The Black Kids: Chapters 20–26

I would feel bad for her, but Nicola acts like she’s so much worldlier than the rest of us just because her parents are Australian and speak in drunk vowels.

So instead of leaving, he stays in his Hyundai, windows down, waiting and unabashedly humming along with “Achy Breaky Heart” on the radio.

The riots have waxed and waned.

The riots have waxed and waned.

When I finally get a good look at my sister, Jo looks a little feral. Her hair is mussed in escaped curls; the front teeth that were in braces up until two years ago are chipped into opposing triangles.

Sometimes the act of growing up cleaves you apart, and even though you walk through the world made of the same stuff, you can’t quite make your way back to the start.

Anyway, the trouble started the way these things usually do—a white woman accused a black man, and the white folks got riled up.

“They called it a riot, but it was more of a massacre. Or like what they did to one of those Jewish areas in the old country.” Ronnie pauses for a moment, searching for the word.
“A pogrom,” my father interjects.

I think whatever sadness I thought I knew, whatever I’ve felt before, hasn’t fully prepared me for this. Uncle Ronnie was right—it’s in my very marrow itself.

A famous photo that I’ve seen many times since of a man with stripes of flesh carved out of his back, a topographical map of scars, of evil.

The next day my grandmother tidied up her entire house, put on her finest outfit, and pinned her hair into a chignon with her favorite hairpin.

Pictures I’d taped up of the four of us through the years have been torn into emphatically small pieces.

“Where is he?” I try to ask nonchalantly.

Jason is mostly nondescript, save for his crooked glasses.

Anyway, one of my favorite lyrics from the song went, “Hey, I’m depraved on account a I’m deprived.”

“Your sister was...difficult too.” She takes a sip of coffee.
“That’s the consensus,” I say.

“In a just world, actions should have consequences.” She looks into my eyes intently. I think this is also her nice, liberal, white-lady way of obliquely talking about everything going on in our city.

The distance between us is a bathroom stall, which incidentally is entirely too close, given what I’ve done.

The inside is various shades of dreary, and the harsh fluorescents make everybody look sallow and vaguely unsure of themselves.

These are the kinds of people I saw: scary-looking. Wary-looking. Harried -looking.

Reggie’s slimmed down since the last time I saw him and is now a good-looking boy who carries himself like a newly good-looking boy, preening and flexing while doing things that don’t really require that much flexing.

The crowd gathered like a bee swarm, swirling and concentrating, dissipating, and then gathering together again to sting.

The first young man had long, sinewy arms and pants that fell in small puddles at his feet.

Several of the young men jumped back under a hail of expletives, and a few began to run away.

I run my hand along the books in his bookshelf, these giant tomes on international accounting and financial trade and global perspectives on economies in transition, blah blah, numbers numbers.

Jo and I played with a skittish guinea pig named Rat, who belonged to a sickly girl who lived three blocks away from us.

She wears a pair of ratty jeans and a men’s V-neck undershirt, with a red handkerchief wrapped around her tousled hair so she looks a bit like Axl Rose.

‘“It don’t matter if you’re black or white.’” She does her best Michael Jackson impression, which is really pretty terrible.
She-Ra purrs an assent.

The black kids are supernice to me, but they have years of history with one another, the kind I used to have with my friends, so I feel like an interloper.

“What if they don’t actually like me but they’re being nice because of, like, racial solidarity or whatever?”

When she tells me to sit, it sounds like a royal edict.

He’s hard, hair shorn, militarily erect, a recent Gulf War vet.

He tells his side of the story succinctly—an agitated crowd, a Molotov cocktail, a building on fire.

...my dad looks like a little boy, reprimanded.

Usually, that window is bordered with seasonal decorations that Ole Felix painstakingly paints every few months, more frequently if it’s holiday season.

“Home from school?” Mrs. Katz shouts over at Jo as she bends a watering can over some succulents.

He’ll drive everyone crazy by doting on you excessively—is your breakfast too hot, too cold, does your coffee have enough creamer, enough sugar, do you need anything else, anything at all—until you finally grab his hands, lean your forehead against his, and say, “Enough, love.”

Gutter punks lean against each other on a small grassy knoll, faces tattooed so that they look like lizards, with their one-legged pit bull and a sign that says, NEED FOOD FOR THE DOG....

I think outside of myself and look down at us in this moment—our skin browning in the sun, bodies leavening, planes flying overhead.

The DJs banter for a bit, and then they open the lines to callers.