Seasons Between Us

by Alan Dean Foster

  A buzzing started. Like a swarm of every negative thought he’d ever had about himself. His heart pounded. His hands sweated. Tears welled in his eyes.

  On the television screen, a scene sharpened into view. His brain placed the picture as familiar until the images coalesced into memory and he realized it was his childhood home. Words crawled along the bottom of the screen warning that the vid about to be shown might be disturbing to young or sensitive viewers, which wasn’t going to stop them from airing it. Drone footage captured every angle, surveillance so routine people rarely took notice of the machines.

  A police car pulled over a vehicle. The officers leapt out and approached the car from each side. The officer on the driver’s side dragged a young black man out and slammed him against the hood. The man struggled to his feet, hands raised, protesting his mistreatment. Charged batons were in the officers’ hands within moments.

  The man’s terror mounted, splayed across the screen for the commentators to dissect in slow motion and close-up. The batons landing all along his body. Each blow sent waves of shock through him. Hakeem recognized the successive expressions, anger, to powerlessness, to shame, to resignation. The light fading from the man’s eyes, the word “why?” dying on his lips. A reporter speculated about the possibility of the incident being ruled an accidental mishap from the man ducking into an officer’s blow.

  The roar of engines filled Hakeem’s ears. The room smelled of burning wood. He grew light-headed. His breathing became heaving gasps, overwhelming him with fear he was being crushed.

  Striding into the shop, a postman—dressed as if from the 1800s, with a blue-grey sack coat, matching pants, and a panama hat—drew a letter from his satchel. He prepared to hand Hakeem the proclamation when it was snatched from his hand by a hooded Klansman who ran out the front door.

  Hakeem stood to give chase. When he reached the door, a torrent of water from a firehose blasted him back into his seat.

  Before him, a cop pressed a figure to the ground. The image resolved into a series of puzzle pieces with the one meant to cover the figure’s face, missing. Yanked up, the figure morphed into his friend Michael, shoved into and struggling in the back of the police officer’s car. The report of a gunshot stilled his movements.

  On the screen, Hakeem’s home bursts into flames.

  Rising from his chair, he walked through the flames, emerging unsinged, but dressed as an astronaut. He closed the door behind him.

  In the distance, over the sound of his sobs, Ms. Jywanza’s voice called for medi-drone.

  STAGE THREE: Remembrance

  The first time I got really angry, I had been a newspaper carrier for two years.

  The newspaper station was a large white bay with stacks of papers bundled next to pylons. When I approached my lot, a folded piece of paper had been tucked into the top bundle instructing, “Please stuff the inserts before delivery.” Staring at the message, re-reading it a few times, I glanced over to the stack. My blood pressure rose with each calculation of my time spent and lost with each paper. “Aw hell, nah,” I cried out, stopping all work in my vicinity.

  “Little. My office,” my manager said. Blue corduroy jacket, two days of unshaven grey-speckled stubble. Thin but wiry-strong, missing one of his cigarette-stained teeth. I might as well remember him as Bossman Chad.

  I grabbed the offending stack of ads and followed him into his office.

  The door barely closed behind me before he went all in. “What’s your problem this time?”

  “You messing with my money. Again.” I had visited his office the previous week complaining about my pay rate. For me to get paid, I had to collect money from each house along my route for the papers I had delivered to them. No matter how much I collected, the first cut went to the Indianapolis Star to cover the papers I delivered. Only after that nut was paid did I see any money for myself. My customers’ slow pay or no pay didn’t matter to the company since it came out of my end. It took two years to realize just how bad I was being fucked.

  “This is the job,” Bossman Chad said.

  “I’m not going to make the motherfucker and then deliver it. That’s not what I signed up to do.”

  Bossman Chad was three syllables worth of shitty. His yellow teeth ground back and forth. “You can put the inserts in the paper and deliver them or you can consider this your resignation whining session.”

  We stared at each other, each waiting for the other to move. Finally, I sucked my teeth and headed to the door. Bossman Chad muttered something, too pleased with himself. I tossed the inserts into the trash can. Not satisfied, I fished in my pockets for my book of matches. Turning to him, I lit one and dropped it into the trash bin. I strode out of the office to a chorus of profanity as he stomped out the flames.

  That might have been the first time my mother called me an extremist.

  Life ran in cycles, intricate spirals of self-repeating loops holding the universe together. Whenever I came to a place where it looked as if I were about to travel the same road as my father, I made a course correction.

  In junior high school, I qualified to be in the band. My music teacher beamed at the possibility. According to him, I had a natural gift and he wanted me to play the trombone. My dad played trombone, and our household was always filled with jazz music. I remember the first time my father played Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. I was transported. Then he left on one of his shamanistic retreats. I quit the band.

  Early in high school I wanted to be an astronaut, fantasizing about one day going into space. I read book after book on anything about space. Then I found out that to qualify to be an astronaut, I had to join the Air Force. Before he took up with the Black Panthers, my father was in the military. I quit my dream of going into space.

  By my sophomore year of college, my schedule filled with classes that carved out and explored a black space like Introduction to African American Studies, Cinema in Black & White: African American Presence and Absence in American Film, Introduction to Black Literature, and Health & Healing in Africa. The exception was my computer programming class.

  “Let’s hear from our friend from Rhodesia.” Professor Becky was a tall woman who strode about the class with a poise and elegance that demanded the whole world be her model runway. There was no calling her by her first name, as she reminded everyone of the title she had earned.

  “There she go again,” I whispered.

  “What’s up?” Dona asked. Hair drawn back into Afro puffs, she glanced at me over the rims of glasses whose thick black frames echoed those worn by Malcolm X. Other than “our friend from Rhodesia,” she and I were the only black students in the thirty-person class.

  “Whenever the brotha lands on her radar, she disrespects his name. And his people. Keeps calling his country Rhodesia. The first time she did it, I let it slide. Everyone was due a slip up. It was not like the news covered civil wars in Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Folks over here don’t care about that.”

  “Can barely spell Apartheid. And that shit’s still going on,” Dona said.

  “That’s what I’m saying. Following week, Professor Becky makes another run at him. Let’s Rhodesia trip off her lips again. Turns to me and winks. I’m like, this motherfucker’s purposely disrespecting him. Us.”

  “You ask ‘our friend from Rhodesia’ about it? See what he wants to do?”

  “He doesn’t want to make a big deal of it. With no tests, a lot of the grade in here is subjective.” I shrugged. “That’s his call. It’s just . . . I can’t let it be. She can’t just disrespect us.”

  “That’s cool, but you need to be strategic.” Dona patted me on my shoulder, her way of calming me. “Step to her wrong, and you’re surfing a wave of white woman’s tears right off campus.”

  “Is there a problem back there?” Professor Becky interrupted. The sharp edge in her voice cause
d the rest of the class to stop taking notes and turn toward me.

  I glanced at Dona. She shrugged, leaving it my choice. “It’s Zimbabwe.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The people of Zimbabwe fought and won a war liberating them from white oppressive rule.” I met the eyes of each and every one of my classmates before turning to Professor Becky. “Their liberation and independence need to be emulated. Their right to choose what to be called needs to be respected. If we don’t support freedom everywhere, we can’t expect it anywhere.”

  The students turned back to Professor Becky.

  “My apologies.” Her tone turned frosty. “Zimbabwe it is.”

  “You got no chill,” Dona said. “I like that. You need to come to the next meeting of the Black Student Union.”

  “Alright, bet.”

  I was the only one who did not pass that class.

  Surveillance drones flew overhead like crows scrounging for food. A murder of drones. Hakeem’s front porch hadn’t changed much since his childhood. Perhaps a little more paint had chipped from the walls. The bricks needed touching up, but the foundation was solid. Hakeem’s mother used to say, “you never get rid of land,” which was why he inherited the house and was able to buy the one next door. Ms. Jywanza didn’t fool him. She had already identified and researched the entire block and then bought the two houses on the other side of him.

  Time stood still. The return to his present reality from his shamanistic journey took nearly a year. Rocking back and forth, Hakeem studied the patch of earth where his father had been shoved to the ground. The cold rage stirred again. Torn from his former orientation, he listened to a deeper consciousness, trying to get to a place to understand the shamanistic whispers:

  This is America. Here’s who you think you are.

  This is America. Here’s who you really are.

  This is Muungano. Here’s where you want to be.

  This is Muungano. Here’s where you will be.

  Ms. Jywanza climbed the porch steps carrying two cups of coffee, setting one on the ledge in front of him before settling in next to him. “You finally back with us?”

  Taking his cup, he sipped at his coffee. “Glad to see I don’t weird you out.”

  “I’ve never minded your brand of crazy.” She tipped her mug in toast. “If you listen, the universe will take you somewhere. So, here’s to embracing the unknown and all that.”

  Hakeem raised his mug before scrolling through his journal. He’d written several poems, most of them trash, but he was improving. It was important to get the words—his feelings—out, no matter what shape they took. At least, so his healers encouraged. Even as essays. He studied the ground where his father had been shackled and shamed. He jotted down the title, “Lessons on Blackness.”

  “Did I ever tell you about the time my husband lost his job?” Ms. Jywanza asked.

  “I knew he switched careers.”

  “The most stressful time of our marriage. We almost split up over it. He’d worked in a lab for almost forty years, the only job he’d known since college. One day his boss comes in and lays off a third of the staff. Most folks were devastated, but not him. He saw it as an opportunity to do and become something new. To recreate himself. Do what he always wanted to do, on his terms. He tried freelancing, writing for different sites to push out the message of The Cause. But, you know how it is trying to make a living off your art.”

  Hakeem made a non-committal sound. He hadn’t told her he had been searching for work via commlink. He just didn’t know how many more “no’s” he could take.

  “With no money coming in, I watched what it did to him. Eating at his self-worth. Not being able to provide. Not seeing himself—and fearing that others didn’t see him—as a man. All the doubts. All the worry. All the dark thoughts he didn’t suspect I knew he had. He just needed a break, some traction under his feet, so he could get his thing up and running.”

  “At least he knew what he wanted to do.” Hakeem’s voice reduced to a hoarse whisper.

  “Something will emerge. The question is, are you ready to get back out there and try and fail at some things until it does?”

  Hakeem recognized that particular glint in her eye. “What you got in mind?”

  “Come work at the bookstore. Take some time to do something with your writing.”

  “I . . .” It was a possibility he hadn’t considered.

  Ms. Jywanza raised her cup again. “Here’s to possibilities.”

  STAGE FOUR: Re-Imagine

  I rarely visited my father at the Marion Psychiatric Hospital. The place reminded me of a prison and his ward, a cell block. I never wanted to see him in a cage of any kind, even a medicated one. The pills left him so sedated, a drooling version of himself. It wasn’t good for him. It only made things easier on the staff and family, not having to fuck with his antics. But I understood: part of me wanted an IV pumping drugs into him non-stop right now.

  “Say that shit one more time.” His rheumy eyes fixed on me. A slurping sound kept drool from escaping the corner of his mouth.

  “My name is Hakeem Buhari now.”

  “Hakeem.” My dad rolled the name around his mouth like it left a bad taste.

  “We call it our ritual of name change. Hakeem means ‘wise’ or ‘judicious’ and Buhari means. . . .”

  “I don’t give a good got-damn what it means. It translates into you being ashamed of me. Of your family.” My father was on the other side of heated. “Call it what it is: a ritual of rejection.”

  If only to myself, I admitted that it was.

  I spent more and more time with the Purdue University chapter of the Black Student Union. They pushed me into a deeper place. I came to see the world as interconnected. First as a series of systems—capitalism, criminal justice, nationalism, military-technological-industrial complex—linked in service to supremist ideology. Second, as a people—Pan-African, those of the Diaspora and of the mother continent—we were united in struggle.

  We needed to reclaim our independence and agency. It began with our own name change.Naming was a way to call something into being. What we wanted to manifest in the world. My brothers and sisters in the black Student Union suggested a name reflective of my talents and I accepted the burden of living up to the name. The ritual of the name change itself was transformational.

  Though I still had to break it to my folks.

  I expected my mother to call me an extremist. Again. The words started to form on her lips, but she paused, almost in consideration, maybe seeing me for the first time. The final derivative in the calculus of colour. Taking my hand in hers, she whispered, “Jesus renamed his disciples with their new mission to redeem places.”

  I expected no such consideration from my father.

  “Pops, I . . .” Suddenly I was the boy afraid to walk down the basement steps.

  “Don’t ‘Pops’ me. I gave you my name. Raised you. Now you spit on me.” My father’s hand flitted, his fingers pinching in the motions of chasing a cigarette.

  “Maybe it’s time for your medicine.” My father had become a pharmaceutical smorgasbord of disorders: bipolar, schizophrenic, oppositional defiance. Each visit seemed to find a new anti-social diagnosis added to his record.

  “Fuck them medications.” Storming toward his bed, he bent over to retrieve a bag of pills hidden between the mattress and spring board. “You take these damn pills.”

  “It hasn’t been easy for me,” I said. “I’m just trying to sort through things. I’m not . . .” The words trailed off. Broken. Beaten. My father’s son. I studied him, not seeing the man he once was, the man he could have been. Only the man who’d had his pride and dreams ground out of him by the system we moved and lived and breathed in.

  I’m not him.

  I still dream
t. Some part of me still hoped. Some part of me needed the name change for another reason. He knew it, too, and it was like the last string connecting us snapped.

  I couldn’t meet his eyes.

  “I . . . understand.” His voice softened. Resigned.

  My breathing hitched, something caught deep in my chest.

  “Let me put one last thing in your ear.”

  I managed to look up.

  “Wherever you go, tell your story. Your way.”

  “I’ve never thought . . .” I rested my hand on his shoulder, still wanting to reassure him, to have his full acceptance.

  He pulled away. “You go do you.”

  My dad killed himself later that year.

  Many of the houses in the neighbourhood had been refurbished. Some torn down entirely, rebuilt with polished regolith, fused lunar material which had become the rage in high end construction. Hakeem had his home restored, not updated. He preferred old things.

  “What you no good, Hakeem?” Q sidled up the porch steps. “I mean, I knew you as Li’l Lamont and all, so I figure I got some special dispensation to come up here.”

  “You’re always welcome, Brother Q. Who’s this?” Hakeem gestured to the lanky figure uncomfortable in his skin, half-hiding behind him.

  “This is my grandson, Keegan Besamon.” Q stepped aside, making room for him.