by Ibi Zoboi
“Welcome back to Manhattan, baby girl. The Big Apple. New York City! And soon, we’ll be in Harlem—the heart of it all—where the beat is, the bass, the drum. Ain’t that right, baby girl?” Daddy says from the driver’s seat.
“It’s No Joke City, Daddy,” I say, easing toward a window. “’Cause this place is serious with them tall buildings.”
“You got that right,” is all my daddy says.
We drive down a winding highway that runs along the green-brown river and on the other side is a sea of shorter-and-wider buildings that Daddy says is Brooklyn. Soon, we turn down Park Avenue where above us a long and wide bridge seems to extend just as far as the whole city. I roll down the window and stick out my head to look up at the giant structure. I remember what it’s up there for from the last time I visited Harlem. It’s an aboveground train track.
“Daddy, ain’t that the Soul Train?” I ask.
He laughs a little. “Could call it that. It is the Harlem Line, after all. The Metro-North. Goes up to somewhere fancy called Connecticut.”
“Can we get on the Soul Train to meet Don Cornelius?” I ask him. Momma never lets me watch Soul Train, and Granddaddy says it’s changed so much from when it first started with all that glitter and dirty dancing.
Daddy laughs even harder. “I don’t see why not. But you gotta dance up there on the Soul Train, baby girl. Whatcha gonna dance to?”
“No, sir. I’m not dancing. Ain’t gonna laugh either. ’Cause ain’t nothing funny about No Joke City!”
“I see you’re not gonna let that one go,” Daddy says. “Don’t worry. Harlem’ll set you straight.”
I shake my head to disagree with Daddy, but he can’t see me from the driver’s seat. Soon, we’re making a left onto 126th Street, Daddy’s block.
This street is full of fast-walking people packed onto the sidewalk like Granddaddy’s sardines, sitting around on stoops, and everything in between. I know better than to trust any of them. The white-teeth smiles or the slap-knee laughter in Daddy’s Harlem—they’re just traps and they don’t fool me. The world here is square and rectangular with its high walls and sharp corners made to keep everything round and bubbly and soft—everything happy—in a cold, hard box.
Except it looks like the box has sprung a leak. Water sprays out of the mouth of a small robot at the edge of a wide sidewalk and it’s free like air, like starlight, like rockets.
“I gotta roll up the windows, Broomstick,” Daddy says. The window squeaks as it slides up and there are tiny cracks in the middle of the glass.
“What’s happening?” I ask, sitting up to watch big-headed and knobby-kneed Harlem kids run through the spray. An iridescent rainbow forms on the ground and no one seems to care because they run all over it with their bare feet.
“Just the neighborhood kids having a good time. But it ain’t hot enough out here for all this mess,” Daddy says. “School ain’t even let out yet for the summer. But what the heck . . . Could use a good car wash!”
Daddy slowly drives the car through the water as the kids make way for him. A boy with a pigeon chest wearing only a pair of red shorts goes over to the small robot and puts his hand in front of the water as it flies even higher. I press my face against the window and the water pounds Daddy’s Buick as if it were the torrential rains of the Second Coming, as Momma would say.
“Wow!” I whisper.
“Could come out here later, if you want,” Daddy says.
The water splashes my window, I squeeze my eyes shut and press my forehead against the coolness. Soon, we’re out of the spray and the kids run back in. I watch everything from the rear window, through the sliding droplets that make everything look bigger and stranger, like a house of mirrors at a carnival.
Still, I don’t trust all that laughing and fun because ain’t nothing funny about No Joke City! “It’s a trap,” I whisper to myself.
“Broomstick!” Daddy says. I jump in my seat. “As long as you change out of those nice clothes, you could run back out there before they turn off the fire hydrant.”
“Fire hydrant?” I ask, wishing that the little robot had more of a funky name.
Fire Crusher pops up in my imagination location. Fire . . . Destroyer!
Before I can think of what a Fire Destroyer might do, I’m out of the car and setting foot on the surface of Planet No Joke City. “Welcome home,” King Sirius Julius says as he pulls my bags out of the back seat. I run to him to help. But a short man wearing a long, dirty coat beats me to it.
“This here your daughter, Julius?” he asks with a scraggly voice. “Looks just like you. You spit that baby girl out!” He tries to grab one of my bags, but Daddy shoos him away. “Lemme help you with those, man.”
“Get back, Lester. I don’t need any help,” he says.
I try to take one of my bags from Daddy again, but before I can even open my mouth to tell him I can carry my own bags he looks down at me with needle eyes. “Broomstick, you go on over there and stand by the steps until I open the door. You hear?” His voice is harder than before—more like the King Sirius Julius he’s supposed to be.
I do as he says and watch as my daddy and this Lester fight over my bags. Lester doesn’t budge. He tries to grab my green backpack, my brown satchel that used to belong to Nana, and Momma’s old makeup case. She had filled that case with all the dolls I never played with. But before we left for the airport, I took out those ugly dolls and replaced them with things more useful and more fun.
“Lester, I’ma have something for you to do in just a minute, if you just let go of these bags and let me take care of my baby girl,” Daddy says, softer now.
Lester steps back and bows as if Daddy really were the king of this place. I get a glimpse of Lester’s sneakers—no laces and one of his big toes sticks out of a hole. He scratches his head and neck and keeps his eyes on my bags as if there were nothing more he wanted to do in the world than to carry one of them up the steps to Daddy’s brownstone.
I’m so focused on Lester and his scratching that I don’t notice the small crowd of kids walking up toward us—even the skinny boy with the pigeon chest and red shorts. I turn the other way. More kids. They’re coming from every corner of this block.
There’s nowhere else to look but down at the brown and gray concrete. Blades of grass stick through the cracks as if there were a secret tiny forest underneath the sidewalk, with teeny-tiny aliens who do nothing but laugh all day. This itsy-bitsy forest beneath the concrete is their prison and punishment for being so happy.
“That’s your daughter, Mr. J?” someone asks. It’s a boy’s voice and I refuse to look up. I imagine one of those tiny laughing aliens climbing over my shiny black Mary Jane shoes, swinging across the lace trimmings of my socks, and scurrying its way up my skinny, Vaseline-covered legs. I let out a snort and quickly cover my mouth before a forbidden laugh bursts out.
I look up to see all the kids’ eyes on me. Then, Daddy yells out my name: “Ebony-Grace! Don’t be rude.”
Get ahold of yourself, E-Grace. Not one snort. Not one giggle. Wipe that smile off your face! I tell myself. I furrow my brows and purse my lips so tight they almost go numb.
“What’s wrong with her, Mr. J?” Pigeon-Chest Boy asks.
There are almost a dozen of them—all different shapes and sizes. They talk at the same time—No Joke City gibberish. But luckily, my super-duper bionic ears can decipher it all. The words and questions spill out of their mouths as fast as shooting stars.
“Why her face like that?”
“Why she just standing there?”
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Can you see through walls with them Coke-bottle glasses?”
“She looks like she been sitting out in the sun her whole life!”
“You know my people down in ’Bama?”
“Is that a perm or a press
’n’ curl?”
“Subspace frequencies jammed, sir. Wormhole effect!” I say and cover my ears and shut my eyes because it’s sensory overload. I need my helmet. I need to go back home. “Beam me up, Granddaddy!”
But still, they poke and prod and ask more questions. They move in closer and they smell like hot sun, salty sweat, city streets, and car exhaust. I brace myself to be beamed back up onto the Uhura. I wait for the atmospheric pressure to squeeze my whole body into a teeny-tiny wormhole in the universe, and I’d zoom up through an invisible portal, catapult into space, and stumble onto the cold, logical metal floors of the Starship Uhura.
“Beam me up, Captain Fleet!” I yell out loud. “Beam me up, please!”
CHAPTER
4
“Hey, hey, hey!” Daddy’s voice booms through all the gibberish. “Y’all step away from her. She’s fresh from Alabama. She’s gonna need her space.”
It’s only when Daddy pulls my hands away from my ears that I open one eye to recognize Bianca Perez making her way through the crowd. She grabs my other hand, stretches her arm out in front of Pigeon-Chest Boy and all the other kids standing around, and pulls me toward the steps of Daddy’s brownstone.
“To the rescue!” I say.
Still, those nefarious minions stand right outside the rusted iron gate, shouting their comments and questions. They’re nefarious because they’re so rude and mean. Who yells at a stranger like that, as if they’d have no home training, as Momma would say? And they’re minions because they’re all working under the orders of King Sirius Julius, who wants them to be friends with me. But they have no manners!
“Hey, girl! You wanna go in the fire hydrant?”
“You know how to jump double-Dutch?”
“I bet you she’s double-handed. They don’t jump double-Dutch Down South.”
“She look country. Look at her knees!”
They all laugh and point and I know it’s a trick to get me to laugh, too. Then, King Sirius Julius will take me prisoner in Planet No Joke City forever! I can just hear him now, calling my momma and granddaddy to say, “I told you she’d be happy here. Now let her stay with me.”
I look around for King Sirius Julius, who’s already disappeared up the steps and into the brownstone, leaving me and Bianca Pluto to fend off his nefarious minions. They keep laughing and pointing, but I won’t be fooled. No Joke City jokes aren’t funny.
Bianca doesn’t laugh, either, thank goodness. “¡Déjala sola!” she yells at the nefarious minions. “Why don’t you go wash off your funky butts in the fire hydrant?”
More shouting, more questions, and more gibberish. I cover my ears and shut my eyes again, until a deep thumping sound comes from somewhere down the block and reaches my bones. It forces me to stare up at the gray-blue sky and hazy yellow sun. Music. Heavy bass music like the Sonic Boom from Planet Boom Box. I can see the sound waves vibrating across the roofs of the brownstones forming a forcefield around all of Harlem. I stand on the steps and point.
“Look!” I whisper.
Bianca stands next to me and looks up, too. “I don’t see nothing,” she says.
“The Sonic Boom,” I say, really slowly so as not to alarm anything that might be inching closer to where Bianca and I are standing.
“The what boom?” she asks.
“The Sonic Boom, sent by the Sonic King and the Funkazoids from Planet Boom Box!”
Bianca rolls her eyes and sighs. “Calvin has a new boom box. You wanna go watch him break-dance?”
I look at her all crazy because now she’s talking nonsense. “Who wants to watch anybody dance when an evil king is sending mind-controlling sound waves over your city?”
“Broomstick!” Daddy shouts from inside the brownstone, and in an instant, the waves disappear. “Ebony-Grace! Come on in here and wash up. We gotta call your mother, and then I got some lunch for you. You can join us, too, Bianca, if your grandmother says it’s all right.”
Daddy’s telephone is at the very edge of the kitchen wall, just like Momma’s phone down in Huntsville. Bianca runs to wash her hands in the bathroom as Daddy picks up the receiver to call Momma in Alabama. The long spiraling cord hangs across the black and white kitchen tiles. I watch him turn the phone dial with each number—all eleven of them, starting with 1, then 256. Of course, he knows my Huntsville number by heart because he calls every Saturday morning. Our short conversations have never changed.
DADDY: “How’s my baby girl?”
ME: “Good.”
DADDY: “You’re getting high marks in school?”
ME: “Yes.”
DADDY: “How ’bout you come up to the Big Apple and stay with your daddy for a while?”
ME: “No.”
And even now that I’m with him (not for a while, just a week), he still doesn’t have much to say, unlike Granddaddy, who can step in and out of his own imagination location with no problem.
CAPTAIN FLEET: “What have you to report from your mission, Cadet E-Grace?”
E-GRACE: “The Funkazoids have dispersed all throughout the galaxy to retrieve the golden Dog Star . . . ”
CAPTAIN FLEET: “Retrieve the golden Dog Star, huh? Is that right?”
E-GRACE: “Affirmative, Captain.”
CAPTAIN FLEET (AS REGULAR OL’ GRANDDADDY): “Ebony-Grace, are you trying to tell me you want a golden retriever for your birthday?”
E-GRACE: “Affirmative, Granddaddy.”
And I was supposed to get that golden retriever this summer, right before signing up for that new space camp. No matter, because I won’t be staying in Harlem. E-Grace Starfleet won’t be Planet No Joke City’s prisoner forever. I’ll make it back to Huntsville in time for my new puppy and for space camp.
So I try very hard not to smile big and bright as Daddy dials and my heart is beating fast waiting to hear Granddaddy’s version of what’s really happening here in No Joke City.
Daddy has to wait a few seconds for Momma to accept the collect call from New York. Daddy always calls collect because Granddaddy is rich. Still, I’ve heard Momma say Daddy could spare a few dollars just to hear his daughter’s voice. And I’ve heard Daddy say that he’d rather spend those few dollars on me when I get here to live with him for good. With my bionic ears, I hear all sorts of things I’m probably not supposed to.
Bianca is back from the bathroom when Daddy’s thunderous voice seems to make the whole kitchen shake. Bianca jumps, and I cover my mouth to hold in a laugh.
“Gloria! How you feelin’? All right? That’s great . . . Well, she’s here. Safe and sound. And happy, too,” Daddy says, without even smiling or winking or nodding at me to make sure that he’s right about my being happy.
So I rush over to him and try to grab the phone. King Sirius Julius can fool Momma, but he can’t fool me. “Let me speak to her, Daddy!”
“Hold on, Broomstick. That’s rude. Lemme finish talking to your momma.”
I step back with my face twisted into a tight knot, my arms crossed, and I tap my toe on his dirty kitchen floor and listen to him lie to Momma.
“Her flight was fine . . . Yes, she was behaving . . . She was reading her books . . . I’ll sign her up at the Y first thing Monday morning . . . I know a dance school over on 145th . . . I already asked Diane to watch her while I’m at the shop . . . Gonna pay her, too . . . No, I don’t need your money or your daddy’s . . . Street urchins? Gloria, those are good neighborhood kids . . . She’s gonna be just fine and happy . . . ”
When he finally hands me the phone, I step away from him as far as the cord will take me—which is all the way through the narrow hall leading to the foyer. I pull the long white cord as it spirals along the wall like a vortex. This is like the portal the Uhura has to go through when it leaves Andromeda for a whole other galaxy!
Finally, I bring the phone up to my e
ar and I don’t even wait to hear Momma’s voice before I say, “Where’s Granddaddy?”
“Now, you know better than that, Ebony-Grace!” Momma says. She has a way of yelling without yelling. Her voice is sweet, but her words shout—like cough syrup that’s candy on my tongue, but hot peppers on my sore throat. “Say you’ll stay away from that dirty shop.”
I lick my lips and swallow hard, getting ready to give Momma my very best Funkazoid robot impression: “You. Will. Stay. Away. From. That. Dirty. Shop.”
Bianca, who has followed me into the foyer, lets out a laugh. I move my arm about like Michael Jackson in that old “Dancing Machine” video.
Momma keeps sweet-yelling over the phone, telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing at Daddy’s house, in his shop, and on “those crazy Harlem streets with those little street urchins.”
Until I yell out again, “Where’s Granddaddy?”
Then, it’s as quiet as outer space. I know better than to yell at Momma. But she’s all the way down in Huntsville and fortunately she knows nothing about teleporting through spiraling portals.
“Little girl,” she says. Now, her voice is like a big round jawbreaker—still sweet, but can make you lose a tooth if you’re not careful. “If I could reach into that phone line and twist your little ear, I would. Now, listen to me, and you listen to me good . . . ”
I don’t listen to her. Her words are just like the No Joke City gibberish. Except it’s more like having a dozen pieces of butterscotch or peppermint candy in my mouth during church and trying to sing “Amazing Grace” with all the other church folks, but it comes out sounding like gobble-gobble. Momma’s words are hard-candy gobble-gobble.
When she’s done and it’s quiet again, I ask, “Can I speak to Granddaddy now?”
“Put your father on the phone, Ebony-Grace,” is all I hear and all I understand.
CHAPTER
5
After such a long trip, I’m expecting a tall pitcher of sweet tea, fried catfish, maybe some grits or black-eyed peas, and a bowl of peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream. That’s how Momma does it after Granddaddy comes back from an engineering conference. But Daddy’s kitchen is dark, hot, and musty, unlike my house down in Huntsville with its brand-new General Electric air conditioner. I can barely make out two plastic plates holding a set of beige squares—Wonder Bread, slices of ham and cheese, and Hellmann’s Mayonnaise. Daddy sets a gallon of milk and two plastic cups in front of us and walks out of the kitchen.
