“What does he feel?”
“He feels sad.”
“Why, J.J.?”
“Because he does.”
“What is he singing about on the rock?”
“He’s dreaming, not singing, he’s dreaming of the day he will kill all the white people, shoot arrows through their eyes and send them back to the sea. He’ll lead a army of warriors and kill the white people with rifles, knives, and arrows.”
“How long has he been dreaming like this?’
I put him down.
“What’s happening here?”
“He’s tired. He hates stupid people. He wants to go to sleep.”
if my father
if my father
if my father
If my father wasn’t dead he would come get me from here for sure for sure my head hurts and I can’t go to the bathroom right so I can’t eat stuff like I like in the dream a boy that looks like me but isn’t me goes into the kitchen lightning in his brain he will fight he will drive the Europeans back to their ships he is different from the other boys of the tribe he lays naked on the mesa under the moon he puts sharp rocks between his toes he sees a vision the war cry shut up in his bones flies out his mouth he draws lightning bolts with mustard across his cheeks his nose is pierced like my mother’s. He opens the kitchen drawer and gets the big butcher knife. “Here, Fox, here, Fox.” He stabs the nastyeye old dog over and over and over again and again. That dog is really Custard and he is Crazy Horse. His head stops hurting and he laughs and laughs.
WHY AM I in the hospital? What’s a concussion? How do I feel? No, I don’t know anything about the dog. I’m sorry for the dog if it’s dead. No, Batty never hit me. No, I didn’t know he hit other kids ’cause he know not to hit me. No, no one ever hit me. No, I told you, I wasn’t so upset I hurt the dog. I don’t even like the dog. No, that’s not why I did it. I never did it. How do I feel? No, I never thought of hurting anything! How do I feel? Stop asking me, please. I think of hot dog buns hot outside frozen together on the inside.
“We think you’re ready to go home now, J.J.”
I don’t like being in the hospital, but I don’t want to go home.
“Your injuries were very serious, but you’ve really done a fine job of getting well. Do you remember my name?”
“Dr Spencer.”
“Yup, that’s my name. You’ve seen a lot of different doctors and people since you’ve been in the hospital. Do you remember any of their names?”
“Yes, Dr Zachariah.”
“Right! He did the surgery that drained the fluid out of your head. You’re fine now, you know that, right?”
“Dr Zachariah also repaired the tear in your sphincter muscle from where you were hurt. That’s a lot better too and soon is going to be all better.”
“When?”
“Well, you’re such a good boy, pretty soon I would say. For the next couple of months you’re going to take stool softeners and drink lots of water so you don’t get constipated and strain and reinjure yourself and keep coming back here where I’ll be glad to see you and be checking up on you to make sure you get well. Who else do you remember?”
“Kate.”
“Right, Kate Cohen, the play therapist. Did you like her?”
“No, she’s dumb.”
“Why do you say that, J.J.?”
“In school we say Native American and she doesn’t. And then one time she came talking about what the doll did and stuff—‘What did this little doll do to that little doll?’” I mimic her dumb self how she talks. “Stupid stuff like that.”
“Well, I certainly won’t tell her who said it, but I sure will tell her someone thinks she needs to learn some things.”
“I don’t care.”
“Don’t care about what, J.J.?”
“If you tell her who said it.”
“What do you care about, J.J.?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not true. You care about the Native Americans being called by their right names. Who else do you care about?”
“The Africans, birds, and sea mammals dying from pollution.”
“See there, you care about a lot.”
My head doesn’t hurt anymore like it did. “How long I been here?”
“A few weeks. I know Kate told you you’d be going to live in a new place.”
“Uh huh.”
“You’re going to a new facility for boys in Harlem called St Ailanthus, run by Catholic brothers. It’s a home and a school for boys where they’ve already had tremendous success academically with the youngsters there. Well, look here! Right on cue, here’s Kate!”
Kate walks in the room with a big man dressed in a long black robe with a white collar like a preacher.
“Hi, J.J.” She smiles at me. I close my eyes. “This is Brother John from St Ailanthus School for Boys. Tomorrow, when you leave the hospital, you’ll leave with him, so I wanted you to meet him beforehand.”
“Hello, J.J., I’ve heard a lot about you. How are you?”
“Fine.”
“That’s cool.”
Brother John talks funny.
“So I’ll be back for you in the morning to take you to your new home.”
“St Ailanthus is a temporary placement,” Kate says. “We hope, of course, that we’ll be able to find another placement soon. A foster family or adoption situation. Do you understand?”
No, I’m not sure I understand.
BOOK TWO
FALLING
I’m fourteen. I’m a wind from nowhere. I can break your heart.
—AI, “THE KID”
ONE
I rise slowly and start to glide toward him. My pajamas are too short for me, way above my ankles, but they’re the largest boy’s size. I need man size, I think. The room is dark and filled with the sound of breathing. I float past bed number five, Malik Edwards; four, Omar Washington; three, Angel Hernandez; two, Richard Stein. Bed number one, Bobby Jackson, is at the opposite end near the door. Across the aisle is the other row of beds; start with number fourteen, Amir Smith; number thirteen, Jaime Jose Colon. Number thirteen supposed to be unlucky, like black cats. Brother John say we lucky, all of us, to be here.
“Jaime,” I whisper, sit down on the edge of his bed, lean over place my lips on his neck. His silk hair brushing against my lips cause my balls to itch. I’m rubbing my dick slow think, scratch. I touch his shoulder. He stiff up. I rock his shoulder gentle like a memo, a note, that says wake up, I’m here, don’t go to la-la land on me, dude. Please, I say to myself, like the sound of steam hissing, please don’t make me mad-dog you. Jus’ be a good boy, Jaime. Just be good. I pull at the skinny blue blanket. He grab the blanket tighter around his shoulders.
“Jaime,” I whisper, “you not sleep.” I pull the blanket and sheets out from where they tucked in at the foot of the bed and throw ’em up in his face where he grabbing the sheet and blanket. He’s shivering with excitement. I’m hard. I grab him with both hands, raise his little booty to me. I jam him. Thrust, I like that word, in him. It’s so good, tight. He squeal, I slam his face in the pillow, kill that. OOOHHHH this shit feel good! Feel good to him too. In out, in-out, in-out, in in in. I’m someplace else same time as I’m thrusting in him. Bed creaking turn me on more. The in-out creak music. I hear that sound in the dark, turn me on, I know somebody getting it on. Fucking him I wanna sssscream but I don’t. I go in an ultra-sweet whisper aaaaahhhhhhhhh! It’s like ice cream and cake, blowing out all the candles at once! I pull out him, my seeds like a . . . a king! I feel like a king. I want him to suck me now, make me come again. I lean down whisper, “Show me some luv, Papi, show me some luv!” He don’t get it, what I’m saying. I grab his head, push it down, “Suck it,” I’m saying, “suck it!” Pleeeaaase, I made him feel good, do me, little Papi, do me. I try to push his head down. He start to cry. Stupid! Stupid motherfucker. I get up pull my pajamas up over my privates.
I’m flying now like Michael Jordan across
the aisle, over those beds, number one, two, three, four Omar, five Malik, six my bed. Why I’m so stink panicked I don’t know. Ain’ nobody gonna hear that stupid little motherfucker. Shit, nobody never heard me.
I lay down go to sleep. Huh? Huh? What happened? Are you crazy, motherfucker? Nothin’ happened. From inside my sheets I shout, “Shut up, asshole! We tryin’ to sleep!” And I really do wish he would shut up, his crying getting all mixed in with my good feeling of . . . of being a king.
SUNDAY WE SIT in Mass by dorm assignment. Same thing after in the cafeteria for breakfast. What I’m getting at is, you just do as you’re told, sit where you sit, ’cause that’s it. So anyway, I carry my tray of cornflakes, orange juice, milk, and pancakes (’cause it’s Sunday) over to the nearest of the tables we spozed to sit at. Like plunk, I put the shit down. I’m not scheming or nothing. I just sit down. Across from Jaime.
The pancakes are one of the few really good things here. On every table is a little stainless steel pitcher of maple syrup. I put some butter on my pancakes, pour some syrup, look over at Jaime who act like his eyes is chained to his plate or some shit. He’s grabbing his fork tight. Not moving.
“Eat up, dude,” I tell him, cut my pancakes, they tastes good. What’s wrong with this dude, he ain’t eating his pancakes. “Come on, dude, you don’t want your food to get cold.” My plate’s empty. “Shit, give ’em to me you don’t want ’em. You can have my cornflakes.” He pushes the plate toward me without even raising his head. “You sure, dude?” I say. “These some good motherfucking pancakes. I don’t know why you don’t like ’em.”
He push the plate the rest of the way across the table. I push the cornflakes in front of him. I’m not really that hungry anymore, but I put some butter and syrup on the pancakes. Jaime raise his hand. To be excused from the table we gotta raise our hands, then one of the brothers come over and we say some shit like, I’m finished, Brother So-and-So, may I be excused to go to the gym or the library, or wherever it is you wanna go.
Brother John come over to the table with his big weird-looking ass. “What’s going on here?”
“Huh?” What’s with this motherfucker, ain’ nothin’ goin’ on. Brother John look at the plates in front of me, Jaime’s plate of pancakes and my empty plate with just a few drops of syrup on it. Then he look at Jaime’s simple ass sitting there holding on to his fork like it’s money with two little boxes of unopened cornflakes in front of him.
“I said what’s going on here?”
I don’t know what he’s talking about.
“Nobody’s got a tongue here?”
“I gotta tongue.” Fuck this faggot.
“So use it to explain how it is you have two pancake plates in front of you and Jaime doesn’t seem to have eaten at all.”
“He didn’t want his pancakes, so he gave ’em to me,” I say, “and I gave him my cornflakes.”
“Is that right, Jaime?”
All of a sudden, Jaime start crying like some bitch. Drop his fork and just you know start boo-hooing. His little curly head going up and down. His whole body is shaking. What’s wrong with him! Brother Bill comes running over to the table and scoop Jaime up in his arms. I wish it was me. I don’t know Brother Bill, everyone say he one of the “nice ones,” whatever that means.
“There, there, Jaime. It’s alright,” he says, and walks out the cafeteria with Jaime in his arms. Brother John and everyone else is just staring at me.
MONDAY WE’RE REVIEWING Unit One in earth science.
“J.J.” Brother John always calls on me. I’m the best in the class, I don’t know if I’m the smartest, there is a difference, but I am the best. I look in Brother John’s blue eyes that sometimes remind me of the sky but this morning remind me of the painted turquoise bottom of the swimming pool that time I was wading through the warm chlorine-smelling water right left right left step step. And I went too far and the bottom disappeared. I screamed panicked, gulping down water. Panic. I feel panic now hearing Jaime sob. But when I blink and pull my eyes away from Brother John and glance over at Jaime, he’s not sobbing, he’s smiling at me, waiting for me to answer the question, staring at the board where Brother John has written:
THE FOUR MAJOR BRANCHES OF EARTH SCIENCE:
1.
2.
3.
4.
I remember my first day here four years ago. Brother John was holding my hand. I wasn’t that scared but I was scared, sad too. I thought about my mother every day back then. The class was quiet, it was different from public school, everybody had on a white shirt and a black tie and black corduroy pants. No girls, just boys, who cares, I don’t like girls anyway, no one does until you’re grown up. I never had a girl who was my friend. And it was bright, all the lights was on, not like in public school, half the lights out. Everybody was doing something, a lot was going on, but it wasn’t noisy. “Attention please!” Brother John hollered. “I want everybody’s attention. We have a new boy today, Jamal Jones, J.J.” He turned to me. “What do you like to be called, Jamal? J.J.?” J.J., I told him. “OK, everybody say hi to J.J.” Two or three kids say hi and then everybody goes back to what they were doing.
“Omar.” He calls a fat kid almost as tall as me. “Show J.J. around the room, why don’t you.”
Omar immediately goes over to the rabbit’s cage, which is in the back of the room where the sink is and where some boys are doing some kind of experiment with potatoes and some other boys are looking in microscopes.
“Come on!”
I’m afraid of rabbits but more afraid Omar will find out I’m afraid. Omar reaches in the rabbit’s cage where LeRoi Rabbit—that was his name, he’s dead now—is sitting surrounded by pale green lettuce and pellets of doo-doo, or maybe that’s his food, I’m not sure. His eyes are red. Omar grabs him by the neck like you do a cat.
“Here,” he says. “Touch him. He likes people.”
I was sweating, but I made myself touch him. His fur looks fat and fluffy but underneath he’s skinny and trembling. He’s scared! Somebody gonna jump me, maybe all of them, or slap me like Batty Boy. Thinking about that my ear inside my head start ringing. Are they laughing at me?
Omar puts the rabbit back in the cage. “Wanna see the turtles?” he asks, looking at the turtles, reaching back to latch the rabbit cage shut, but before he can do it LeRoi jumps out the cage! Then Brother John leaps from his desk, swoops down, and grabs LeRoi by his ears, and it seems like in one step he goes from the front of the room to the back and throws LeRoi in the cage and locks it in one motion! The class giggles nervous all together like they’re one boy instead of twenty.
Omar don’t pay them no mind and tries to hand me a turtle.
“Show him the wall, why don’t you, and then come back to the turtles and then go over to the rocks.”
I didn’t know then Brother John was a geologist. This school didn’t have reading groups like my old school—High Alligators, Beavers, and Cobras. Everybody was in a cluster depending on what their class project was and everybody read hard stuff and easy stuff too, the same. Omar told me later he was keeping up for the first time in school. Omar hands me the turtle and takes me over to the mural.
“Jaime, Amir, you want to come over here and help Omar tell J.J. about the mural.”
The mural takes up half the wall. Amir, who turns out to be Omar’s cousin, is one of the biggest kids I ever seen in fourth grade, he’s fatter than Omar and taller than me. And Jaime is one of the littlest kids I ever seen to be in the fourth grade.
Amir points to the mural. “We painted that. The building is the Schomburg Library, and the man in the middle”—he points to a face in the middle of the building, a dark, heavy man with wavy hair—“that’s Arthur Schomburg, and all the faces floating in the sky around the building is famous people that’s in the Schomburg.”
Amir starts reading the words underneath the mural:
CIVIL RIGHTS JOURNAL
Premiere Edition published by the U.S
. Commission of Civil Rights
Arthur “Afroboriqueño” Schomburg
By Robert Knight
© 1995
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a self-described “Afroboriqueño” (Black Puerto Rican), was born January 24, 1874, of Maria Josefa and Carlos Féderico Schomburg. His mother was a freeborn Black midwife from St. Croix, and his father a mestizo merchant of German heritage. They lived in Puerto Rico, in a community now known as Santurce. Young Schomburg was educated at San Juan’s Instituto Popular, where he learned commercial printing, and at St. Thomas in the Danish-ruled Virgin Islands, where he studied Negro Literature. (He reads good!)
While his education equipped Schomburg with tools essential to his extraordinary bibliophilia, it was also in school that he encountered the flame which burned throughout his career. By Schomburg’s own account, it was in fifth grade (that’s what I’ll be in next year!) that a teacher glibly asserted that people of color had no history, no heroes, no notable accomplishments. Young Schomburg embarked on a lifelong quest to refute the mythology of racism in the Americas.
“That’s how the Schomburg Center got started, man!” the little guy Jaime screamed. I didn’t know then he was gonna be my friend. I wanted to say back, I know, but I just ask, “What’s bibliophilia?” I wanted to ask, What’s the mythology of racism? too, but I realize they probably don’t know either. What’s on the Internet is complicated and true. I know they got this from the Internet, that’s how we did at my old school, we got a name and then went to Google and read it and then print out what’s the best for our reports.
“A bibliophile is a person who collects or has a great love of books,” Brother John answers my question. “Do you love books, J.J.?” I shrug my shoulders. What kinda question is that, what kinda school is this?
Omar takes me over to the turtles. I’m looking at the faces floating in the sky on the mural, Charles Drew, Zora Neale Hurston, John Perry, and Crispus Attucks. I heard of them before. I even been to the Schomburg before, I think, I’m not sure. Omar hands me a turtle. That’s where they got Langston Hughes. I know stuff, these boys better not be thinking I’m dumb. I was in High-A reading group in my old school. Batty Boy thought I was a girl, dumb. I’ll show these boys. My ear does its funny buzz buzz. They better not mess with me. Nuh uh! Not here!