Buck (22 page)

HURSTON:
“The present is an egg laid by the past with the future inside its shell.”

WHITMAN:
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

DEVLIN:
“We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it.”

BALDWIN:
“We live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal … for if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

BAKER:
“Give light and the people will find their own way.”

Now I see why reading was illegal for black people during slavery. I discover that I think in words. The more words I know, the more things I can think about. My vocab and thoughts grow together like the stem and petals of a flower. Reading was illegal because if you limit someone’s vocab, you limit their thoughts. They can’t even think of freedom because they don’t have the language to. I think about all the nghz I know with limited vocabs, the ones who keep asking,
Nahmean? Yahmean?
because they don’t have the words to express what they really mean. I don’t want to fall into that trap, so every day I learn new words:
ascetic,
mizzenmast, aft, estuary, diaphanous, sedentary, trireme, drapetomania
.

ASSATA:
“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”

I read
Animal Farm
and think about all the crooked cops in Philly.

ORWELL:
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

I read Sistah Souljah and think about Nia: “Only a hardworking man, a sharp thinker who doesn’t hesitate to do what he gotta do, to get you what you need to have, deserves you.”

SIDDHARTHA:
“Make the effort to obtain information that will allow you to best guide your destiny. Make your voice heard in the world through your life and works and do not be lowered into inaction by status, tradition, race, ethnicity, gender, or affiliation. Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down to many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

I write in between reading. I write everything: poems, rhymes, stories, essays. Sometimes what I want to say is a poem, sometimes it’s a story, a movie, or a song. Each form of writing is like its own language. I want to be fluent in all of them so that I can speak to people in whatever language they understand.

Stacey says being a good writer is about making connections, connecting the dots. I start connecting everything back to writing. Like how in science class today, George, my science teacher and basketball coach, was talking about the difference between a thermostat and a thermometer. The thermostat changes the temperature; the thermometer just reflects it. I want my writing to be like a thermostat.

Writing is just like the streets: don’t hide anything at the beginning, don’t reveal anything until the last possible moment.

Y2K hangs on the horizon like sunset. The supermarket shelves are empty. Gas station lines look like rush hour traffic. Everybody’s stocking up on everything, panicking, bracing for the last days. It’s like that Prince song:
And tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999
. Action News 6 says all the world’s computers are going to crash. I think about 10 Gs and how their spaceship, Nibiru, is supposed to come and take them away on Y2K.

Despite all the Y2K chaos, word on the street is that Bone and Damien are still gunning for me. “Dead man walking,” they call me.

Kam tells me this on the phone. His voice cracks with fear. “So what you gonna do?”

I don’t know. Philly’s only so big and I’m bound to run into them eventually. My brain storms on legal ways to get
money … not just to pay Bone off, but for myself and to help my mom.

I head back to Olney.

A hustler, an entrepreneur, is about seeing opportunities and seizing them. Like 2Pac said, a real N.I.G.G.A. is Never Ignorant Getting Goals Attained. It’s about looking around and peeping all the possibilities. The entrepreneur sees the world as the writer sees the blank page—as a chance. The game changes but the hustle stays the same.

I walk into Fresh Cutz and find Mike. He tells me that there’s a few people in front of me, waiting for haircuts.

“I’m not here for a cut,” I say.

“What’s up?”

I reach into my pockets and grip all the money I have in the world.

“You still got those vending machines?”

I watch my classmates stock up on snacks before class. Juice, soda, water, candy, chips, cookies, crackers, gum, all courtesy of my vending machines. I pitched the vending machine idea to my school—“It’s what the students want,” I told Michael, “supply and demand”—and they green-lighted it. I stock up on product at Sam’s Club for a nice discount, fill my machines up, and voilà!

Wrappers crinkle around the circle of love. The whole class chomping and munching and slurping. In the circle of love, I come out first: “I want to read.”

All eyes on me.

“This is a story I’ve been working on … I’m not done yet …”

This is it.

“The fall in Killadelphia. Outside is the color of corn bread and blood. Change hangs in the air like the sneaks on the live wires behind my crib. Me and my big brother, Uzi, in the kitchen …”

I get home from school, my mom rushes me, pushing a letter into my hand.

“Read it,” she says, antsy.

I unfold it, thinking it’s probably from Uzi.

I read under my breath: “ ‘Dear Amina … demonstrated exceptional capacity for exceptional creative ability in the arts …’ ” I stop reading and smile at her. “You won?”

“I won! I got it.”

My hug tells her how proud I am of her. I think about how strong she is to win something like this in the midst of all the chaos and sickness. She’s like Jordan in the flu game.

Glowing in the dark like a fuzzy star in the black night, the TV says, “The big story on Action News tonight … It’s being called one of the biggest drug and weapons busts in Philadelphia history … three suspected drug and weapons dealers have been arrested in a million-dollar criminal operation …” They show Bone and Damien being hauled into police headquarters in cuffs. Bone has his T-shirt pulled up over his face.
They flash his mug shot. It’s surreal. I think about how that could have been me. The TV shows the police behind a table with all of the drugs, money, guns, and ammunition they seized. I think about how Bone and Damien wanted to kill me, tried to kill me, and maybe they even killed Amir? I think about how Nia warned me all of this would happen, how she loved me enough to say something.

I remember what she told me:
Love is learning the song in someone’s heart and singing it to them when they forget
.

Black Jesus mosaic looking right at me. I’m sitting in the pews of Bright Hope Baptist Church waiting for Nia, watching her choir rehearsal.

“That’s the largest stained-glass black Jesus in the world,” one of the church elders whispers to me under “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”
Go, tell it on the mountain/Over the hills and everywhere …
Sun pours through.

Nia sees me when I come in, sees me, and it’s like when we first locked eyes at Broad and Olney.

We watch Y2K fireworks explode, big and bright like electric sunflowers in the night sky, above the Art Museum.

Our hands interlocked, I apologize to her.

“Everybody is going to hurt you in some way,” she says. “You just got to find the ones worth suffering for. And I did.”

“Thank you.” She says that
espera
, the Spanish word for “waiting,” comes from the word
esperanza
—“hope.” She asks if I see the connection.

“I feel it.”

She tells me about this concept the Mayans have:
in lak esh
, meaning “You are my other me and I am your other you.”

“In lak esh,” she says.

I look into her eyes and see all the seasons changing at the same time.

“Malo, do you know what my name means?” Nia asks.

“No.”

“Purpose.”

Nia leads me through the darkness of Old City. We walk past a smelly place called Bank Street Hostel, cut across a parking lot, and end up standing in an alley under a colorful flag that says
The Five Spot
. It feels like a secret place. Outside the entrance is alive with energy. Cyphers, laughter, the click of heels on concrete, and music from inside pours out like warm air.

“If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing,” the host says. “Poetry is the voice of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.”

One mic, glowing onstage like the most precious jewel in the diamond district. It’s dim, crowded. A spotlight throws a beam around like a lighthouse.

All types of peeps in here: races, styles, vibes. Beautiful brown girls with Coke hips and tribal tats. Backpackers with backward fitteds and notebooks. Divas in dresses, long legs, pointy shoes. Braids, dreads, weaves, perms, baldies, everybody nappy, happy.

The host spots Black Thought, ?uestlove, and the band. “The legendary Roots crew from Philadelphia!”

It’s an open mic. Anybody can go up and rip it. A blur of underground talent blesses the stage. Poets Black Ice, Ursula Rucker, Post Midnight, Just Greg rip it. Emcees Bohemian Fifth, Suga Tongue Slim, and King Syze rock the mic. Then this lady, Jill Scott—“Jilly from Philly” they call her—sings, brings the damn house down, and gets a standing O.

Nia sings “Tell Him” by her favorite singer, Lauryn Hill. Her lips glow as she sings. People ad-lib:
Get it girl, get it … tell him … uh-huh, don’t stop … work, girl
.