Behind You

Table of Contents

 

You do not die.

Your soul steps out of your body, shakes itself hard because it's been carrying the weight of your heavy skin for fifteen years. Then your soul lifts up and looks down on your body lying there—looks down on the blood running onto concrete, your eyes snapped open like the pages in some kid's forgotten picture book, your chest not moving. Your soul sees this and feels something beyond sadness—feels its whole self whispering further away. It lifts you up—over a world of sadness and anger and fear. Over a world of first kisses and hands touching and someone you're falling in love with. She's there now. Right there. Look closely. Yeah. That's her. That's my Ellie. . . .

OTHER BOOKS BY JACQUELINE WOODSON

SPEAK
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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam's Sons,
a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2004
Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2006

Copyright © Jacqueline Woodson, 2004

All rights reserved
Poem on page vii from All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver,
copyright © 1996 by Tess Gallagher. Introduction copyright © 1996 by Tess
Gallagher. Editor's preface, commentary, and notes copyright © 1996 by William L.
Stull. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

 

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Woodson, Jacqueline.
Behind you / Jacqueline Woodson.
p. cm.
Summary: After fifteen-year-old Jeremiah is mistakenly shot by police, the people
who love him struggle to cope with their loss as they recall his life and death,
unaware that Miah is watching over them.

eISBN : 978-1-101-15727-5

 

 

 

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume
any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

 

 

And what did you want?

 

 

—Raymond Carver

YOU DO NOT DIE. YOUR SOUL STEPS OUT OF YOUR BODY, shakes itself hard because it's been carrying the weight of your heavy skin for fifteen years. Then your soul lifts up and looks down on your body lying there—looks down on the blood running onto concrete, your eyes snapped open like the pages in some kid's forgotten picture book, your chest not moving. Your soul sees this and feels something beyond sadness—feels its whole self whispering further away.
Shhhh. Shhhh. Shhhh—
past the trees in Central Park, past the statues and runners and children playing on swings.
Shhhh. Shhhh. Shhhh.
Over yellow taxicabs and late-afternoon flickering streetlights.
Shhhh
away from the dusting of snow, the white tips of trees, the darkening sky. Already you hear your mother screaming. Already you see your father dropping his head into his hands. Helpless. Already you see your friends—walking through the halls of Percy Academy. Stunned. But you do not die. Each breath your soul takes is cool and reminds you of a taste you loved a long time ago. Licorice. Peppermint. Rain. Then your soul is you all over again, only lighter and freer and able to be a thousand and one places at once. Your new soul eyes look around. See two cops standing there with their mouths hanging open. One cop curses and kicks a tree. Slowly your soul realizes it's in a park. There are trees all around you. And both cops look scared.

He's dead,
one cop says.

And the other curses again. Your soul doesn't like the way the curse word sounds. Too hard. Too heavy in the new soul-light air.

The cops can't see you. They see a dead body on the ground—a young boy. A black boy. They know this is not the
man
they'd been looking for. They know they've made a mistake. Your soul looks at the boy and knows his friends called him Miah but his full name was Jeremiah Roselind. Tall. Dark. He has locks and the locks are spread over the ground. His eyes are opened wide. Greenish gray lifeless eyes. Your soul thinks—somebody loved that boy once. Thinks—once that boy was me. The wind blows the snow left, right and up. You are so light, you move with the wind and the snow. Let the weather take you. And it lifts you up—over a world of sadness and anger and fear. Over a world of first kisses and hands touching and someone you're falling in love with. She's there now. Right there. Look closely. Yeah. That's her. That's my Ellie.

FOR A LONG TIME AFTER MIAH DIED, SO MANY PEOPLE DIDN'T sleep. At night, we lay in bed with our eyes wide open and watched the way night settled down over wherever we were. I was in a room on the Upper West Side, in a house my parents moved to a long time ago. Not a
house
—a duplex
apartment
in a fancy building with a doorman. My dad's a doctor. My mother stays at home. I go to Percy Academy. Some people look at me and see a white girl in a uniform—burgundy jacket and gray skirt—and think,
She has all the privilege in the world.
I look back at them, thinking,
If only you knew.

If only they knew how we were sprinkled all over the city—me in my big room, Nelia in her Fort Greene brownstone, Norman in his girlfriend's apartment, aunts and uncles and cousins, even strangers—all over New York City—none of us slept. We lay there staring up at our ceilings or out into the darkness. Or some days we stopped in the middle of doing something and forgot what it was we were doing. We thought,
Jeremiah's dead.
We whispered,
Jeremiah's dead.
As if the whispering and the thinking could help us to understand. We didn't eat enough. We peed only when the need to pee got so big, we thought we'd wet our pants. We pulled the covers off ourselves in the mornings then sat on the edge of our beds, not knowing what to do next. If those strangers looked, really looked into my privileged white girl face, they would have seen the place where I wasn't even there. Where a part of me died too.

Miah died on a Saturday afternoon. That evening, the calls started coming. First his mom, Nelia, asking if Miah was still with me. Then his dad, Norman. Then the cops. Then silence. Silence that lasted into the night and into the next dawn. Then the phone ringing one more time and Nelia saying,
Ellie, Miah's been shot. . . .

 

I don't remember much more than that. There was a funeral. There were tears. There were days and days spent in my bed. A fever maybe.

There was no more Miah.

No more Miah.

No more Miah and me.

I USED TO BE A WRITER. IDEAS AND PEOPLE AND PLACES WOULD come to me and I'd write it all down. There was such a
clarity
to the world then. When I sat down at my desk and began to write, I felt like I understood
everything.
I felt brilliant and whole and good. But who understands
everything.
Who understands
anything.
I mean
really
. People getting awards for being geniuses and brilliant writers and world shakers. Do they understand. Do they have any
idea
what it feels like to wake up some days not even sure of your own name. What is my name? . . . Nelia. It's Nelia. My whole name? Cornelia Elizabeth Roselind. But before it was Roselind, it was something else. This morning, I don't remember. It doesn't matter anyway. Who I was. Who I am. Who I'll be one day. You see, the whole world has changed for me. It's filled with people saying things I don't understand. Faces on the television screen talk at me—lips moving with no sound. There's a war somewhere. And somewhere else, there are suicide bombers. People missing and found. Children looking for homes. Candy for sale. This morning, I saw a dog with only three legs. It was black and had the saddest eyes. But what dog isn't sad eyed. And what child doesn't want a home. My skin used to be so soft. But now I feel like a hard shell is growing over my blood and bones.
The New York Times
grows like a sunflower just inside the vestibule. It gets delivered in a blue plastic bag. A blue sunflower, growing out of control. But I can't stop it from growing. Someone needs to come to this house. Teach me how to dial a phone again. Because then I could call someone—who?—and say—what? Please don't deliver any more papers. Is that what you say? When a person answers the phone—do you ask for
less
of something? Who wants
less
of something? Don't we all want more?

I am not old. My hair is still black. The way it curls has not changed. Except in one spot. There. Right where the tiny indent of my neck bends into my head. The hair is straight there. Once it used to curl and the curls moved toward my neck. But now the hair sticks straight down like someone's bad perm job.

And my hands. I am not old, but my hands shake sometimes. I cannot find a pen that writes. I cannot find paper to write on. I cannot. I cannot. I cannot.

So I sleep. In this big house with all of its quiet, what else is there to do?

LOST OUR LAST GAME UP AGAINST DALTON LAST WINTER, 102-62. Dalton don't have no game. I mean, that team is
busted
. People trying to say it's 'cause Miah got kilt—killed—I mean, he got
killed
. But even if Miah's dead, that ain't no reason to get your booty
slammed
by some I-don't-want-no-scrubs from
Dalton
. I mean, show a dead brother some respect and at least go into some overtime or somethin'. Don't be just straight-up losing like that.

I'ma tell you—there's things I love about Percy Academy and stuff that be making me crazy. Like the team. I mean, I love ball, but Percy got the A-1 sorriest team this side of, I don't know—this side of the
galaxy
. Probably got a better team dribbling down the Milky Way. Three-inch Martians probably got better jump shots than the guys on my team. But there's stuff I love about that school too. Like—okay, so I know this is whacked and if someone said I said it, I'd be ready to mess them up real bad and nobody'd believe them anyway 'cause everybody at Percy knows Kennedy don't be playing that, but . . . I love the uniforms. Carlos be saying,
There goes Kennedy in his monkey suit,
but I know it's just jealousy eating him up from the inside out. See, where I live, don't a whole lotta kids be going to private school. Kids be going to school—it ain't like how reporters be trying to televise—all that talk about high dropout rate and teenage pregnancy and blasé, blasé . . . Yeah, that goes on where I live, but it be going on where everybody else be living too. Only trouble is—the news got a need to be slanting stuff just to make people afraid. Like if peeps ain't running around scared enough as it is. I just hate that the news gotta be making people afraid of somebody that look like me. Or Miah. If Miah's really dead, then that's the reason—he's dead because of people being afraid. That's why I don't try to be afraid of nothing. In the morning I get up, brush my teeth, take a shower. I look in the mirror and take off my nylon, check my braids, make sure they working underneath it. Maybe if my scalp's dry, I'll run a little bit of grease in the parts, spray a little oil sheen on my braids—you know, make them nice. Then I put on my Percy clothes: gray pants—I wear them baggy, the school don't trip, so that's cool—white shirt with a maroon tie. Maroon jacket got a Percy Academy patch on the left breast. Walk out of building
1633
Albany Houses in NeverRan Never-Will Brownsville. Brooklyn, New York. Yeah—it's the projects. Yeah, I come from the projects. So what? Lots of Percy kids got heavy pockets, live in those big buildings on the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side. They be having doormen and dry cleaning dropped off and whatnot. Stuff like that. I guess some of them probably think they better than me because they got some cash and whatever, whatever. But truth is, cash and doormen and some nice clothes ain't gonna be going with you to the next place. Shoot—given the fact that we gotta wear uniforms at Percy, nice clothes don't even be getting you through
this
place. Yeah, I believe in a next place. And I believe in this place too. And when I'm sitting in my room, staring up at the posters of all the ballplayers that came before me—I start understanding that I know some things. I might not be real rich or real smart or real good looking, but I know some things. I know a cop shot Miah in the back and the bullet went straight through from his shoulder blade to his heart. And then the heart just turned itself off like a TV. And maybe it burned Miah to die that way. Maybe it hurt real bad going down like that. But some days, I feel my boy right here, right next to me. He's sitting on my bed. And he's looking up at the posters too. And he's got this big grin on his face. I even feel his hand—slapping mine, saying,
You know we shoulda whipped Dalton, yo.
And I take his hand, pull him to me real quick, slap his back. Say,
Who you tellin', Miah man? Who you tellin'?