The Block Series
By Matthew Stein
2013
Table of Contents:
“On the Block” Page 1
“Off the Block” Page 3
“Back on the Block” Page 6
Authors Biography Page 12
“On The Block”
Every day is the same old routine for me. Wake up to the sounds of the city buzzing with car horns honking “beep beep”, police sirens “whee-o whee-o”, and our neighbor Mr. Getty yelling at the alley cats “hey get out of here!”. After I crawl out of my bed in my not so spacious room in our apartment on the second floor, I hear mama saying “breakfast is ready!”. I race out of my room and flop into one of the wooden chairs in the dining room. There is always a plate set ready to have pancakes flopped right on it and a fork on the right side of it with a perfectly laid out napkin underneath it. Mama comes over with the pancakes stacked high on a platter and places them in front me. I always eat them two at a time, with butter slopped on them which melts right into the golden pancake. I also pour about a cup of syrup on them, usually Aunt Jemima, but sometimes if Mama has brought home extra money in her paycheck from her house cleaning job and if she is feeling that extra tingling of niceness, she will buy real maple syrup from the market. After my pancakes are ready to eat with all the toppings, I gulp them down faster than a cop car chasing a bank robber.
My tummy is full after eating all those pancakes so then I usually go outside and play on the sidewalks with my suite mates in the apartment. Allyah lives in C-4, Jalissa is from C-9, Shonelle hails from D-4 with her sister Charmaine, and I, Miss Akeiyla Beal, am from B-6.
Sometimes we play double dutch with the pink jump rope that Shonelle and Charmaine’s grandmama gave to them for Christmas, other times we take turns drawing with a little fragment of chalk that we have saved oh so carefully. Still, when we do neither of these activities, we just sit on the sidewalk or on the steps and look up at the sky thinking about all the going ons in the city and what life will be like when we all are growed up.
“Dinner time!” Mama calls out the window in our flat. This means I have to say goodbye to my girls for the night-well most nights. Some nights after a luscious meal of buttery mashed potatoes, golden corn, and greasy fried chicken, me and the girls go down the Brooklyn streets to go get ice cream. Before we go, all of us beg our mamas for money and usually they round up all the change that is laying around the rooms, put it in a little plastic baggie for us and off we go.
The ice cream parlor is only down about four blocks, but we always make it an adventure and usually take a longer time to venture to and fro because of us making jokes to each other, finding more change on the ground, laughing at Jamal and his boys trying to be cool for me and my girls. Jalissa once kissed Jamal on the cheek, but right before he could kiss her back, his mama called him inside.
When we finally reach the ice cream parlor, we usually all order the same thing, which is a small vanilla ice cream in a cone with little chocolate chips sprinkled all over it. Our mamas always tell us we can do without the chocolate chips, saying “little girls like us don’t need all dat sugar”, but that doesn’t stop us from getting it every time.
As we walk home we eat our ice cream, trying to lick it before it melts and gets white, sticky, vanilla all over our chocolate, black hands. On the way home one time we ran into Jamal. Literally ran into him. It was me who ran right into him making my ice cream smash right into my face. At first I was upset and shocked when the cool treat hit my face, but Jamal told me I looked like I had a beard which made me laugh. I started to say “ho ho ho” like Santa Claus and that just made us laugh harder.
By the time we get back to our stoop, our ice cream is gone and our tummies are all full of its sweetness and creaminess. We all say our goodnights to each other, slapping each others hands followed by a snap. Even though we hate to, we must, must say goodnight (otherwise all our mamas will give us a scolding and not let us out the flat the next day nor give us change again for ice cream). We all make our way inside up to our rooms, all dragging along tired from the day.
As I walk into our apartment, there is a light left on for me. I poke my head into mamas room and bid her goodnight. I get myself all ready for bed and finally hop into my bed. I lay there and look out the window, admiring the moon, listening to the city sounds, thinking about the day. I think about Allyah, Jalissa, Shonelle, and her sister Charmaine, about my mama, the jump roping, the sweet ice cream, and how I Miss Akeiyla Beal, live on the Brooklyn block in apartment B-6.
“Off The Block”
(Story number 2 of a 3-part story)
Remember that Brooklyn block I once lived on? I, Miss Akeiyla Beal, sure do. I remember it every day of my little life and what seemed like the little time I spent on that block.
I remember Allyah, Jalissa, Shonelle, and her sister Charmaine, even Jamal and his boys foolishly showing off for us all. I remember the sounds of cars rushing through the city, the local police whirring their sirens, the honking of them angry taxi drivers as they rushed to pick up clients. I remember the sweet vanilla ice cream with them little itty bitty chocolate chips sprinkled all over it. I remember the laughs that me and the girls used to have whilst walking down the block, running into Jamal and then having that ice cream smacked right into my face. I remember saying goodbye to all the girls before going into the flat. The hand slap followed by a quick snap. And snap, thats how it seemed to happen when we moved off the block.
In just a snap, Mama lost her house-cleaning job. Our apartment had been taken over by a new landlord, who didn’t have the heart to give us a discount like Mrs. Maple-our old landlady, did when we came up short on our payment. I had thought maybe Jalissa’s mama could have helped us out on our payment, because she had recently won a good sum of money on a lotto ticket, but turns out she had to use that money to bail out her brother out of a Harlem jail.
So as it turned out, we had to move off the block. Mama wasn’t happy about it, she actually didn’t mind her job at all, she knew she was making money, which she could support me with, and she knew how close I was with all my girls. I think the only reason that she was happy we was moving was so I didn’t eat no more of those vanilla ice cream cones with them chocolate chips. “The new town”, Mama said, “didn’t have an ice cream shop, so now you can use all my loose change to buy fruit at the super market.”
The new town was far from Brooklyn, too far I knew to see my friends or even thinking about getting ice cream every once in a while. I wasn’t happy about moving because I knew how much I would miss everything about my block. In fact, the first night Mama told me about the move, I went to bed without eating and cried myself to sleep. Mama had come in and brushed through my black braided hair. She had said “Child, worry not. Just because we are moving on, from this block, doesn’t mean we lose everything, we still have each other.”
The next morning as I had packed up my belongings, I thought about what Mama had said. I still had that feeling of sadness, but realized that Mama was right, no matter what; I still had her and the memories of this block.
After all my stuff was all packed in flimsy cardboard boxes and this one old grey suitcase my grandmama had given to me when I helped her clean out that dusty, smelly attic of hers, I decided to go round up my girls to spend one last day with them on the block.
First, we jumped rope with that pink rope and we jumped higher than I think we ever had before. Then, we played with that ol’ little piece of chalk and drew pictures and wrote our names on the sidewalk. Allyah drew a face of a black girl with braids in her hair, and then labeled it “Miss Beal”, meaning it was supposed to be me.
After that I gave her I think the biggest hug anyone could give anybody. After we put away that piece of chalk, we sat on the stoop. This time all of us on the same step, all looking up at the sky. I remember it was a sea blue sky with not a cloud in it. We all looked at it, silent for a few minutes till Charmaine said “Akeiyla, you better come back and visit us and when you do, you better bring us some of ‘dem good peanut butter cookies your Mama makes!” At that, all of us burst into laughter, Shonelle, Charmaine’s sister, even cried from laughing so hard. After we regained ourselves, we said a quick goodbye, not goodbye for me moving, but so we could all go eat dinner with our families.
After dinner, we all had the same thought in our heads, which was to collect some change from our mamas, so as we could go on an ice cream adventure, one last time. We walked down the block and before we got too far I told my girls to wait up a quick minute. I wanted to invite Jamal to come with us, even though he hadn’t been a real close friend to me and always tried to be cool, I figured hey, at least this time I wouldn’t run into him on the way back and get ice cream all over me. Turns out he was with