She had two long, brown, leather tubular cases strapped and crisscrossing on her back. On closer inspection, I could see from the red and green stripes on her leather cases that they were designed by Gucci. She looked like she was headed to an archery expedition, her bow and arrow strapped behind her. I realized that she was carrying her artwork inside the leather tubes.
As I watched her, she seemed trapped somewhere in her own thoughts. In that short space of time I wondered what she was thinking. I wondered how it was going with her aunt and uncle. When she looked up and realized it was me waiting there, her smile lit up so bright it cut through the evening dusk.
She locked her eyes into mine. No translation needed. I stood and held my hand out to assist her up the last step. She never let it go. We walked hand in hand like that toward her class.
I didn’t know what my next move would be. I had suspended my thoughts and was moving only on feelings, something completely new for me.
Down the hall from her class, I pulled out a piece of paper and wrote out my telephone number, then handed it to her.
“Arigato.” She ripped the paper in half and wrote her telephone number on her half, then handed it to me.
I felt foolish standing there with no words in the middle of a storm of energy moving back and forth between us. When more and more students brushed by, I placed my hands on her shoulders and spun her around in the direction of her classroom.
She spun back around to face me and threw up the “call me” sign, using her two fingers, the pinky and the thumb.
“Hai,” I said, agreeing. We both laughed a little, then we both turned to leave at the same time.
It was even crazier when she called me late that same night. I picked up the telephone in my room. Instantly I recognized the rhythm of her breathing and her seductive silence.
She didn’t say nothing. So I didn’t either. She started to breathe a little harder then laughed lightly. Then I laughed too. After all, what did I expect by giving her my telephone number? Even when she called, we didn’t have a common language to speak.
“Please,” was all she said. Then click, she hung up.
I called her back. Her telephone line was busy. I hung up.
Four minutes later, my telephone rang again. It was her Japanese cousin with her American accent. “Akemi asked me to call you for her,” she said, speaking in a low tone like she didn’t want anyone on her end to overhear her.
“I’m sorry. I know it’s late. But Akemi has no sense of time. She’ll stay up all night drawing and painting and forgetting about how us normal people live,” she said, sounding a little embarrassed.
“It’s a’ight. Most of the time I’m up late too,” I told her.
She took a deep breath. “So, I guess the two of you have become friends,” she stated.
I don’t know why I didn’t like her way of choosing her words.
“Friends,” is all I answered back.
“Okay, good. Well, anyway, Akemi wanted me to tell you that she won’t be working at Uncle’s store this weekend. She has to finish up her midterm art projects. She wants to know if you and she can meet up instead on the following week on Wednesday at two P.M.?” She didn’t wait for my response. She started talking real fast and answering her own questions. “I told Akemi that you probably couldn’t meet her then because you’ll be at school on Wednesday at two P.M., right?” she asked and suggested at the same time.
“Tell Akemi Wednesday at two is cool. I’ll pick her up at your uncle’s store.”
“Um, wait a minute, no. Meet her at that bakery like the last time you saw her,” she said, assuming that the last time at the bakery was the last time I had seen Akemi. I could tell now that Akemi didn’t tell her cousin everything.
“Wednesday at two at the bakery, a’ight,” I agreed.
“Oh, so you’re on spring break next week, too?” her cousin asked, still digging. “I didn’t know if New York public schools are closed, but Akemi’s college is closed and New Jersey public schools are closed too.” She waited for me to tell her my business. I flipped it around on her and began questioning her instead.
“I thought you said that Akemi is sixteen, a high school student like us,” I asked.
“She is sixteen. She attends the art college on a scholarship, Monday through Thursday in the evenings, and helps out Aunt and Uncle at their store on the weekends. She won a nationwide art competition in Japan. One year at an American art college was the top prize. That’s why she’s here in the U.S. It’s her first time. You know, it’s a very demanding program. Akemi really doesn’t have a lot of free time.” The cousin continued to meddle.
“You have an American accent,” I said to the cousin to hear her reaction.
“Yes, thank you for the compliment,” she answered like I figured she would.
“Why don’t you teach Akemi how to speak English?” I asked, putting the pressure back on her.
“Akemi does whatever she wants to! Maybe now that the two of you are friends, she’ll learn to speak English,” the cousin answered strangely and defensively. “Listen, back home in Japan we are all required to learn English in school. But not Akemi! Her and her father make all of their own rules. Akemi speaks Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Thai, that’s it, no English.” She laughed as though speaking four major languages was nothing if English wasn’t one of them. She sounded like Umma’s father, Northern Grandfather. He used to say, “English is the language of money. No English, no money!”
The cousin continued talking, seeming to enjoy the attention being switched to her.
“My family moved from Japan to the States when I was six years old. My parents and my brothers, we are all fluent. Everyone except my mother’s mother. She refuses to learn English too,” the cousin said, looking down on her grandmother’s choice.
“So Akemi’s mother and your mother are sisters?” I asked her.
“No. Akemi’s mother is dead. She was North Korean. Akemi’s father and my father and Uncle at the store are all brothers. Uncle just came to the U.S. two years ago. Akemi’s father has never been to the U.S. He is big, big business in Japan, way too busy,” she said proudly.
She had breezed by the statement “Akemi’s mother is dead,” just like the Americans breeze by heavy and serious and sacred topics with an ease I was unfamiliar with and could not understand as a Sudanese. As the cousin continued speaking, I was stuck back there.
It must be terrible to be motherless, I thought. It must be a loneliness that no one but a motherless child could understand, really. My world without Umma would be a world without sunlight or heat, without moonlight or music, without reason or love. It would be a cold place with no seasons, filled with complete darkness, no stars and no nothing. A strange sensation flashed over me. It felt like I had blacked out for a minute.
“He never remarried, Akemi’s father. He is elder brother and Akemi is his only child,” she was saying when I came back to listening to her.
Only child, I thought, no mother, brothers, or sisters. More loneliness.
“Okay, Wednesday at two at the bakery,” I said, abruptly cutting her off.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay,” like her feelings were hurt.
“Thank you for calling me for Akemi,” I said, hanging up.
20
SHOW AND PROVE
Me, Ameer, and Chris were seated on the gym floor with the rest of the cats who made the cut. Like everybody else, we wanted to hear how the competition was going down, and what the stakes were.
Tyriq and his boys, who stood solidly behind him, got straight down to business.
“Who provides the recreation in our hoods?” Tyriq started off asking us questions.
We the players was just kicked back, leaning on our elbows, one cat balancing his head on a basketball, another spinning a basketball on his finger, just looking at one another wondering if anybody knew what he was really asking us. No one said shit.
“All of you are right. The answer is,
nobody provides the recreation in our hoods.” He looked around to assess the effect of his words.
“If you young motherfuckers were not all sitting right here tonight, your asses would be outside doing nothing! I need y’all to remember that. Remember that we are doing something that no one else is doing for your black asses. Remember that when the stands are full, and the parks are packed, and everybody is watching and cheering for you!
“Don’t lose your head. Remember who checked for you, who made it all possible.
“Everybody in here got on Nikes. Is Nike running this League? Does Nike give a fuck what half a million niggas are doing on a Friday night in Brooklyn? Count it up! If you can count!” he said. Him and his boys laughed.
“One hundred twenty-five youth in here, including us up here in front, paid at least a hundred dollars for a pair of these joints. That’s twelve thousand five hundred dollars’ worth of footwear in this room alone. And you know Brooklyn gotta stay fresh! So us in this room all together, will spend at least twelve thousand five hundred dollars a month on kicks. That’s a hundred fifty thousand dollars a year, just for us in this room.
“Outside on the streets, at least eighty-five percent of Brooklyn youth, male and female, are rocking Nikes. Yeah, I know, some paper also gets spent on Reebok for your girls and on Adidas. For Nike, that’s half a million youth times twelve thousand five hundred dollars a month, in Brooklyn alone! How much is that in a year? Who can add that up?”
“That’s seventy-five billion dollars,” I answered in the silent gym.
“My man!” Tyriq shouted, giving me my props. “What’s one percent of seventy-five billion dollars?”
“Seven hundred fifty million,” I answered again.
“Are the rest of you listening?” he asked the players. “Nah, y’all ain’t listening ’cause the numbers we talking, you never even thought about. Niggas is one hundred percent loyal to Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Puma, all them. But we can’t get one percent return on our loyalty. You can’t get none of these companies to put up even fifty thousand stinking, measly, fucking dollars to run this league, buy some uniforms, donate some surplus sneakers and a couple of balls. So remember who is right here in the hood with you, spending paper, making it happen, giving you something to do before you get a chance to kill each other.”
One kid started clapping, then all the cats started cheering and clapping.
“Be grateful,” Tyriq continued. “I hope not one of you is here looking to get something for nothing. You gotta work to earn. You gotta train to win. You gotta go hard and play hard. Got it?” Tyriq ended his pitch. He looked like he was feeling pretty good about himself.
I’m looking beyond the hype of his words, wondering if this meant the league was bankrupt and we wasn’t getting paid shit.
Then he laid out the incentives. Ten thousand dollars each for the first-place team’s five starting players. Bench riders get gift certificates for The Wiz, an electronics store. Next, two thousand each for the second-place team’s five starting players. Bench riders get Foot Locker gift certificates. The most valuable player of this youth league gets twenty-five thousand, a custom-made diamond ring, and bragging rights in every hood in the New York area.
“For losing, you get the same thing you get for losing in life, nothing!” The players cracked up.
“We got no space or time for bullshit,” Tyriq announced. Then he paced the gym floor, laying out the youth league rules. He started off with their “code of silence.” He said since Nike gets our loyalty for free, we should at least let the league have it for the price of the prizes. The business of the league was confidential. He said any player who told anybody outside of the league anything about the business of the league, money changing hands and whatnot, would forfeit his winnings and position on the team.
“Don’t ask us how we’ll find out if you been running your mouth. We just do. And when we do, there won’t be no lawyers or trials, if you know what I mean. And don’t think that if you’re one of the losers, that you got nothing to lose. You always have your life,” Tyriq threatened. His words brought on a serious silence. When he felt the fear had sunk in enough, he laughed it off. But we all know he wasn’t joking.
When he broke all 120 of us down into ten teams of twelve players each, we were seated into new groups on the gym floor. Some guys’ faces were tight with the team choices, crews being broken up and different kids from different areas of Brooklyn being mixed in together, friends being divided, enemies being united.
“This is business,” Tyriq said, cut and dry, responding to the tight looks.
He handed out each team’s schedules for practices, scrimmages, and game times, dates, and locations. Each team got assigned a color instead of a team name. Needless to say, he had everybody’s full attention and cooperation.
One of Tyriq’s boys was assigned to each team. We now found out they were actually our team coaches. The cat who came my way was named Vega. Wearing a red Puma track suit, a crisp white tee, a cropped S-Curl, and red suede Pumas, he was swift and light on his feet and broad chested, like he had a committed daily workout. He squatted, signaled us all to squat, and spoke softly so we had to strain to hear his words.
“You looking at the winning squad right here,” he told us. “I can feel it.” He scanned our faces like he wanted our instant trust. “There’s only one way to take control of this thing and that’s this right here.” He placed his hand over his heart. “Do you niggas got the heart?” he asked. We all stared right back at him, but nobody said nothing.
“Listen, I got tickets to the Saint John’s college ball game tomorrow night at Madison Square Garden. This is the hot ticket, the Big Eastern Championship joints.” He pulled the tickets halfway out and pushed them back into his jacket pocket. “I want all of you to meet me right outside the Garden in front of Roy Rogers tomorrow night at six-thirty. If you late, you fucked up. I need y’all to see how these players hustle, so you’ll know what we need to do to handle this business. Don’t bring no fucking body with you. I don’t care who it is. From this night forward, we the team. Anybody ain’t seated in this circle right here tonight, don’t need to know and don’t count. You got it?” He held out his hand. Everybody gave him a pound. He introduced himself, unfolded a sheet of paper from his pocket and tried to match players’ names with their faces.
It was almost eleven P.M. when we 120 ballplayers got out of there. We walked out calmly, no crowd or music or drama like last time. Probably each one of us was still spinning the dollar numbers around in our heads and wondering if it was real or not.
I couldn’t front. Vega didn’t seem like a coach but he got me open with those tickets. I had never been inside Madison Square Garden, although I walked right past it often. Of course I’ve seen it on TV, the world-famous home of the New York Knicks. Back in the Sudan, at my father’s apartment in Khartoum, we watched their games a couple of times on my father’s satellite television. My father even had an autographed ball by old-school point guard Walt Frazier. Now my blood was pumping at the thought of checking out the championship game.
The police were circling the area of the high school gym like sharks waiting for an easy kill. It was a reminder to all us Black youth that we were born suspects. But for once, wasn’t nothing jumping off with us teens. Cliques was regrouped and formed up and all walked off quietly in almost every direction. Tonight I could see that when somebody finally stops playing and starts talking real business opportunity to some young Black men, all that rowdy shit goes right out the window.
We three hung back a minute while everything cleared up. As soon as we went to push off, the girl with the dimples popped up out of the dark, walking swiftly toward us. She waved her hand with excitement.
“Hey, star!” she called out. All of us laughed. As she came into view I saw she had a T-shirt on that said midnight in bold, dark-blue letters across her breasts.
“Where are the rest of your girls?” Ameer asked her right away. She didn
’t even look at him when she answered. She just said, “I don’t really be with them like that.” Ameer caught her intent.
“Anyway, I waited so long for you to call me, I got in trouble. I wouldn’t let anyone in my house use the phone. I kept telling them, ‘He’s gonna call. He’s gonna call.’ What happened? Did you lose my number?” she asked, smiling, full of energy and rocking back and forth on her feet like there was no way for her to keep still.
“Nah,” I answered.
“ ‘Nah’ what?” she asked.
“Nah, I didn’t lose your number,” I said.
“All right, superstar,” she said in a joking way. I smiled at her style. She had a nice complexion with smooth skin. Her hair was shining from the gel she used to swirl out her bangs.
“God, you got perfect teeth,” she said, after I smiled. I really didn’t know what to do with her comments. She seemed to say whatever was on her mind. She didn’t give a fuck that my two friends were hearing her every word.
“I’m not gonna worry about it. You’ll call me, I know it,” she said. “I gotta run. I got one minute before my grandmother locks the door on me!” She turned on her Nikes and ran full speed in her denim miniskirt, leaving Ameer and Chris doing double takes.
“I think you need to call her, man,” Ameer said. Him and Chris laughed.
“What y’all think about the money?” Chris asked. “Do you think the winners will really get paid like that brother Tyriq said?”
“Well if they don’t pay out, what the fuck can anybody do about it? The hustlers are the sponsors. Who’s gonna go to war with them?” Ameer asked.
“I think they’ll pay out. I got a feeling about it,” I told them.
“What kind of feeling?” Chris asked.
“You know, we thinking that it’s all about basketball. But they gotta have something riding on it too. Otherwise, why would they do it?”
“Something like what?” Ameer asked.
“It could be anything. You see how they cut the groups into teams and gave every team a color?” I asked.