Disgruntled (4 page)

Johnbrown, before he conceived of The Key, while he was between crap jobs, was the one who had come up with the Seven Days, and later he seemed to forget that Sheila nearly had to wrestle him to the ground to get him to read the Toni Morrison novel. He thought the organized murdering in the book was brilliant, an ideal combination of what he saw as Eastern discipline and black anarchy, but, as he saw it, the times did not quite call for that.

His original idea had been a combination of service and confrontation. In addition to the volunteering, he wanted to stage raucous demonstrations at the suburban houses of city slumlords. He wanted to block streets in the Northeast or in the Irish Catholic part of Southwest Philly, where the white people regularly harassed black pedestrians; to patrol the neighborhood borders of South Philadelphia, where black met Italian; to picket racist unions and sabotage the Mummers Parade, the white trash blackface spectacle that was the city’s sole indigenous tradition.

Johnbrown had several ideas, but perhaps his favorite involved provoking the police. For as long as she could remember, Kenya’s father had owned a gun, which lived in the basement in a locked metal box that she had imagined but never seen. Johnbrown wanted all of the Days to own handguns—“legally, of course.” His idea was that they should take their guns to the local police station to stage their right to bear arms—but without the “fascist theatrics” of the Panthers. But no one else was interested in spending their evenings in the city jail or getting their heads cracked with billy clubs. It might have also been the case that no one trusted Johnbrown at the police station with a gun. In any case, the Seven Days had become what they were.

When Johnbrown started his “burn it all down” talk, the others would become sullen as they listened to him rant about how even though Philly now had a bullshit black mayor, it was still Rizzoville. “And why,” he would ask, his voice climbing octaves, “are we putting ourselves at the mercy of those ignorant racist thugs y’all call the police?” This was Yaya’s cue to pick up the hat she was endlessly crocheting and unraveling, and Alfred’s to stare thoughtfully into his can of beer. Kenya’s mother had a special sigh and a dark expression for moments like these. In the end, Johnbrown usually wore himself out and things continued on as they had before.

One Saturday night, after a particularly gloomy spell of several days, Johnbrown announced, “It’s no secret that I think it’s time for us to
really
talk about what’s going on in this city, this country, in 1984. Yeah—1984. Does that ring a bell for anyone here?” His pouty tone reminded Kenya of the afternoon not long ago when Charlena had been upset about her parents’ fighting.

“Look, we’re doing what we can. Just give it up, John,” Sheila snapped. He’d appended
brown
to his name when he was kicked out of Cornell. Kenya’s mother left it off when he seriously displeased her.

“Maybe we should hear him out,” said Cindalou.

Sheila continued. “Look, if y’all want to go moon the local precinct—”

“Aw, Sheila,” laughed Yaya. “That ain’t right.”

(“Umph!” agreed Alfred.)

Johnbrown stood up abruptly, rustling the huge corn plant beside him. “Moon the police station? Oh, fuck that! Who started this whole thing?” he yelled.

Suddenly Yaya stood as well, and Kenya found herself slung over her shoulder, receding backward away from her father’s bulging eyes.

“Who started this whole thing?” Johnbrown yelled. “I mean, what the hell were y’all doing with your lives when I came up with this? Going to the disco? Pledging the alumnae chapter of Wine Psi Fi?”

Behind her door, Kenya heard her mother’s voice getting louder, her father’s going high. “It’s not like I can’t hear them,” she said to Yaya, rolling her eyes though her chest was tight with terror.

“That’s okay,” Yaya said. “It’s better as background noise. So what’s your favorite bedtime story?”

It was very difficult for Kenya to carry on a conversation with Yaya and still listen to what her parents were saying, but she couldn’t help being indignant.

“My mother is a
librarian.
I read my own books!” she said.

Yaya grinned. “Well, excuuuuuse me. I forgot you were a genius.”

Kenya’s face burned. She bragged about her reading but she was no Charlena. It had always seemed to her that if she was going to be so unpopular at school, the reason should be that she was so smart it put others off.

“I’m just playing with you,” Yaya said. Then she perused the stacked orange crates that held Kenya’s books and few remaining toys. “How ’bout I read this one to you anyway?” she asked, picking up
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
, a book that her parents had fought about. “Atonist” bullshit, her father had called it, using his mysterious epithet for Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

Kenya had just begun reading the Narnia books. She nodded, and in the brief silence before Yaya started, they both heard Sheila’s voice snap across the word
brat.
Yaya had to leave eventually, and Sheila and Johnbrown Curtis argued into the night while Kenya fell asleep clutching her stomach.

*   *   *

The fight over bringing it to white Philadelphia was the only real disagreement among the Seven Days. But it was not the only battle that Kenya’s parents fought. Though she really only began to pay attention because of the talk with Charlena, there had been two main kinds of fights for as long as she could remember.

One was always initiated by Sheila, and it began with her saying something like:
I’m supporting this family financially and the least you could do is the dishes I don’t care what Karenga says I’m not married to him and I don’t know where your fucking (sorry, Kenya) socks are
. These fights occurred more frequently after Kenya went with her mother to the library downtown, where they listened to a woman named Audre Lorde read poems that did not rhyme.

“I don’t go in for that gay stuff,” Sheila told Johnbrown, “but everything else that sister said is all right by me.”

“She’s probably an FBI informant. A lot of those people are,” Johnbrown said.

“She certainly informed me about why I’m not ironing your shirts or pouring your cereal anymore.”

“What people?” asked Kenya, but no one answered.

Shortly after that conversation Sheila moved from cooking an unpredictable array of fatty, fancy meals into a rigid dinner schedule featuring flavorless baked fish on Mondays accompanied by a glop of spinach, and hot dogs with a gross salad on Saturday nights.

“I’m not a housewife and I’m not the cook,” she announced defensively when Kenya and her father poked at their iceberg lettuce. “Eat until you’re full.”

Kenya considered it a mercy that their tradition of Sunday-morning pancakes remained.

There was another ancient fight, this one always started by Johnbrown. It was
You Don’t Need Me Anyway
. Shortly after Charlena had confided her fears about her parents’ splitting up, Kenya was up in her room practicing jacks when
You Don’t Need Me
broke out. It was because of Charlena’s parents’ imminent divorce that she ran downstairs yelling, “We need you! We need you!” and grabbed her father’s leg. He ignored her, bulging his eyes in the direction of her mother, who said, “Upstairs, Kenya.”

“Stop fighting!”

“We’re having a discussion,” her father said through gritted teeth, trying to shake her off.

“I won’t go until you stop having it!”

“Oh yes you will,” her mother said, folding her arms, and of course she was right. “And don’t be sitting up there at the top listening to grown folks talk!” she called, but she didn’t need to yell, because Kenya could hear her very clearly from her perch at the top of the stairs.

“Just don’t get a divorce,” yelled Kenya, before going into her room.

“We can’t,” her father’s voice floated up. Then he laughed. She heard her mother laugh, too, then say quietly, “You think you’re funny, Johnbrown.”

*   *   *

The shame of being alive
was a phrase Kenya would hear in her father’s voice; it wafted in and out of her consciousness like the chorus of a song. What he meant by this it took her years to understand, since just as often he said, “Sure, that’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Things that were “nothing to be ashamed of” included bodily functions, growing up poor, as her mother had, and feeling lonely, as her father had when he was a child. And of course, though both white folks and some black—like his parents—tried to make you feel it, there was certainly no shame in being black. But during the time of her supposed stewardship of Duvall (which only amounted to her trying not to hate him) and the time of joylessly making out with Charlena, Kenya came into increasing consciousness of how fitting it was that Johnbrown had provided the language for this shame. After all, he and Sheila had created a world of opportunity for her to experience it.

In December of Kenya’s fourth-grade year, Sheila decided that she would use her library connections to stage a Kwanzaa presentation with the Seven Days at the library on Fifty-Second Street, a few blocks away from their house. When it came time to start on that Saturday afternoon, the small Programs Room on the first floor suddenly looked big as a ragged handful of families scattered themselves among the rows and rows of chairs. Kenya counted technically more participants than Seven Days, though it certainly didn’t feel that way. And then, on the border between presenter and participant, there was an enthusiastic drunk in a bright red wool cap with a surprising amount of knowledge about Kwanzaa. “Ujima!” he shouted as Sheila lit a red candle, before she’d even had a chance to name the principle. “Ku-uuuuuuuuu-maaaa-baaaaa!” he growled, giving the word an extra syllable. Sheila ignored him, her jaw growing steely. Johnbrown stared into the middle distance.

As her parents and their friends took up a chant that Yaya had designed to help the day care kids memorize the principles, Kenya’s eye was suddenly drawn to the cracked-open door. There stood an openmouthed L’Tisha Simmons and her mother. The two sported the same ponytail, spiky with escaping bits of straightened hair, and even though L’Tisha was only nine, they also wore matching leather pants. At L’Tisha’s side was her minion Fatima.

Kenya could see herself in the girls’ eyes, sporting an orange, yellow, and brown dashiki and a forehead-straining vertical braided hairstyle that was her mother’s imitation of an African mask. The chanting and clapping were not loud enough to drown out the sound of L’Tisha and Fatima laughing, or the sound of L’Tisha’s mother admonishing the girls for having
no class
.

L’Tisha’s laughter was the soundtrack to the shame of being alive; it burned Kenya’s stomach and cheeks even when L’Tisha was clearly not laughing at her. There had been one time, which Kenya recalled desperately as the Kwanzaa presentation dragged on, one incredible time when L’Tisha had laughed because Kenya made a joke. Before Duvall became her charge, she had said his breath smelled like cheddar cheese and L’Tisha had howled. Kenya had floated for the rest of the day.

Actually, Kenya wasn’t sure which was worse, being laughed or gawked at, or simply being in a place where shame coated the walls, floor, and ceiling. In February, a week after she turned ten, Kenya’s parents took her to a Black History Month celebration that had been advertised in
The Philadelphia Tribune
. It was at a poorly heated community center in North Philadelphia where Johnbrown had gone to the occasional Black Marxist meeting. Kenya’s fingers grew stiff with cold that night as she watched presenter after presenter make the same joke about the shortest month of the year. A giant man wearing a beret and a green army jacket who reminded her of Brother Camden brandished a flyer about salmonella poisoning and repurposed kangaroo meat in the chicken at McDonald’s. Then a spotty filmstrip about a black junkie named Charlie got chewed up in the projector. Taking up the theme of the destroyed film, a black-clad man did a mime performance about being trapped in a box. The box, he said, was heroin. Finally, two women in colorful bikinis jumped around to some Africanish disco music. As their dance was winding down, they invited people from the audience to get up with them. Many of the men went, including Johnbrown, who jutted his hip bones forward and waved his hands in the air. Sheila’s mouth closed in a line. One of the women’s tops fell open and a thin breast jumped out. As the minutes passed, Kenya veered wildly between the desires to laugh and to cry; she fought a mounting nausea.

At least L’Tisha wasn’t there laughing and saying “boogeddy-boo.” But she was there in school the afternoon Duvall raised his hand the way he always did, abruptly and with the force of a rocket.

“Mrs. Preston, my stomach hurts and I really have to go to the bathroom.”

“Boy, you just went to the bathroom!”

“I know, but my
stomach hurts
.”

“Duvall has to fart!” yelled a boy whose intriguing name was Aaron Hurt.

“Aaron said I had to fart,” said Duvall.

“Boy, you do have to fart!” snapped Mrs. Preston. “Go do it in the bathroom!”

Without meaning to, Kenya gasped at the teacher’s meanness. She looked around to see if anyone had heard. There was L’Tisha, three desks away, smiling.

As Duvall ran out to the bathroom clutching the seat of his pants, Kenya heard quiet singing: “Kenya and Duvall, Duvall and Kenya, doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it…” It was as if the class knew that Kenya was supposed to speak up for Duvall even though she certainly hadn’t and, despite what Brother Camden and her parents said, she certainly never would. It was as if the class was punishing her for being a coward.

The song caught fire and followed Kenya for days. She had to weep in front of Mrs. Preston to make it stop.

*   *   *

The spring of that year, 1985, brought small victories. Kenya finally eked her way into Charlena’s reading group. But so had a boy with large yellow teeth named Allmon, which dampened the triumph. Kenya did, however, beat them both at the spelling bee. She tried her best to be humble about it, because it seemed that this was the stylish way to win.