“Alexander!” Bam! Right on time. “You’re looking good!” My father had on his best smile as he slid into the booth. Donald Scott, weatherman, had on a brown sport jacket, blue shirt, and dark slacks. I had on my New York Knicks sweatshirt.
“How you doing?” I asked.
“Couldn’t be better,” he said. “You order yet?”
“No,” I said.
“Hey, guy, brought you something,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “It’s a rhyming dictionary.”
I didn’t know what he expected me to do with it but I took it from him and opened it up. It was kind of embarrassing because I knew I didn’t want it but I didn’t want to tell him that.
“ ’Case you’re thinking up a rap while you’re on the A train,” he said, “and needed some rhymes.”
That was so lame.
“Yeah, okay.”
“So what’s going on?”
“Nothing much,” I said.
“Your mother tells me that you’re studying the Civil War,” he said, picking up the menu to figure out what salad he was going to order. “That’s good stuff, the Civil War. Important American history. Few people understand that many of the issues we face today, the balance of powers between the federal government and the states, were hammered out in that bloody conflict.”
“If you say so.”
We sat there for a while and he ran through his checklist of the things to say to your kid when you live on the West Coast and your kid lives on the East Coast. How pretty the girls were on the East Coast, how boating was a favorite sport in the Seattle area, and how many more people drove sports cars in Washington.
“More open highway,” he said. “Not in the SeaTac region itself but on the outskirts, as you head toward Mount Rainier. You got the pictures of Mount Rainier I sent you. Your mother said you liked them.”
He even started talking about how well the Seattle SuperSonics were going to do.
“The SuperSonics suck,” I said.
He looked a little hurt when I said that and I felt bad, but I didn’t take it back.
It was funny, because being around him always made me mad, but I wanted to be around him more. It made me mad because he was always trying too hard and I wished he wouldn’t. I wished he could just chill out and be whoever he was.
“So, tell me about the Civil War,” he said, still trying.
“It was a war, the Union won, end of story,” I said.
“Sometimes things are more complex than that,” he said. “Even with the weather. A rainy day is good weather for an umbrella salesman but bad weather for a lifeguard. It’s a matter of perspective.”
“Unless you’re a cloud,” I said. “Then your life is over.”
“That’s … very creative,” my father said. “But you need to see what the people were thinking were their reasons for the war, too.”
He always mumbled when he wasn’t sure of himself. In a way I liked that about him. And what I said about the cloud wasn’t creative. It was stupid and we both knew it but there we were. I was on the East Coast and he was on the West.
He ordered a tuna salad platter and I ordered a burger deluxe.
“By the way,” he said, holding up his fork with a piece of tomato on the end of it, “I called your school about two weeks ago. Just thought I’d see how you were doing.”
“Why didn’t you ask me?” I said. “Or Mom.”
“Well, sometimes it’s good for the school to know that both parents are interested,” he said. The tomato disappeared into his mouth.
“And what did the school say?” I asked.
“Said that you were among the brightest and the best,” he said. He pronounced his T’s like he was announcing something. “But, somehow, your grades don’t reflect that.”
“I’m working on that,” I said.
“I’m wondering if you might be better off in a school in the Seattle area,” he said. “There are some great schools in the U district.”
“U district?”
“University district,” he said. “Lots of kids whose parents teach at the University of Washington or some of the other schools. Lots of competition. Think you could stand being around a lot of brainy young people?”
“Don’t want to go to no Seattle,” I said.
“You know, Alexander …” He had his fingers together in front of his nose as if he was going to say something deep. “Sometimes we don’t always know what’s best for us. You only get one chance at a good education and you have to take advantage of it. If you’re not doing well living here in Harlem then you have an obligation to yourself to be someplace else.”
“Mom is here in Harlem,” I said.
“Your education is not about your mother and it’s not about me, frankly,” he said. “It’s about you and your chances in life.”
“You got Mom really upset when you sent that thing—the subpoena,” I said. “Why you have to do that?”
“Because I care for you and I want answers, not promises,” he said. “As I said, it’s not about me or your mother. And I didn’t send it as just a guy who lives an awfully long way from a son he loves very much. I sent it as a father who would just hate to see that son throwing away his talent because he’s not being closely supervised. Did I tell you that Carrie is a teacher? She could really help you get back on track.”
“Who’s Carrie?”
“Oh, uh, your stepmother,” he said. “You didn’t remember her name?”
Her name was Carolyn and I did remember it. I also remembered what she looked like because he sent me a photograph of her. She was young looking with a round face and reddish-brown hair. Mom and I drew a mustache on her before we threw the photograph away.
“I’m not going to Seattle,” I said.
“We’ll explore all of our options,” he said.
He switched the conversation to basketball and asked me what position I was playing. I told him I was playing forward and he said I would be tall enough soon to play center.
“I don’t want to play center,” I said.
We didn’t talk much after that and I thought he was glad when the lunch was over. He asked me if I needed cab money to get home and I told him I was going to walk.
“I’m taking a cab downtown—corporate offices. I’ll drop you off first uptown,” he said, standing on the sidewalk.
“I’m walking.”
We did our firm handshake bit and I watched as he hailed a cab and started downtown.
I wished things were different, that he and Mom were together. But they weren’t, and that was the way it was. I thought about LaShonda. Her parents had been really young when they left her with an aunt one day and just never come back. At least I was living with Mom and knew my father was around someplace. Maybe if I was around him more I wouldn’t feel I had to put him down so much.
When I got to 145th Street there were police cars in front of the house. The cops had three teenagers lying across the hood of a patrol car. There was a crowd of people, mostly kids and women, standing around.
“I just seen it there!” one of the teenagers was yelling. “I didn’t even touch it.”
I saw Mr. Albert standing a little way off and went over to him.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“Them boys were walking down the street and a cop car pulled up on them real sudden like,” Mr. Albert said. “When they saw the cops getting out their car they looked like they wanted to run but the cops were on them too quick. The police found a paper bag with some dope in it and they all swearing it don’t belong to none of them.”
“Drugs ain’t even about me,” one of the kids was yelling. I saw his hands were cuffed behind him. “I ain’t no crackhead.”
“I hate drugs, man!” one of the other kids said.
The cops made the people watching move back onto the other sidewalk or down the street.
“Just another day on the streets,” Mr. Albert said. “Three more young men get to ride in the backseat of a p
olice car.”
“They’re saying they don’t like drugs,” I said. “Maybe they’re innocent.”
“Could be,” Mr. Albert said. “And maybe they hate drugs and maybe they love drugs but it don’t make no never mind. The police are saying that if you got it you own it. They got the drugs and now they got to own it and pay the consequences. That’s the way life is. They should have thought about what they had when they were bopping down the street with it.”
Mr. Albert was right. They put them all in the patrol car and soon they were headed downtown to the 135th Street police station.
When I got home, Mom was there and she asked me how things went with my father.
“Bad,” I said.
“Why?” She put down the papers she was looking at and sat down at the table.
“Mostly because he was trying to be supercool and I was busy being a jerk,” I said.
She laughed at that and then I laughed and it was good. She said maybe we should send my father an apology.
We both said “nahh!” together.
One Story—Sad, then Not Sad, then Sad Again
From LaShonda Powell’s Diary
Okay, first the sad part. I’m still living at St. Francis, which is a group home for kids who either don’t have no folks or their folks don’t have them. Some difference. My moms died when she was sixteen and I really don’t know much about her except she had had me and my brother by then. My father is out there in the Great Somewhere, and peace to him. End of sad part.
Here comes the Not Sad part. Last week I met a woman who said she had known my mother back in the day. She said she still had her yearbook from Wadleigh and that I could have it if I wanted it. She didn’t have any other real stuff about my moms so I went and picked up the yearbook. Inside the yearbook, near the back, I found my mother’s report card. There were a lot of remarks on it about her poor attendance record and “difficult” home life. But then I scoped the chick’s grades and they were smoking! She had straight A’s in everything except Social. Studies and She copped a B+ in that. You always hear about people hoping their kids do better than they did. If you can get next to that you can get next to how I feel knowing my mom did better than me when everybody I know was badmouthing her as a druggie who OD’d on a rooftop. I was glad to find her report card.
Now for the sad part again. I wish I had gone to school with her. I just know we could have hung out and been friends. We would have been homegirls and I would have been watching her back 24/7. Whatever she needed I could have got it for her, because that’s the kind of girl I am and she would have done the same for me. Word.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sometimes You Can’t Get an Answer Because the Question Didn’t Show Up
Me, Bobbi, Cody, and Kambui were in the media center looking up the causes for the Civil War. Miss LoBretto got all excited and started giving us a bunch of resources when all we wanted was a short, easy list. But we did get to the Declarations of Causes of Secession. The first states that broke away from the Union had their reasons and they were all about the differences between their states and the non-slave states and what rights they had under the Constitution. It was confusing and Bobbi loved it.
“It’s like thinking about infinite number possibilities,” she said, wiggling in her seat the way she does when she’s pleased with herself. “Suppose you designed a computer that could multiply the number one by itself an infinite number of times—”
“It would still always be one,” Cody said.
“Right, and it would be the same if you divided one by itself,” Bobbi said. She was delighted with herself. “Isn’t that cool?”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, that’s what it’s all about with math,” Bobbi said. “You have to get in there and figure out all the relationships between the numbers and what they mean. It’s a lot clearer than using words.”
I was beginning to see that.
All the reasons given for the causes of the Civil War seemed flaky to me because none of them included any feelings that black people had or even if it was right to have slaves in the first place. In a way Alvin and the Sons were tiptoeing around the same as the people had before the war broke out.
The next day Cody sent me a text message saying he had been grounded for life for supporting the Cruisers. Bobbi sent a message that Alvin had said in his Hip Baller Blog that she was secretly Puerto Rican.
if i wz i wd hook ↑ w/the D man
The D man was Demetrius Brown, whose parents were from Cuba, and I didn’t even know Bobbi had eyes for him but I did know that we were getting next to Alvin.
Me and Kambui took our bikes to school on Monday. It was a short trip but it was fun. Kambui had painted his helmet black and put stars all over it, which made it look stupid, but I didn’t mention it.
I was feeling confident when I got to school because I thought that the Cruisers were deep into the game and working out okay. Then I saw some of Alvin’s boys gathered in the hallway around Mr. Culpepper. One of them pointed me out when I came in and Mr. Culpepper turned and took a look at me.
That’s when my brain flashed a message. Memo to self: Get with the Cruisers and meet Mr. Culpepper at lunchtime.
Culpepper made an exception to his rule about writing a note to get into see him, so by the afternoon, when we got to his office, I was feeling pretty much okay. Ashley was looking worried, while all the time Alvin was acting like the world really belonged to him and we were just renting space or something. Bobbi, Kambui, and LaShonda were looking down at their feet.
“My father said that the Civil War was about a lot of issues,” Alvin said. “He even wrote an article about it for a magazine. He said that slavery was only one issue and even that wasn’t just about race.”
“One of the things we are not going to do from now on,” Mr. Culpepper said in his Sunday morning holier-than-thou voice, “is accuse someone of being racist unless we can absolutely prove it. Is that understood by everyone here?”
“If only black people were slaves,” I asked, “why isn’t that about race?”
“Well, that’s not the point, is it?” Mr. Culpepper said. “You’re talking about events that happened a hundred and fifty years ago. You can’t say that Alvin is a racist because he is merely reenacting those days.”
“And when the Confederate states seceded they didn’t talk about race,” I said. “They were talking about property rights. So if you call slaves property how come it’s not about race?”
“It’s a very complex issue, Mr. Scott,” Mr. Culpepper said. “The states of the Confederacy were quoting the Constitution when they claimed your—the slaves—as property. That might be too complex for eighth-graders.”
Okay, now I was seeing it. Mr. Culpepper was talking about slavery being too complex and too hard for eighth-graders to think about. It didn’t seem that hard to me—it was either right or wrong. I didn’t see why that was complex. Then I thought about what Mr. Albert had said about the teenagers the police had on the ground. Maybe race was more like drugs than people thought. When they could use race it was good, but nobody wanted to own it when they got caught using it.
“So how important is it for me to be in a movie?” Mom, as usual, had the phone on speaker and was combing out her hair as she talked to Marc. “And how important is it to you to get the fifteen percent?”
“Melba, it’s your career, not mine.” Marc’s voice came over the speaker. “I’m just telling you that I think the exposure will be good for you.”
“I’ll think about it,” Mom said.
“That’s what you said last week,” Marc replied.
“And I did,” Mom said. “I really did.”
Marc did some cursing, then hung up.
“How come you don’t want to be in the movie?” I asked.
“Well, it could be a good movie,” Mom said. “But it could really be a bust. Have you ever seen Gone with the W
ind?”
“Why would I want to see that old flick?”
“Okay, so I guess you haven’t seen it. It was about this white girl on a plantation in Georgia at the beginning of the Civil War. She’s spoiled and bratty and kind of mindless. The first guy she was going to marry dropped her, and then she meets this cool guy played by Clark Gable and she falls for him big-time but he only partway falls for her. Anyway, she’s got this black maid and there are plenty of black people in the movie. Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for best supporting actress.”
“She was black, right?”
“Right. So then they were having the war and all these Southern boys were marching up and down and acting like they were going off to a picnic and looking pretty good in their uniforms. The war went on for most of the movie and ended up with the burning of Atlanta.”
“They talked about race a lot?”
“Nope. They just skipped around it and talked about Southern honor and protecting the South, that kind of thing,” Mom said. She was wearing a bright red blouse and was trying on a yellow scarf, holding it against the blouse to see how the colors matched. “They didn’t even talk about slaves from what I remember about the movie.”
“So Hattie McDaniel was free?”
“No, they just didn’t talk about her being a slave.” Mom was laying out clothes on the bed. “I guess the producers didn’t want the movie to be controversial.”
“But she was a slave?” I asked again.
“Yes. They want me to play her part in this satirical movie,” Mom said. “Do you know what satirical means?”
“Sure I know what it means,” I said. “It’s when being funny makes a point.”
“Okay, but the problem is that sometimes these movies start out to be satire and then end up just plain silly. I don’t want to be running around with a bandanna around my head looking stupid. Besides, the movie is supposed to show how racist the story was and you can’t show anything about racism if it’s all about joking around.”