Long Division (34 page)

The cat licked its paws and pawed at something in the shadows of the hole.

I reached over toward the shadows and saw that it was pawing at
Long Division
.

“Wait,” I told the cat. “Can you tell me who wrote this?”

Meow

I opened the book to the last chapter. With the cat lying on the side of my lap, the top of the hole open, and the light blue of the computer screen cupping my greasy face, I closed the book and wondered if I was the reader or somehow, actually, the writer of the book I had in my hands.

“Wait,” I said to the cat. “Did I write this? When?”

The cat ignored me and kept scratching its ears.

“I know this is supposed to be all dramatic,” I told the cat, “but can you just help me understand what this book has to do with me? Somebody knows and I’m just tired of not knowing.”

It just kept licking its paws.

“Thanks a lot, homie,” I told the cat and sucked my teeth. “Where would I be without you? Did you ever really talk to me?”

The cat yawned and started licking its own ass.

Making Baize really reappear was going to be harder than making her disappear, harder than anything I’d ever imagined in my life. And I was going to have to do it all with a book without an author called
Long Division
, Baize’s computer, a fat-head cat, and a hole in the ground.

That’s one of the only things I knew. I also knew that “tomorrow” was a word now like the thousands of other words in that hole. I closed my mouth, pulled down the top of the hole, and imagined more words in the dark.

But someone else was in the hole with me.

I heard more breathing and more fumbling around, so I walked toward the noise until I was close enough to smell dried sweat, pine trees, and ink.

“Who is that?” I said, sounding scared as hell. “How’d you get down here?”

I gently reached and rubbed my hands up, down, and all around their noses, their eyelids, their dry lips and ear lobes. I found their thighs, their flimsy T-shirts, and finally all of their crusty hands. I had one more match left from the book I’d taken from the 1960s, so I went in my pocket and struck the match.

“
You!
?”

Slowly, we opened our red eyes in the dark and taught each other how to love. Hand in hand, deep in the underground of Mississippi, we all ran away to tomorrow because we finally could…

Out in the Bonneville, LaVander Peeler sat in the back and I sat up front with Grandma. She sat there not saying a word for a few minutes, with one hand on my thigh and the car running. She took her hand from my thigh and cupped her face with both hands before massaging her temples with her thumbs. I placed my left hand on the back of her neck and rubbed it like she’d do to me when I couldn’t sleep.

I sat there, waiting for Grandma to say something and, really, waiting to hear from her how being in love with Jesus was going to help us out of whatever situation we were in. I didn’t want no silly voices pass-interfering when Jesus decided to let me know what to do next. But even if you put it on strong leash, and even if you’re saved, the imagination makes more noise than a little bit and takes you wherever it wants to go.

And my imagination did exactly that. It took me right across the road in those Magic Woods and it had me stepping on dead catfish and brittle monkey bodies and the blue crossed eyeballs of white folks. All the while, all I could hear around me was Uncle Relle saying, “Gotdamnit. Gotdamnit. Gotdamnit.”

Jesus
, I thought to myself,
if you’re there, I’m not trying to cuss you. I swear I’m not
.

Then, it took me back to a bed on a stage where Mama, Troll, Shay, Gunn, and MyMy were there and they were all kissing me all over my stretch marks and showing stretch marks I never knew they had. Without warning, my imagination calmed down and took me right back to my baptism and that Halona King song was blasting on level eighty trillion.

I pulled
Long Division
from my bag. “Grandma, I’m fine,” I told her. “Really.”

“Your face,” she said.

“What?”

“It looks like my baby done aged fifteen years in two days. Lawd, have mercy. Please have mercy. This wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

“Oh, naw. I’m fine, Grandma. I’m just waiting, but it shouldn’t be long now.” I sat there with
Long Division
, trying to get situated in the passenger
seat of the car. “In a way, everything is right here.” I handed her the book. “I think Jesus wanted me to find this book. You should read this one day. There’s another one in the shed.”

“I picked it up,” she said.

“You did? Good. You should read it.”

“I love you, City,” she said and put the book back on my lap. “Galatians 6:9 say,
Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up
. I ain’t giving up, but I didn’t do good this weekend and I reckon they ’bout to come for me. I want you—”

“Grandma,” I interrupted her, “I’m gonna miss you. You know that, right? I am. And I’m gonna miss Melahatchie so much. And you ain’t even got to tell me; I already know I can’t say nothing about what happened in that work shed. It didn’t really happen, right? I think I know where Baize Shephard is, Grandma.”

I reached for Grandma’s waist, smashing my head against her chest as she hugged my neck. Her heart was pounding so hard, so fast. The smell of the shed and Pot Belly was still strong on her chest. “You scared, Grandma? We didn’t kill that man, right? Even though you think he killed Granddaddy and Baize Shephard, we didn’t kill him, did we?”

I could feel tears from Grandma’s face dripping onto my head. “Grandma, I have another question.” I pulled away from her so I could see her eyes. “What does Jesus say is the difference between the fiction in your head and the real life you live? You know what I mean? It’s like there’s two of everybody, the one in fiction and the one in real life. But what’s the difference?”

She squeezed my hand tighter and looked me right in the eyes. “Really, it ain’t no difference, City,” she said. “Because unless you use both of them the right way, they just as bad or just as good as you want them to be. But you lead both of them,” she whispered in my ear. “And don’t take no ass-whupping or no disrespect from no one in your own house or your own dreams, you hear me? Do whatever it takes to protect you and yours,” she said. “Especially in your dreams. Especially in your dreams, because you never know who else is watching.”

“Grandma,” I looked behind me at LaVander Peeler, who was looking out of rear window, “that’s what I did at the contest. That’s all I was trying to do. You think I did the wrong thing to protect me and mines today?”

Grandma tapped me on the forehead with my pencil and ignored my question. She told me to read and write when I got bored and needed to make sense of it all. She said I should never show anybody what I wrote, “…unless you really feel like Jesus forgot you and you’re trying to save your own life, or the life of somebody you love.” Then out of nowhere she said, “What I did to protect me and mines was wrong, City. I shoulda gone underground. I knew better.”

“But you were just cleaning up our mess, right? You were doing what Jesus would have done.”

“Naw.” Grandma looked at her hands. “I was cleaning up my own mess. Or I reckon I was punishing that man for his part in some mess that can’t never really be cleaned the right way. I don’t know, City.”

“It can be cleaned, Grandma. That’s the thing.” I wasn’t sure what I meant, but I knew I meant what I was saying. “It’s cleaner than it would be if folks didn’t fight back. We can make it even cleaner.”

“We can make it dirtier, too,” Grandma said and kissed me right on the mouth and reached across me and opened my door. “You should go, City. They gon’ be coming for me directly, so I should probably go to them first. Don’t ever go back in that house or that shed. You understand me?”

In all the years I’d known my grandma, I never imagined her as someone’s sad child. But there she was, looking like some kind of rotten blue loss was swallowing her whole, like she’d just lost 50 contests in a row in front of her parents, the boy she liked, and all the black folks to ever live in the state of Mississippi.

LaVander Peeler and I got out of the car and stood in front of the woods. While Grandma’s Bonneville slow-crawled down the road and all these other cars were blowing their horn and passing her, I put my hand on LaVander Peeler’s shoulder and walked him into the Magic Woods. I remembered where the rusted handle in the ground was. I didn’t have to explain anything to LaVander Peeler. He wanted to come with me.

I reached down and pulled open the hole in the ground. We both looked at each other and walked down the steps. “This wasn’t supposed to happen to us, City.”

“Yeah, it was,” I told him. “Like you always say, all things considered, we didn’t really have no other choice or no other story to tell, so we had to make one.” I waited for him to say something back but he didn’t, so I looked right in his face and said what I should have found a way to say to him after the contest.

“I love you, LaVander Peeler. I do, man, and I don’t care what you say about that homosexual stuff. I know you love me, too. You ain’t even gotta say it. Just treat this like the best video game ever made and act like we just beat the game together.”

LaVander Peeler looked at me, not like I was crazy, but like we just tied for last place in the longest uphill three-legged race in the world. The hole was huge once you got in and so much colder than I expected.

“Should we leave the top open?” I asked him.

LaVander Peeler just stood next to me, ignoring my question and resting his head on my shoulder.

“Listen,” I told him. “You hear something? Sounds like someone breathing.”

“City, all things considered,” he said, “I’m so scared. Can we read that book?”

In that hole, right in that second, I felt as far away from Melahatchie and I felt as close to a real character as I had ever felt. And the craziest thing is that I wasn’t sure if that was a good, bad, or sad thing. With LaVander Peeler’s head on my shoulder, we started rereading
Long Division
from the beginning, knowing that all we needed to know about how to survive, how to live, and how to love in Mississippi was in our hands. The sentences had always been there

I want to thank my father and mother for patience and life. I’m sorry I was so bad for so long. I just want you to be proud.

Thanks to my Aunt Sue, Aunt Linda, Nichole, and Mr. and Ms. Simmons for sharing their God, their healing voices, and their homes with me when I was homeless. Thanks to my little brother, Tommy, and my little sister, Jeanne, for the short time we’ve shared.

Thanks to Amie, Assefash, Kleaver, Danielle P., Sharon, Rachel, Tanay, Abby, Lauren, Catherine, Robyn, Amielle, Kendall, Leona, Ocasio, Akil, Evan, Cordelia, John, Nate, Rosa, Emma C., Brianna, Amanda, Adam, Safy, Parker, my agents David and Robert, and she who has next, “Nephew Jessie,” for reading or listening to early drafts of this book and believing when there was little to believe in. Thanks to Kara for embracing this book like I was family. Thank you for opening your heart to these characters and me at a time when we were so afraid and most in need of magic, music, and time.

Thanks to Raymon for showing a draft to his little brother and needing to teach it to his students.

Thank you to Amitava, Imani, Paul, Michael, and Hua for real talk and modeling innovative literary excellence up close. To Leslie, Peter, Paul, Judy, and David for mentoring and advising me not to sell out.

Thank you, Millsaps College, for a peculiar kind of freedom. Thank you, Jackson State University, for always being home. Thank you, Oberlin College, for a second chance at life and art. Thanks to the Indiana University MFA program for time to learn from some great ones.

Thanks to Lerthon, David, Terry, Henry, Roy, Brandon, Kareem, Stacey, Baraka, Madra, Hasinati, Leighton, Shonda, Robyn, and Shirley for making thousands of Mississippi memories and keeping me alive.

To Andrew, Lila, Bob, and Joanna for welcoming me, and Cappy for keeping Vassar College’s doors open to brilliance.

To Carlos, Luis, Prescott, Kisha, Torrie, Mona, and the one and only O.G. Raymon “Gunn” Murph for the kind of service, brotherhood, sisterhood, and love that saves lives.

To Bama, Magtoto, Adam, Paulsak and the rest of that first Writing the Underground class I taught at Vassar for holding me accountable to ride-or-die integrity.

Thanks to Morrison, Baldwin, Salinger, Butler, Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Trethewey, Rich Santiago, Ava DuVernay, Outkast, Big K.R.I.T., Ani, Jigga, Kanye, Joni, Maxwell, Scarface, 2pac, Spike Lee, Tyler, Crooked Lettaz, Frank Ocean, dream, Kendrick, Halona King, Brandon Green, Noel Didla, Adisa Ajamu, Marlon Peterson, Mychal Denzel Smith, Darnell Moore, and Killer Mike.

Thanks to Ron, Luke, Mia, Andy, Kim, and Lisa for your willingness to fight and collaborate. Ron, you took a chance on me when you didn’t have to. I will never forget your courage.

I want to also thank 2010–2011 Senior Composition for creating and sustaining a rigorous, emotionally dense, innovative writing community when I was really unhealthy and ready to quit.