Buck (21 page)

I can’t help it. Everything he’s saying is pissing me off. I’m angrier than I’ve ever been. I sit there and my blood just boils like my seat’s a stove. I hear my mom’s cries all those nights. I think about how we struggled. Fire in my eyes.

“I don’t care what you have to say.”

“You talking to me like that?” My dad squints in disbelief.

“Who else?” I’m starting to bite my lower lip. I taste my own salty blood. “Fuck you!”

“Trouble is a bitter tree, but sometimes it produces sweet fruits.”

“What?”

“You’re looking for trouble … and you found it,” he says, pulling the car over.

“Talking to me like that you must want to squabble,” he yells, his southern accent coming out.

“Let’s go.”

The car stops. We’re at Broad and Erie in front of Checkers. He opens his door and is outside.

“Get on out here, then,” he says, and slams the door. I come out and he’s standing in front of me waiting for me to make a move. He’s in a defensive stance like a wrestler. He probably hasn’t rumbled since like the sixties. Amir would say,
He’s so old he farts dust
. Amir would also say,
What are you doing? Man, at least you got a pop. At least he’s trying. Nobody’s perfect but at least he’s in your life
.

For a second I can’t believe we’re doing this, but I throw my hands up anyway. I want to make him feel the pain me and my
mom felt. I swing … he grabs me under my arms, I feel his strength as he lifts me off the ground while I beat his back with the side of my fist.

We’re on the hood of the car. He’s on top … now me … him … Cars roll by and honk peace. He’s on top of me and looking straight into my eyes. It feels like he’s looking right through to my soul. All my strength leaves. I can’t move.

“I love you,” he says hard under his breath, holding me down, pressing his words into me.

“Get off of me.”

“I love you, boy,” he yells now. I realize how much I missed his voice. We’re panting, gasping for air.

We stay like that for a while, not fighting, just bonded, tangled together, and I feel at peace. Like we’re one. Whole again.

“I’m so hungry” is how it ends. We walk across the street to Dwight’s Soul Food.

BBQ chicken and catfish.

“Your mother and I were married in 1982 in Zimbabwe. She was the most incredible dancer I’d ever seen. Your birth was remarkable. I took her to the hospital twice in twenty-four hours and the second time you were born. You were the first American to be born in Zimbabwe. A true African American. You were celebrated and praised and held up as an example of African babyhood. Ministers of government and high officials like Makunike, Chimutengwende, and Shamuyarira blessed us and you. ”

Mac and cheese and string beans.

“She suffered from hurts from childhood that I knew little about and could not repair regardless of my actions, love, and devotion. She had been brutalized by others, from what she told me, but I never treated her brutally nor ever raised my hand toward her. I loved her. I thought I could help her control it. I was the first person to insist that she go see a psychiatrist, which she did. I was with her when the top psychiatrist in the country declared that she was manic-depressive and prescribed lithium right on the spot. She had a couple of major surgeries that caused her to go into a deeper depression.”

Yams and corn bread.

“She started spending money we didn’t have, paying far too much money for things that we either did not use or did not need. She didn’t want me to know that she had been stretching money from one place to pay another, using more than twenty credit cards to handle the juggling. Neither your mother nor I could survive in misery. We struggled to pay your tuition. Each month we got deeper into debt.”

Black-eyed peas and collard greens.

“The day I left I believed that I was making the best decision I could. My commitment to you has never wavered. I have always thought that my responsibility was first to my children. I have never wished your mother any harm or ill. None of us choose our own demons.”

Hush puppies and okra.

I’m listening to his story but it doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t care what he’s saying, only about him … and my mom … and Uzi and where we all go from here. Amir was right—I’m lucky to have a dad who cares, who’s down to fight with me, for me, for us.

“I love you,” I say for the first time in years. He tells me his love for me is unconditional.

Sweet potato pie.

On the way home, he plays a speech from his friend Jeremiah in Chicago: “What makes you so strong, black man? How is it that three hundred and seventy years of slavery, segregation, racism, Jim Crow laws, and second-class citizenship cannot wipe out the memory of Imhotep, Aesop, Akhenaton, and Thutmose II? What makes you so strong, black man?… How is it that after all this country has done to you, you can still produce a Paul Robeson, a Thurgood Marshall, a Malcolm X, a Martin King, and a Ron McNair? What makes you so strong, black man?… This country has tried castration and lynching, miseducation and brainwashing. They have taught you to hate yourself and to look at yourself through the awfully tainted eyeglasses of white Eurocentric lies, and yet you keep breaking out of the prisons they put you in. You break out in a W. E. B. Du Bois and a Booker T. Washington. You break out in a Louis Farrakhan and a Mickey Leland; you break out in a Judge Thurgood Marshall and a Pops Staples; you break out in a Luther Vandross, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Harold Washington, or Doug Wilder. What makes you so strong, black man?”

The blank page begs me to tell a story—dares me to tell one—one that’s never been told before, and to tell it like it will never be told again.

The blank page lights up a room in my heart that I didn’t know existed.

I’m standing outside of Crefeld, staring into the endless green of Wissahickon Park, when my purpose finds me.

I hear Uncle Howard’s voice in my head as I race through the hallway:
Let the beauty of what you love be what you do
.

I find Stacey in her classroom.

I declare it: “I want to be a writer.”

“That’s great, Malo,” she says, moving to the bookshelf. A sign above the bookshelf reads:
Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.”

She pulls out a book and says, “Means you have to be a good reader, though.” She hands me
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac.

That night, sitting on the terrace overlooking G-Town, I enter the world of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as they wander across the highways of America, just like me and Ryan did a few months back, finding adventure and trouble and girls and drugs and themselves all at once.

The next day I ask Stacey for another book.

She chuckles. “How about finishing
On the Road
first?”

“I did.” She looks at me like she wants to believe me but doesn’t. She squints for me to ’fess up. I pull the words from the back of my eyes: “ ‘The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.’ ”

I tell her I didn’t just read
On the Road
, but that I understood it, related to Sal and Dean’s journey, what they were feeling, their quest for freedom and dream chasing.

She gives me a stack of books.

I devour them, finishing a book a day. I push myself hard because I feel like I’m behind, like I have to make up for lost time. Before Crefeld, the last book I read was in sixth grade. I starved myself and now I’m hungry for words, phrases, stories, and knowledge. The more I read, the more I want to read.

José Martí, a Cuban writer from back in the day, says literature is the “most beautiful country.” For me, each book is a journey, a voyage into new land.

I finish Stacey’s stack and hit the library. A sign above the entrance says
Lys Ce Que Voudra (Read What You Will)
. And that’s what I do. I walk through the aisles of books, touching spines with my fingertips, rubbing dust jackets with my thumbs, and reading everything with my heart.

WHITMAN:
“Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

GINSBERG:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.”

I spend a night at my dad’s apartment in Levittown. It’s small, even smaller than my mom’s spot in G-Town, and barely furnished. I crash on the futon in the living room. He cooks eggs, grits, and toast in the morning. I eat slow, savoring each bite like it’s my last. Over breakfast I tell him that I want to be a writer. He tells me that writing is in my DNA, that my grandfather loved to write.

“He was always a man to speak his mind,” he remembers, leaning back in his chair. “I remember when I realized I had to return to Georgia to see him. It was when he told me on the phone, ‘I can’t hold the pen anymore.’ That was the most frightening thing I had ever heard him utter because he wrote something every day, a tradition that he started after finding himself confined to his bedroom. It was in his blood to speak his mind and to have his say. If he could not speak it vocally to an audience, he would write sermons and poems and songs. And he did so until the day he could not hold the pen, the day he died.”

Before I bounce to go back to Philly, Pops gives me a few books:
Assata
,
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
,
The Miseducation of the Negro
. The books show the world not just as
it is but as it could be, should be. They connect me to everything that has ever happened and to everyone who has ever lived.

WOODSON:
“When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.”

BALDWIN:
“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”

DU BOIS:
“Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.”

FANON:
“Who am I? Am I who I say I am? Am I all I ought to be?… Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”