Disgruntled (3 page)

Suddenly Sheila said, “I’ll level with you. Your father does not care for Cindalou.”

Kenya tried not to act excited, but she loved it when her mother “leveled with her.” It did not happen often.

“Why not? Why doesn’t he like her?”

“Well,” said her mother over the sputtering idle of the car, “you know, a lot of men don’t like you to have your own friends. Even good men.”

Kenya thought about that as she walked into the schoolyard, where the classes were lining up. She was so wrapped up in the riddle of it—that her father, who had Robert and Earl and his wino philosophers, would deny Sheila Cindalou—that she walked right over to Fatima McCullers when she called out to her. She didn’t notice until it was too late that Fatima was huddled with L’Tisha, as if plotting some meanness. Aliyah, the white-looking Sudanese girl, often their audience, stood there as well in one of her oddly formal dresses, pink with a white sash.

Kenya walked over, careful not to trip over her feet. “What?” she said, putting a hand on her hip.

L’Tisha took her traditional morning Blow Pop out of her mouth and said something so quietly that Kenya couldn’t make it out.

“Huh?” she said, trying to sound more snotty than confused.

L’Tisha spoke again, saying something that sounded like “boogeddy-boo.” Fatima and Aliyah elbowed each other and laughed. Nearby, Kenya could see Duvall trying to curry favor with some of the cooler boys in the class, showing them some small metal object, surely last year’s prized Christmas present.

“I can’t hear you,” Kenya said, trying not to whine. She scanned the yard for Charlena, who was nowhere to be found, worrying that she would not have a line partner.

“I thought you understood African!” L’Tisha yelled. Aliyah clapped her hands while Fatima held her belly and emitted a fake laugh. Duvall giggled. In that moment, the most Kenya could do as a Day was to not kick him in the stomach.

*   *   *

Every day of that grim week L’Tisha was nearby, muttering “boogeddy-boo.” And so, as was often the case, the Seven Days meeting was the thing Kenya most looked forward to. On Saturday night, Kenya washed up quickly after dinner and hovered by the windows, waiting for everyone to arrive.

Yaya and Alfred came first, bearing a bottle of wine for the libation and Alfred’s personal six-pack of beer, which he only occasionally shared.

“Hey, Good People,” said Yaya on her way into the kitchen to see Sheila. Alfred quietly muttered something to Kenya that sounded like
Hunchwa
but seemed to be “Hello.”

“Ho!” said Johnbrown. He fought with one of Sheila’s massive hanging plants to rifle through the records on the shelf underneath it. He liked to play music as the Days were arriving. Tonight it was a howling jazz record, ironically titled
Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe
.

“Baba, that was terrible,” Kenya said when it ended. Finally the Days had all gathered and she was tucked between Cindalou and Sheila on the scratchy plaid love seat, which had been Sheila’s mother’s only piece of living room furniture back in the projects.

“I’m gonna have to agree,” said Cindalou. “I’m gonna have to say that is the opposite of music.”

“Well, what I’m gonna have to say is…” began Johnbrown with a thin smile.

“Oh, here we go,” said Yaya. She sat on the arm of the easy chair where Alfred sat, while the other men, Earl, Robert, and Brother Camden, sat on the large couch, trying their best not to touch one another. Johnbrown preferred to stand, sometimes pacing, sometimes lean-sitting on the radiator.

“We ain’t even done the libation yet,” said Sheila.

“I take it back,” said Cindalou.

Johnbrown opened and closed his mouth; he seemed chastened by the missed opportunity to give a lecture.

“From the Creator, for the martyrs,” Robert said.

Anyone could start the meeting by intoning the libation. Robert, who liked to move things along, often did. Sheila always opened and poured the glass of wine. Now she passed it around. Each—except Kenya—drank from it and poured it into a bowl that was passed along as well.

“From the Creator, for Malcolm X,” said Sheila.

“From the Creator, for George Jackson,” said Yaya.

Denmark Vesey, Fred Hampton, Patrice Lumumba, Nat Turner. Everyone had a favorite martyr; most were names Kenya had known since she was very small. Most of the people named were black, but Yaya liked to mention “the
white
John Brown” when she was in a certain kind of mood. Brother Camden also sometimes broke tradition by mentioning what he called Indigenous Peoples.

“From the Creator, for Geronimo,” he said tonight.

“From the Creator, for Martin Luther King,” said Cindalou.

A deflated-ball disapproval sound left Kenya’s father’s mouth.

“Johnbrown,” warned Sheila.

“I’m sorry, sister,” he said to Cindalou. “Pay me no mind.”

“Did I say something wrong?” she said.

“JB, I’m not sure I ever understood what your problem with the brother was,” said Earl. “He spoke out against the war. He spoke up for workers’ rights.”

“I just feel like … a martyr with a McDonald’s commercial?” said Johnbrown. Kenya could tell he was trying to seem calmer than he was. Johnbrown could get very excited about the topic of Martin Luther King and how overrated he was. Kenya noticed that Martin Luther King, Jr., was the only one of the martyrs she had learned about in school.

“That’s not his fault,” said Sheila. “He’s not
in
the commercial. And the reason is that he got shot to death minding his own business.”

“Maybe we should move on,” Johnbrown said.

Cindalou hadn’t said anything. Now she eyed Johnbrown, her lips twisted slightly. “Should I say somebody else?”

“Girl, don’t you listen to this nonsense,” said Sheila. “Just pass that glass over here.” The two women grinned at each other over Kenya’s head. (Still, after that meeting, Cindalou stuck to Medgar Evers.)

Johnbrown liked to keep everyone guessing with the martyrs he himself named, and he also liked to do his offering last. That way he could begin the meeting with a long story about a democratically elected Latin American president that the CIA had secretly murdered, or a black scientist who’d died on the steps of a segregated hospital.

At the same meeting where Cindalou ventured King, Johnbrown mentioned his favorite martyr.

“From the Creator, for Julian Carlton,” he said.

“Now, who is that?” murmured Cindalou.

It was then that Kenya realized she didn’t know who he was either. His name had been coming up for some time but had run in with the other ones whose deeds had been animatedly explained to her. Now she steeled herself to follow the intricacies of a story involving the Michigan State Police or FBI task forces.

“What, you mean you don’t know the name of Frank Lloyd Wright’s butler?” asked Sheila, rolling her eyes.

“That doesn’t make his sacrifice any less,” said Johnbrown, “that he was a butler. In fact it makes it more.”

“Brother, go on and tell us your gruesome story again,” said Yaya.

“So this was a brother from Barbados,” said Kenya’s father. “He turned up in Wisconsin in … 1904, to work for this famous white architect, probably the most famous American architect. Obviously after slavery, but in terms of the way black servants were being treated … anyway, he went to work for this white man in the middle of nowhere, this guy who everybody thought was a genius, who was, of course, incredibly arrogant. He was so arrogant that he left his wife and five kids—”

“That’s the worst part of this whole story to me,” said Sheila.

“And five kids,” Johnbrown repeated, “and he built this house to live with his mistress, who also ran off from her husband with her kids. Anyway, one day the architect was out of town and the mistress, who probably treated him like crap, fired the brother. I mean, in those days you could only imagine why he was getting fired. I mean, even today some of these insane mammers I work for—”
Mammers
was Johnbrown’s substitute, Kenya knew, for
motherfucker
(which she sometimes whispered to herself on the toilet, to see if the sky would fall).

“So he got fired and then he killed everybody,” finished Sheila.

“How did he kill them?” asked Kenya. They all turned to her as if they’d forgotten she was there.

Johnbrown looked at her. “He set the house on fire and then stood in the main doorway with an ax in case anyone tried to escape.”

“You mean he chopped them up?” Kenya said. She saw her mother looking at her father. He looked back.

“Yes,” he said to Kenya.

“And what happened to him?” Yaya asked. “Did Wright’s wife give him a medal?”

“Well, it’s confusing. He tried to drink acid, but it didn’t kill him. And then he supposedly died of malnutrition in prison. My guess is they beat him to death.”

“And this was better than integration?” said Cindalou, who had been listening with wide eyes.

“First of all,” said Johnbrown with a dramatic sigh, “folks act like King did everything on his own, when you got your Bayard Rustin and Fannie Lou Hamer and a bunch of other nameless folks who made all of that happen. And second of all, as someone who grew up with white people, I’m not convinced that desegregation is the answer to our problems.”

“But chopping up white people is?” asked Robert.

Alfred made an emphatic noise that sounded like
urumph
, indicating that he thought Robert had scored some kind of point.

Johnbrown said, “Look. You can’t tell me that a mass murder doesn’t say more than a mass march. What the brother understood was the power of rage. I’m guessing that more regular outbursts by seriously disgruntled black employees would achieve more than three hundred sixty-five days of peaceful marches.”

“Sure,” said Brother Camden, “you got point seven of the ten-point platform: self-defense. Where did that get us?”

“The Panthers were onto something, but didn’t quite get there. Think about their paramilitary costumes and their formations and what-have-you; they weren’t different enough from the police. Fascist chic. What I’m talking about is anarchy. Black anarchy.”

“Like the riots?” asked Cindalou. “We watched that on TV back home and thought y’all had truly lost your minds up here.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have thought that if we’d torn up white people’s neighborhoods. Because that’s what
I’m
talking about.”

*   *   *

After they honored the martyrs, they talked business, accomplishments, and goals. But that was dull and Kenya always hoped that they would rush through it to get to the part where they gossiped about local and national events: talking trash about Frank Rizzo, the illiterate thug former mayor, and Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood menace; making sardonic comments about the fact that it was actually
1984
. Then they gossiped about “movement people” in Philadelphia, arguing about who was a poverty pimp, a drunk, or an FBI agent. They usually finished off by insulting one another: Robert, the nonpracticing lawyer, was cheap as a broke Jew; Sheila, being from the projects, was niggerish (“Kenya, don’t you ever say
nigger
”), with a switchblade strapped to her leg and government cheese under the sink; Yaya was waiting for the revolution so she could loot Wanamaker’s for designer clothes; Alfred, so he could loot the beer distributors; Earl they teased about kids he’d left in Vietnam; they rarely mocked Brother Camden, because all he ever said was “Y’all crazy” with a smile that looked painful to maintain.

For months after she joined the Days, nobody ever made fun of Cindalou. She wasn’t like the others. She was a waitress in an Upper Darby diner and hadn’t even gone to college long enough to get expelled. But then one night Johnbrown paused in a rambling lecture about something he’d researched for The Key about differences in gravity based on proximity to the equator and wasn’t it interesting that even the experience of gravity was related to race—and Cindalou snapped, “Prep School,
puh-leeeeeze
! Give somebody else a chance to talk.”

Johnbrown flinched.

Everyone knew, but no one talked about, the way Johnbrown had grown up. It was like calling Robert out for being gay, something even Kenya knew and no one mentioned.

“I went to public school just like everybody else, sister,” he said in a tight voice.

Kenya’s mother laughed lightly. “We know, honey. You went to Lower Merion.”

Yaya cleared her throat. “Excuse
you
. I went to Catholic school. My parents had ambitions for me.” Then she winked at Kenya.

Johnbrown ignored Yaya. “Look, it was no fuckin’ picnic walking around black on the Main Line back then. Or now,” he said, trying to sound calm.

“You didn’t hear that, Kenya,” said Yaya. “All you heard was ‘picnic.’”

“Whoa, now. Sorry I raised these painful memories,” said Cindalou with wide eyes. “I had no idea.”

Kenya had never met anyone like Cindalou. You wanted to laugh at almost everything she said, and though she was very earnest, it seemed as if that was her intent. Talking to her was like being tickled. All she had to say was “Hey, Kenya” to make her giggle. Kenya tried to stifle a laugh as Cindalou apologized to her father.

“No worries,” said Johnbrown. “At least I didn’t go to school in a one-room shack with a dirt floor.”

“Ba-
ba
,” Kenya gasped.

Cindalou laughed. “That’s okay. I did go to school just like that. We had to have a dirt floor for our teachers, who were chickens, of course.” Even Johnbrown chuckled.

*   *   *

Brother Camden’s presence was unpleasant, but there was only one person who could truly ruin a Seven Days gathering for Kenya.

Johnbrown, in a certain kind of mood, would remain silent for most of a meeting. If spoken to, he would respond slowly. Then, at the end, he would ask, “Do you all really think that what we do is enough?”

Sometimes he waited for one of the others to tell the story of someone they knew getting their head busted by the police, or harassed by white folks on the job. Just as the story seemed to wind down, he’d say, “
That’s
exactly why we need to bring the fight to them Julian Carlton–style. Just burn it all down.”