Buck (2 page)
Authors: M.K. Asante
“I’m African,” he told Uzi and Ted the other day on the porch. Ted calls Pops “Dr. Africa.” “That’s why I wear African clothes.”
“But you’re from Georgia,” Uzi said.
“Being born in Georgia doesn’t make me an American any more than being born in an oven makes a cat a biscuit.”
“Huh?”
“There’s an African proverb that says, ‘No matter how long a log sits in a river, it will never become a crocodile.’ That means that even in a foreign habitat, a snail never loses its shell. Even in America, I’m still African.”
“Here he goes.” Uzi shook his head. “Always in his Afrocentric bag.”
The newspapers call our father “the father of Afrocentricity” because he created it.
My third eye is my rail, on this L of thought
With Afrocentric stamps I’m mailin thoughts
*
Pops is always preaching Afrocentricity. He was a Church of Christ minister way back when, one of those child preachers, and he still sounds like he’s in the pulpit when he talks about black people, white people, and the struggle. I remember this debate he took me to at East Stroudsburg University a few years back: him vs. Cornel West vs. Arthur Schlesinger. It was packed, standing room only. I remember how West, this cool black dude with a big Afro and a tight three-piece suit, talked with his hands flying fast like he was conducting an orchestra. And how Schlesinger, this old white guy with hair the color of milk and a red bow tie, sounded like a statue. I remember the cheers, the boos, the ad-libs. Most of all, though, I remember how dope my pops was: his passion, energy, confidence, intelligence. Half the time I didn’t even know what he was talking about—
hegemony
…
pedagogy
…
subverting the dominant paradigm
—but I was proud.
Back then I didn’t get it, but now I think I do. Afrocentricity basically means that black people should view the world through our own black eyes. It’s like the poster my dad has framed in the hallway that says, “A people without knowledge of their past is like a tree with no roots.”
Hit the Earth like a comet, invasion
.
Nas is like the Afrocentric Asian, half-man, half-amazin
†
Our crib is mad Afrocentric: naked African statues standing everywhere, ritual masks ice-grilling down from the walls, portraits of Martin, Malcolm, Harriet. From the wallpaper to the plates, everything is stamped with Africa.
Even my favorite porn series,
My Baby Got Back
, is made by a company called Afro-Centrix Productions. “Beauties that give up the booty,” the box under my bed says. Mr. Marcus, Lexington Steele, and loudmouthed Wesley Pipes nailing Nubian queens like Janet Jacme, Obsession, Midori, Monique, and Lacey Duvalle in doggy style, reverse cowgirl, and missionary.
I tell Pops about the other Afro-Centrix and he’s disgusted.
Say what?
But he’s the one who’s always talking about how black people should have their own stores, own banks, own schools—shouldn’t we have our own porn studios too? What’s more Afrocentric than black pussy?
Uzi doesn’t really get down with Afrocentricity. I think he’s still mad about the whole
Star Wars
thing from when we were little. Uzi used to love
Star Wars
and he kept begging my parents for a Luke Skywalker action figure. Finally my dad took him to Toys R Us. They came back—Uzi was heated.
“He got me Lando Calrissian!” Uzi said.
“Who?”
“Exactly! Nobody knows who he is. Lando Calrissian!”
“Who that?”
“Fucking Billy Dee Williams! The corny black dude. He has no gun, no weapon, no special powers, and he talks like he’s in a goddamn Colt 45 commercial, like”—he lowered his voice—“ ‘the power of Colt 45 … works every time.’ ”
“They didn’t have Luke?”
“They had everybody—Luke, Obi-Wan, Han Solo—but Dad wouldn’t get them because they’re white.”
So now Uzi’s in his closet deciding what to take with him to Arizona.
“Make sure you leave this room better than you found it,” my dad says, scoping the mess.
“Whateva,” Uzi sighs, and tosses a shirt into his duffle.
“What’d you say?” My dad moves closer. I see his face clenching, like he wants to slap the shit out of Uzi. He won’t, though, because Uzi’s his stepson. Now if it were me, I’d be ducking haymakers. Uzi steps out of the closet. They’re a swing away from each other. My brother, at 6′6″, Michael Jordan’s
height, towers over my pops, who might be 5′7″—Spud Webb. Pops ain’t no slouch, though. He’s southern stocky, used to chase chickens and wrestle swamp thangs and chop firewood back in the day.
“What”—Uzi tilts his head like one side weighs more—“eva.”
Pops swallows hard. They eye each other down like the cowboys in the black-and-white Westerns my uncle John loves watching—toothpicks plugged into stone faces, beat-up brims, ashy steel toes.
I love a good fight, but I don’t want to see this. One day when Uzi was real mad at my dad, he told me if it ever came down to it, he’d fight my pops like “a ngh on the street.” I don’t want to see that, and I know deep down Uzi doesn’t want that either, but he’s a cannon. He’s got a Rasheed Wallace temper, so hot you can fry bacon on it.
“Finish packing. Be downstairs ready to go in thirty. You’re not welcome in this house anymore.”
“Man, I don’t give a fuck!”
“Don’t you use that language with me, boy,” Pops says, pointing at Uzi, eyes on fire.
“You Malo dad, not mine.” Uzi moves in closer. “Don’t get it twisted.” I can see the veins in Uzi’s neck pulse like little lightning bolts, striking on every word.
“Pack. Your. Bags,” my dad blows out. He turns to me. “Downstairs!”
“Why?”
“Because I—”
“Damn, I can’t chill with my lil’ brother before y’all kick
me out?” Uzi jumps in. “You said I ain’t coming back, right? Well, at least let me say bye to my lil’ brother.”
“Yea, c’mon,” I add.
“Thirty minutes!” He storms out. Uzi kicks the door shut.
“Can’t stand him,” Uzi says, scrunching up his face. “Wish I lived with my real dad. That ngh right there, my real pops”—shakes his head into his fist in awe—“is cool as shit. Lets me do whatever the fuck I want.”
Whenever Uzi gets into it with my dad, he starts talking about Bob, his dad.
“Bob is the truth,” he says.
No he ain’t
, I think.
I’ve heard all this before, but I listen like it’s new music. In my mind, though, this song is played out. He sings about how Bob runs shit in Harlem, from One-two-fifth to the Heights; how everybody calls him “the mayor of the ghetto”; how he’s always rocking the fly shit before everyone else—fitteds, jerseys, fedoras; how he curses up a storm, all types of
fucks
and
shits
and
bitches
—hurricane slang.
But the other night, while Uzi was locked up, I heard the unofficial lyrics to the song. The ones hidden in Uzi’s stomach, I guess. They said that Bob is a junky, all strung out on heroin; that he beat the everything out of my mom every day they were together, like Ike Turner did Tina; and that my mom’s neighbor, a priest, put a gun in Bob’s mouth and told him if he ever touched my mom again he’d be “summoned to appear before his maker.” My mom told me this secret music from her chair, Egyptian pillow resting on her stomach. I was kneeling next to her, holding her soft hands, soaking up these blues.
“He would beat me and beat me until my eyes were purple and swollen shut.” She cried as she told me. I hugged her with
all I had: arms, heart, body, and soul. I want to protect her from everything, from all the evil in this cold world. I think about the man who beat her and bite my bottom lip so hard it bleeds. I think about using my dad’s double-barreled shotgun on Bob—about taking it from his closet, loading it with buckshots just like Pops taught me last summer after our crib got robbed, and squeezing. Uzi doesn’t know that I know this.
“Bob is
that
ngh,” Uzi says.
Fuck Bob!
is what I really want to say, but this is Uzi’s last day in Philly and I don’t want him to bounce on a bad note—so I press mute.
My parents are in the kitchen waiting to take Uzi to the airport. They’re mad because Uzi keeps getting in trouble. They get him out, but he gets right back in. They keep saying he’s playing with fire.
He gets expelled from all the schools: Ivy Leaf for telling some girl “Suck my dick, bitch” in the middle of math class; Piney Woods, this black military school in Mississippi, for breaking some kid’s nose; and a bunch of other places. He even gets booted from the last-chance schools—the ones with names like Second Chance and Fresh Start—so now my parents don’t know what the fuck to do.
The day after Uzi got locked up they called a family meeting. They sat us down and talked about the struggle, about the sacrifices our ancestors made, and about how they came up. They asked us all these questions about their upbringing, then answered before we could respond.
Do you know where we came from?
DAD:
A one-room shack in Valdosta, Georgia. I was the oldest boy of sixteen children. Sixteen of us in a shack the size of a pigeon coop, on the banks of the Okefenokee Swamp and Withlacoochee River.
MOM:
The projects in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. I was the oldest girl of three. We all slept in the same bed. Single mom.
Do you know what it was like back then for us?
DAD:
I started working on the plantation when I was six. Picking cotton for white folks. I picked more than I weighed, working under the hot Georgia sun from can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night. The thorns around the bolls would leave my hands cracked and bloody. We were sharecroppers who never got a share. Separate restaurants, separate water fountains, separate toilets, separate schools, churches, neighborhoods. The only thing that blacks and whites shared in Valdosta were mosquitoes.
MOM:
I started working when I was eight: scrubbing floors and toilets for white families in Long Island. It showed me just how poor we were. Dirt.
Do you know how hard it was?
DAD:
I was eleven when I got my first job as a shoeshine boy at a white barbershop. I just took my wooden shoe box and went inside the shop and asked the owner if I
could set up and shine shoes. He said, “Yeah, boy, just give me fifteen cents on every quarter you make.” Shining white people’s shoes was a guaranteed position; after all, it was nonthreatening and subservient. So I was not surprised that I got the job; other than working in the fields, it was probably the only job that I could have gotten at the time. My first customer, a young white man in his twenties with black shoes, sat in the chair near the window, and I took out my polish, my rag, and toothbrush. When I finished, instead of paying me, he spat in my face.
MOM:
I saw my mother raped. We lived on the third floor of a rooming house on Vanderbilt Avenue. “Yell for help, yell for help,” my mother told me as the man broke down the door to our room. I ran to the window and looked down on the dark street where nothing seemed like it was moving. I opened my mouth wide but nothing came out. No voice, no cry, no nothing.
The refrain:
If we made it from all that—from projects and plantations—what’s your problem?
It’s not just Uzi either. My cousin Kadir from the Bronx got knocked a week after Uzi did for robbing the subway platform.
“The subway platform?” I asked my aunt on the phone.
“Yes, he robbed everyone who was waiting for the A train at ten-thirty in the morning. I’m convinced he’s lost his goddamn mind.”
They’re sending Uzi to Arizona to live with my uncle Jabbar. Bar’s cool. He’s a former Golden Gloves champ who sparred
with Muhammad Ali back in the day. He always rocks a gold chain, pinky nugget ring, and a hustla’s grin. Cadillac slick, he looks just like Tubbs from
Miami Vice
.
Last time I saw him, on Thanksgiving, he pulled me to the side.
