I pull on my jeans and T-shirt. Ten minutes after nine. Someone is crying like a bitch, but it’s not me. Not me not me oh Holy Mary mother of God in the name of the Father CLAK CLAK CLAK CLAK bam a bam goddamn! Bam! I slam my fist on the arm of the sofa.
“Do not leave the grounds today, hear?” He grabs my chin with his thumb and finger and pulls my face to his, tries to stare me in the eyes. I’ll put ’em out first, my eyes mine. “Do you hear me? Do you hear me!”
I try to squirm and twist my chin from his grip, look out at the door. He pinches harder. His smell, my smell, sweat, the smell of leather climb up my nose.
“Do you hear me? Do you hear me!”
I nod.
He drops his hands from my face. I walk out the office hear his big bear ass plop down on the couch. I’m going where I been planning on going all week, then I realize how early it is. The Africans don’t start till one-thirty. It’s not even ten o’clock yet.
I jog down to Marcus Garvey Park. Quiet. Bare brown dirt where the grass has died. Bushes green. It seems like nothing is going on, but it’s really like a split movie screen, on one side of the hedges cars is zipping past. Other side, other world—park people, waiting on dope dick ducat. I back into the high green hedges, sink down on my knees. A pair of jeans walks past with a big belly. “Five,” the jeans say. “Ten,” I say, unzipping the jeans, putting the bill in my pocket.
I got time to kill before class. I run up to the watchtower. No one has rung the bell since 1850 when New York had thatched roofs, I can’t imagine that! I love it up here, don’t nobody usually come up this high. Don’t need the watchtower no more, just let people, niggers, burn up. Who can I tell, where can I go? Brother John said the technology to record CDs was there when they brought CDs on the market, just like two-deck tape recorders, but wouldn’t have been no money in it. “Money is the motivating force for almost everything.”
“Almost?”
“Yeah, almost, not everything can be bought and sold.”
“What can’t?”
“What can’t is so insignificant in the eyes of the world—”
“What about us, the Catholics, St Ailanthus?”
“Yeah, we’re different. That’s why I’m here. I’m not of the world.”
Sometimes I like Brother John. Most times I don’t. I like earth science, though. This park is here ’cause they couldn’t cut down the rock. I’m a Capricorn, climb the rock. Right now I’m going to Bake Heaven to get some donuts. There’s a fracture in the earth’s crust that runs across 125th Street. I pull out my ten in Bake Heaven and it’s a one! I start back in the direction of the hedges, what the fuck, shit even if he ain’t gone which he is, I didn’t even see his fucking face.
“CLASS IS FIVE DOLLARS,” says the girl sitting on the floor writing people’s names on a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard, putting their money in a big manila envelope.
“All I got today is a dollar.” I stress “today.” The girl looks up at the teacher, who has on a deep blue leotard, same style as the yellow one she had on last week, and has appeared like magic by the girl’s side.
“Next week,” the teacher says.
“OK.”
“What’s your name?”
“J.J.”
She writes my name down and puts my dollar in the big manila envelope. She points to a door down the hall. “That’s the men’s locker room. You can get dressed in there.”
I’m already dressed, though. I slide my back down the wall, sit on the floor, check things out. It’s a nice-size gym but not huge. Above us is an indoor track. Some niggers is hanging over the railing looking down at us. Mostly women in the gym. All kinds—young, hip-looking, dark, light, one old white woman. Some is fat, some look like athletes, almost all of them, even the old white one got on some kinda African shit. I wonder how many of these niggers is real Africans and how many is just dressed like it. Against the wall, under the windows, are four chairs with a tall drum sitting in front of ’em, no guys drumming, just the chairs and the drums. These people in the gym seem different from the niggers walking up and down the streets. I try to figure out how and what it is, where or how I fit in, can’t—just know this is where I want to be and where I am, and I don’t really give a fuck about anything else. Four guys in long white African robes file in and sit down in the chairs in front of the drums. I’m so busy scoping them, wondering what country in Africa they come from if they are Africans, that I don’t notice Jaime has slid up beside me! His earlobe is swollen and got a little drop of blood on it where he has pierced it with a silver hoop that has a seashell on it. It’s like the shells some of the girls have sewn on their belts and African bra tops. Around his forehead he got a band like Indians wear around their heads. I think he thinks it’s African. More, I think in some way he’s sorry about this morning. Whatever! He’s here. That makes something swell up in my throat, I can’t even talk.
“Whew!” he whispers. “Man you stink.”
I flip back through the dollar scene in the park, back to me flying over Brother Samuel’s shoulder in Dorm Three this morning. But I laugh at how funny beautiful Jaime looks and how embarrassed I am to be so glad he’s here. The girl near the door with her clipboard hollers to Jaime, “Five dollars!” He walks over to her. I never seen any of the St Ailanthus boys in the park. How do they get money? Rob? They got it, I can see that. I don’t strong-arm kids for cash even though I could. Jaime’s grandmother be bringing him dust, talking about she gonna break him out when she gets back on her feet. But according to Etheridge, who is a KP, not an office monitor, meaning I don’t know how he know everybody’s business, she ain’t getting back on her feet no time soon. She got AIDS—SIDA, the Spanish people call it. Most of the boys in St Ailanthus is there because of that even though they don’t say so. Jaime got on white sweats and a blue sweatshirt say SYRACUSE HIGH #7. Next week I’m coming in here with some African shit on. The woman teaching the class, she’s tying a beautiful piece of blue and white cloth around her waist. You could see her stomach is flat, and she got big muscles with definition like dancers do in her legs. Her face is dark smooth chocolate, no wrinkles. But her hair, which is pulled back in a braid and that she’s tying a piece of African cloth around, is all white. Weird. It don’t compute, she ain’t old enough for no white hairs.
We do a lot of exercises with dance names: pliés, tendue-flex-pointflex. Plié, relevé, roll down 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 soften your knees for eight counts, now using every vertebra in your back, that’s it, roll up slowly. Then we did stretches and sit-ups and push-ups. The stretches are excruciating for me, but the push-ups and stuff are easy.
“Line up four across,” she says, nods at me, Jaime, and three other guys, “men come in the back.” Rows materialize with the sound of her voice. I like that. She claps her hands and the drums start.
“Ba BAH! Ba Bah!” she says, her right foot coming down on the Ba, her left on BAH! Her arm comes down from where she has it stretched up toward the ceiling, and she flings her hand open to the ground as she stamps her foot on BAH!
“You’re planting seeds. You throw the seed into the earth, then you stomp the earth—BAH!” She brings her foot down on the earth where she has just thrown the seeds. “This movement comes from Congolese dance, which really influenced a lot of Afro-Haitian movement.”
The drums funk up! Me, Jaime, and the three other dudes are in the last row bringing up the rear as the girls move across the floor. Ba BAH! Ba BAH! I’m in Africa or Puerto Rico somewhere, planting my seeds on my land.
I FORGET WHEN he starts that Papi shit, but that’s when I start to pull away from Jaime. He has me mixed up with somebody, something else. I’m a man, not a faggot. I got an A in my earth science project, an A on my midterm paper in English, a B-plus in math, and an A in art. If I wasn’t so old, Brother Samuel told me, I would be a prime candidate for adoption, so old and so big, you scare them, they want little boys. If they’ll take black kids, they want mulattoes and girls. Wh
atever they want, they don’t want black boys. I guess my question, even though I’m only thirteen, is what kind of motherfucker is Brother Samuel to sit up and tell me some shit like that? I don’t know if I want to be adopted anyway. What would I do in a family now? Next month, January, I’ll be fourteen. Raven is fifteen. I met her in dance class. I’m meeting a lot of people in dance class. I think she likes me, Raven.
No one says anything to me anymore about dance class. It’s been three months now. Jaime still comes. At first it’s like he’s following me, then it’s like he’s in this too. He found some shit for himself here. I don’t know who we really are. Orphans, I guess, whatever all that means. I’m a regular nigger, I was born in Harlem, Jaime in the Bronx, but here we fucking Africans, everything we are and ain’t is cool. I don’t know about Jaime, but me, I’m going to be a dancer.
BROTHER SAMUEL is standing in the light that comes in through the window above my bed. I look up at the clock under the exit sign over the door. Three o’clock.
“Get up, J.J. I have some gentlemen here who would like to talk to you,” Brother Samuel says. The blankets have come off my feet, which are touching the cold metal footrail of the bed. I shiver. I don’t know why, but I feel I’m dying, although I don’t know how that feels. My life doesn’t flash before my eyes, but the dream I had last night does.
In the dream I . . . I feel the light from the window in my eyes, disturbing me, the light is saying get up, get up. Get up for what, I wonder, and peel off the covers very carefully as if to toss or throw them would make a sound like pots and pans falling. I swing my legs out of the bed and my feet onto the cold linoleum floor and rise. Rise and fly down the center aisle past Malik Edwards, Omar Washington, Angel Hernandez, Richard Stein, and Bobby Jackson on one side, and Louie Hernandez, Billy Song, Etheridge Killdeer, Jaime, and Amir Smith on the other side. I fly slowly, majestically, a flying king I am. I fly under the exit sign and through the door. The lights in the hallway are bright as sun, summer, they make me not able to fly no more. In the dream my feet are on the cold linoleum again, but I’m lucky, I turn into a panther. Real graceful and black, making no noise as I creep stealthily down the hall. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven steps twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen steps, I push open the door. Slide up slowly, now I’m a trapeze artist flying through the air? A gymnast twirling down the beam? No? Yes! Beam! I’m a beam of light visiting the dark. A daddy to my boy. His teddy bear has fallen to the floor, I pick it up, sit it gentle next to me at the foot of the bed. I pull the sheets and the blankets out where they’re tucked in at the foot of the bed. I see his little brown feet white on the bottoms like the belly of a fish. I lean down kiss his toes, run my tongue under the arch of his foot, roll the covers back some more, kiss his calves, bite his calf muscle gently. I feel like the king! Rich instead of poor. I am here to give him something. Everything is like soft music, the low notes on the flute.
Then I don’t know what happens. I know I’m hard full of love, a good person, the king here to love him, and he starts to whimper. Whine. It makes me furious, in the dark I see blood red! I slap the shit out of him for being stupid! You know BAP! Like shut up, motherfucker! Then I climb on top of him and fuck him. Fuck him, pushing his little whiny mouth into the pillow, he wants it, I know it, I feel strong like a warrior king, umph, umph, UMPH! Planting my seeds, riding my horse! I throw the covers back over him and slide out the room to the blind light of the hallway. I am not seen in the presence of light, being light I am absorbed and the brightness of things increases and you can see more but you still can’t see God like I am. I float through the door, past the boys, bed by bed, to my bed. Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep Bless us all at St Ailanthus Bless all the children of the world AAHHHHHhhhhMennn. And bless me.
Someone is shaking my shoulder. “Come on, get up, J.J.!” In dreamland there’s always some kinda crazy mistake. It’s not even time to get up! When it’s time to get up is 6:00 a.m. on weekdays, 7:00 on Saturdays, and 8:00 on Sundays; one of the brothers, usually Brother John or Brother Samuel, pushes open the door, throws on the overhead fluorescent lights, and starts ringing the bell DING DONG DING DONG! And we get up one by one all of us. But something is wrong now, the clock says 3:00, and Brother Samuel is saying, “J.J., I have some people here who want to talk to you.”
“Whaa . . . huh . . . say what?” I’m still all sleepy and shit.
“Say get up! That’s what, J.J.!” says this mean voice, then a stick bangs on the metal post at the head of my bed.
“Stop playing games, J.J.,” the voice says. “You heard us—get up!”
I open my eyes. Brother Samuel is standing with two men in suits and ties next to my bed. “Does he have a robe?” I don’t hear what Brother Samuel says, but I don’t have a robe. That’s extra, only kids who have family still on the set or have sponsors or Big Brothers and shit get extra.
“Get dressed,” one of the men in suits says. My blood gets chilly. This motherfucker is a cop. I reach in the trunk under my bed, pull out a pair of briefs, snatch my jeans and a T-shirt from a hook on the wall at the head of my bed.
“Got a jacket?” the cop asks.
“Does he have to go downtown, Officer?” Brother Samuel asks.
It’s two cops, one tall skinny don’t say nothing, one short meanlooking. The short one looks at Brother Samuel weird and says, “Downtown? No, Father, the station is around the corner.”
“I’d like to minimize any unnecessary, unnecessary . . . oh, I don’t know . . .” Brother Samuel’s voice trails off.
“We just want to ask him a few questions. Put your shoes on, J.J.”
“Is he under arrest?”
“No, but we can do it like that if you want.”
Brother Samuel doesn’t say anything. I look at the clock, 3:10. That’s two hours fifty minutes before wake-up time!
“May I come with him, Officer?”
“Yeah,” the short cop says. “Be our guest.”
AT THE POLICE STATION, the cops walk one on each side of me, they hands on my elbows, not hard or hurting me but serious, like if I do move they’ll kill me.
Behind me Brother Samuel says, “Well, gentlemen, I don’t quite understand what’s going on here. I mean . . . ah, it does seem as if J.J. is . . . ah, I don’t know . . . under arrest or something.”
“We just want to ask him a few questions, Father.”
“Brother,” Brother Samuel corrects him.
“Should I seek legal counsel?” Brother Samuel asks. Why does this big Frankenstein motherfucker who been terrorizing me all these years all of a sudden sound like a pussy and even more confusing, like he’s in my corner?
“Well, that’s up to you, Brother.” The short cop seem like he does all the talking. “We’d like to keep this as simple as possible.” At the door of a room that looks like every room on TV I have ever seen where they slap the shit out of you and accidentally kill you, Brother Samuel rushes up to me. He puts his hand on my shoulder and looks in my eyes. I let him in, notice that his eyes are not really blue the way Brother John’s are but are some kind of deep purple, the color of the sky when the sun’s been gone an hour.
“J.J.” His eyes widen, he squeezes my shoulder. “You must tell the truth, do you hear?”
I nod my head. I know this big-ass freak is telling me to lie. Lie my motherfucking ass off. I feel old, real old, and real smart.
No, I went to bed at the same time I always go to bed. What time is that? Nine o’clock. Did you look at the clock? No. Then how do you know it was nine o’clock? ’Cause that’s the time we always go to bed. Did you get up at all during the night? No. Do you usually get up at night to go to the bathroom? Yes, I mean no. What do you mean, J.J.? No, I mean sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Did you get up tonight and walk down to Dorm One? No. You got up tonight and walked down to Dorm One, didn’t you, J.J.? No no no no! What are you getting so upset about, J.J.? You touched Richard Jac
kson, didn’t you? No. Was this the first time you touched him? No, I mean, no, I never touched him. You know what sexual intercourse is, J.J.? Did you have sexual intercourse with Richard Jackson tonight? NO no no I never had sexual intercourse with nobody! I start crying, I’m scared, but my middle name is no. Don’t be scared, I hear somebody say. I look up, it’s Brother Bill, but he’s not talking to me. He’s talking to Richie Jackson. Is that who hurt you, Richie? I don’t know. You said—The cop cuts Brother Bill off. He looks at Richie Jackson. Is that who touched you tonight? It was dark, I couldn’t see, Richie says. Get him outta here, the cop snaps like a pit bull. How old are you? he asks me. He just turned thirteen, Brother Samuel says. I didn’t even see him come in the room. He must have come in behind Brother Bill and Richie. Let me take the poor lad home, Officer. This is all some kind of terrible mistake. We run a tight ship at St Ailanthus. I’m sure J.J. didn’t do anything wrong. Alright, let’s call it a night, the cop snaps, then, looking at me, Get him outta here.