The Cruisers (7 page)

M
om has this thing she does with her teeth. First she flosses, then she brushes, then she uses this machine that sends water through her mouth. She’s got great-looking teeth and wants me to do the same thing but I didn’t think I wanted to go through all that. She’s got another thing she can do, even with the water running and toothpaste foaming around her mouth. She can hear a telephone.

She made a signal for me that our phone was ringing and pushed me toward the living room. It was LaShonda.

“I thought you were running on empty but now I think you got something going on,” she said.

“Like what?”

“I called about ten of the black kids I know and told them your plan and they were all over it!” I could hear
the excitement in her voice. “You know, nobody was speaking out but now that you’ve got something they can run with they’re coming around. How many signs did you make?”

“Twenty-five,” I answered. “Then I ran out of ink because I did it in Photoshop on my ink-jet.”

“Get some more ink,” LaShonda said. “I got a feeling.”

“There aren’t that many black kids in the school,” I said.

“Zander, word has spread—it’s not just the black kids calling me,” LaShonda said. “Get the ink!”

I told Mom what LaShonda said about what was happening, showed her the sign, and told her I needed to cop some printer juice. Her money wasn’t that heavy but she gave what she had.

“Demonstrations always work,” she said. “At least they let people know you’re pissed off.”

I hadn’t thought of that, but it was something to tell the kids at school.

I got the ink and started making more signs. They measured eleven by seventeen on card stock and they looked good. The bold lettering took a lot of ink but the words really
stood out. I looped the ends of the string and stapled them to the card stock so the signs could be hung around the neck. All in all there were nearly a hundred signs, although I didn’t think I’d need half of them.

As I put the signs together I started telling myself not to be nervous. It was as if I was overhearing myself saying, “Calm down, Zander, calm down.”

I really wanted the demonstration to be successful. Maybe I even needed it to work. LaShonda’s call gave me confidence, but then I started thinking that maybe the message wasn’t strong enough. Kambui and LaShonda had both said I was coming on too weak. It was clear that we were being degraded. Everyone knew that and, for a while, I wondered if I had enough ink to do the whole thing over with something stronger. But then I thought about the signs that the workers in Memphis carried that read “I Am a Man.” People could see that the workers there were men, but the way they were being treated, as if they just had to do what they were told and take whatever salary the city offered, people had to be reminded. That had to be the starting point. Before I went to bed I went into the living room and kissed Mom good night.

“You’re really nervous about this demonstration, aren’t you?” she said.

“Yeah, I am,” I answered.

Thursday morning. Kambui was sitting on my stoop when I got downstairs. I had the signs in a Macy’s box. He looked them over and nodded.

I HAVE BEEN
DEGRADED

As we walked toward the school, I asked Kambui if he was scared about the demonstration. He said no.

“Me, either,” I said. “My mom says demonstrations have always worked. At least they’ll know we’re pissed off.”

“I’m not nervous because this one
won’t
work,” Kambui said. “I’m nervous because they’re going to laugh at us, then tomorrow you’ll fight Alvin and get beat up, and then we’ll get kicked out of school, slide into a life of crime, and go to jail for the rest of our lives. Case closed.”

“LaShonda said that a lot of kids were interested,” I said. “I just hope that nobody gets mad enough to start a fight.”

When Kambui and I got to Da Vinci I could sense that something was already going on. Mr. Culpepper was sitting downstairs at the security desk with the security guard and they were looking around as if they were trying to figure it all out. I knew what had happened. When LaShonda had made her calls somebody had called somebody who had called somebody who had run it all down to Mr. Culpepper.

I took the signs into my homeroom and took some of them out of the box. LaShonda and Bobbi came in and they both took a stack of signs to hand out to the kids who wanted to get involved.

I was hoping for the best as I slipped a string over my head, positioned the sign across my chest, and headed for Algebra.

Math was usually a little interesting, but today was even more interesting because our teacher acted like he didn’t care about the signs the black kids were wearing. He just kept talking about how the ancient Egyptians figured out the height of the pyramids.

But the whole time he kept checking out the black kids in the class wearing the signs that said that they were being degraded.

Then, when the class was almost over, Kelly Bena opened the door and blew into the room. She looked around for a hot minute, spotted me, and came to my desk.

“Can I see you outside?” she asked.

I looked over at the teacher and he nodded that I could go. Picking up my books and the signs I had brought with me, I followed her into the hallway.

Kelly stood very close to me and spoke quietly like she always did.

“Zander, I’m not a racist and I don’t like being treated like one,” she said. Her whole body and face looked mad but she still spoke softly. “This is not fair and I’m going to complain to Mrs. Maxwell!”

“Who said you were a racist?” I asked her.

“Nobody
said
it,” Kelly answered. “But if the black kids walking around with signs about being degraded can look at me in the same way that they look at the Sons of the Whatever, then they’re putting me in the same category as them, and I resent it.”

There were tears running down her face and I knew she wasn’t into any acting. I didn’t know what to do.

“I’m not saying that you were degrading us.”

“Zander, I can see your point. But when you make things this simple—just black against white—you’re including everybody,” Kelly went on. “And I don’t want to be degraded by anyone for who I am or what I am. I go out of my way not to degrade anybody else. If anybody is being degraded, then we’re all being degraded.”

I handed her a sign.

Kelly looked at the sign and then at me. Her mouth moved as if she was trying to say something, but nothing came out. Then, in one quick movement, she turned the sign around and put it across her chest.

As she walked off I knew it was good and bad. She was saying that the black kids had to own what we were doing the same way that I was saying that Alvin and his crew had to own what they were doing. Okay, but she was also pinning the tail on Alvin, just as I hoped she would.

The period ended and when we went into the hallway there were groups of kids gathered around the bulletin boards where we had put up the broadsheets. It was Mr. Weinstein, the gym teacher, Cody’s father, who tore the first one down.

“You’ve got to put that back up!” I heard Cody say. “It’s a school rule that you can’t take something down from the bulletin board unless it’s obscene.”

“Cody, don’t you go starting trouble!” Mr. Weinstein said. “Because that’s against
my
rules!”

“Put it back up, please!” Cody insisted. “Sir.”

Mr. Weinstein dropped the paper on the floor and stormed down the hallway. Cody picked it up and tacked it back onto the bulletin board.

Sidney Aronofsky came up to me and asked me for a sign. Soon I was passing them out to more kids, blacks and whites, girls and boys.

LaShonda had been right. A lot of the kids at Da Vinci had been checking out the Sons of the Confederacy and hadn’t liked what they were doing. But they had been quiet until we had given them a way to express themselves. We gave out all of the signs, and before I knew it a lot of students were speaking to me. They were telling me how they were glad that someone was speaking up. One boy said that his grandfather had gone South on a bus with the Freedom Riders.

“He got beaten up,” the kid said. “But on the way home he was thinking that was the only fight he had ever won.”

In Language Arts, Miss LoBretto changed the lesson to a poem that Yeats had written called “The Second Coming.”

“Who knows what Yeats meant when he wrote the lines ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,’” she asked.

We spent the rest of the period talking about Yeats and the poem and about people speaking up when they see something wrong.

I was feeling good when Phat Tony came up to me after Language Arts.

“You’re the Zander man,” Phat Tony said. “I might even let you join my posse.”

“Mr. Scott!”

I turned to see Mr. Culpepper less than four feet away from me. Ashley saw him and came over quickly.

“This is a private conversation, Ashley,” Mr. Culpepper was talking through clenched teeth.

“Better make it fast because I just called the city newspapers,” Ashley said. “You know, I call them if I have news and they call me if anything big breaks in the city. That’s the way we …”

I didn’t get to hear the rest of what Ashley had to say
because Mr. Culpepper was dragging me down the hall. All the time he was muttering in my ear that I had better stop whatever it was that I was doing or he would personally execute me.

By the time he let me go, we were down near the watercooler outside the recording lab. Mr. Culpepper had me against the wall, his nose a quarter of an inch away from mine, and telling me how much I was going to enjoy the great beyond.

I think he really wanted to do something dramatic, like give me the evil eye and turn me into a frog or something, but in the end he just breathed some really hot breath in my face and walked away.

“Hey, Zander!”

I turned to see Alvin McCraney coming toward me.

“What?”

“I didn’t think this was about race, really,” he said. He looked uncomfortable. “We were just acting, brother.”

“We’re just acting, too,” I said.

“But guys are saying they don’t want to be like me and I didn’t mean it to be that way—you know, racist—in the first place,” Alvin said.

“That’s not the way it seemed to the black kids,” I said.

“And I guess most of the white kids saw it that way, too,” Alvin said. “Yo, man, I’m, like, sorry and everything.”

“Whatever,” I said, mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

By the middle of the lunch period Mr. Culpepper had called an assembly of all the eighth-grade students. I asked Ashley when she thought the newspaper reporters would arrive.

“They weren’t interested,” she said, behind her hand. “There was a fire in the State Office Building and the local reporters are covering that. But, as my grandfather used to say, sometimes even the threat of truth is useful.”

What Does My Heart See?
           By LaShonda Powell

What does my heart see

When I close my eyes to the pain

My sisters must feel?

Does it have secret visions?

Remembered dreamscapes

That twist reality?

What does my heart hear?

When I close my ears to the words

That thunder the air?

Is there some elusive tune

Pulsing through its valves

Like a gone mad iPod

Humming Swahili?

What does my heart feel

When I close my soul to the grief

That stinks up the air?

What sad list of excuses

Can I give myself

Pretending I don’t know

How a stone heart breaks?

M
r. Culpepper showed a new talent as he stood on the stage in the auditorium talking to the eighth grade: the ability to turn very red from the top of his upper lip to his forehead while turning just a little red around his chin.

“The entire project is canceled! You will go back to the usual way of dealing with the units on the Civil War. There will be no more Union and Confederate factions. There will be no discussions on slavery outside of the classrooms. There will be no broadsides posted on any bulletin board, student or otherwise, without my permission.

“Anyone who disobeys my directive will face disciplinary action, detention, and possible dismissal from Da Vinci Academy.

“All racial matters will be resolved by me in the privacy of my office! Is there anyone in this assembly who is not clear as to my instructions?”

No one raised their hands.

“To clear the air we can now have any
necessary
comments or observations. Keep your comments brief and to the point!”

Kelly Bena started toward the stage and Mr. Culpepper said she could make her remarks from her seat. She still came to the stage, stood at the mic, and turned toward the kids.

“I don’t like to be accused of anything ugly or be associated with anything like being disrespectful to people. Maybe I should have spoken out when I saw what the Sons of the Confederacy published in
The Palette,
but I was trying to be cool because it could have been a freedom of speech issue. It’s also a human issue and we can’t separate it from our history.

“Also, I don’t like the idea that the Cruisers didn’t just go after the ones who published the article even though I understand from Zander that it was difficult to pin them down. That’s all I have to say except I hope everyone has a nice day.”

Alvin came up next.

“I think everybody is still making too much of this whole thing. I’m not saying the Sons of the Confederacy shouldn’t have thought more about how people were going to take things, but I know that none of them are racists or anything. We were supposed to be back before the Civil War and we were putting our minds in that time frame.

“I don’t know if you have to study history from one point of view. Maybe you can understand it better if you put yourself in someone else’s shoes and try to understand what was going on back then.

“I’m sorry for the people I offended but I think it’s wrong of people to come down on me so hard when almost the whole country had some connection with slavery back in the day. I guess I’m not too sensitive a guy, but that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. We should be able to talk about race and maybe even make fun of it. Or that might be in a perfect world or something, I don’t know. It’s, like, a hundred and forty-some years since the Civil War was over and I thought we could treat everything lighter. My bad, but I’m not a racist and I think that Zander should come up and deal with everything people are saying.”

A lot of students turned toward me and it was one of those moments when I knew I should have put something down on paper. I hadn’t, but I was standing up and headed for the front.

I was thinking hard and fast. The only thing really cool I came up with was that the Cruisers were supposed to have been peacemakers.

Alvin was still at the mic and he held out his hand. I shook it and I heard some boos, probably from the Genius Gangstas.

“Okay, so I would like to thank Mrs. Maxwell for giving us a chance to play a role in studying the Civil War,” I said. “I’d like to thank Mr. Culpepper, too. I knew it was hard on him not to come down on us, but he gave us some slack and that was cool. I would like to apologize to anybody that me and the Cruisers got uptight, because we have to own what we did, too. But I don’t think you can just throw spit, wipe off your chin, and say you were just kidding.

“If you say something to somebody’s face or behind their back or on the Net or on the phone, you have to own it. And that means you have to think about it before it comes
out. As for the Sons of the Confederacy, I have to say that you don’t have to think wrong to be wrong. Not thinking can be as hard as thinking wrong if it hurts people.

“I’d like to thank the Cruisers for their support and how generally cool they are. I’d also like to thank the Genius Gangstas and all the kids who supported us.

“Da Vinci is the Da Bomb!”

I got some nice props, and when Mrs. Maxwell clapped even Mr. Culpepper put his hands together—once. Mrs. Maxwell came up to the mic next.

“Well, haven’t we had an adventure?” she said. “I think we’ve all learned something very valuable. Because speech is free in America it is still very powerful and must be handled with caution. I think we’ve also learned that there are many issues surrounding the major events of history that make problem solving difficult.

“I’m very proud of the fact that, although some tempers were pushed to a high degree, the issues were resolved in thoughtful ways. The debates were very similar to what occurred during the period before the Civil War.

“I would like to thank those students who represented the Union, those who represented the Confederacy, and even those who represented other groups. The Cruisers’
peacemaking efforts did bring the arguments forward, but sometimes, as Mr. Culpepper suggested, there comes a time when we need to change the path of history. I hope part of your classroom instructions on the War between the States will also include some discussions about what happened with our little exercise. Lastly, I want you all to be very proud of yourselves. While there were disagreements, there was also a great deal of learning going on and it was handled with typical Da Vinci dignity. Thank you. Now, please return to your next scheduled period.”

When we left the auditorium a lot of kids came up and gave me high fives. They hadn’t spoken up before but now they were in on it and I guess that’s the way things go. People who should be taking a stand won’t budge until they’re pushed into it. It was seriously lame but I didn’t say anything. I wondered what I would have done if it had been about somebody besides black people.

If I had been white would I have spoken up? Was it really just about the principles or was it mostly about the personal hurt?

Everybody was buzzing as if a thousand lightbulbs had gone off in their heads, and I was thinking it was easy
being a hero when you weren’t really risking anything in the first place.

In US History Mr. Siegfried gave the speech we all expected.

“Most studies of the years leading up to the Civil War are notable for the fact that they move the human issues away from the center of the discussions. The statements of the Southern states declaring their reasons for leaving the Union talk about constitutional rights to own slaves and constitutional obligations of the Northern states to return escaped slaves, but they carefully avoid talking about the simple moral issues. Is it right to enslave a human being?

“What happened was that a number of fantasies were created. The first was that Africans were better off as slaves in America than they would have been as free people in Africa. The second fantasy was that most people in the South believed in a Southern cause that included slavery. Most people in the South never owned a slave and didn’t want the war. The war made them victims of the slave trade.

“This is not 1860, and we can’t turn back the clock to a different time and different mentality. In the final analysis I think the Cruisers did a good job in centering the issues.

In theory they stopped the Civil War. Now for your homework assignment.”

The groans flew around the room.

“I want you to write essays about what would have happened if there actually had been no Civil War,” Mr. Siegfried went on.

The Cruisers got a short round of applause at the end of the class and I felt good about the whole thing because we had stopped the bad feelings flying around the school, and we did get kids to work with us in the end, so it was mostly good. In the media center there were some other ideas.

“I think we should have let Zander and Alvin fight it out,” Cody was saying. “Then we could see what the Zander man has going on.”

“I think Zander would have won easy,” LaShonda said. “He’s got those long arms and everything.”

“I still don’t know if this whole thing is settled,” Kambui said. “Because some people were talking in the auditorium and being all correct, but they were hanging out afterward and I think they were backing off and going back to thinking they were right, it was all light stuff.”

We talked more about everything later when we were walking home.

“Time will tell,” I said.

“Time will tell?”
Kambui stopped in the middle of the street and turned to me. “You got that from
The Book of Lame Sayings
?”

Bobbi and LaShonda came over and we all exchanged high fives.

“We are so together!” LaShonda said.

“I think that even Mr. Culpepper has to admit it,” Bobbi said.

I doubted that.

When I got home Mom was crying again.

“I just got off the phone with your father,” she said. “And?”

“He’s having the subpoena dropped,” she said. “He said he was very upset about his conversation with you and thought that I was poisoning your mind against him and his new wife. He doesn’t want you going to Seattle.”

“So I’m staying in Harlem.”

“Yeah.”

“So what you crying about?”

“I always feel so bad when I talk with him,” she said. “You know that.”

“Did you tell him you were going to be in a movie?”

“I did, and I told him I was going to be making twice as much money as I am,” Mom said. “Why did you say that?”

“To make him feel bad,” she said. “You think I should call him up and apologize for lying?” We both said “naaah!” at the same time.