would tell me to go get her switch and she’d give me twelve licks. I didn’t know if Mama Lara had ever been beaten by a white man in a sheet. I did know she had walked by the locked white folks’ bathroom, though. She had seen and felt what I was feeling in that Freedom School, whether she’d had her legs stomped to rubber bands or not. I wondered if Jewish Evan Altshuler’s people knew the same feeling.
I was trying so hard not to scream when the door to the school busted open and Jewish Evan Altshuler and Shalaya Crump rushed in. One of the men who had been looking at the computer ran toward Evan. And you know what that boy did? Evan pulled out this long wooden BB gun and just started shooting at the chests of the whole Klan. I figured that the Klansman with the real rifle was gonna shoot us all in the head, but he didn’t reach for it at all.
Shalaya Crump came over near me and helped drag me out of the school. She let me rest a lot of weight on her, but I didn’t wanna put too much weight on her because she’d know how heavy I really was.
“I’m okay,” I told her. “But they got Baize’s computer.”
“We’ll get it later. We gotta get outta here.”
Shalaya Crump didn’t say a word until we got to the hole. I tried to let her get in first but she didn’t want to. “City,” she said, “let me help you.”
I got in the hole and she looked back toward the school. I peeked my head out of the hole and all three of the men had their hoods off, and one of the men was whupping Jewish Evan Altshuler like he was his grandma or something.
“That’s his uncle,” Shalaya Crump said.
“What?”
“It’s hard to explain. They had to do it. He took me to his house and he told me the truth. He showed me.”
I backed away from the mouth of the hole to give her room to get in. “Just come in the hole and tell it to me more when we get home.”
“We can’t leave him, City.”
“Listen to me. I saw a talking cat, Shalaya. For real! And I saw this colored bathroom. We don’t belong in a place like this. We ain’t built for this.” Shalaya Crump looked back toward the school. “Please let’s just go home. Please! I went to 2013 for you just like you asked me. Please.”
I couldn’t see what was happening but I heard Evan screaming and I heard what sounded like wet open palms slamming down on someone’s back. “You’re right,” Shalaya Crump said. “Scoot back and give me room to get in.”
I crouched and made more room for Shalaya Crump. It was the first time I’d been in the hole by myself and I’m not sure why but it seemed bigger and colder than before. I was crouched for a good ten seconds, but Shalaya Crump didn’t get in so I stood up. “Come on, Shalaya. Let’s go.”
She looked me right in the face. “I’m sorry, City,” she said. “It’s for the best.”
Shalaya Crump slammed the door to the hole shut.
I pushed open the door of the hole slowly. Before my eyes could adjust to the light, a pine cone bounced right off my forehead. “I knew you’d be back. Gimme my damn computer, and my book!”
It was Baize.
“Where am I?”
“You know where you are.” She snatched Long Division from my hands. “I want my computer, too! And my damn phone.”
“Oh, I didn’t take a phone. I only borrowed your computer.” Baize was wearing the same outfit she’d had on when I saw her before, but with different shoes. She had on these red, black, green, and yellow hightop Nikes.
“Where they at, Voltron? I’m serious.”
“Umm.” I was trying to decide whether to lie or not. “One of my friends has the phone and someone else has the computer.” I looked at her face and, more than anything, I just wanted her to hug me. Sounds crazy, but after getting your legs stomped to dust by white dudes in sheets, you kinda want someone black to touch you in a way that’s soft. “Okay, look, I’m gonna tell you everything.”
Baize picked up another pine cone and threw it right at my head. “I don’t want to know everything,” she told me. “I don’t even want to know anything from you. I just want my computer back.” She picked up another pine cone and stared at it. “When was the last time knowing everything about something ended up good for you?”
I didn’t know how to answer her question, so I got out of the hole and told Baize how my friend had showed me the hole a few days earlier and took me from 1985 to 2013. I told her about meeting a white boy who said he could take us back to 1964. And I told her that I needed to go back and help my friend get back home alive.
You know what she said after I explained it to her?
“I believe you. I still really need my computer back, though. All my rhymes are in there. And I need it for the Spell-Off.”
“You do?” I stood up and tried stretching out my knees. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are all your rhymes in there?”
“Because it’s my computer.”
“Oh. I’m saying why do you need a computer for a Spell-Off?”
“Because I wanna look at some Spell-Off clips on YouTube. I got this perfect introduction and I wanna make sure they let us introduce ourselves. It’s so dope.”
“Oh. I don’t really know what you talking about. One more question? Well…uh, why do you believe me?”
“Because I know people can disappear.”
“Wait. What?”
“Never mind. Let’s go.”
Baize said that I could come stay at her house until the morni
ng, when her great-grandmother got off work. I told her that I didn’t need to stay that long. Before I limped into her house, she told me to sit down on her porch. My legs were killing me. I just wanted to eat something and come up with a plan to save Shalaya Crump.
“Just tell me,” she said. “Is it us or is it the hole that sends us back in time?”
“You know about the hole?”
“I saw you jump in that hole after you stole my computer,” she told me. “And I got in the hole myself the next day.”
Part of me thought it was just Evan and Shalaya Crump who could time travel. But if Shalaya Crump could time travel and Evan could time travel and I could time travel, and now Baize could time travel, I figured it must be the hole.
“I ain’t gonna lie to you,” I told her. “I think it’s the hole. Can we go inside? I’m hungry.”
Baize’s house and porch were so raggedy that I didn’t really wanna walk in. Super nasty houses always made me itch even if nothing was crawling on me. The TV in their living room looked like it belonged in Richie Rich’s house, though. It was nearly as tall as me.
“Why your TV so big and nice but your house is kinda, you know…”
“To’ up from the flo’ up?” she said, and started grinning.
“Yeah, how do you…” I paused to try to get my words right. “How much is a TV like that? Like $2,000?”
“More like $35 a month.”
Baize sat in the one chair in the living room and I sat on the floor. She turned on the TV with one of the three remotes.
Before the TV came on, all these lights went from red to green. When it finally came on, a new version of Soul Train was on, and it was the sound as much as the screen that I couldn’t understand. Soul Train on that TV sounded like life. You know how in life, there’s hardly ever just that one sound you’re listening for? Like even when I imagined Shalaya Crump telling me she loved me, I imagined hearing the wind whistling and a few different car horns behind us and maybe a freight train miles away and definitely some barking dogs. That’s how the sound was on that TV. You could hear people moving their feet and snapping their fingers and it sounded like the Soul Train line was happening in your room. If everything you saw in real life had the best light behind it, and was polished super shiny, that’s how Soul Train looked on that TV.
