Long Division (21 page)

I looked at Grandma before glaring up at white Jesus again. I wondered if any folks in the church knew about the cross-eyed white man in Grandma’s work shed. I wondered what they would think about my grandma’s relationship with the Lord and with right if they really knew. If they ever found out, maybe two of them would talk smack about my grandma, but I figured that everyone in the church had been treated like a visitor on their own road, in their own town, in their own state, in their own country. It wasn’t really complicated at all, but I’d never understood it until right then in that church. When you and everyone you like and everyone who really likes you is treated like a pitiful nigger, or like a disposable nigger, or like some terrorizing nigger, over and over again, in your own home, in your own state, in your own country, and the folks who treat you like a nigger are pretty much left alone, of course you start having fantasies about doing whatever you can—not just to get back at white folks, and not just to stop the pain, but to do something that I didn’t understand yet, something a million times worse than acting a fool in front of millions at a contest.

One sentence.

That one sentence had the potential to be the greatest sentence I’d ever thought of, and I wished LaVander Peeler was there to hear it and help me figure out what the last part actually meant.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhmen!”

Everyone dropped hands and we made our way out of the church. I walked out feeling that my First Monday Baptism might be the last thing I ever experienced. Whether it was because I was going to die during the baptism or because I was going to be some wack holy dude I never imagined being, I didn’t know how I could live another day as myself after that baptism. Either way, I figured I needed to go home and write a will on the blank pages in
Long Division
. If I did die, I wanted to give something to all the folks I was leaving behind.

1. I leave my Pine wave brush to LaVander Peeler
.

2. I leave my XL mesh shorts to Shay
.

3. I leave my grown-folks books to Shay and Gunn and a few of my illiterate kids’ books to MyMy
.

4. I leave my cell phone to my grandma because she needs one even though they don’t ever get decent reception down here
.

5. I leave my essays to Mama
.

6. I leave my vintage Walter Payton jerseys to LaVander Peeler
.

7. I leave my notebook to Grandma because she taught me how to read
.

8. I leave my Obama Loves the South T-shirt to Shay
.

9. I want to leave my spot on that TV show to Grandma too. She’d be better than I ever would be. And if Grandma won’t do it, I leave it to that Mexican girl from Arizona, the one who I should not have dissed
.

10. I leave my password to my email, Twitter, and Facebook to my Uncle Relle. It’s W-H-O-S-T-A-N-K
.

In the middle of my will in
Long Division
, I smelled Pot Belly and got that feeling that someone was looking at me. I turned around and there was Uncle Relle filming me with one of his cell phones.

“Oh hey, Uncle Relle. You smell funny.”

“Funny how,” he said, and he put one of his hands in his pockets. “Don’t worry about how I smell, City. Keep doing you, like I ain’t even here.”

“It’s hard to do me when I know you’re trying to tape me doing me,” I told him.

“Well, you better get good at acting like you’re doing you in the future. The reality TV shit, it’s about acting like the camera ain’t there. You can’t be looking all in the camera and making faces.” Uncle Relle turned his phone camera off and put it in some leather case he kept on his belt. “It’s a few basics that I think you haven’t really ingratiated yourself to.”

“You mean gravitated to?”

“Just listen, City. Close that gotdamn book.”

I closed my book and braced myself for another one of Uncle Relle’s speeches.

“This writing thing, it ain’t like that hip hop shit, City. For li’l niggas like you,” he told me, “this writing thing is like a gotdamn porta potty. It’s one li’l nigga at a time, shitting in the toilet, funking up the little space he get. And you shit a regular shit or a classic shit. Either way,” he said. “City, you gotta shit classic, then get your black ass on off the pot.” He actually grabbed my hand. “You probably think I’m hyping you just for the money. It ain’t just about the money. It’s really not. It’s about doing whatever it takes for you to have your voice heard. So I don’t know what you’re writing in that book you always carrying around, but it better be classic because you ain’t gonna get no two times to get it right, you hear me?”

“I hear you.”

Uncle Relle put Grandma’s keys on the stove next to all this German chocolate cake she’d made. He told me he had some phone calls to make so he was about to walk down the road and try to find a signal. That was his way of saying he was going to buy some more weed from Alcee Mayes.

When Uncle Relle walked down the road, I decided to go look in the work shed again. Before I went out to the work shed, I found this little
battery-operated CD player that Grandma took outside with her whenever she hung up the clothes out on the clothesline. The only song Grandma listened to while she was hanging up clothes was this Halona King song called “Monsters in the Night.” I had no idea what other songs were on that CD because “Monsters in the Night” was the only song Grandma ever listened to or liked that wasn’t gospel. She’d play it on repeat over and over and over. Pot Belly didn’t seem like the kind of white dude who would like Halona King, but I figured he might want to hear something other than squeaky mice and bullfrogs since he was chained up in that work shed all by himself.

Pot Belly was lying face down in the sawdust of the work shed. He had these bloody welts up and down the top of his butt cheeks. Lying next to him was a half-empty bottle of pepper sauce.

“My uncle came in here and beat you down?” I asked him and turned on the CD player. “I thought maybe you’d wanna to listen to something. You like Halona King?”

Pot Belly’s chest was heaving in and out. “You okay? Look, I might decide to save you tomorrow. For real. I mean, if I don’t die at my baptism. I’m serious. You want anything?”

He started trying to turn over. To the left of his hips, on the floor of the work shed, were the words “So sad…” written in the sawdust on the floor. It looked like he’d used his finger to write those two words and three dots.

“Damn man, you wrote that? Why did you add the dot-dot-dot? They use that a lot in that book. I can’t even lie to you, that’s one of the saddest things I ever seen in my life. I guess I’m sorry my uncle beat you, but you shouldn’t have called me names and kicked me. At last not in the back.”

He started trying to talk but you couldn’t hear anything thing but muffle since his mouth was filled with that rag. “Shut up and listen,” I told him. “If it helps, I’ve seen him be mean to folks who wasn’t even white. For real. Well, don’t think I’m gay, but I’ma pull your pants up and leave. It’s too sad up in here.”

I turned my head so I wouldn’t smell him too much. “Kindly pause,” I said and pulled his underwear up all the way on his butt with the tips of my fingers.

“Look, man.” I picked up the copy of
Long Division
that was still right where I’d left it on the floor. “I know you gotta be bored as shit up in here. I’d be bored and sad, too, if all I had to look forward to everyday was sweating and breathing in sawdust and having someone like my uncle beating my ass.”

I thought about those two words: “So sad.”

“You know that I never told anyone on earth that I’m so sad?” I told him. “I’m serious. Even after all that stuff happened on TV the other day, I never thought to tell someone that it all made me feel so sad. But that’s the truth. That’s what I felt.” For the first time since I’d been in the work shed, I thought about Baize Shephard and whether she was chained up in someone else’s work shed. I didn’t think she was, but you just never could tell. “I wonder how sad Baize Shephard is right now.”

He actually turned his eyes toward me when I said that.

“This book is crazy,” I told him. “You want me to read you a little of it? It might help you feel less sad. Is it wack for me to read to you while that music is playing?”

Pot Belly didn’t move.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” I told him. “Remember that. Sometimes the glass is full as hell, white boy. You better drink. I’m trying to help you out.”

It might sound weird to you, but even though I hoped that I would never do anything that could lead to my being chained up in a work shed, if I was chained up in a work shed, feeling so sad, I would have wanted someone to read a chapter of a book like
Long Division
to me with Halona King playing in the background.

So that’s what I did.

In the movies or a dumb book, I knew that I could look down at the ground and follow footprints to see where Shalaya Crump and Jewish Evan Altshuler had gone to, but the problem was that I’d never even seen a real footprint. There wasn’t much sand or even dirt in Chicago or Jackson, and when there was, I can’t say that I spent even a second looking for somebody’s footprints.

I walked over to what Evan called the Freedom School. To the left of the door was a tilted black cardboard sign with white letters, a dot-dot-dot, and an exclamation point.

Be a FIRST CLASS Citizen

REGISTER…VOTE!

I peeked in the window at three people covered in sheets. They were walking around the inside of what looked like an old-fashioned classroom. There were three desks in the middle of the room. The ceiling was super high and you could see bird’s nests all at the top. The floor was part carpet, part wood, part tile and all around the corners of the room were wooden sculptures and saws and pictures. The men in sheets weren’t wrecking the room or trying to
set anything on fire. They were just walking around, looking at the walls, talking to each other. I was zoning out when all of a sudden, I felt a shot to the back of my knees.

I turned around and another man in a white sheet was poking me in the kidney with a T-ball bat. I still didn’t drop the laptop computer or the book. I’d seen plenty of movies about people in the Klan. In the movies, they always talked in those rough country voices that are only ever used by Northern white men actors playing Southern white men. But in real life, the men weren’t saying a word. They didn’t even grunt. They didn’t even breathe loud. I never really understood before that Klan sheets didn’t have mouth-holes. You would think that they had to breathe heavy unless they wanted to suffocate under those sheets.

When they pulled me into the school, they sat me in an old-fashioned desk I could barely fit in. The men walked around and circled me. One of them reached down for the computer, but I didn’t let it go.

“I ain’t letting this go,” I told him. “I’ll give you this book, but I can’t give you this computer, man.” He pulled his sheet up and showed me the barrel of his rifle. “Oh, but you know what? I’ma show you how to turn it on,” I told him. “Did any of y’all see this pretty black girl and this other white boy with a fro who looked… he looked…um, not good. His name was Evan. He was your color and…”

Before I could finish, one of the men slapped me right across my mouth and looked me right in the eyes. I couldn’t see his eyes because he had on glasses. I looked at all the men’s eyes for the first time and realized that they all had on glasses under their sheets.

“Just so you know,” I told them, “that’s the first time I ever let someone hit me in my mouth. I’m serious. And if you didn’t have that gun, I’d probably pop that old ass right in the jaw. I’m serious.”

Another man slapped me right across the mouth after I said my piece. My problem was that I’d seen so many pictures of Klansmen. The pictures made you know that the men under the sheets were real men with real stinky breath, real rotten teeth, real pot bellies. I figured it was like football. As soon as you put on your helmet and shoulder pads and your jersey, you were like everyone else on your team, especially to people watching. Our football coach, Coach Foots, wouldn’t even let us have our names on the back of our jerseys because he said the team is more important than the player.

But even dressed in the same uniform and with no name on the back of your jersey, the
GAME
was filled with seconds where it was up to you to make a play. Not your teammate.

You.

I knew that each of the Klansmen was feeling fear and trying to figure out a way to seem less afraid than he was to the other teammates on his Klan squad. But when you’re getting the taste slapped out of your mouth for no reason, it doesn’t matter if the person doing the taste-slapping is probably just as scared as you. And it makes you feel weird that no matter what, the taste-slappers never talk…they just breathe like new asthmatics and watch you. It made it easier to believe they lived their whole lives behind those white sheets, slapping black kids up and never breathing right.

“I wanna be honest with you,” I told them.

One of the men was looking at the laptop computer and playing with the keys. He tapped the shoulder of the one who was standing over me and he bent down and started looking at the laptop computer, too.