Disgruntled (2 page)

Johnbrown said his parents did not like children, and that his mother became a teacher because she wanted to “crush their young spirits.” But it seemed to Kenya that Grandmama liked at least one child very much. She grabbed Kenya’s face with cold, fat hands and kissed it, blowing an interesting wind that combined rot, perfume, and the peppermint balls she sucked when she wasn’t smoking long, thin cigarettes.

“How are
you
?” she’d ask, settling into her throne-size brown velvet chair as Kenya and her mother tried not to make weird noises on the couch’s plastic slipcover. “What are you learning in school? And tell me the interesting stuff, don’t bore me, you know.” Then she’d listen with great concentration as Kenya talked about the excruciating difficulties of long division and named all of the planets in the solar system.

Mostly, Sheila and Johnbrown’s mother talked about dull things like the price of gasoline, the need to be careful on winter ice, and the doings of the president. It was always just before Kenya’s mother sighed that it was time to be going that Grandmama would ask after Johnbrown.

“You know, Mrs. Curtis,” Sheila said once. “He is the same.”

“I think about him every day. And, Sheila, when will you call me Eveline?” Grandmama responded.

“What do you think about?” Kenya piped in. “What do you think about him?”

“Kenya,” her mother said, the name a warning.

“That’s okay, Kenya,” Grandmama said, pronouncing her name
KEEN-ya
, as she always did. “I guess I just wonder when he will take responsibility for his life. He’s so stuck on this business about being black, like he’s the first person to have that problem. I wonder when he will do right by the both of you.”

After she finished speaking, she reached first for a cigarette from a lacquered box on the coffee table, then instead for a peppermint ball in a yellow glass bowl. Kenya watched her, listening to the ticking of a clock that must have been there all along. She wondered if it had gotten louder. Her mother stared off into space. Sometimes when Kenya recalled this conversation later, she remembered her mother saying, “But he is a good man.” Sometimes she remembered her saying nothing at all.

At the end of every visit, Johnbrown’s mother reached into her bulky maroon purse and handed Sheila a slip of paper. When Kenya learned that it was a “check,” and what a check was, she learned to look away.

*   *   *

Sheila had what she called “a good job” working at the public library on Fortieth Street near the University of Pennsylvania. But when kids at school asked about Johnbrown, Kenya had two choices if she wanted to tell the truth. She could say he was either a housepainter or a philosopher. She had considered saying that he was dead, but she felt terrible about that.

Though he often gave speeches to Kenya about the importance of doing well in school, Johnbrown did not believe in the ability of Western institutions to educate oppressed peoples like him. He had attended Cornell University, an Ivy League school, but only, he would remind everyone with a sneer, to escape the draft. He’d planned to leave once the war ended, but he lost the chance to drop out when he was expelled for participating in a failed attempt to take over the administration building.

After that he worked in a milk bottling plant, sold knives, and even sorted mail for a few months. But those jobs were too constraining. Saying he wanted to pursue “a life of study,” he took up rather sporadic house painting. On the days when Johnbrown wasn’t painting a house, he followed a schedule taped to his wall that began with predawn calisthenics. The rest of the day was blocked out for meditation, reading philosophy in a book-choked spare room, and working on The Key. The Key was a contemporary work of black philosophy that would also be a way of living for nonblack peoples who were enlightened. It would draw on Classical thought, as well as West African and Native American ways of knowing. It would unite Du Bois, Ellison, Cleaver, Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X. It would be bigger than Karenga, who thought small, definitively refute Freud, and make Spinoza a household name in the community. Only when he finished The Key would Johnbrown go back to school and get what he called “a square job.” (“Do you know what cats used to call jobs in the fifties?” he asked Kenya. “What?” “Slaves.” “You calling me a slave, Johnbrown?” said Sheila.
Cats have jobs?
thought Kenya.)

They had a nice stereo and a very large record collection, but not much else. Even though she never had guests, Kenya was embarrassed by their old black-and-white television. Sheila made her slender frame glamorous with thrift store trips, the rich-smelling oil that she bought from street vendors on Fifty-Second Street, and endless variations on a part-cornrow, part-Afro hairstyle. She took Kenya shopping for clothes at the dungeon-like House of Bargains in the summer and at the nightmarishly bright Marshalls at the start of each school year. Occasionally, there was a trip to the glorious Plymouth Meeting Mall, where Kenya was allowed one item of clothing (often, though Sheila didn’t know it, a flimsier version of a blouse or skirt that L’Tisha had worn) and one scoop of ice cream (Kenya nearly dreaded this part, so great was the agony of deciding between mint and butter pecan). There was no bright new outfit for Easter, which they did not celebrate.

*   *   *

Kenya had no aunts or uncles or cousins; she didn’t go to family barbecues or reunions. But there were the Seven Days, a group Kenya’s parents had started with their friends. The name came from something in
Song of Solomon
, one of the few books both Sheila and Johnbrown loved. In
Song of Solomon
, there was a group of black men who killed a white person for every black person they’d heard of being killed by a white person. If the black person had been killed on a Monday, the Monday man undertook the revenge, killing a roughly equivalent white person, say, a little girl, in a roughly equivalent fashion. Just as they were about to strike the blow, they would say, “Your Day has come.”

(“Don’t talk to her about that, Johnbrown,” Kenya’s mother said when her father told Kenya this story, his eyes glinting with mischief.

(“This doesn’t scare Kenya. Wait, you scared, Monkey?”

(“No,” she lied.
Your Day has come
, she would sometimes say to herself in the dark of her bedroom, shivering with delicious terror.)

Provided she had washed up and put on her pajamas, Kenya was allowed to sit in on Seven Days meetings at her parents’ house, which usually happened two Saturday nights a month. She loved the feeling of being in a crowded living room, which, with its boarded windows, low-wattage lamps, and huge plants, felt both cramped and cozy. She listened or dozed on her mother’s shoulder, sometimes not waking up until the next morning in her own bed.

Kenya’s parents and their friends did not kill anyone. Each of them devoted a day in their week to doing something for “the community.” Kenya’s father went to welfare and Social Security offices to advocate for women with crying children, frail seniors, people who were a little slow—anybody who needed help navigating piles of paperwork. He annoyed employees, most of whom were also black, by passing out mimeographed flyers about asserting civil rights in a hostile bureaucracy.

After she’d graduated college, Sheila had sworn off all contact with Richard Allen; too depressing, she’d said. As a Seven Day, she went back once a week. Johnbrown was the one who pushed her, going on about how much Sheila would have liked to meet a beautiful professional black woman like herself when she’d been a girl. (“I would have loved that,” Sheila said, “especially if that woman would have bought me some new clothes.”)

On her day, she knocked on doors and gave out books the library was getting rid of and made lists of repairs, for which she harassed the Housing Authority. Sometimes she would round up a group of women and children to ride downtown with her and press their demands in person. For a brief time, because Johnbrown’s idea of her as a mentor did appeal to her, she also tried to make friends with some of the teenage girls—especially the ones with small children. She invited them to come to the library and take out children’s books to read to their kids. This didn’t last, though. “I don’t understand them,” she admitted to Johnbrown. “I lived there but I was never a girl like
that
.” Something told Kenya not to ask what she meant.

Yaya, who worked as an accountant for the city, was Kenya’s mother’s best friend. Her Seven Days contribution was using personal and sick days to volunteer at the large, shabby childcare facility where her “triflin’” sister worked. Yaya read to the children and bullied the teachers into turning off the soap operas they watched on the television sets designated for
Sesame Street
. Kenya knew from her own mother that only a certain kind of black woman watched soap operas, and she knew this because in those pre-VCR days, her mother hid from Yaya the fact that she breathlessly read summaries of
The Young and the Restless
in the daily newspaper and scheduled days off around watching it.

Yaya’s large and mostly silent husband, Alfred, who delivered mail, did home repairs for struggling single mothers. Johnbrown’s college friend Robert, who had a law degree but worked in a health food store, gave legal advice. Earl, a Vietnam veteran taking divinity night classes who quietly continued to refer to God when others invoked the Creator, operated a mobile ministry that moved from corner to corner of Southwest Philly, delivering boys to the Church of the Advocate. He believed that liberation theology would keep them out of prison and out of the army.

Nate Camden, who insisted on being called “Brother” Camden, was Kenya’s least favorite Seven Day. A short, pudgy psychology professor at Temple University, he always came to meetings with red eyes and wearing the same faded black sweatshirt and pants.

(“You shouldn’t judge folks like that, Monkey,” Johnbrown said when Kenya asked if he ever changed his clothes.

(Sheila snorted. “Well, is she allowed to judge the smell of his one outfit? I sure do.”)

But that wasn’t the only problem with Brother Camden. It was that he seemed to want to “get in Kenya’s world.” He badgered her for watching
The Muppet Show
. (“Where are the black Muppets?”) Another time he said that the Now and Laters she was eating, which were a special treat, had killed male rats and made the females sterile.

(“You mean clean?” asked Kenya.

(“Enough, Camden,” said her mom.

(“Well, she
shouldn’t
be eating that crap,” said Johnbrown. “You ever see that kind of candy in a white neighborhood store? They trying to poison us.”)

And so of course it was Brother Camden who suggested that Kenya officially become a Seven Day by taking on a repugnant task. He had come early for a meeting, and while he’d appeared to be deep into one of his homemade-looking books, making low noises and scribbling notes, it seemed he had also been listening to Kenya talk to Sheila about an unfortunate boy in her fourth-grade class named Duvall. When it was his turn to report on what he’d done that week, he said, “I think maybe Sister Kenya should befriend Brother Duvall for her first act as a Day.”

“But—” Kenya said, looking at her father, who seemed distracted. His week as a Day had gone badly; he had argued with the security guard at the welfare office, who’d told him to get a real job. (“After you,” Johnbrown had said, taking off before the guard called the police.)

“But,” Kenya said again, “I can’t just…”

“Yes?” said Sheila.

“Duvall talks slow and he eats his tuna fish sandwich with his mouth open and you can see little balls of bread! Even Mrs. Preston is mean to him,” Kenya said, immediately realizing her mistake.

“We all have a purpose, young sister,” said Brother Camden, fixing her with one of his beady eyes. The other floated in space.

“Brother, I don’t know that it’s your job to assign Kenya a purpose. But, Kenya, that sounds like all the more reason,” said Sheila, while Johnbrown nodded vigorously.

Kenya’s favorite Day was Cindalou Waters, a pale dumpling of a woman from North Carolina who had only recently joined the group. Cindalou was the first black person Kenya had met with freckles; she also had what Kenya was forbidden to refer to as “good hair,” too soft to hold an Afro. Where Brother Camden smelled faintly homeless, Cindalou came into the living room on those Saturday nights in a delightful cloud of strawberry scent, saying “Hi y’all doin’?” and pronouncing everything “wunnnnduhful.”

Sheila had met Cindalou at the library, where she’d come nearly every week for months, checking out all of the history books about black people that she could carry away. Cindalou was somewhat of an exotic for Kenya’s mother. Sheila didn’t have family in the South, had not spent the requisite summers down there with cousins that the rest of her generation reminisced about. Even Johnbrown had stories about mean chickens in Georgia and his great-uncle-with-a-shotgun. Sheila had only a secret love for
Gone With the Wind
, of which no amount of race pride reeducation could cure her; she had
Gone With the Wind
and a soft spot for Cindalou Waters.

Kenya could tell that Johnbrown, on the other hand, did not seem to care for Cindalou. His face would often fall flat when she spoke, or else he would wear a tight smile. Kenya wondered if it was because she was so light-skinned. Despite being a greenish-tan color himself, with slanted eyes that ignorant black people admiringly called “chinky,” and perhaps because of his parents, his views about fair-skinned black folks were firm. (Once Kenya had asked him what he would be if he couldn’t be black and he had said, “Light-skinned.”)

“Why doesn’t Baba like Cindalou?” Kenya asked her mother one day as they were driving to school, a few months after Cindalou had joined the Days.

“What makes you think he doesn’t like her?” Sheila asked.

“I don’t know,” Kenya said, trying to put her feeling into words. The ride was short and they were already in front of the tall school building with grated windows, the schoolyard full of running, screaming children who made Kenya want to go home and crawl under the bed.