X (6 page)

Mr. Ostrowski’s reddish cheeks puffed outward as he smiled. “Now, Malcolm,” he said, “you know that’s not likely to happen.”

I blinked at him.
Not likely?
I had heard him say it plenty of times — that there was more out in the world than just being a farmer, like most of the other kids’ parents. He talked about a whole life to be lived beyond Mason, or even Lansing, about striking out on our own, making a go of it, especially to those of us at the top of the class.

“You ought to be more realistic,” he went on. “A lawyer? That’s no kind of realistic goal for a nigger.”

My stomach began to clench. “But, I —”

“What can you really be?” Mr. Ostrowski mused. “A carpenter? You’re good with your hands, I think. That’s respectable work, carpentry.”

“Sir, I’m at the top of the class,” I managed. “I really think . . .” My voice trailed off. Beneath my protest, I could feel the dream slipping away. Right through my fingertips, like air.

I tried to hold on to Papa’s belief in me and to the things Mom had always said about making him proud.

“This is the real world, boy,” Mr. Ostrowski said. “Be as good as you want in the classroom, but out those doors, you’re just a nigger.”

Just a nigger.

Those words haunt me. I can’t get out from under them.

I’ve been a Negro my whole life. Light-skinned, sandy-haired, and olive-eyed, yet a Negro nonetheless.

Up until that moment, I’d never, ever heard it as a bad word. It had been tossed my way a thousand times. People on the street:
Nigger
. Boys in school:
Hey, nigger
. Playing around after class:
Come on, nigger.
I rolled with it. Always felt it was all in fun. We were friends, all of us.

Now I saw it all new. What it really meant to be called a nigger.

It was like hurting in retrospect, each repetition of it a pinprick. A thousand tiny stabs, felt all at once.
I’m a nigger.

But that wasn’t the word that hurt most, it turned out. The one that sliced me.

Just.

Just
a nigger.

I’d always been colored, but now I saw the walls that came along with it. Thick and white and holding me in place.

I thought about Mom, passing as white at all those jobs, burying her blackness beneath the way she looked. Trying to get us the things we needed. Things we couldn’t rightly have.

I thought about Papa.

Just a nigger.
You try to be more than that, you get cut down.

I thought about the white boys I used to play with, the ones who would go along with any game or prank I came up with.
Great idea, nigger.
They used to follow me anywhere, looking up at me like I was smart and wise. A leader. And I thought I was. All this time I thought they were seeing me. Now I knew they were seeing just a
nigger
.

I started to feel restless, an itching under my skin that I didn’t know how to scratch. One that couldn’t be scratched, maybe.

On the Bus, 1940

When the sky turns black again, the air through the window cracks turns to slices of cold. I huddle deeper in my seat. My coat is too thin to make a good blanket. Even though it’s summer, night is night and the air is cool.

I’m far too hyped up to sleep. The old miner snores softly beside me; I don’t even have his constant chatter to distract me from the weightless feeling. Like we’re hurtling into infinity. Like the night will never end and the black sky will conquer us all. But I love that black sky. The mystery of it. I can’t help but wonder about the pitch-dark secrets it holds.

If I could turn off my mind, my heart, it would be perfect. But I just keep thinking about how far from home I’m getting. A little farther. A little farther. It still doesn’t scare me, but I guess I’m waiting for the moment that Lansing is so far in the rearview that it gets smaller. But it’s all still here with me, stowing away.

Papa’s in my mind. Memories from a long time ago. And shadows of the things I don’t know. Maybe Ella remembers him, can tell me the stories that never got told back home, about how Papa was young once. He’d ridden on a bus before, I know that much. But there’s plenty I don’t know.

We’re all family, Ella says, on account of the Little blood that we share. I try to think of it that way. Not like two families, but like one big family, just spread out. But it isn’t exactly the same. Ella seems familiar to me and close, but not like my whole brothers and sisters. That’ll change, I hope, once I’m staying with her.

At the bus station saying good-bye, it felt not quite real yet. Hugging everyone. The whole history of our lives in those hugs. Days and days and nights and nights together. I know every hair on their heads. I can tell the difference between my brothers’ breathing in their sleep. We don’t even have to speak. Every single glance and tiny movement is a language of its own.

There have been good-byes before. When the welfare man sent me to the first foster home, and again when I ended up with the Swerlins in Mason. We’ve been split apart in all directions, time and time again. But they were always see-you-tomorrow good-byes, not see-you-I-don’t-know-when. We’ve always been a walk or a shout away from one another. This is different. This is huge.

It’s huger now. Now that I’m alone on the road and the world outside seems so much bigger than it ever has before.

Lansing, 1939

I would swing by our house pretty often, to see about Philbert and Hilda and Yvonne and everyone. Mom always seemed glad enough to see me, but I started to think that my dropping by only reminded her of how things were coming apart.

I came around one time, and everything was going to shit. I saw the familiar black car out front, as well as another car and a small sort of truck with a closed-in back. Different from usual.

My heart thumped faster as I bounded into the house, into a living room crowded with people. My siblings stood in a loose half circle around the room, facing the four intruding adults: three large, unfamiliar men, plus a woman I’d seen before, from the welfare office. Mom sat on the couch, with Yvonne clinging to her arm. “You cannot separate me from my children,” Mom declared. “This is wrong!”

The woman looked away from Mom and spoke to Wilfred instead.

“She’s not in her right mind,” the welfare woman said. “She needs psychiatric care.”

She handed Wilfred a pile of papers with small print. Important, scary-looking papers. Wilfred glanced at them. “A mental institution?”

The woman nodded. “The state mental hospital. In Kalamazoo.”

“For God’s sake,” Mom said. Her eyes lit with anger. “Can’t you leave me and my family alone?” She wasn’t crazy — we all knew that. Something else was going on.
They’ll try anything to destroy us
, Mom had said once. I hadn’t believed her. I mean, they couldn’t . . .

“Please don’t take our mother from us!” Hilda cried. Kalamazoo was an hour and a half away. Too far to visit regularly.

“She’s not crazy,” Wilfred said.

“Leave her alone,” I blurted out. But the men ignored us.

“Get the girl,” one of them said. “Move her out of the way.”

Hilda reached for Yvonne and drew her back, away from Mom. “Mama!” Yvonne cried. But Hilda was larger and stronger. She pulled Yvonne close, despite her growing cries. To fight would only make things worse.

“Take my babies to the kitchen,” Mom ordered Hilda. The men were moving in on her.

“Let’s go,” they told her, reaching for her arms to help her up. At the first hint of contact, Mom began to fight. They gripped her instantly and hard.

“No. No!” she cried. “Wilfred —” She stretched an arm out toward my brother. He started toward her automatically, but the men pulled her back. “Take care of your siblings,” Mom called. “We have friends who will help you. Remember that!” She looked at the rest of us. “Be strong. Make me proud. Make your papa proud!”

The government men dragged Mom out of the house. They held her by the elbows and ankles and shoulders and thighs, their harsh, meaty hands digging into her softness. She flailed against their touch, but they overpowered her with ease, the way those white men always knew how to do.

Still, Mom did not go quietly. Her hair came loose from the neat bun at her neck and flew in long frizzes down to her waist. The determined, proud expression we all knew so well surfaced from beneath the sorrow. I thought,
No way can they take her. Not Mom. Not really.

Yvonne cried on. Her retching, choking, uncontrollable cry was the sound that rose above all the rest: the scuffle of boots on earth, Mom’s angry protests, and the slamming of paddy-wagon doors, with its cursed finality.

A cloud of dust rose as they drove Mom away from us. The usual cloud that turned the air brown and silty, but this time it failed to dissipate.

Right there and then, this happening shot to the top of the pile of moments that defined our family, in darkness and in light. I put my arms around my sisters. We fell into a familiar sad huddle, which took me back seven years, to the night Papa never came home. I was so small then, comforted by the others, who were bigger and older than me. Now Hilda laid her head on my shoulder. Her tears dripped into the space between my collar and my neck, directly onto my skin. Soft. Warm. Wet. I stared straight ahead, my own eyes dry as desert bones.

We held hands in a small tight circle. We had already lost Papa. Forever. Losing Mom this way was worse than forever, almost, how she was just out of reach now. To know she was out there and not be able to touch her.

Hilda sobbed. Philbert turned away to hide his trauma. I wanted to tell them it would be all right, but it didn’t feel all right. Didn’t feel like it ever would be, not for a minute, ever again. Wilfred’s face was like a statue in the rain. I don’t think I had seen him cry but once in my life: at Papa’s funeral. It tore my guts to see my siblings so shattered.

“Come on, then,” the government man said. “You can’t all stay in the house alone.”

“We’re not alone,” I said. “We have each other.”

The government man’s face twitched. If he had laughed outright, I would have leaped across the room and punched him. Couldn’t have helped it. “It’s the law,” he said. “A bunch of kids can’t live alone. We got places for all of you.”

Hilda’s head snapped up. “Places?” She emphasized the
s
.

“Yeah.”

“No. We will stay together,” Philbert said.

This time the government man did laugh. “Ain’t no one that’s going to take in all of Earl Little’s stray niggers.”

I would have leaped then, but Hilda was holding my arm.

“I’m twenty,” Wilfred protested. “I can take care of them.” He’d been doing it all this time anyway.

“You can stay,” said the man. He nodded at Hilda. “And you. For the rest, we have homes.”

Wilfred led the government man to the side of the room. There was nowhere to talk without us hearing, but he appeared more like the man of the house for trying. He argued. He pleaded. He offered himself, time and time again, as our caretaker. And then he stopped. He stopped because the game was over and we all were outplayed. He returned to us.

“You have to go,” Wilfred said. “For now, you have to go.” He urged us to our feet.

The government people waited by the door while my siblings each packed a small bag of clothes and things. I didn’t have anything to pack myself, of course. I had already moved. I tried to help Reginald gather his things, but he shooed my hands away, glaring at me through the tears.

Philbert, too, held his back to me, and I wondered how many more ways this day would find to cut me. My brothers turned to one another to stem the sadness, but not to me. Because I was already gone for them. And so I began to hate myself for leaving. What had seemed like not a big deal at the time now seemed like the first wave in a terrible ocean tide. The waves just kept on coming, larger and harsher and saltier than ever before.

My limbs grew heavy, and after a time I found myself sitting on the porch, the corners of the boards digging into the backs of my thighs. The light mellowed as the afternoon deepened around me. My breath frosted into thick, sad clouds. The trees arced shadows over the snow. I no longer lived here, but everything around me was home. Snowdrifts covered the stretches of grass that I had walked every day of my life, the mounds of garden earth that I had turned with my bare hands. Beneath the blanket of white, the land now seemed empty, its history erased. What would this place become now? Without Mom, without the others, could I ever again think of it as home?

One by one, my siblings came out onto the porch. Philbert. Reginald. Wesley. Yvonne. Robert. From inside drifted the echo of Hilda’s weeping. She had been our second mother for so long — would she now become the one to grieve us?

The government people bundled my brothers and sister into their cars. I could hear them talking about where everyone was going — Philbert and Reginald to one home, and Yvonne, Wesley, and Robert to another. I suppose it was a relief to hear that no one would be sent away alone, the way I had been. They couldn’t have managed it, to be torn away from the family. Not like me.