Hold Love Strong (16 page)

W
ith the thirty-five other students in my third period World History class, I was jammed in, squeezed beside, and confined by walls of cinderblock painted pale green. We had a total of fourteen incongruous textbooks. All were published before we were born, so some of the maps, country names, and truths were wrong. They remained stacked on our teacher's bowed metal desk. There were twenty desks. I was one of the privileged who got to sit by himself at one. I sat in the back left corner, the seat closest to the soot-streaked, metal-grate-covered window that fractured but did not thwart the near noon sun beaming across the warped wood floor. At the front of the room stood our teacher, Mr. Cullen, a heavyset, ruddy-faced fifty-something-year-old Irish man who addressed each student in class by his or her surname and savored junk food like every Oreo was a purveyor of perpetual strength, each M&M a capsule of the fountain of youth, every potato chip an endless oral orgasm that didn't leave him drowsy. He leaned against the dusty
chalkboard and read from the handout he had passed around the room. It was a photocopy of a newspaper article from the previous Friday. Bill Cosby's son, Ennis, had been murdered on the side of a Los Angeles highway.

“You mean some white nigga killed Theo?” exploded Taquanna, who was even louder and more caustic than she was when we were children, and whose body and disposition had become a stack of broken bass speakers: a big square body, a big square head with square eyes, and a square mouth that radiated squelchy pounding.

“You stupid,” sighed Precious, sitting beside Titty at the desk in front of me.

“What you mean I'm stupid?” snapped Taquanna, swiveling around in her seat beside Kaya at the front of the room. “You the nigga who's dumb! Ain't Theo Bill Cosby's son?”

“This is his real son,” said Mr. Cullen.

“Why niggas always got to get shot?” Kitchen asked from the last seat in the row next to me.

“Cause that's the way it is,” announced Yusef.

“It's racist,” Kitchen decided, settling on the label he assigned everything that was either inhumane or difficult to explain.

“Bill Cosby's son?” asked Titty, returning from a daydream so just realizing the topic of conversation. He swigged from a bottle of orange soda, his face the same round baby face of his youth, still flabby and fat but adorned with a faint moustache. “I thought the Huxtables was rich.”

“Nigga, ain't no money protect no niggas from getting killed,” said Yusef. “Look at Tupac. Ain't none of us safe.”

“He in a gang or something?” asked Taquanna.

“Theo wasn't in no gang,” Titty dismissed, his brow and eyes folded like fabric.

“Ennis,” corrected Mr. Cullen. “This is Bill Cosby's real son.”

“So you saying only
real
niggas get killed?” Precious asked. “Like Martin Luther King?”

“No,” said Mr. Cullen. “I'm saying—”

“Like Jeremiah?” burst Titty.

“Who?” said Mr. Cullen.

“My cousin,” said Titty. “That nigga was a angel.”

There was a moment of silence in which we were not students in a classroom but witnesses, survivors of perpetual funeral processions. Who would survive that day, that year? Who would live to twenty, twenty-five, fifty? How many of us would be blessed with death by natural causes? Mr. Cullen took his always present can of diet soda from the blackboard's chalk shelf and sipped its plastic straw.

“So why we reading this?” Taquanna demanded, waving her handout in the air as if desperate to surrender. “Why I got to care?”

“We surrounded by enemies,” Yusef sadly surmised. “A nigga can't even be rich and not get killed.”

“Even Cosby's real son,” said Precious, shaking his head. “I thought white people loved Bill Cosby. He's on TV and everything.”

“So what's the solution?” Mr. Cullen asked, his voice tinged with apathy.

“Solution?” Taquanna crashed. “There ain't no solution to people acting stupid.”

“You tell us,” Yusef told Mr. Cullen in an accusatorial tone, scoffing at the possibility that a man from Long Island who always smelled like fresh-cut grass could grasp what murder meant. “You the one who's white. Ain't none of you getting shot.”

Mr. Cullen glanced at Yusef then decided to ignore his provocation. “Come on,” he begged everyone in the room. “Are you just going to say people kill each other? That's it? No, there's got to be a way. Take a second. Imagine you're the mayor of a city where there is a high murder rate. Better yet, imagine you're the president. Tell me. How do we stop young men from killing each other?”

“We don't,” said Taquanna. “I mean please, shit. It ain't like you can teach someone not to do it.”

“Why not?” Mr. Cullen asked.

“Cause you just can't,” Taquanna said. “I mean everyone knows it ain't right. But that don't stop them.”

“You got to teach people who they are,” announced Kaya from her seat at the front of the room. “Like Timbuktu.”

“That ain't no real place,” said Kitchen.

“Yeah it is,” said Kaya. She looked at our teacher. “Mr. Cullen, ain't Timbuktu real?”

Suddenly, the bell rang and everyone leapt from his or her seat, the squeak and screech of our desks and chairs trumpeting our rush to exit.

“Wait! Wait!” Mr. Cullen shouted, waving his hands over his head, his voice swallowed by our sound, the sound of students exiting other classes, and our collective echo pouring through the hallway. “You tell me! Ladies! Gentlemen! For homework! Timbuktu! Tomorrow, be prepared to tell me if Timbuktu is true.”

W
ithout a doubt, our table was the loudest, most dramatic table in the cafeteria. Sure, other tables had their rumblings, their occasional disputes, their celebrations. But our explosions were a daily happening. We exploded in political, cultural, and economic discussion. And in irrelevant ones. We clashed over who was the most beautiful sister. We boomed about rap music. Some accused while others denied. The salacious happenings at school, who breathed heavy on who, who was humbled by a cold shoulder, and who mistook five minutes of unsatisfying sex in the school boiler room or topmost stairwell plateau for making slow and sweaty love all night long: we made it all a jubilee. We were the rowdiest waltzers at the dance. We spoke with tongues of Christmases and Fourth of Julys. We were Ever Park brothers, revolutions in the name of an imperative cause. We sat jammed together. Elbows, plastic trays, and the remnants of eaten food, wrappers, tinfoil, balled napkins, and plastic utensils covered the table. We ate. We
talked. We breathed. Precious sat at the outside corner of the table. Titty sat across from him. Yusef sat to Titty's left. I sat to his.

Titty reached in front of Yusef 's face and snatched a handful of French fries from my Styrofoam tray.

“No ketchup?” he asked.

“Nigga,” scolded Precious, ignoring Titty's thievery, his shining brown eyes pinned on me. “Who eats fries with no ketchup?”

“I do,” I said.

“Shut your face!” Precious said, his eyes wide. “You don't eat no fries with no ketchup.”

“How do you know?” asked Yusef, coming to my defense.

“Because I seen him,” Precious said.

“When?” said Yusef, pushing his glasses back on his nose then folding his arms across his chest.

“McDonald's,” Titty mumbled, his mouth full of food.

“McDonald's?” Yusef said, his voice shrill with surprise. “That big imperial bitch? Nigga, I've never eaten McDonald's in my life!”

“Not you,” said Titty. “Abraham.”

“Liar!” bellowed Kitchen, sitting to my left, his face weathered, pimpled and pocked from having to shave against the grain of the thick, rough beard that covered his face in order to earn the smooth skin everyone our age owned.

“Who's a liar?” said Yusef.

“You!” said Precious. “You just ate McDonald's yesterday.”

“Nigga,” said Yusef. “If there are two things I don't eat, it's fast food and pussy!”

“Liar!” said Kitchen again, pounding his thick hand on the table. “Liar!”

Suddenly I recalled that I didn't do the homework for math class and I looked at Yusef.

“What?” he asked.

“You got the math?” I asked.

A mischievous smile seeped across Yusef 's face. “Kaya's got it,” he said.

Everyone at our table went silent. Kaya King had become my month of March, lion and lamb, the cusp of spring and its irrepressible birthing; that is, whatever she wanted to do to me she did. She was my girlfriend but not my girlfriend. She liked me but didn't need me. Some days we'd have conversations that lasted for hours. Some days she wouldn't so much as sigh in my direction. Sometimes I'd smile at her. Others I couldn't stop looking at her, staring, my face blank. Kaya needed nothing to fortify her, not a single compliment nor sweet whisper, not a boyfriend, man-friend, nor child of her own. And she never had a problem making such things clear to me. She said it, walked it, and sat in class with it, the flag of a correct answer, her right hand, always primed to burst into the sky. Kaya made my tongue butter and my wants attach themselves to her wildest dreams. She was no longer that little girl I had a crush on. She was a woman. That is, she owned being. She didn't just participate, carry, or control it. Every time she settled her eyes on me a warm and deep river rose up from my soul and consumed me. My friends perceived this tension to be sexual. But what it was was the confrontation and contemplation of two determined forces weighing and measuring each other.

“You know,” said Precious. “I'm getting real tired of your ass sitting back and just looking. Nigga, you need to step up and put it to Kaya. No more fucking around. It's damn near the twenty-first century. What the fuck you waiting for?”

“I ain't waiting on nothing,” I shrugged.

“Nigga's scared,” said Titty. “He was scared when we was little and nigga's scared now. Don't even waste your breath on him. Abraham ain't never gonna do shit. Nigga nuts in his pants just from knowing Kaya lives in Ever too.”

“See,” I said, shooting my eyes at Titty. “You always talking shit. But what about you?”

Titty erupted. “I tear pussies up. I beat on them like my first name's Jack and my last name's Hammer. You feel me?”

“Then tell me three parts,” I laughed. “Go ahead. Name three parts of a vagina.”

“Vagina?” laughed Yusef, his eyes squeezed closed and shaking his head as if trying to rid the smile from his face. “Nigga, only you would call that shit a vagina.”

“Name three parts,” I demanded.

“Lips,” said Yusef.

“Titty,” I said, making it clear my challenge was only meant for him.

Titty thought as hard as he could. He furrowed his brow then pursed his lips. “Eyes, ears, and mouth, I don't know,” he listed. “Shit, what does it matter? I know what to do with the shit.”

We laughed. Then, to cap off my victory and to prove I wasn't scared, and as if my mind weren't spinning, I stood up and walked toward the table where Kaya and her friends sat. Unlike our table, theirs was always clean and organized. There was never any trash, never an empty tray or wrapper or a drip of dropped food. The floor around them and beneath their feet shined. Their space was immaculate. They were immaculate. Their hair, their clothing, the gleam in their eyes; all of it was in its perfectly proper place. They were the same age as us, but there was no doubt Kaya and her friends were light years ahead. That is, we were certainly young men, but although some of us were intelligent, and some of us were physically attractive, and some of us were charming, we were immature, spontaneously unruly, brash and disorganized. And they were never afraid to let us know, highlight each of our shortcomings and identify the traits we had to aim for. Of course, we were guilty. But in defense of ourselves, we surmised that any girl and/or
woman who didn't revere us was either a lesbian or an elitist. It was a weak defense, the weakest of weak defenses, but even if we were not sure we were right, we never let ourselves be wrong. We couldn't be. It was impossible. We were still alive, weren't we? And we were in school. So we were loud because we could be loud; because we had time to be loud; because it was our table and we were what the whole upcoming Black History Month was about; young, free, getting our equal education. Weren't we?

Kaya and her friends didn't see me coming, or at least it didn't seem like they did, although they might have known I was coming all along. Either way, they didn't look up or stop talking when I came near.

“You go to war,” Kaya said, making eye contact with everyone at the table, “for love.”

They might have been discussing something from the news or a movie, a book, or TV show. They might have been discussing a song, a ballad, Homer's
Iliad
and
Odyssey,
the creation of Islam, the spread of Christianity, patriotism, or the lyrics of a collaboration between a gruff-voiced rapper and a velvet-throated soulstress who clenched her fists and stomped her feet every time she reached deep into her chest for a high note. Or maybe they were discussing two people we knew.

“Abraham,” Kaya said, suddenly looking at me and speaking with the same level of passion she'd just spoken with. “What you doing?”

I smiled, tried to play cool. “What you mean what am I doing?” I asked.

“After school,” Kaya stressed. “You gonna go look up Timbuktu?”

“I don't know,” I said. “You?”

“I already know it. Besides I got to read for English.”

“You gonna go to the library?” I asked.

Kaya screwed her eyes at me. “What you think?”

Kaya was always at the library. She sat in the farthest cubicle from
the front door and stayed there, hunched over, headphones pulsing music into her ears until all of her homework was not only finished, but written without smudge marks, crossouts, or crinkles in the page. How could I have forgotten such a thing? Suddenly, I froze. I was off balance. I stuttered. I shrugged. I feared someone, maybe Taquanna, would demand to know why I wanted to know if Kaya was going to be at the library. What did I care? And what was I doing there anyway?

Behind me, my friends exploded. They slapped the table with their hands, threw their chins in the air, laughed so hard some fell out of their chairs.

“A damn shame,” Yusef called out.

“I told you nigga's scared,” added Titty.

Scared?
I thought.
I ain't scared of nothing.