Leaving: A Novel (3 page)

At the end of the three minutes, the door to the quiet room slowly cracked open.

“Have a seat, Love. Your sit-time will start now.” Love sat in the corner with his knees up to his chest. Dark tracks of dried tears streaked his face. He could not see Tom through the open door, only the rope held taut across the space and a leg of the plastic chair.

Love sat silently for twenty minutes. His breathing slowed. He knew the inside of the quiet-room intimately but examined it again, every scratch mark on the walls, every stain in the carpet from some kid urinating or defecating. There was a Plexiglas ceiling over the lightbulb and a vent for letting in air. Behind the vent, a fan turned with a slight hum and ticking, light cutting through it as it spun. He counted the ticks, trying to beat his own personal best, but repeatedly lost count before three hundred. He heard Tom turn the page of a magazine and tap his foot.

“Did I b-l-i-n-d him?” Love spelled softly. The rope went slack and Tom nudged the door open wider. Tom had worked with Love since the boy had arrived at Los Aspirantes four years earlier They could see each other completely now. Tom had a red splotch on his forehead.

“Are ya worried ya mighta hurt Rick?” Tom asked.

Love shrugged his pointy shoulders.

“So ya think ya blinded him?”

“I cut his eye.”

“How does that make ya feel?”

Love shrugged again. They both watched a spider walk across the wooden strip in the doorway.

“Can ya tell me how ya feel about cuttin his eye?”

“T-r-e-m-e-n-d-o-u-s,” Love spelled.

“Ya don’t look tremendous.”

“You can’t tell me how I feel, dog!”

“I didn’t tell ya how ya feel; I told ya how ya look. Don’t ya think your anger has anything ta do with ya havin ta leave?”

Love puckered his lips and sucked in through his nose. Tom yanked the rope taut, but before the door slammed shut, Love spat a wad of saliva that hit Tom in the knee.

“No, Bitch!”

SANTA RITA JAIL

HE CAME TO
the front of the recreation room, stood on the table, and spoke to the men:

We were not the first people to be slaves, and we won’t be the last. But all the knowledge about slavery—about how to break a man down, how to keep us in check, how to make us forget we ever had the power or right to be free—all the experience with slave-making, from the time the Jews were slaves in Egypt and before that, went into our enslavement. If you want to know how to make a slave the right way, you can learn from the past. And if you want to learn how to be a free man, you’ve got to learn from the past too. The most dangerous part of having been a slave is not knowing what it means to be free. You’ve got to know how you were robbed, know what was taken, before you can get it back.

What’s slavery got to do with me? you ask. That foolishness ended a hundred and fifty years ago; what’s that got to do with me sitting in jail right now, over a decade into the new millennium? Didn’t we leave all that behind us?

I know what you’re thinking: what’s that got to do with me lightin up, or bustin a cap into some punk’s head, or my father taking a switch to my ass? You say, not all Black men are in jail, in fact most are not, so it must be my own damn fault that I’m here and not CEO of Ford Motor Company, or a congressman, or a lawyer, or a teacher, or a busboy.

And it is.

You heard me: it is.

And it ain’t.

It is and it ain’t.

You are an individual, but you are on a raft. The limits of that raft are the limits of who you think you are and how you think you have to be. That’s true if you’re Black, White, Red, Brown, or Yellow. Right now you don’t even see that you’re on a raft. You don’t know that your raft is floating down a river, the River of History, and that the events of the past have surrounded you and brought you to this place, and that unless you get off of this raft, you are going to stay in the course the River has been pushing you. But first you’ve got to recognize that you’re on a raft, and to see how the River has surrounded you to make you believe in your limitations. You must know rivers.

I’m calling you from the shore.

I’m telling you to dive into your history. It’s your job to learn about that River, how wide it is, how strong the current is. Without the knowledge of the past, you’re likely to drown in it by making the same mistakes as those who came before you, or jump right back onto that raft, and worse yet, pace back and forth on that raft forever, like a beast in this jail-cage, until it takes you right over the edge.

CHAPTER 2A

1959   •   CORBET 49, RUBY 21, LOVE E 13

TO RUBY, THE
inside of GI Bill on Cranston Avenue was like a church. Not a church she had been in, but the way she believed a church should be, beautiful and frightening, with polished wood floors and high ceilings. The front windows arched across most of the living room wall facing the street, and the burgundy lace curtains blossomed in an intricate pattern of roses and thorny stems.

“I told your mother she should come on out with you,” Corbet said, as he took them on a tour of their new home. “If you were in so much danger, why was she so safe? I asked her. But she said she wouldn’t be herself if she left the South. I said, ‘Elise, I don’t think that would be such a bad thing,’ but she didn’t take to that.” Behind the living room was a large kitchen with wooden cabinets and a fancy refrigerator that made its own ice cubes.

“I sure hope your mother taught you to cook,” he said to Ruby. “I miss pork chops with mustard and onions, and fried chitlins. All Saul knows how to fix is spaghetti and soup.” He stood up straight and looked directly at her. “Besides, there are a lot of people who’ll hire a woman who can cook and clean.”

“She’s not a maid,” Easton spat out. “She’s a seamstress.”

“Hush,” Ruby whispered. “I do all the cookin an cleanin you want. An I serve up some fancy corn fritters when I put my mine to it.”

“Très bien, car je suis affamé.”

Easton raised his eyebrows and laughed, not a sincere laugh but forced, like he was trying to insult Corbet and make something happen. He covered his mouth and waited. Ruby watched Corbet to see what he would do. There was no question what Papa Samuel would have done if Easton had laughed at him: he would have picked up the iron that sat on the counter and thrashed him across the face with the cord.

Corbet walked to Easton slowly. He raised his hand in the air and Easton closed his eyes.

“Est-ce que j’ai l’air stupide?”

Easton opened his eyes.

“Repeat after me,” Corbet said. “Raise your hand and repeat.”

Easton raised his hand.

“Je suis un nègre et j’en suis fier.”

Easton laughed again, then tried it.

“Well, listen to you, a regular man of the underground. A man of the Resistance.”

*   *   *

THE UPSTAIRS HAD
three bedrooms. Corbet told them to drop their trunk in the front room to the left and said that Easton could have the room across the hall. They were not to go into the back room because that was Saul’s. But he knew better than to tempt curiosity, so he opened the door and showed them. In the corner was a rolltop desk next to a bookcase and, on the far side, a dresser with black slacks folded on it. The room had all the fixings of a bedroom, without a bed.

“Where’s he sleep?” Easton asked.

“He stays with me when he’s here.” Corbet closed the door firmly and didn’t offer any more explanation. He took them back to Ruby’s new room to get them set up.

Within a week of their arrival, Ruby had her sewing machine running all day while Corbet went to his job at the docks. They’d enrolled Easton at McClymonds. The school was integrated, which he had never experienced, but still there were very few White children. Out of thirty-five students in his class, five were White, two were Chinese, and one Japanese.

He quickly found his favorite class. His math teacher, Miss Claudia Grossbalm, was young and serious. She paced across the front of the room with her head down, her dress pressed against her body by the force of her movement, deep into her explanation of an algebraic equation as though she were rediscovering her own religious conviction; at times she would even raise the math book in the air like a Bible, revealing small stains of sweat under her arms. She was strict with the boys in the back and didn’t take any of their lip, strong and curt, the way Easton had never seen a White woman act before.

“Quiet, Mr. Waters,” she chastised a boy whom most teachers ignored out of fear. But she continued with her lesson, and he had no opening to respond, for she was not confronting him, simply pushing aside an obstacle in the way of her mathematical quest.

“Now!” She turned to the class suddenly, breathing hard through her nose and looking out over the faces with passionate and hopeful eyes. “Who can tell me how to find twenty-five percent of XY when X equals five and Y equals one-half X?” There was a silence so strong it sucked at the marrow of every student. Easton could not bear to see the slow transformation from rapture to despair on Miss Grossbalm’s face. He could not help but raise his hand.

“Yes, Mr. Childers.” He stood, as he had been taught to do in Norma, and a few kids chuckled. He felt the eyes from the back row upon him, yet the smile of anticipation on Miss Grossbalm’s lips drew him on.

“Point two five times five times two point five.”

“Yes, and then?” She practically ran to the board to write out his equation.

“Uppity nigger,” he heard from the back of the room. “Whitey.” He was lighter-skinned than most of his family, but he’d always seen that as a source of pride.

Miss Grossbalm turned. “Mr. Waters, stand up.”

“But it wasn’t me,” Charles Waters said without conviction. She never involved herself in a tug-of-war. If it wasn’t him, it was one of his lackeys.

“Stand up and come here to the board to finish this equation.”

At this challenge, Charles stood, pulled his shirt out of his pants, and swaggered up the aisle toward the front of the room where Miss Grossbalm held out the chalk. It took him a long time to make it to the front row. He forced a confident smile, but everyone knew he could not possibly solve the equation. As he passed Easton, he covered his mouth and coughed into his hand: “Daddy’s a homo.” The rest of the class laughed. Charles sneezed, “Up the ass.”

Easton knew the time would come when he’d have to settle into the pecking order with the back-row boys, and the sooner he got that over with, the better. He grabbed Charles by the hair and brought his face down onto his knee with the solid force that ensured he and Charles would become close friends in the future. At that time, kids in Oakland didn’t carry knives like everyone did in Norma, so the whole class screamed when Easton pulled a blade out of his back pocket and brandished it toward the rest of the back row. Charles was still on the ground when Miss Grossbalm walked directly to Easton and took the knife from his hand. That’s when he knew he was in love. She led him by the wrist and walked him to the principal’s office.

He was suspended for a day. It would have been much longer had Miss Grossbalm not explained that Mr. Waters had antagonized him, which was no surprise to the principal. But he did punish Easton for bringing a knife to school, and he did call Corbet.

For this act of self-defense, Papa Samuel would have been proud of him, not for being suspended—for that, he still would have gotten a whipping—but for having fought back and won. However, Corbet was different in every way from Papa Samuel, and Easton didn’t know what to expect.

*   *   *

WHEN EASTON RETURNED
home, Corbet sat him down on the couch in the living room and then went to his rocking chair. Ruby came up behind Easton and put her hands on his shoulders, watching her father carefully. He pinched tobacco between his thumb and forefinger and ground it into his pipe very slowly, as if he were squeezing the life out of it. He lit the pipe and leaned back in his chair. Easton wiped his cheek repeatedly as he looked around the room for a switch or any long piece of wire. The only thing he saw was a thick leather belt, and that was still firmly wrapped around Corbet’s waist.

It was a long time before anyone spoke. Ruby shifted her weight a few times in the silence. Finally she said, “Sometimes I think we should jus tie all de boys to dey desks at school.” Corbet nodded his head slowly and took another drag from his pipe. The tobacco glowed orange for a moment. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been burned, Easton thought. Ruby continued: “But dat jus remine me of de racehorse dat all de folks love in Greenwood. Dis horse beat all de udder horses in town and beat all de horses out to Orangeburg County, an all de people love dis horse ’cause it be fast and beautiful, wid his shiny muscles on his legs. But when dis horse ain’t racin, it still had a whole lotta mischief. He always jumpin out de fence and runnin into someone’s field. He run ’round an et all de carrots and de turnips and run through de rice patties, an jus do a general stompin all over. It was jus in his nature to be wile. But de people got real mad ’cause dey losin dey crop. So de owner, he tie him up to de barn. Well de horse start neighin and kickin and makin all kind of a racket all night long. So de owner start to whip him to make him stop. But de horse jus get madder and madder. He stop while de man whip him, but when de man come out again, he see dat de barn door done been kicked down. So he made de horse lay down and he tied de animal’s legs to de stable. But dat nex night, de horse pull de ropes so hard, he break his own leg, and de nex day de man had to take him out an shoot him. Lose hisself a mighty fine racehorse.”

Easton looked at his sister in bewilderment.

“Tell me this,” Corbet said. “Who started it?”

Easton stood straight up in front of the couch, as though he were answering a question in the classroom. “I’ll tell you I sure enough finished it. He didn’t get a chance to hit me. Not one boy could take me in that whole school.”

“You sound awfully proud of yourself.”

“Yes sir.”