Leaving Atlanta (5 page)

“Might be,” Mama said.

“Might nothing. Think about it. You ain’t never heard of nobody black going around killing people for no reason. That’s white
people’s shit.”

“Daddy,” said DeShaun, “you’re not supposed to say bad words.”

Her little voice broke her parents’ intensity. They both looked across the table at the girls as if they had forgotten that
they even had children.

Tasha wanted to thump DeShaun right in the middle of her shiny little forehead. She never could just shut up and listen. Tasha
would have gone ahead and crunched on her crackers and slurped her milk like a regular person if she had known DeShaun was
going to butt into the conversation, demonstrating beyond a doubt that little pitchers have big ears.

“Girls,” said Mama, noticing their empty plates, “go to your rooms and finish your homework.”

“We already finished,” Tasha said, although she knew the situation was hopeless.

“Go and look it over. I’ll be up in a minute to see if you know all your spelling words.”

Tasha gave her sister a look-what-you-did look and walked out of the room. As soon as they had crossed the threshold, Daddy
started talking again. Tasha paused, just out of sight, and listened.

“Think about it, Delores,” he said. “Charles Manson, Son of Sam, all of that stuff. White folks.”

“I’ve known some black folks to do some ugly things,” said Mama.

“I ain’t saying that niggers are harmless. I know a black man will cut you in a minute on a Saturday night over his money
or his woman, something like that.”

“Yeah, a real good reason like that.”

“Delores, I am not saying that it’s all right to stab somebody for two dollars. I’m saying that
we
gotta have a
reason
for killing someone. White folks just kill for the hell of it.”

“Hold on, Charles,” Mama said, holding up her hand. “Tasha, I know you are not in that hallway.”

Now how did she know that? Tasha had not made a single sound. She even breathed half as fast as she regularly did.

“We weren’t doing anything,” Tasha protested, heading to her room. She wanted to hear more about the white killers. What were
their names again? Daddy said them easily, like he was saying the name of somebody famous like Michael Jackson or El Debarge.
Tasha wished she could recall the names, but asking Daddy to repeat himself was entirely out of the question. She thumped
DeShaun behind the ear as they headed down the dark hallway. She’d just have to make do with the information she had.

At recess, the fifth-graders had formed a kind of ad hoc discussion group. They clustered under shady trees sitting cross-legged
on the pine needles. A breeze, cold but heavy with baking bread, blew over from the Sunbeam factory and made their stomachs
growl and reminded them that lunchtime was only thirty minutes away.

Tasha was sitting between Monica and Forsythia. The two of them were best friends, but sometimes they were nice to Tasha.
As a matter of fact, she had been with the two of them all day. She was dying to tell them what Daddy had said, but she waited.
Some information was too juicy to be wasted on mere small talk. The words were inside her and trying to get out. She adjusted
her weight from side to side as if she had to go to the bathroom.

“Stop wiggling,” Monica said, too loud, and everyone laughed.

“I was just getting comfortable,” Tasha mumbled. “And I was getting ready to say something.”

“Well say it then.” Monica had a way of making everything sound like a invitation to fight.

“I was just fixing to say that it has to be somebody white that’s doing it.”

Some of the kids nodded. “That’s what my mama says too,” said Roderick Palmer.

Tasha, encouraged, went on. “Because black people don’t do stuff like that.”

“Black folks do too kill people. My uncle …”

Tasha tried to sound like Daddy: patient, authoritative, but a little annoyed. “I’m not talking about people killing people
over money or their woman.”

Jashante broke in: “I’d cut somebody for my lady.” He looked meaningfully at Tasha and turned a piece of candy over in his
mouth.

Monica touched Tasha with that pointy elbow of hers. She must have done the same thing on the other side because Forsythia
let out a low giggle.

“Well, who do we know that’s white?” Roderick addressed the group.

“Miss Russell,” volunteered someone behind Tasha.

Miss Russell was the art teacher who came to their class on Tuesdays. Her hair, the color of acorns, was so long she could
sit on it.

“Miss Russell is a lady, fool,” Jashante said. “Ladies don’t be killing people.”

“A lady can’t kill a man; they not big enough, but she could get a little ol’ third-grader.”

“Even when I was just a third-grader, I wouldn’t let no white lady come and kill me.”

Tasha imagined that he wouldn’t.

The conversation deteriorated into fifth-grade macho, with the boys illustrating in competing detail how they would handle
a homicidal white woman.

Tasha was bored. The only white woman she could think of was skinny Miss Russell with her paint and clay, and any idiot could
see that she wasn’t about to try and kill anyone. As a matter of fact, Tasha thought that she was really nice and even liked
her. She felt guilty listening to the boys discuss hypothetical acts of violence toward the art teacher, even if it was in
hypothetical self-defense. The recess bell finally rang and the sound of tennis shoes rustling pine needles drowned out Roderick’s
insistence on the ferocity of his karate chop.

Tasha walked about a pace and a half behind her companions.

“What you waiting for?” Monica asked.

“I’m not waiting,” Tasha said, hoping to sound casual.

“Her boyfriend,” Forsythia said. “I saw you looking at Jashante the whole time.”

Tasha stared at the pretty girl incredulously. It was unspoken but accepted that Monica would be the one to initiate all teasing
or ridicule. This was unprecedented; Tasha was unprepared.

“I was not looking at that boy.” She shoved her hands into her fur muff.

“And he was looking right back at her.”

“No he wasn’t,” Monica said. “Jashante wasn’t studying Tasha.”

Now Tasha was unsure if Monica was coming to her defense (also unprecedented) or if she was implying that Tasha wasn’t cute
enough for a boy to look at, even one like Jashante. Because of this double possibility, Tasha was unsure how to respond.

Monica continued. “Tasha wouldn’t talk to somebody like that anyway. He been kept back so many times that even
he
don’t know what grade he supposed to be in. And”—she lowered her voice—“he lives in the projects.”

“So,” Forsythia said. “She was still looking at him. You saw it too; that’s why you elbowed me.”

“Looking isn’t the same as talking.”

“She was smiling too.”

“I was just trying to be nice,” Tasha said.

Forsythia said, “My mama says you just can’t
be
nice to some people.”

Now what did that mean? There were some people that kids weren’t nice to, like Octavia Fuller, who they called the Watusi;
but Tasha figured that everyone could be nice to her if they felt like it. Maybe there were some people that you just
couldn’t
be kind to, but she was pretty sure that she hadn’t met any of them.

DeShaun wasn’t scared anymore. She could eat an entire plate of spaghetti while the newscaster talked about the Missing and
Murdered Children. Tasha watched her sucking the noodles into her figure-eight mouth; the end of each pasta string slapped
her gently under her nose.

“You’re not supposed to eat like that,” Tasha told her. “You can choke like that.”

“For real?”

“And when you choke, your lips turn blue. You’ll be trying to call somebody to help you but you won’t even have enough air
to talk with—”

“Tasha, cut that out,” Daddy said.

As soon as Daddy started paying attention, DeShaun started acting like she was really worried about choking.

“Do kids really choke on their spaghetti and die, Daddy?”

Daddy gave Tasha a long look that said that he was mad. She would have given DeShaun a hard pinch under the table if she thought
she could get away with it. But there was nothing that she could do with Mama and Daddy both sitting right there.

At night, in their canopy beds, Tasha said to her sister, “I wonder what’s happening to all those boys.” There was no noise
from DeShaun’s side of the room. “Someone, or some
thing
, is hunting them.”

“Some
thing?
” DeShaun said. “What do you mean by that?”

Tasha smiled in the gentle orange glow of the night-light. “I mean that whatever is killing those kids might not be a person.
It could be a creature or something.”

“What kind of creature?”

“Oh, any kind of creature. There are a lot of different kinds. Especially around here. The only thing keeping the creature
from getting us is Daddy.”

“For real?”

“Think about it,” Tasha said knowingly. “When somebody gets killed, they show just the mama crying on the TV. Those kids that
got snatched, not one single one of them has a daddy.”

“For real?”

“Um-hum. That’s why Daddy came back. Remember he said ‘Nobody will hurt you as long as I’m around’? That’s what he was talking
about. I’m just telling you what I know.”

The girls lay uneasily in the darkness and almost quiet. The story she had told DeShaun was only half real, like chocolate
Easter candy with just air in the middle. Little snuffly sounds made their way across the room.

“What’s the matter?” Tasha said like she didn’t know.

“Scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“The creature.”

Tasha felt cruel like that time she had poured salt on a snail and it had dissolved into a shell full of blood.

“That creature is not going to mess with you. Remember I said that it only bothers kids without dads.”

“But Daddy left us that time. When they were separated.”

DeShaun was getting smarter.

“Well,” Tasha said, “if the creature tries to get you, all you have to do is say a magic word.”

“What is it?”

Tasha started to make something up, run some syllables together, but she changed her mind. “I don’t know yet.”

“You could tell me. I won’t tell anybody.” DeShaun’s voice collapsed like a house made out of Popsicle sticks falling in on
itself.

“You can come over here if you want to,” Tasha said, scooting against the wall to make space in her narrow bed.

October was dry and cool; the pine needles, brittle and sharp, blew across the playground, tumbling end over end, erasing
footprints. Tasha leaned carefully against a dull silver pole and watched the boys run races. They crouched like the runners
in the Olympics two years past. One knee on the ground, between their hands, the other leg stretched behind. Each boy looked
straight ahead at the line scuffed in the red dirt with the toe of a sneaker. The winner would be the one who crossed this
line first.

Monica said, “On your marks, get set, GO!” and the boys pushed themselves forward and ran. They beat the air with their tight
fists and turned their faces upward as they struggled to get to the line, where Forsythia would declare the winner. Jashante
was in front. He moved more freely than the other boys because no one forced him to wear a cumbersome jacket. His arms pumped
powerfully in a thin pullover sweater as they kept time with his legs.