Leaving: A Novel (7 page)

“Don’t be shy,” she said.

“I ain’t shy.”

She unzipped the bottom of her jacket completely and let it swing open, revealing dark crescents of sweat under her breasts.

“What you like, then?” She smiled; her teeth were yellow with pieces of sunflower-seed shell caught between them.

“What you mean?”

“You know what I mean. What’s your pleasure?”

Love backed away from her. “You know who I am?” he asked.

“Sure, baby.”

“Who am I?” he demanded.

She looked away toward East 14th. “Listen, honey. Don’t play no games with me. You too young to be a cop. What you want? Or you got something for me?”

Love looked at a rust streak that ran down her jacket along the zipper to where she nervously picked at her nails with her thin, burnt fingers. Her eyes darted around the street for danger.

“Look at me,” Love said.

“I am.”

He fixed his eyes on hers. They were a dark hepatitis yellow. An airplane passed overhead and dampened all other sounds for a few seconds, as if they were standing in a private room. Neither of them spoke or moved. He begged her silently for recognition, but she continued to stare back at him vacantly. A car honked and drove past. Lida turned, then looked back to Love.

“Now tell me what you want?” she asked.

“I don’t want nothing,” Love said.

“Well, you missin out.” She turned and walked away, a pear-shaped stain on the butt of her pants.

She sat down on a parking block again. The brown Honda pulled out of its space and stopped in front of her. She stood and bent down to the window. The man inside cleared some papers from his passenger seat, and Lida went around and got in. The brake lights flickered and the car turned slowly onto East 14th.

Just as the car began to accelerate, a young kid in a silver and blue Dallas Cowboys jacket stood up from behind the stacked shopping carts and tossed a large brown beer bottle at the car. The bottle broke by the back tire and the car stopped short. The kid did not run. Instead he began walking toward the car with another bottle in his hand, barking like a wild dog: “Rah, rahr, rah.”

The car pulled off again.

Love stepped over the curb into the parking lot toward his brother. He approached him quickly with his hands at his sides. The boy did not see Love until he was a car length away.

“Li’l Pit,” Love yelled to him. His brother turned and raised the bottle. He barked at Love and bared his teeth: “Rah rahr rah, rah rahr rah.”

“Damn, bro, you still slobbering all up on yourself.”

“East Side Ace Trey!” Li’l Pit yelled.

“Drop that shit. You ain’t all that.”

Li’l Pit hurled the bottle in Love’s direction, missing by a foot.

“Shit, dog.” Love stayed in his place, careful not to step on any of the shards in his socks.

Now the little boy’s fists were clenched at his sides.

“Take him down, blood,” came a yell from the street. At the edge of the lot were the two kids on their bikes.

“East Side Ace Trey!” Li’l Pit yelled again, and glanced at his crew.

“They ain’t your blood, dog,” Love said. “You got your props with me.”

Love took a step toward him, and Li’l Pit didn’t step back. He stared him in the eye. He had a part shaved in his hair like a sickle.

“Shit, I raised you hard,” Love said.

“Go on, kick his ass, Li’l Pit,” the kid in the dark glasses yelled. Li’l Pit didn’t move. There was no breeze, and for a minute no one came or went from the market. Love watched Li’l Pit stare at the boys on the bikes as if hypnotized. And then the wind blew gently and the sun hit the windshield of a car entering the lot.

“Why don’t you come kick my ass yourself, dog?” Love yelled back. The kid threw down his bike and it bounced off the pavement. He pulled his blade from his belt and walked quickly toward Love. His partner with the orange headphones followed. Love flashed the West Side sign even though he wasn’t affiliated with them—middle and ring fingers crossed, thumb down—a bluff for protection.

As the East Side kids came across the lot, Li’l Pit also turned and faced them. They shed their flannels and strutted in their white tank tops. The boy with the sunglasses wore Love’s shoes. Love bent down and picked up the neck of the broken bottle beside him. He stepped toward the kid with the knife, looking him straight in the eye. The kid stopped, as if surprised this guy hadn’t run away yet.

“I’m gonna fuck you up,” the boy said.

Love took a step forward.

“You gonna wish you stayed up wherever you been hiding,” said the kid with the headphones.

“I’m gonna—” the first boy started to say, but Love ran at him, the bottle in his hand. The boy stepped aside and slashed at him with the knife, but Love didn’t slow down. He kept running past him, across the lot. The boy with the knife laughed, and his friend laughed with him.

“That’s right, punk,” the boy yelled, and they laughed harder until they saw Love grab one of the dirt bikes. Then they ran after him, all three of them.

Love threw his bottle and sped up High Street past the telephone booth. He rode standing in his socks. The air felt good on his face. He heard the pedaling of the other bike behind him, but he didn’t waste time to see how far back it was. He would keep riding until he saw the 580 and then turn; then they would be far enough away that it would only be one person to fight. He tried to remember what it was like to be in a full-on brawl without staff to break it up. How did you know when to stop? How did you keep from killing each other? He would go for the throat, choke him until he passed out so he didn’t have to keep fighting.

Love got to the overpass, stopped, and turned. Li’l Pit came right at him, howling at the top of his lungs like a young coyote. But he didn’t slow down. He sped past Love, jumping the curb onto the sidewalk. Love mounted his bike again and followed, catching up to him just as they turned on to MacArthur, and they headed west together.

SANTA RITA JAIL

AND HE CAME
to the front of the recreation room and stood on the table with a book in his hand:

So we are brought ashore and we don’t know where our wives and sisters are. We have been unloaded separately, and when we call out to them, we are flogged. It is forbidden to speak in our languages. And even when we find a secret moment, the Africans around us are from different tribes and do not speak our language. That’s right, we have a tribe, we have a history and place of origin. That is why some of us are tall and thin, some of us are round and thick, and some in-between.

Do you know your tribe, brothers? Have you ever thought of yourself as anything but the children of slaves, with no history but that of an inferior and victimized race? Are you Baul, the great musicians of Africa; Zulu, the master iron-smelting spear-makers whose soldiers could not marry until they were forty; Mandingo, Wolof, Serer, Fula, Fanti, or Ashanti. Are you from Dahomey with their awesome female warriors, or of their enemy, the Yoruba of Oyo, artisans secured behind the village walls, whose king had to commit suicide if he had a vote of no confidence—now that’s Power to the People!

When we get off this ship, we still have our history within us, but we will not be allowed to tell it to our children. They will never know the accomplishments of our people. We will not be allowed to pass down the songs that teach of our tribes’ battles, the dances that tell of how the world began, or the sciences our ancestors discovered: how to make powder from the dried leaves of the baobab tree to cure dysentery; how to use the pyrethrum plant as an insecticide that doesn’t hurt animals and to which insects cannot develop immunity; how to use the leaves of the shea-butter for headaches. The Europeans would not have even been able to colonize Africa if they hadn’t learned from us that quinine from the cinchona bark could cure malaria. By losing the language, we lost the religion, the food, the crafts of building and farming, the art of our tribes’ baskets and healing.

We once held a position in our village: we were the scientist, the reader of the sky, who knew if there would be rain or drought this season by the smell of the wind and the cloud formations; or the zoologist, a Pygmy animal tracker, who knew the difference between a deer and an antelope dropping, between the paw print of a jaguar and the paw print of a lion. Or we were the slaves of another tribe; yes we might have been slaves of Black people, but we had respect, we had dignity, and we kept our culture to pass down to our children. In America, all will be wiped out, our children are given a new set of rules. Everything wise and powerful will seem to have been created by the White man.

CHAPTER 4

FEBRUARY 1963   •   EASTON 17

EASTON SAT ON
the brick steps of the university’s West Lawn. He and the other protesters had gathered there, a few blocks away from Woolcrest’s. It was seven-thirty in the morning and the store had already opened. High up to the left, the white fog drifted through the top branches of the eucalyptus grove with a silence that made him shiver. He rubbed his hands together, stood up, then sat down again.

“Shit. Let’s go already.”

Ken Weaver yawned and sat down next to him. Ken was one of the Black leaders of the march. He wore sunglasses and a white cardigan sweater, V-necked with blue stripes, his hair cut short and neat.

“You nigga motherfucker shit coon pussy,” he said to Easton. “Go back home to Africa.”

“Morning, Ken.”

“Black ape.”

“You’re not a completely convincing bigot.” Easton smiled cordially.

Ken took a sip of his coffee and let out a loud, satisfied sigh. A police car drove by on Oxford Street, the single top-hat siren unlit.

“Just remember,” Ken said. “No matter how hard it is, we’re trying to make friends out of our enemies.”

“I’ve done this before,” Easton said. He’d joined the Congress for Racial Equality six months earlier, after Charles told him about it. Since then he’d participated in a protest every month. “The store is open already. We should go.”

“Patience. Not everyone’s here yet, and we have to finish the signs. Why don’t you go help.”

Easton stood up and walked over to the circular brick bench from which he could watch Sandra kneeling down in her gray skirt, drawing large letters on a picket sign. The blond hair on her calves stood up in the cold, but she was concentrating on making the large, round “u” in prejudice.

They’d talked once before, at another rally, when he’d placed himself next to her in the song chain so they could hold hands. She’d raised their clenched fists in the air together, and he stared at their interlocking fingers.

“I hope my father’s watching the news,” she had said to him. “He’ll probably think we’re having sex.” She was a freshman at the university and a year older than he, originally from Oregon. In Norma, he might have been shot just for standing so close to her.

“This is what I say we do.” Charles’s voice shook Easton out of his memory. They were both watching Sandra.

“There is no
we
here,” Easton said. “There’s me and there’s her.”

“Her? I’m not after no white meat.”

“Sure.”

“Listen,” said Charles. “I’m serious now. I’m talking about the cops. See, the cops expect all of us niggers to be scared and just let the White kids in our group scream and shout, ’cause the White kids don’t have anything to lose. But the funny thing is, it’s really us that don’t have anything to lose, right? But they don’t get it. We have to scare them until they realize we’re really angry, that they’re hurting us and we’re going to hurt them back if they don’t stop it.”

“Why do you think someone like her is doing this?” Easton asked.

“Listen to me, man, I’m serious. None of this ‘keep your mouth shut, be they friend’ shit.”

Sandra started another card and flipped her short ponytail over her shoulder so that her neck showed above the white collar.

Charles continued, “Malcolm said it’s fine to be nonviolent, and if everybody’d lay down their guns, then he’d lay down his gun. But if people are still shooting at you, you got to defend yourself.”

“That’s true. That’s true,” Ken said as he came over, nodding his head. Easton watched Sandra as the other two got into it again. “But we’re doing our damage economically. Nobody ever got anywhere but dead fighting with their fists against the oppressor.”

“I guess you never heard of the Civil War.”

“I guess you never heard of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Gandhi, or Thoreau.”

Easton stood and left the two to their endless debate. He walked over to Sandra, around to the front of the cards, his hands in his pockets.

Easton cleared his throat. “Need some help?”

“Oh. No. You don’t have to do anything. I’ve got it.” Her fingernails were perfect half-moons, polished clear and smooth. She pressed on the brown Magic Marker and filled in the circle of an exclamation point.

“I just want to get started,” he said. “Please, give me something to do.”

“Here, take these signs and nail them to those crosses.”

Easton sat and collected the signs. “Did your father see us holding hands?” he asked as he hammered.

She smiled and her ears turned red, almost translucent at the curl. “No. No, he didn’t see it.”

“Well, maybe today.”

“Yeah.” She put the marker away and sat up, considering her work. “How’s that look?”

He moved around next to her and his heart quickened. “Good. But you spell abolish with an “o,” don’t you?”

“Do you?” She scribbled out the tail of the second “a.”

“I’m not carrying that one,” he said.

“No. I’ll carry it. I never was so good in spelling. I’m hoping you don’t have to spell to be an anthropologist.” They were so close that the skin of their arms almost touched. She turned and looked at his face, around his forehead and cheeks, at his lips and hair. He smelled her perfume, a clean alcohol smell, not sweet like his sister’s vanilla oil.

“Any other corrections?” she asked. He sifted through the signs intently, as if he were looking for a winning ticket to the lottery. He could feel her eyes on him but was afraid to turn and see.