by Kiese Laymon
3. You were brought to this country with the expectation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
True/False
4. If you push yourself hard in the direction of freedom, compassion, and excellence, you will recover.
True/False
5. Loving someone and loving how someone makes you feel are the same thing.
True/False
6. Only those who can read, write, and love can move back or forward through time.
True/False
7. There are undergrounds to the past and future for every human being on earth.
True/False
8. If you haven’t read or written or listened to something at least three times, you have never really read, written, or listened.
True/False
9. Past, present, and future exist within you and you change them by changing the way you live your life.
True/False
10. You are special.
True/False
*Bonus*
11. You are innocent.
True/False
Score: 80%
I put the test back on the desk. When did I even take this test? It was super annoying to see a test you don’t remember taking, but it was even more annoying when you missed some of the answers and whoever was grading the test didn’t tell you which you missed. I knew there were more important questions on the test, but right that second I wanted the answer to the easiest one. And the easiest one to me, right there, was, “Loving someone and loving how someone makes you feel are the same thing.”
Mama Lara walked out from one of the rooms while I was thinking. She looked exactly like she looked back in 1985.
“You’re a witch, ain’t you?” I asked her. “You watched it all happen, didn’t you, just like the sky? Please just tell me what’s going on. Is any of this real?”
“Do I look like a witch to you? Even after all you been through today, does my baby still believe in witches and magic?”
I didn’t answer her question. All I said was, “I’m not a baby.” I held my head right there in that desk and tried to listen to my heartbeat. “I don’t understand, Mama Lara. If we changed the future, how come I’m still here? How come you look the same in 2013 that you did in 1985? Say something. Why would my mama and daddy still have me if we changed the future? It just doesn’t make sense.”
Mama Lara had what looked like Baize’s laptop computer in her hand.
“Where’d you get that from?” I asked her.
“People disappear, City,” she said, ignoring my question. “We live, we wonder, we love, we lie, and we disappear. Close the book.”
“Are you for real? That’s it?”
“And sometimes we appear again if we’re loved,” she said. “Accept it. Which answer did you get wrong on the test? I know you know.”
“I don’t even know when I took that test, Mama Lara,” I told her. “I’m not trying to be disrespectful. I’m just so tired.”
“The test ain’t going nowhere,” she said. “When you’re ready to find out what you got wrong, you will. Close the book.”
“Close the book? Then what? Then can Baize come back? Is that Baize’s computer?” I asked her again. “Is she here somewhere?”
“Take it,” she handed me the computer. “You’re so close.”
“I know she’s here. I can feel her. Where is she?” I asked.
“Wait.” I looked up from the computer. “Is Shalaya Crump the governor of Mississippi, or is she like the president or something?” Mama Lara just looked at me. “How old is she now?” I did the math in my head. “Damn near 65? I bet she’s still fine as all outdoors, though. Did she marry that dude, Evan?”
Mama Lara stood there smiling with her hands folded across her chest. Honestly, I didn’t know what it took to be a good president or governor, but I knew Shalaya Crump had it. I knew it from the first day I met her. In her own way, she was as compassionate and thoughtful as a girl could be, but her mind was stronger than yours and no one could ever really break her heart. You could sprain her heart, and her heart would bruise a lot, but it could never ever be broken. Never. I figured that there were probably 27 people like that in the world at one time and they were the only people who should be running for president of anything that mattered.
With all the windows in the museum open, and the lightning bugs outside winking like it was going out of style, I looked at Mama Lara. “So this is it?” I said loud enough so she could hear me.
“No,” Mama Lara said. “This ain’t it. You know how movement works now. You know how love and change work. And you know that sometimes, just sometimes, when folks disappear, they come back, don’t they?”
“I hear you, Mama Lara, but you don’t get it. Right now, all that goofy talk don’t help me. I just need something to hold on to. I need to know what’s gonna happen tomorrow. Don’t you see what I’m saying? If you can’t help me get Baize back, can you just stop talking for the rest of the day? You ain’t got no stories to watch on TV? Please just stop talking.”
“Think about what I’m asking you, City,” she said and sat in the desk next to me. “The book is open. Close it and get to work. How else do people disappear?”
I looked down at the desk and thought about everything I’d experienced in the last few days and, I guess, the last 50 years.
“Water,” I told her.
“What else?”
“Um, fire?”
“What else?”
“The wind…and um, words?”
“Who uses words to make folks disappear?”
“People.”
“And who makes people disappear?”
“Um, people make people disappear,” I told her.
“That’s it,” she said. “And everything that makes people disappear can make people what?”
“Reappear?”
“It’s all in your hands now. They’re waiting for you.”
I sat there in the desk looking at my actual hands and thinking about water, fire, wind, words, and people. Both sides of my hands looked so worn, so bloody and smudged and ashy. From typing on a laptop computer, to brushing my hair at the Spell-Off, to tying the hands of a fake Klansman, to reading the first chapter of Long Division, to holding my daughter’s hand, my hands had done things I’d never imagined wanting them to do.
I wanted to walk out of that museum ready to explore, knowing that I’d done new things with my hands and new things with my imagination. Maybe I could find Shalaya Crump and Evan tomorrow, I thought. There was so much I wanted to explore. But before I could go forward, I had to go back under.
Again.
So I grabbed the computer, told Mama Lara thank you, and headed back toward the hole. I loved the slice of the new Mississippi that I’d seen and I respected Shalaya Crump’s decision to stay and fight for us, but I needed Baize back. I didn’t care if it was right to anyone else but my daughter and me.
When I got in the hole, I opened the computer. A revised version of the paragraph I’d written when I first took Baize’s computer back to 1985 was on the screen:
I didn’t have a girlfriend halfway through ninth grade and it wasn’t because the whole high school heard Principal Jankins whispering to his wife, Ms. Dawsin-Jankins, that my hairline was crooked like the top of a Smurf house. I never had a girlfriend because the last time I saw Shalaya Crump, she told me she could love me if I helped her change the future dot-dot-dot in a special way.
I reread it. And I wondered. And I wandered. And I wrote. And I reread that. And I wrote more. And I erased some lies. And I wrote more. And I erased some truth. And I thought about Honors English teachers and librarians. And I forgot about them. And I thought about what people like Shalaya, Baize, Evan, and me needed to read in school to prepare to fight, love, and disappear. And I forgot about that. And I wrote more. And the more I wrote and erased, the more I felt Baize and other characters slowly—word by word, maybe even sense by sense—coming back.
Meow
&nbs
p; That fat-head black cat, with the “Red Naval” collar around its neck, appeared and started meowing right outside the hole. I grabbed the cat and brought it down in the hole with me. “Don’t call me an asshole, okay?” I told it. “You were right last time, but still…I ain’t in the mood for that. Man, I lost my daughter and my half-wife and now I’m stuck in 2013. You hear me? Ain’t you supposed to be old and dead?”
The cat licked its paws and pawed at something in the shadows of the hole.
I reached over toward the shadows and saw that it was pawing at Long Division.
“Wait,” I told the cat. “Can you tell me who wrote this?”
Meow
I opened the book to the last chapter. With the cat lying on the side of my lap, the top of the hole open, and the light blue of the computer screen cupping my greasy face, I closed the book and wondered if I was the reader or somehow, actually, the writer of the book I had in my hands.
“Wait,” I said to the cat. “Did I write this? When?”
The cat ignored me and kept scratching its ears.
“I know this is supposed to be all dramatic,” I told the cat, “but can you just help me understand what this book has to do with me? Somebody knows and I’m just tired of not knowing.”
It just kept licking its paws.
“Thanks a lot, homie,” I told the cat and sucked my teeth. “Where would I be without you? Did you ever really talk to me?”
The cat yawned and started licking its own ass.
Making Baize really reappear was going to be harder than making her disappear, harder than anything I’d ever imagined in my life. And I was going to have to do it all with a book without an author called Long Division, Baize’s computer, a fat-head cat, and a hole in the ground.
That’s one of the only things I knew. I also knew that “tomorrow” was a word now like the thousands of other words in that hole. I closed my mouth, pulled down the top of the hole, and imagined more words in the dark.
But someone else was in the hole with me.
I heard more breathing and more fumbling around, so I walked toward the noise until I was close enough to smell dried sweat, pine trees, and ink.
“Who is that?” I said, sounding scared as hell. “How’d you get down here?”
I gently reached and rubbed my hands up, down, and all around their noses, their eyelids, their dry lips and ear lobes. I found their thighs, their flimsy T-shirts, and finally all of their crusty hands. I had one more match left from the book I’d taken from the 1960s, so I went in my pocket and struck the match.
“You!?”
Slowly, we opened our red eyes in the dark and taught each other how to love. Hand in hand, deep in the underground of Mississippi, we all ran away to tomorrow because we finally could…
COVERED IN INK.
Out in the Bonneville, LaVander Peeler sat in the back and I sat up front with Grandma. She sat there not saying a word for a few minutes, with one hand on my thigh and the car running. She took her hand from my thigh and cupped her face with both hands before massaging her temples with her thumbs. I placed my left hand on the back of her neck and rubbed it like she’d do to me when I couldn’t sleep.
I sat there, waiting for Grandma to say something and, really, waiting to hear from her how being in love with Jesus was going to help us out of whatever situation we were in. I didn’t want no silly voices pass-interfering when Jesus decided to let me know what to do next. But even if you put it on strong leash, and even if you’re saved, the imagination makes more noise than a little bit and takes you wherever it wants to go.
And my imagination did exactly that. It took me right across the road in those Magic Woods and it had me stepping on dead catfish and brittle monkey bodies and the blue crossed eyeballs of white folks. All the while, all I could hear around me was Uncle Relle saying, “Gotdamnit. Gotdamnit. Gotdamnit.”
Jesus, I thought to myself, if you’re there, I’m not trying to cuss you. I swear I’m not.
Then, it took me back to a bed on a stage where Mama, Troll, Shay, Gunn, and MyMy were there and they were all kissing me all over my stretch marks and showing stretch marks I never knew they had. Without warning, my imagination calmed down and took me right back to my baptism and that Halona King song was blasting on level eighty trillion.
I pulled Long Division from my bag. “Grandma, I’m fine,” I told her. “Really.”
“Your face,” she said.
“What?”
“It looks like my baby done aged fifteen years in two days. Lawd, have mercy. Please have mercy. This wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”
“Oh, naw. I’m fine, Grandma. I’m just waiting, but it shouldn’t be long now.” I sat there with Long Division, trying to get situated in the passenger seat of the car. “In a way, everything is right here.” I handed her the book. “I think Jesus wanted me to find this book. You should read this one day. There’s another one in the shed.”
“I picked it up,” she said.
“You did? Good. You should read it.”
“I love you, City,” she said and put the book back on my lap. “Galatians 6:9 say, Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. I ain’t giving up, but I didn’t do good this weekend and I reckon they ’bout to come for me. I want you—”
“Grandma,” I interrupted her, “I’m gonna miss you. You know that, right? I am. And I’m gonna miss Melahatchie so much. And you ain’t even got to tell me; I already know I can’t say nothing about what happened in that work shed. It didn’t really happen, right? I think I know where Baize Shephard is, Grandma.”
I reached for Grandma’s waist, smashing my head against her chest as she hugged my neck. Her heart was pounding so hard, so fast. The smell of the shed and Pot Belly was still strong on her chest. “You scared, Grandma? We didn’t kill that man, right? Even though you think he killed Granddaddy and Baize Shephard, we didn’t kill him, did we?”
I could feel tears from Grandma’s face dripping onto my head. “Grandma, I have another question.” I pulled away from her so I could see her eyes. “What does Jesus say is the difference between the fiction in your head and the real life you live? You know what I mean? It’s like there’s two of everybody, the one in fiction and the one in real life. But what’s the difference?”
She squeezed my hand tighter and looked me right in the eyes. “Really, it ain’t no difference, City,” she said. “Because unless you use both of them the right way, they just as bad or just as good as you want them to be. But you lead both of them,” she whispered in my ear. “And don’t take no ass-whupping or no disrespect from no one in your own house or your own dreams, you hear me? Do whatever it takes to protect you and yours,” she said. “Especially in your dreams. Especially in your dreams, because you never know who else is watching.”
“Grandma,” I looked behind me at LaVander Peeler, who was looking out of rear window, “that’s what I did at the contest. That’s all I was trying to do. You think I did the wrong thing to protect me and mines today?”
Grandma tapped me on the forehead with my pencil and ignored my question. She told me to read and write when I got bored and needed to make sense of it all. She said I should never show anybody what I wrote, “…unless you really feel like Jesus forgot you and you’re trying to save your own life, or the life of somebody you love.” Then out of nowhere she said, “What I did to protect me and mines was wrong, City. I shoulda gone underground. I knew better.”
“But you were just cleaning up our mess, right? You were doing what Jesus would have done.”
“Naw.” Grandma looked at her hands. “I was cleaning up my own mess. Or I reckon I was punishing that man for his part in some mess that can’t never really be cleaned the right way. I don’t know, City.”
“It can be cleaned, Grandma. That’s the thing.” I wasn’t sure what I meant, but I knew I meant what I was saying. “It’s cleaner than it would be if folks didn’t
fight back. We can make it even cleaner.”
“We can make it dirtier, too,” Grandma said and kissed me right on the mouth and reached across me and opened my door. “You should go, City. They gon’ be coming for me directly, so I should probably go to them first. Don’t ever go back in that house or that shed. You understand me?”
In all the years I’d known my grandma, I never imagined her as someone’s sad child. But there she was, looking like some kind of rotten blue loss was swallowing her whole, like she’d just lost 50 contests in a row in front of her parents, the boy she liked, and all the black folks to ever live in the state of Mississippi.
LaVander Peeler and I got out of the car and stood in front of the woods. While Grandma’s Bonneville slow-crawled down the road and all these other cars were blowing their horn and passing her, I put my hand on LaVander Peeler’s shoulder and walked him into the Magic Woods. I remembered where the rusted handle in the ground was. I didn’t have to explain anything to LaVander Peeler. He wanted to come with me.
I reached down and pulled open the hole in the ground. We both looked at each other and walked down the steps. “This wasn’t supposed to happen to us, City.”
“Yeah, it was,” I told him. “Like you always say, all things considered, we didn’t really have no other choice or no other story to tell, so we had to make one.” I waited for him to say something back but he didn’t, so I looked right in his face and said what I should have found a way to say to him after the contest.
“I love you, LaVander Peeler. I do, man, and I don’t care what you say about that homosexual stuff. I know you love me, too. You ain’t even gotta say it. Just treat this like the best video game ever made and act like we just beat the game together.”
LaVander Peeler looked at me, not like I was crazy, but like we just tied for last place in the longest uphill three-legged race in the world. The hole was huge once you got in and so much colder than I expected.
“Should we leave the top open?” I asked him.
LaVander Peeler just stood next to me, ignoring my question and resting his head on my shoulder.
