Long Division

by Kiese Laymon

Grandma’s crooked frown broke into a half moon. She brought her bushy brow together, tilted her head to the side, and looked me right in the eyes. “What, Grandma? I’m serious. I’m just saying I love you. Like I for real love you. I don’t just love how you make me feel. I really love you. And until today, you were the only person I knew on earth who really loved me, too.”

  “Who else you know loves you today, baby?”

  “Jesus,” I told her. “Right now, I feel like Jesus likes me whole lot, too, Grandma.”

  Grandma blinked finally, and said, “Problem was that you was always wanting to taste why. You too young and that little bread you got is too soft to understand there ain’t no why but Jesus. Them atheists can say what they want, but Jesus, he the only thang done kept us from killing them folks.” She fixed the strap on my backpack. “Don’t waste another second trying to taste why by yourself, though. Jesus is already in love with you. He been in love with you. That’s what you was feeling at the church just now. I know you ain’t felt nothing like it, have you?”

  “Um, naw, Grandma,” I told her. “I never felt something like that before.”

  “I know. But now, see, you gotta fall in love with him by your actions. Show him you love him by acting as you know he would act. Jesus has seen parts of you that you ain’t even know was alive. And even if you was the biggest, baddest nigga in the world, he done seen the wonder and goodness you capable of. I’m just telling you what I know, baby. Jesus is in love with you, City. Let yourself fall all the way in love with him and everything’ll be awright.”

  I stood there wondering about what Jesus told Grandma about that white man in the shed. I felt closer to Jesus after baptism, but I didn’t really know how he or anyone else could be in love with me. I thought about how I looked, how I’d felt the past few days, how I’d acted. I really didn’t know what I’d done to make Jesus fall in love with me, but I was damn sure ready to start reaping the benefits of that love.

  Grandma interrupted my thought. She told me she was going to run down to Troll’s for a little while to handle some business. She handed me the keys and told me to put my stuff in the car when I came back.

  This was too good to be true.

  I wouldn’t have to come up with some crazy plan to steal the keys if I wanted to get to Pot Belly.

  “Hurry up, City. We gotta get you and that Peeler child on that bus before two o’clock.”

  LaVander Peeler walked in the bedroom while I was writing in my book. He told me Uncle Relle had dropped him off and claimed he had to run some errands. “Your uncle should stop doing so many drugs.”

  “You’re right about that,” I told him. “He should.”

  “Those two straggly-looking girls, the black one and the white one, and that homosexual boy in the karate suit told me to tell you bye.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You ready to see what’s in that work shed?

  LaVander Peeler and I could smell what was left of Pot Belly’s funk from outside the shed. Couldn’t decide if breathing in through my mouth or nose was better, so I alternated.

  I opened the door and there he was. Unlike the other times I’d been in the shed, this time Pot Belly was facing me when I opened the door. Immediately, he started squirming, making loud muffled sounds, begging me with his crossed eyes to let him go.

  “I told you I was coming back to save you today, didn’t I? But first, you gotta do something, okay?” He nodded up and down. “This is my friend, LaVander Peeler. You said you saw me at the contest so you probably saw him too, right?”

  Pot Belly nodded his head.

  LaVander Peeler wasn’t blinking at all. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “I told you, LaVander Peeler. You can’t tell nobody at school about him, though, okay?” LaVander Peeler’s eyes were big as I’d ever seen them. “You see where it says ‘So sad …’ on the floor? He wrote that with his finger.”

  I plopped my knees down on the sawdust of the shed and looked at the chains on Pot Belly’s legs. “I think both of y’all should read this whole book when you get a chance. It’s really short and it’s more of a young-adult book for adults, so even if you aren’t the best reader in the world, you can still get a lot out of it. I know this is corny but I wanna read these last chapters out loud with y’all, okay?”

  It was one of the corniest sentences I’d ever said, but with LaVander Peeler standing above me and Pot Belly chained on the floor of the work shed, I read the end of Long Division.

  …

  Yes Indeedy…

  The lady came closer and looked right in our eyes. “Ma’am, we’re not from around here,” Baize said. “We were just looking for one of our friends. What exactly is supposed to happen in this school?”

  The lady looked at both of us for almost a minute without saying anything.

  “Both of y’all look familiar to me,” she finally said. “Sound like both of y’all been educated somewhere, too, with all them questions. Charlie Cobb and them just mailed this down here to us who fixing to help with the teaching. Cobb say children ain’t educated if they ain’t been taught to question.” The lady handed Baize and me two stapled sheets of paper with some typing on them.

  “What’s this?” Baized asked her.

  “Read it,” she told her. “You tell me.”

  SNCC’S NOTES ON TEACHING IN MISSISSIPPI

  Dear Teacher,

  This is the situation. You will be teaching young people who have lived in Mississippi all their lives. That means that they have been deprived of a decent education from first grade through high school. It means that they have been denied the right to question. The purpose of the Freedom School is to help them begin to question. They will be different, but they will have in common the scars of the system. Some will be cynical. Some will be distrustful. All of them will have a serious lack of preparation, but all of them will have knowledge far beyond their years. This knowledge is the knowledge of how to survive in a society that is out to destroy you. They will demand that you be honest…

  Baize flipped the page and kept reading, but I stopped. I just watched as Baize’s round red eyes moved over the page. Just like Shalaya Crump, you could see her read sentences over if they were too short or too long.

  The lady in front of us started explaining what was happening in that school while Baize was still reading. “These SNCC folks think our children ain’t got no more sense than God give a light-head possum. I reckon they got they heart in the right place. My thang is what’s the use in having a school if we ain’t giving the students no tests? Everybody need a test, don’t you think? We gotta work on that. Yes indeedy.”

  The lady went on, saying words like “organization” and “compassion” and “justice” and “education” and “future,” but I was zoned out. The last thing I heard her say at the end of her long speech was, “Last year this time, y’all probably already know this, but our house got fire-bombed. My daughter was hit in the head with some pillars off the fan, and I got my face a bit burnt up trying to see about her.”

  “Why’d they bomb your house?” Baize asked. “I mean, I know why they bombed people, but why you?”

  “They been shooting in folks’ houses, burning down they’ churches, anything they can to scare us away from working with them college kids,” she said. “That’s enough questions. What y’all doing up in here? We told all the children to stay in they’ house this week. Didn’t nobody tell y’all?”

  If I had wanted to hear the words coming out of that woman’s mouth, I could’ve stayed in 1985 and watched PBS. I just kept looking at Baize wondering how what she said about her parents being City and Shalaya could even be true. I hadn’t seen any pictures of us in her house, but then again, maybe we looked completely different 20 years older. Or maybe I was too focused on other things to look for pieces of myself in her place. Or maybe she took down all the pictures because it made her sad.

  “Wait,” I said to Baize. “Were your parents really married?”

  “Y
eah. Why?”

  “Just wondered.”

  The woman walked over to the man, who now had his head on the desk. She looked at us and didn’t say a word, so I just started looking up at the bird’s nest at the top of the room. Thin pieces of nest kept falling to the ground.

  “Before y’all came in, I was trying to tell this one right here to put that bottle down. This one here is in serious need of a test.”

  “Why?” Baize asked her.

  The woman told us that the man sitting in front of us cut trees for a man named Gaddis. That was the same name as the park Baize had talked about back in 2013. Gaddis had a sixteen-year-old daughter named Brianna. Brianna came out to watch the man cut down some trees a week before that Freedom Summer was announced. Brianna and the man had known each other for years, so they talked and laughed for a while. When Brianna got ready to leave, the man patted her on the bottom of her back and said, “Good luck with everythang, baby. Fine as you is, you sho’ ain’t gon’ need it.”

  Baize said, “You can’t put your hand on a Becky or go around calling them ‘baby’ and expect good to come from it.”

  “Who is Becky?” I asked her.

  She ignored me.

  Neither of us knew what to say after that. Baize was really into what was happening, but I was just looking at her, trying to see if I could find a part of me in any part of her face. People always said I looked like all these people who I never thought I looked like. That made me think I really didn’t know how I looked at all. Baize definitely had my hips and maybe she had my forehead, but other than that, I couldn’t see or hear a drop of me in her. If she was my daughter, I hoped to God that she had my tiny belly button and not one of those big ol’ country ones like Shalaya Crump that made you look like you had a brown Vienna sausage growing out of your stomach.

  “Is your mind or mouth broke?” the woman said to me. “You gonna let your baby do all the talking for you?”

  “Umm. Oh, naw,” I said. “I talk. She ain’t my baby, though. We’re from a land far away.” Baize just looked at me and started shaking her head. “Um, have you ever heard of a man named Lerthon?”

  Baize cut her eyes to me. “Lerthon Coldson?” she whispered to me. “You never said we were looking for Lerthon Coldson. You said we were coming to save your friend.”

  The old man with his head down on the desk started giggling. “Yeah, we know who he is,” he said. “We know that lowdown son of a bitch good and well, don’t we, baby?”

  “Where can we find him?” I asked and got closer. “I got some information Lerthon might need.”

  “Found!” the man said. “I’m ’Thon. Why you asking?”

  Mama Lara never married my granddaddy, and now I understood why. You could tell that one day, maybe a long time ago, maybe even a month earlier, Lerthon Coldson was one of those beautiful men that people, including other men, loved to watch smile. Even now, he had the kind of smile that made you think that all people, no matter how old, were beautiful eight-year-olds who drank with their whole mouth covering the water fountain. That didn’t mean he wasn’t also completely drunk out of his mind, though. Shame, shame, shame, I thought to myself. “Oh, okay. Mr. Thon, I have a message for you?”

  “Is it a message in a bottle?” he asked me. “If it is, just gon’ and give me the bottle. You can keep that message, though, big boy.”

  Lerthon wouldn’t stop laughing and then he started slowly crying and apologizing while he was laughing. “Gotdamnit,” he said, “folks do whatever they can to stay alive. I just be hating that mirror. That’s ’bout it. That little white girl was going off to school. She was making them eyes at me so I told her what was on my mind.”

  “But you said she was 16,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “I know how old she is. I got me a 13-year-old daughter myself. Shit, if her daddy woulda called my daughter ‘baby,’ wouldn’t nobody be after him. Wouldn’t nobody get to shooting and carrying on, would they?”

  “But that don’t make it right,” the woman said and started walking out of the door, shaking her head from side to side. “You got a wife, Thon. Even though my face burnt up don’t mean you can fill my chest up with salt.” From nearly out of the doorway, she said, “Y’all need to get out this building and go ’head home. Thon don’t listen to reason. Never did until it’s too late.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said and looked at my wrist like I had on a watch. “Well, Mr. Thon, we need to get on out of here. I have a message for you. You might need to watch out for the Klan,” I told him and put my hand on his back. “Somebody told us that they were coming to get you. We were supposed to tell you so, yeah, I guess we’re telling you. Watch out for that Klan. So…”

  I looked at Baize and she was looking right in my mouth like it was covered in purple Kool-Aid. “What you looking at?” I asked her. “That’s true. Well, we’re gonna go now. You should probably leave here soon. Thank you. We’ll holler.”

  Baize and I walked out of the school and she headed across the road toward the Co-op. She didn’t say a word, and I had no clue what she was thinking. I just kept looking at how she waddled like me, and had a perfectly shaped head like Shalaya Crump. Was I really a father? I kept thinking about how crazy time was even if you weren’t hopping from present to future to past. In just like five minutes, I had discovered the daughter I never knew I had, met the shady granddaddy I never knew, and found out that the girl I would have given up my eyeballs to kiss was actually my wife. In that five minutes, I met the human being I would become without actually remembering becoming that human being.

  People always say change takes time. It’s true, but really it’s people who change people, and then those people have to decide if they really want to stay the new people that they’re changed into. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be this new person. But I was sure that my daughter didn’t need to be fighting Klansmen.

  Baize stopped in front of the Co-op and rested with her hands on her knees. She was straining to keep her breath.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  “I’m fine. Allergies, I think,” she said. “I just wanna see if the water is still back here.”

  As we passed the Co-op, I tried to shield Baize’s eyes from the “COLORED” door. The cat and the Dobermans were just chilling in front of the sink in the bathroom. Baize looked at the door, then looked at the animals, then just shook her head.

  “That cat, that’s the one that talks,” I told her. “I swear to God.”

  “I believe you,” she told me. “You ain’t gotta swear to God.”

  The work shed was right next to the clothesline, but I hadn’t even noticed it before. Behind the Co-op and the work shed were these train tracks and on the other side of the train tracks was the Gulf of Mexico. In 1985, there was this rickety little pier where we’d go and sometimes throw rocks or watch people fish. The pier’s wood was this splintery deep brown and maroon. Baize kept her book bag on and just walked right up on the pier. At the end of the pier, she just stood up on her tippy toes.

  “You hear that, Voltron?”

  I listened. I heard birds singing and sea creatures dipping in and out of water, but mostly I heard wind. When you’re listening for something special and you don’t hear it, you start to sniff for something different. “I don’t hear nothing but wind, Baize. Can we go?”

  “Back home,” she said, “there ain’t no pier. When you come out here, the water, it’s still crazy black in some places from all that oil.”

  “Oil?”

  “Yep. You can light a match and throw it in one of the oil spots and sometimes the flame can stay lit for a whole minute. You know what’s really ill? When you come out here and look at the water, you can see the lightning bugs getting their wink on, you know, lighting up against all that black.”

  “Is it pretty?”

  I waited for her to say something but she didn’t. She just cut her eyes at me and blinked in slow motion the same way Shalaya Crump would when she th
ought something I’d said was ignorant as hell.

  “It’s blue,” she finally said. “All of it.”

  “Blue? You said it was black?”

  “It is, but it’s all so blue, too, because of the black. Don’t you see it?”

  “Look Baize, we gotta go.”

  “Man, I come out here all the time and imagine this is a beach with palm trees and mountains in the background,” she said, “but no matter how nice I see it, the sky ain’t never quite right.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said with her back to me. “I hate it. Folks act like they hate the oil now more than the wind, but me, I’d kill the wind, the sky, and water if I could. I ain’t lying. I always imagine that my first video is gonna be me rhyming against a computer-generated dude who looks like he’s made of black water, like Terminator 2, except he’s gonna be called Swaginator and I’m killing that fool in the first minute of the video.”

  “Why, though?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why kill the sky?”

  “Because it took my family. Shit. I told you that.”

  “No, you didn’t. What do you mean, the sky took them?”

  “I mean, I never got a chance to see them again because the sky took them away from me.”

  “They didn’t drown?”

  “If they really drowned, their bodies would have come up sooner or later.” Baize turned around and headed back across the pier and over the railroad tracks.

  I grabbed Baize’s hand as we walked by the bathroom again. The cat and the Dobermans weren’t in there any more. We looked across the road and headed toward the hole. “Look, I hear what you’re saying about your parents disappearing and all that, but I’m taking you home.”

  “Home as in 2013?”

  “That’s the only home you got, right?”

  “I ain’t going back home without you,” she said, and kept trying to look me in the face. “Voltron? Voltron! Yo! You said you wanted my help.”

  “I changed my mind, Baize. You’re too young for this. You sound sick, too. I bet it’s that time of the month. Things are about to get crazy. And you know what else? Folks can tell just from how you dressed that you ain’t from the ’60s.”