[5 of 5] Long Division, Book Two, pages 58-135 by Kiese Laymon (2013)
Author: Kiese Laymon
Laymon, Kiese. “Book Two, Pages 58-153,” Long Division, Scribner Book Company, 2013, 2021.
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BOOK TWO
EYES HAVE IT…
In the movies or a dumb book, I knew that I could look down at the ground and follow footprints to see where Shalaya Crump and Jewish Evan Altshuler had gone to, but the problem was that I’d never seen a real footprint. There wasn’t much sand or even dirt in Chicago or Jackson, and when there was, I can’t say that I spent even a second looking for somebody’s footprints.
I walked over to what Evan called the Freedom School. To the left of the door was a tilted black cardboard sign with white letters, a dot-dot-dot, and an exclamation point.
I peeked in the window at three people covered in sheets. They were walking around the inside of what looked like an old-fashioned classroom. There were three desks in the middle of the room. The ceiling was super high and you could see birds’ nests all at the top. The floor was part carpet, part wood, part tile, and all around the corners of the room were wooden sculptures and saws and pictures. The men in sheets weren’t wrecking the room or trying to set anything on fire. They were just walking around, looking at the walls, talking to each other. I was zoning out when all of a sudden, I felt a shot to the back of my knees.
I turned around and another man in a white sheet was poking me in the kidney with a T-ball bat. I still didn’t drop the laptop computer or the book. I’d seen plenty of movies about people in the Klan. In the movies, they always talked in those rough country voices that are only ever used by Northern white men actors playing Southern white men. But in real life, the men weren’t saying a word. They didn’t even grunt. They didn’t even breathe loud. I never really understood before that Klan sheets didn’t have mouth holes. You would think that they had to breathe heavv unless they wanted to suffocate under those sheets.
When they pulled me into the school. they sat me in an old-fashioned desk I could barelv fit in. The men walked around and circled me. One of them reached down for the computer, but I didn’t let it go.
“I ain’t letting this go,” I told him. “I’ll give you this book, but I can’t give you this computer, man.” He pulled his sheet up and showed me the barrel of his rifle. “Oh, but you know what? I’ma show you how to turn it on,” I told him. “Did any of y’all see this pretty Black girl and this other white boy with a fro who looked… he looked… um, not good. His name was Evan. He was your color and…”
Before I could finish, one of the men slapped me right across my mouth and looked me right in the eyes. I couldn’t see his eyes because he had on glasses. I looked at all the men’s eyes for the first time and realized that they all had on glasses under their sheets.
“Just so you know,” I told them, “that’s the first time I ever let someone hit me in my mouth. I’m serious. And if you didn’t have that gun, I’d probably pop that old ass right in the jaw. I’m serious.”
Another man slapped me right across the mouth after I said my piece. My problem was that I’d seen so many pictures of Klansmen. The pictures made you know that the men under the sheets were real men with real stinky breath, real rotten teeth, real potbellies. I figured it was like football. As soon as you put on your helmet and shoulder pads and your jersey, you were like everyone else on your team, especially to people watching. Our football coach, Coach Foots, wouldn’t even let us have our names on the backs of our ierseys because he said the team is more important than the player.
But even dressed in the same uniform and with no name on the back of your jersey, the GAME was filled with seconds where it was up to you to make a play. Not your teammate.
I knew that each of the Klansmen was feeling fear and trying to figure out a way to seem less afraid than he was to the other teammates on his Klan squad. But when you’re getting the taste slapped out of your mouth for no reason, it doesn’t matter if the person doing the taste-slapping is probably just as scared as you. And it makes you feel weird that no matter what, the taste-slappers never talk… they just breathe like new asthmatics and watch you. It made it easier to believe they lived their whole lives behind those white sheets, slapping Black kids up and never breathing right.
“I wanna be honest with you,” I told them.
One of the men was looking at the laptop computer and playing with the keys. He tapped the shoulder of the one who was standing over me and he bent down and started looking at the laptop computer, too.
“Look, I wanna be honest. You know what that is? That’s a computer.”
They didn’t say a word. “A laptop. I can get you three of them, but first, you gotta let me go and you gotta let me take that one with me.”
One of the men stood up after I said my speech and stood over me. “I’m serious. I can get you whatever you want. I’m good at stealing. Computers, telephones, color televisions, tape players, penny loafers, Bibles, tickets to Fresh Fest. I know y’all lackin’ in 1964. Just tell me what you need.”
I held my hand out. “Look, let’s go ahead and shake on it. I’m serious. This book… how about I give you this book, and you let me go?”
The Klansman who slapped me in the mouth a second earlier looked at the book and actually reached for it. I pulled it away from him and, without hesitating at all, he reared back and hit me in my head so hard that the blood in my mouth tasted like canned spinach. I was on that floor tasting all kinds of spinach when I heard, “Nigger, you talk too damn much…” I couldn’t hear anything except the crunch of his work boots stomping my legs to mush and the echo of nigger.
You can see that all the books are connected in a way and what happens in one can coordinate to another
I find that this happening adds levels to what I imagine City going through.
Everybody I knew, at one point or another, had called someone “nigger,” but I never heard the “er” when we said it to each other. It was just something that all of us said. We didn’t mean it to hurt each other and we didn’t mean it to make someone feel lucky. It was like the only word that meant lucky, cool, and cursed at the same time. But when that white man behind that sheet called me “nigger,” I heard all the “er” and I knew when he said it, he thought I was not just less than him, but less than a human. Or at least, he was trying to really convince himself.
In 1985, every little thing we did in front of white folks had to be perfect, according to Mama Lara. And if I acted like I wasn’t perfect around them, Mama Lara would tell me to go get her switch and she’d give me twelve licks. I didn’t know if Mama Lara had ever been beaten by a white man in a sheet. I did know she had walked by the locked white folks’ bathroom, though. She had seen and felt what I was feeling in that Freedom School, whether she’d had her legs stomped to rubber bands or not. I wondered if Jewish Evan Altshuler’s people knew the same feeling.
I was trying so hard not to scream when the door to the school busted open and Jewish Evan Altshuler and Shalaya Crump rushed in. One of the men who had been looking at the computer ran toward Evan. And you know what that boy did? Evan pulled out this long wooden BB gun and just started shooting at the chests of the whole Klan. I figured that the Klansman with the real rifle was gonna shoot us all in the head, but he didn’t reach for it at all.
Shalaya Crump came over near me and helped drag me out of the school. She let me rest a lot of weight on her, but I didn’t wanna put too much weight on her because she’d know how heavy I really was.
“I’m okay,” I told her. “But they got Baize’s computer.”
“We’ll get it later. We gotta get outta here.”
Shalaya Crump didn’t say a word until we got to the hole. I tried to let her get in first but she didn’t want to. “City,” she said, “let me help you.”
I got in the hole and she looked back toward the school. I peeked my head out of the hole and all three of the men had their hoods off, and one of the men was whupping Jewish Evan Altshuler like he was his grandma or something.
“That’s his uncle,” Shalaya Crump said.
“What?” I backed away from the mouth of the hole to give her room to get in. “Just come in the hole and tell it to me more when we get home.”
“Listen to me. I saw a talking cat, Shalaya. For real! And I saw this colored bathroom. We don’t belong in a place like this. We ain’t built for this.” Shalava Crump looked back toward the school. “Please let’s just go home. Please! I went to 2013 for you just like you asked me. Please.”
I couldn’t see what was happening but I heard Evan screaming and I heard what sounded like wet open palms slamming down on someone’s back. “You’re right,” Shalaya Crump said. “Scoot back and give me room to get in.”
I crouched and made more room for Shalaya Crump. It was the first time I’d been in the hole by myself and I’m not sure why, but it seemed bigger and colder than before. I was crouched for a good ten seconds, but Shalaya Crump didn’t get in, so I stood up. “Come on, Shalaya. Let’s go.”
She looked me right in the face. “I’m sorry, City,” she said. “It’s for the best.” Shalaya Crump slammed the door to the hole shut.
I pushed open the door of the hole slowly. Before my eyes could adjust to the light, a pine cone bounced right off my forehead. “I knew you’d be back. Gimme my damn computer, and my book!”
“You know where you are.” She snatched Long Division from my hands. “I want my computer, too! And my damn phone.”
“Oh, I didn’t take a phone. I only borrowed your computer.” Baize was wearing the same outfit she’d had on when I saw her before, but with different shoes. She had on these red, black, green, and yellow high-top Nikes.
“Where they at, Voltron? I’m serious.”
“Umm.” I was trying to decide whether to lie or not. “One of my friends has the phone and someone else has the computer.” I looked at her face and, more than anything, I just wanted her to hug me. Sounds crazy, but after getting your legs stomped to dust by white dudes in sheets, you kinda want someone Black to touch you in a way that’s soft. “Okay, look, I’m gonna tell you everything.”
Baize picked up another pine cone and threw it right at my head. “I don’t want to know everything,” she told me. “I don’t even want to know anything from you. I just want my computer back.” She picked up another pine cone and stared at it. “When was the last time knowing everything about something ended up good for you?”
I didn’t know how to answer her question, so I got out of the hole and told Baize how my friend had showed me the hole a few days earlier and taken me from 1985 to 2013. I told her about meeting a white boy who said he could take us back to 1964. And I told her that I needed to go back and help my friend get home alive.
You know what she said after I explained it to her?
“I believe you,” she said, “but I still really need my computer back, though. All my rhymes are in there. And I need it for the Spell-Off.”
“You do?” I stood up and tried stretching out my knees. “Why?”
“Why are all your rhymes in there?”
“Oh. I’m saying, why do you need a computer for a Spell-Off?”
“Because I wanna look at some Spell-Off clips on YouTube. I got this perfect introduction and I wanna make sure they let us introduce ourselves. It’s so dope.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what she was talking about. “One more question? Well… uh, why do you believe me?”
“Because I know people can disappear.”
Baize said that I could come stay at her house until the morning, when her great-grandmother got off work. I told her that I didn’t need to stay that long. Before I limped into her house, she told me to sit down on her porch. My legs were killing me. I just wanted to eat something and come up with a plan to save Shalaya Crump.
“Just tell me,” she said. “Is it us or is it the hole that sends us back in time?”
“I saw you jump in that hole after you stole my computer,” she told me. “And I got in the hole myself the next day.”
Part of me thought it was just Evan and Shalaya Crump who could time travel. But if Shalaya Crump could time travel and Evan could time travel and I could time travel, and now Baize could time travel, I figured it must be the hole.
“I ain’t gonna lie to you,” I told her. “I think it’s the hole. Can we go inside? I’m hungry.”
Baize’s house and porch were so raggedy that I didn’t really wanna walk in. Super nasty houses always made me itch, even if nothing was crawling on me. The TV in their living room looked like it belonged in Richie Rich’s house, though. It was nearly as tall as me.
“Why your TV so big and nice but your house is kinda, you know…’
“Tore up from the floor up?” she said, and started grinning.
“Yeah, how do you…” I paused to try to get my words right. “How much is a TV like that? Like $2,000?”
Baize sat in the one chair in the living room and I sat on the floor. She turned on the TV with one of the three remotes.
Before the TV came on, all these lights went from red to green, then a new version of Soul Train was on, and it was the sound as much as the screen that I couldn’t understand. Soul Train on that TV sounded like life. You know how in life, there’s hardly ever just that one sound you’re listening for? Like even when I imagined Shalaya Crump telling me she loved me, I imagined hearing the wind whistling and a few different car horns behind us and maybe a freight train miles away and definitely some barking dogs. That’s how the sound was on that TV. You could hear people moving their feet and snapping their fingers, and it sounded like the Soul Train line was happening in your room. If everything you saw in real life had the best light behind it, and was polished super shiny, that’s how Soul Train looked on that TV.
Baize gave me the remote and told me that she was gonna make something to eat. “Even if we had a lot of money, we wouldn’t waste it on the outside of our house. That could be gone in a second if another storm came. You want chicken ramen with your french fries and butter beans?”
Baize walked through the other room into the kitchen.
The first thing I did with the remote was check how many channels the TV had. When I pushed below 1, the TV went to channel 1,975. Back in my time, we’d watch TV and say “Ain’t nothing on.” I didn’t know how anyone could ever say “Ain’t nothing on” in 2013. The Flintstones was on. Basketball was on. Soap operas were on. Andy Griffith was on. The Cosby Show and Good Times were on. And PBS shows that looked exactly the same as they looked in 1985 were on.
And on more channels than you could imagine, there were Black women with real JET-centerfold booties yelling and righting each other.
Baize came back in the room and sat on the floor next to me.
“What, what?” she asked me. “Don’t ‘what’ me in my house.”
“Why you sitting next to me so close?” She didn’t answer, but her hip was touching my left hand. So I moved it and asked, “Is the ramen ready?”
“Almost. I warmed up the biscuits to go with the butter beans and french fries.”
“Okay.” | kept changing the channels. “What happened to real actors and comedians? On all these stations you see people you would see at the mall fighting. And when did McDonald’s start using Black folks on their commercials?”
“I don’t even know, Voltron,” she said. “That’s a good question.” I could tell she wasn’t really listening to me. “Um, do vou wanna smoke?”
“Smoke what? Aren’t you like twelve?” I asked her. “I’m good. You ain’t never heard of ‘Just Say No?' ”
“Wow,” she said. “I’m thirteen. You should have your own reality show. Keep doing you, Voltron. I’m smoking before I eat.”
Baize walked back toward the kitchen and I just sat there in front of that TV. I hated Baize for smoking without me even though I didn’t want to smoke. After a few minutes I got really curious, though.
I had seen plenty of folks smoke weed and cigarettes, but I’d never seen a girl younger than me smoke.
I walked toward the kitchen and saw that there was a screen door. Sitting on the step on the other side of the screen was Baize. And she had a square in her mouth. Right in front of her was the area where I had seen those two Dobermans doing it. And next to that was a huge, grimy work shed.
“You ever wonder what happened before you in the same place you’re standing now?” I asked her. “Like, I saw this talking cat right around the corner.”
I looked at her and waited for her to ask me to explain myself. “Look,” she said, “let’s talk, but don’t be coming out here messing up my high. Don’t say nothing to me about how I shouldn’t smoke, either. I’m thick and I’m extra and I smoke. Leave me alone.”
“Just extra.” She took a puff and exhaled it.
“If you ask any girl in Melahatchie about me, they’ll be like, ‘Baize, that b- is extra,’ especially after my song blew up on YouTube. It’s a compliment. I know myself.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “You don’t mind people calling you that name, though?”
“What name? ‘B—-?’ Yeah,” she said. “I mind hating-ass b—–es calling me ‘b—–‘ But my girls, they could call me ‘b—-‘ and I could call them ‘b—–‘ and it wouldn’t be a big deal.”
“If you called me ‘b—-,’ I’d get you,” she told me. “I’m just keeping it one hundred. Somehow, some way, I’d have to get you, ’cause it’s hard for boys to really love girls anyway, so I can’t really see letting a boy get away with calling nobody a b—-. Mama taught me that a long time ago. And if a boy did love me, knowing how much it hurt…” She started trailing off. “I don’t know what to say. A nigga who loved me wouldn’t call nobody a b—–. But I don’t even like boys like that anyway.”
“Oh,” I said. All I could think about was how Shalaya Crump whupped this boy, Damon Frazier, to his knees for calling me a “yap-mouth b—-” the summer before last. The whole time she was whupping him, she kept saying, “You gonna respect me.” I thought it was weird she would say that after I was the one that Damon was calling a “yap-mouth b—–,” but it was all making a little more sense now.
“Seem like you thought a lot about that word,” I told Baize. “Can I switch subiects? You ever wonder why people smoke with their hands so close to their lips?”
“Look Voltron,” she said, “no offense but you messing up my smoke, though, for real.”
“Oh. My bad. People still say ‘for real’ around here? You know, you talk like you’re way older than thirteen. Sometimes you call me ‘mayne’ and sometimes you call me ‘boy’ and sometimes you call me ‘Voltron.' ” Baize inhaled more but actually took her fingers away from her lips a bit. “You know why I think you sound so old to me? Because your TV has every age on it. Every age! Like my TV back home, we get four channels including PBS, and you gotta watch all the commercials because you can’t be flipping a lot or your mama and them claim that’ll break the TV.”
Baize looked like she was listening, but she wasn’t. “Whatever,” she said. “You know what was weird when I went back to the past? I was on this same road in my same hood, but no one cared.”
“Why do you just switch subjects like that? I bet when you watch TV, every time a commercial come on, you get to flipping, don’t you?”
“Wait. You walked around back in 1985?”
“Girl, that was dumb. Why would anyone back there care? You ain’t even born where I’m from.”
“That’s what I’m saying.” She lit another cigarette. “It’s hard to go back because you see that there was a time when people in the same space where you are ain’t even care or think nothing about you. But somehow, I’m still related to those folks. When I went back, I wanted to see what the music was like and to see if I could find my parents.”
“Dead,” she said. “I mean, I think.”
I had never had someone tell me that both of their parents were dead, and I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t want to say something to ruin her high, but since I’d never ruined someone’s high before, I wasn’t sure what kind of stuff could ruin your high.
“Man, having dead parents must be like, um…’
“Kinda like having to eat dessert first for the rest of your life and having that dessert be something like, um, pears when everyone around you is eating greasy fried catfish platters and hot peach cobbler, huh?”
That’s all I could come up with.
Baize didn’t say anything. She just kept smoking. “Naw,” she finally said. “Having dead parents ain’t nothing like eating pears.” She blew smoke right in my face. “I only half-knew them. They had me when they were young and they died when they were young. But they loved me.”
“You’re still young,” I told her. She just looked at me and didn’t say a word. “They died together?”
“Yep. We had come back from the swings over there at Gaddis Park. And everyone knew that the storm was coming. So me and my little brother was gonna go stay with my cousins and my grandma and them up in Jackson. So they dropped me off, and went back because… shit, I don’t know why they went back. Never made much sense to me.”
“Then nothing. I never saw them again.” Baize threw what was left of the square on the grass and mashed it into the ground with her Nikes. “They got swallowed up by the water, I think. Or the wind.”
“Because they wouldn’t have left us.” Baize got up, looked down at me, and walked inside the screen door. I followed her. “If I had my computer, I could play one of the songs I made for them after that white man caught me slippin.”
I figured I’d read the words to Baize’s song, but I didn’t want to hear her rap it. It would have embarrassed me too much if she couldn’t rap a lick. I knew I should have been thinking more about her dead parents and what kind of storm could just make people disappear, but I wasn’t. I was thinking of that talking cat and those two Dobermans who just earlier in the day were right where I was looking now, and I was thinking about what Shalaya Crump and Evan were doing. I didn’t think they were kissing anymore. I knew that they were trying to stay alive or fighting to not disappear together, which was even worse.
“What happened to your brother?”
“Oh. Wait. Can I ask vou one more question?”
“That wasn’t a real cigarette, was it?”
Baize liked to control the remote, and she never left it on one channel for longer than five minutes. “I usually don’t watch this much TV, but since you stole my computer and my phone, I don’t have a choice.”
“Yeah, you could read Long Division since you were so pressed about getting it back,” I told her. “Have you read that book? All of it?”
“I read some of it and it made me feel weird.”
“Me too. I like that part where they all got together and listened to that boy talk about that kid LaVander Peeler’s fade. Who wrote it?”
“I don’t know. I told you that I just found it in the woods.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird that there’s no author’s name on it? Is that how they do books in 2013?”
She just looked at me. “That’s what I’m saying, Voltron. There’s something painful in that book. Real painful. And I just don’t feel like reading to the end and finding out what it is.”
“Then why’d you want it back so bad if you weren’t gonna read it?”
“Because it’s mine,” she said. “Whatever is wrong with that book, I wanna be the one to find out before anyone else does. It’s mine.”
“Do kids read a lot in 2013?” I asked her. “Like, in my time, I read a lot because if I don’t, I get my ass whupped. I usually hate whatever I have to read, but when I finish something, I feel so happy. I can’t even lie, though. I probably only finished two books in my whole life.”
Baize was laughing at me. “Nobody around here really reads unless it’s something on a computer, but nobody writes to folks around here, either. But that’s the thing about that book. If I gave it to the most illiterate ass nigga in my grade, I bet he’d at least get through the first chapter, you know?”
“Yeah, I do know,” I told her. “I got through the first chapter.”
“Why no comment?” I asked her. “I would have read even more of it if I didn’t have your computer to mess with. It’s hard for us in 1985 to finish books, and we don’t even have a thousand channels or phones that look like calculators or laptop computers.” I waited for her to ask me something, but she didn’t. “You know what else? I never typed on a typewriter before. But when I typed on your computer, I felt like what I was typing was famous. It just looked so famous on the screen, like I could have written that Long Division book.”
“Voltron, you dumb. I bet vou only wrote a few sentences. That’s a big-ass book. I ain’t trying to hate, but you couldn’t write something like that. You have to have gone through a lot and then have a lot of time on your hands to do something like that. I don’t even think I could do it.”
“I’m not that dumb,” | told her. “Look. We could turn the TV off and you could just write in a tablet, or we could watch a movie,” I said. When I started talking about watching a movie, Baize muted the TV. I don’t know why, but when she turned down the TV to listen to me, it took my like for Baize from twenty miles per hour to around fifty miles per hour. I tried to keep talking and not look as thankful as I was.
“Are you one of those people?” she asked me. “My father used to be like that. I remember he was always telling my mother to turn the TV off so he could watch a movie or tell some ol’ silly story.”
She started smiling. “Yeah, they were. You would have liked them.” I knew I was supposed to ask why, but I didn’t really want to. Didn’t matter, though, because she kept talking anyway. “He said a lot in his stories, kinda like you do.”
Right after she said that, there was this white woman on the television with stringy black hair and big eyes and a nose that reminded me of a tiny paper boat.
“Who is that lady sanging all good? Turn it up.”
I got closer to the TV and watched different scenes with this person dancing and sounding like Michael Jackson. But nothing about the person looked like the Michael Jackson I knew.
“Yeah,” she said. “He died four or five years ago.” She started scratching her head. “Sorry.”
I slumped on the ground away from the TV and just watched the first part of the show about the life and sound and death of Michael Jackson with my head resting on my shoulder. I thought about Shalaya Crump telling me to just be myself. What did that even mean if years in the future, you could look like a totally different person and be dead? There was no way to be yourself and be the same way you were. And even if you did manage to be yourself, one day you were going to die and regret it all any-way. That’s what I realized while watching the show about Michael Jackson.
“This is real, Baize. This shit is real.” | stood there not caring what I looked like. I understood that if Michael Jackson was really dead, it meant that people I knew were dead, too. “I gotta find my ma and my Mama Lara. What if they disappeared in some flood just like your parents?”
“Tomorrow, okay? Look,” she stood up and took the remote controls from me, “you gotta rest so your legs feel better. Then tomorrow, well…” She paused.
“You gotta decide if you go back and help your friend or if you stay and look for your family. I don’t care what you do. When the morning comes, I’m jumping back in that hole and getting my computer and my phone back somehow.”
“But what if all my family is dead?”
“Well,” I said, and thought about her question. “I guess if they’re dead, I’d want to know and maybe when I go back to my time I can do what I can to stop them from dying.”
“What if you go looking for your people and you find out that they’re alive, but you ain’t?”
“Then, well, I guess…” I just didn’t know what to say. “Where am I sleeping tonight?”
“On the floor in my room, I guess.”
I followed her into the bedroom and then I stopped. “Baize?”
“What?” She turned around and looked me right in the eye.
“Is all of New Edition dead, too?”
Baize made a nice little area to sleep on the floor next to her bed. I should have asked to take a shower, but I’d seen when I went in their bathroom earlier that there wasn’t a shower. Couldn’t understand how they had all the technology to get over one thousand channels and make the TV sound like life, but they didn’t have technology to make their tub go from the brown of a double-yolk egg to a somewhat regular white.
I sat there on the floor of Baize’s room and pulled up the sheet to look under her bed. There were maybe twenty green notebooks piled there, and all kinds of raggedy keyboards, drumsticks, and broken turntables. Surrounding all that stuff were these tiny fingernails.
I grabbed one of the green notebooks and opened it. There were all these sketches of connected circles, and surrounding the circles were these long winding lines of the numbers 201319851964 that looked like they were coming out of the circles. I opened another notebook and it was the same thing. Different-shaped circles and long lines of winding numbers surrounding a question in Baize’s handwriting:
How do you get good at love when your family disappeared and every day it feels like you and your friends are getting written off the face of the earth?
While I was trying to figure out if Baize was doing some kind of long division in the notebooks, Baize leaned her head over toward me. “If things start to crawl on you, you can just get in the bed with me, long as you stay on your side.”
“Wait, what’s gonna crawl on me? Fingernails?”
“Why are these notebooks filled with circles and numbers?”
“They’re not circles,” she told me and took the notebook from my hand. “They’re holes.”
“I don’t know. Never mind, Voltron,” she said. “Just watch out for the roaches down there.”
“Well then, can I just… you know… get up there with you?”
“Don’t get it twisted, okay?” she said and moved over. “I’m really not about that acting ho-ish life.”
“Whatever that means.” I told her and got in the bed. “I been wanting to tell you that the slang y’all use is kinda stale in the future.”
Baize put four of her green tablets between us. She told me that I couldn’t cross over the tablets without getting punched in the gizzard, and I told her not to worry. It’s not hard to explain what I felt about Baize. She had the perfect mix of funk and perfume. And even though she had a Mr. T-style hair-cut, she was cuter than a cute girl. And she was finer than a fine girl. And she was way smarter than a smart girl. And she was even weirder than the weirdest girls. But she wasn’t as good-smelling, as cute, as smart, or as weird as the girl I loved. And even if she was, which she wasn’t, I really told myself that if I didn’t touch Baize, then maybe, just maybe, Evan and Shalaya Crump weren’t touching, either.
I wanted to stay up and ask Baize more questions about life in 2013, but the day had beaten me down. A few minutes after my head hit that crappy pillow, I turned away from Baize and was cold knocked out.
Sometime during the night, I had one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming. Everything in the woods was a different shade of lavender. Shalaya Crump had my hand in hers and she was pulling me through the woods toward the Freedom School. When we got to the door, everything turned black-and-white.
“Why you talking weird,” I asked her, “like this is a stupid book?”
We walked all the way to the center of the room, into the smell of burning hair and pancakes. When we stood in the room, the sound of one of those TV shows I watched on Baize’s TV was surrounding us.
“He’s different than you think he is, City.”
“This guy.” Shalaya Crump pulled out a picture of a white boy I’d seen before on TV. He looked like Ricky’s friend on Silver Spoons. “Evan.”
“That’s not Evan. That boy is way cuter than Evan. Why you using words like ‘guy,’ too? You kissed him, didn’t you?”
“No, I didn’t, but I want to.”
“Wait. This is a dream. I know it’s a dream, but you can’t really think Evan looks like that? For real. ‘Laya, he don’t look like that at all. Why couldn’t you pull a picture out that looked all sick and gangly and like he’s smelling something? You know he’s raggedy as a roach, right?”
Shalaya Crump put the picture in her front pocket and put her hands on my shoulder. I’d practiced kissing her enough to know that I was supposed to put my hands on her hips and come in with my eyes closed and my nostrils kinda flared.
“Open your eyes,” she said, and kissed me on the left side of my lips, then on my cheek, then on my neck. Everywhere she kissed felt like a trail of rubbing alcohol and smelled like butterscotch.
Shalaya Crump was coming back toward my lips. “Do I keep my eyes open?” I asked her. “I ate a banana Laffy Taffy before we got in here. You smell it?”
“Shush.” she told me. “Let’s just do what we want.”
“What if Evan finds out?” I asked her.
“I’m gonna tell my guy,” she said.
Shalaya Crump pulled me even closer and took my bottom lip between her lips. Every feeling in my body sprinted between my wide hips. And for just about ten seconds, all those feelings screamed and tried to blow out these candles I didn’t even know were lit. After ten seconds of blowing hard as they could, the feelings ran from my hips back to my feet, my toes, my knees, my eyeballs, and wherever else they came…
When I woke up, Baize was standing up looking at me like I was straight crazy.
“Nothing, Voltron,” she said. “I just read more of that book while you were sleeping this morning.”
“So nothing,” she said. “Let’s just go.”
We had to get up early enough that Baize’s great-grandma wouldn’t see that I was in the house. She said her great-grandma got off work at eight and went to her second job from nine to two. The plan was to head back to 1964, get Baize’s stuff, save Shalaya Crump, and never ever jump back in the hole again.
Baize was running around the house getting everything ready, so she really didn’t have time to talk to me about what had happened the night before. I waited out on the porch. When she finally came through the door, she had on a backpack and had a little carry case and a brush in her hand.
“What you doing with all the mess? This ain’t no vacation. We gotta go!”
“It’s a diva thing, Voltron. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Means that you should mind your stanky business, and let this brush touch your beady beads.” She handed me the wave brush. “If I wanna go outta town looking fresh, that’s on me. If you wanna go outta town looking like the number-one driver on the nappy-head truck, that’s on you. Niggas from the ’80s gotta do what niggas from the ’80s do.”
“It’s just that we ain’t going out of town,” I told her. “I bet you brought money, too, didn’t you?”
“Like I said, you wouldn’t understand. If I had some money, I would’ve brought all of it.” | stood there shaking my head. “Wanna be useful and carry my book for me?” She handed me Long Division.
We walked across the road into the woods and headed toward what used to be the Shephard house–what Evan had called the Freedom School. It now had a sign that read “Melahatchie Community Center.” Baize introduced me to a Mexican-looking man named Oscar who had a mullet and a yellow short-sleeve shirt. Oscar held out his hands and gave me some dap. Baize said he worked security at her school, and that he was deaf.
I whispered in her ear, “You know deaf Mexicans?”
Baize ignored me and started throwing sign language with the dude.
After a while, we walked down the hall. “What did you just say to that Mexican dude?” I asked her.
“Don’t call him ‘that Mexican dude.’ His name is Oscar. Please don’t tell me that you’re one of those niggas who stay hating on Mexicans.”
“I don’t know any Mexicans,” I told her. “They seem like they work hard.”
She shook her head. “Dude, just be quiet for a few minutes, okay? I didn’t ask you if they worked hard. Hell, some of them don’t work hard, just like some of us don’t work hard. Don’t you get tired of being such a hater?”
I ignored her question and looked around the center. “So is anyone you know gonna be in the contest with you? This reminds me of that first chapter in Long Division, where the main character.
“If you read the first chapter, you know his name was City.”
“Yeah, well I only read the first chapter, so I don’t know what happens, but City and that other dude compete in some kind of contest, right?”
“Right. But that was a crazy contest. This is just a basic real-life county spelling bee. I hope you know how to act around white folks.”
“Girl, I lived in Jackson my whole life until we moved.”
“So what,” she said. “Jackson is way Blacker than Melahatchie, dummy. You stay catching L’s, don’t you?”
“I feel like I’ve done all this before,” I told Baize. I wasn’t lying. Something about the words, the tem-perature, and the sound of what I thought was about to happen felt like it had all happened before.
“You haven’t done this before,” she told me. “You just read something like it before, or maybe you had a dream about it.”
While we walked down the hall, we had to shake hands with people. Well, Baize did. I had Long Division in one hand and brushed my hair with the other. Soon as someone put their hand out for a shake, woman or man, girl or boy, I’d make a fist while gripping my book. I’d never seen that many white people on Old Ryle Road before, and I was surprised that all the white folks we passed knew to give me a pound. I knew it was the future, but white folks in 2013 acted way more familiar with you than white folks in 1985.
“We’ve been waiting for you, Baize,” said this white lady named Cynthia. “Who is your friend?” She took both of our books and said that there were no aids allowed beyond this point. Baize said hold on, looked up two more words, and gave it to her.
“Voltron what?” the lady asked. “Did you compete in the prelims? I don’t remember seeing your name.”
“Voltron Bailey,” I told the lady. “I was out of town during prelims.”
“He’s from Jackson,” Baize told the lady. “West side.’
“Yes ma’am. Well, he was born and raised in Melahatchie, but he went up to Jackson after the storm. He’s just back here visiting for the week because of all that gang violence up there. You know how it is.”
“Why’d he say he was outta town, then?” she asked Baize. “Is his mind right, Baize?”
“Yes ma’am. His mind is fine. He’s one of the best spellers in Jackson. He won eighth place in the Jackson Spell-Off last year, didn’t you, Voltron?”
“Yeah, I umm, I made that Spell-Off tap out.”
Baize put her hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “Go ‘head and chill with the ad-libs, Voltron. I’m working something here.”
The lady took off down the hall. She kept looking back, though, saying, “Don’t leave. I’ll be right back.”
“Why you lie to that lady?” I asked Baize while we walked into the room.
“Because now I know she’ll let you spell.”
“Why? I don’t even want to spell.”
“Because these folks think Jackson is a shark tank and you’re a Black boy and they want to save you before vou turn into a shark.”
“Wait ” I said. “Who is a shark?”
“Wow! I’m so glad I didn’t grow up in the ’80s,” she said.
The room we walked into was the only place I’d been in since I’d been in 2013 that felt like home. Everything else, from the shiny hubcaps to the six-foot TVs to the music to how folks wanted me to compete in a Spell-Off seemed different. I guess I should describe the room or something since it felt like home, but there ain’t really nothing to say about it except it felt like home. Looking back on a room, you can make up all kinds of flowery stuff about it if you want to, but this room had four dirty walls, a high ceiling, and a dusty floor, and it was empty just like most of the rooms in 1985.
“Let’s do this,” Baize said, and we walked toward the stage.
Even though Baize and I were there together, I felt embarrassed. Embarrassed, I understood on that stage, was just another way of saying I felt alone. It was the first time I’d felt alone since I’d been in 2013 and that was mostly because of Baize.
Right there, though, I remembered that I’d forgotten about Shalaya Crump. Even though I’d dreamed about her, I’d forgotten how I needed her. If Shalaya Crump would have been there, we could have dealt with the cameras and the crowd together. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do on that stage in front of those people. And even more than that, I couldn’t believe I was on some raggedy stage in 2013 when the girl I loved was fifty years away from me, probably doing something fun and nasty with the ugliest boy I’d ever seen in my life.
I couldn’t see anybody in the crowd because the lights were shining so bright. I sat on the left side, third seat from the aisle, and Baize was in the same seat on the other side.
The judge made us stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance. While everyone stood, I walked over to Baize, who stayed sitting. “Look,” I whispered in her ear. “I’m gonna go, okay? Shalaya Crump needs me. Thanks for everything. If I find your computer, I’ll bring it back to you, okay?”
“You can’t leave yet,” she said.
I started walking away from Baize when I heard, “Baize Shephard is our first contestant. I’m sure most of vou know that Baize tied for fifth place in last ear’s Spell-Off. Baize lost her parents and brother in Katrina eight years ago and she actually lives right down the road. In addition to doing her homework, Baize is an aspiring hip-hop performer and entrepreneur. Sounds fantastic. She writes in her bio, ‘If you get it twisted, please tighten it back up, Boo Boo. My name is Baize Shephard, aka the Baddest Baize in Mississippi. I do not need to win the Spell-Off to know I’m special. This is Baize Against the World, not that Akeelah and the Bee life. Hashtag Baize killed swag hashtag my hood to your hood.' ”
I looked over at Baize and she was frowning.
“Baize, your first word is ‘abnegations.' ”
Baize stepped to the microphone with her fist clenched, looking down at her red, black, green, and yellow high-top Nikes.
“Um, I don’t know how to spell it,” she said. “I thought we were supposed to introduce ourselves.” Baize walked right back to her seat, still frowning. The crowd and the spellers started clapping in spurts. I was clapping loud and hard as hell for her until they called my name.
“Voltron Bailey, from Jackson, Mississippi, we’d like to welcome you. Voltron has been added as an alternate. He is a special wild-card competitor in our Spell-Off. Voltron was born in Melahatchie but moved to Jackson after the storm hit. As a result of all that gang violence, he is back in Melahatchie, where people know how to act. We expect great things from him. Since you didn’t provide us with a bio, Voltron, would you like to say something about yourself?”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Back home, we… uh, we say that reading, it’s… umm… it’s fun-da-mental. You know, like, it’s fun and mental, duh. There’s a lot of violence in Jackson but it ain’t a shark tank. I’m serious. If kids had more programs and our parents had more money, I don’t think it would be that violent at all.” Everyone was quiet. I guess they expected more, but I was done playing a role in this dumb Spell-Off. I needed to go find Shalaya Crump. “I’m sorry, but, um, I have to go home. My stomach hurts. I feel like I’m about to lose my manners, to tell you the truth. Listen though,” I said into the mic. “Be nice to Baize, okay? Let her do her bio like you let me do mine.”
No one said a word, so I looked down at my feet as they slid off that stage, and tried not to imagine the looks on folks’ faces as I headed out the door of what used to be a Freedom School.
I wanted it all to be a dream.
I wasn’t out the door more than twenty seconds before Baize came running after me. When she caught me, we didn’t say a word. We just walked toward the hole. During the first minute of our walk, Baize was quiet and I watched my feet miss most of the thin branches that had fallen in the woods. Every time I stepped an inch from a branch, I thought about how I couldn’t wait to tell Shalaya Crump that I had been on a stage in 2013 talking about stuff I knew nothing about.
During the second minute of our walk, every time we passed an ant bed, I thought of all the folks in 1985 who would have been ashamed if they had seen how I represented them. I had looked like a complete fool in front of folks I didn’t even know. I could feel Baize looking at my face too hard while I was thinking. “Don’t worry about it, Voltron,” she said. “How you feel?”
“Why you even asking me that?” I asked her. “I’m fine.”
“I mean, you caught an L,” she said. “No doubt about that. That was a fail and a half back there, but you had your heart in the right place.” She put her hand on my shoulder as we walked. “We should have never come anyway. It was more important to go back and save your friend.”
“You didn’t have to come, though. You should have stayed.”
“Naw, I’m good. I just really wanted to say that ‘This is Baize Against the World, not Akeelah and the Bee’ line onstage. I thought they were gonna let me say it in my own voice. I think it could have gone viral.”
It was weird, because up until that point, I hated any folks who were skinnier than me and taller than me and smarter than me and funnier than me and sweated less than me. And I hated folks from different states and folks who had shinier penny loafers and folks who had rounder heads than me, and folks who didn’t like as much tartar sauce and hot sauce on their catfish as me. But right then, I didn’t even hate those folks. I did, however, hate this future I mean, Klan-hate. After I saved Shalaya Crump, I wanted to do everything I could to come back to the future and make it suffer for helping me embarrass myself.
With all my hate bubbling, we walked to the hole. Out of nowhere, Baize fell to her knees right outside the hole and told me to hold on a second.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
“Looks like vou praying. But why?”
“The question is, why ain’t you praying?” she said. “My parents and great-grandma told me that every knee must bend, especially when you have no idea what’s gonna happen next. You should probably pray with me.”
I looked down at her. “I pray before I go to bed like two times a week.”
“That’s on you,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”
And with that, Baize brought her hands together, closed her eyes, and actually started praying right outside the hole. After a minute or so, I started breathing heavy wondering how much longer this prayer was going to take. Near the end, she touched my calf and said, “Amen.”
Baize got in the hole first and I followed her. While we were in the hole, deep in the dark, Baize grabbed both of my wrists and made her way down to the palms of my hands.
“Baize.” It was the first time I’d called her by her name. “Your eyes open?”
“Yeah, Voltron. My eyes open. Are you scared right now?”
That was the new best question anyone had ever asked me. The thing is, I was never scared of what I should have been scared of. For example, I wasn’t scared of people finding out I stole those Bibles for Shalaya Crump. I wasn’t really even scared of the Klan. I was only scared of knowing that Shalaya Crump could love someone else. Nothing else scared me. And if nothing really scared me, I wondered if anything else really even mattered. Everything else just made me mad or made me embarrassed or made me nervous. But all of those feelings had to do with Shalaya Crump in some way or another.
“Ain’t no reason to be scared,” I told her and took my hands back. “What can people do to you, really?”
“They can make you disappear,” she said.
“Yeah, but then you’re gone. I ain’t afraid of disappearing. I bet disappearing doesn’t even hurt, to tell you the truth.”
“People can mash your heart in your chest, Voltron, while you’re still alive. They can take people from you. That’s something to be afraid of. Stop fronting like you’re ’bout that life, boy.”
I said okay, but I knew people could hurt people way more than Baize would ever know. Shalaya Crump and I had this friend named Rozier. I liked to think about big ol’ JET-centerfold booties for as long as Rozier knew me, and Rozier liked to think about big ol’ boy booties for as long as I knew him. That’s just how he was. The thing about Rozier was that he was the kind of guy who you met and twenty-nine minutes later, you knew he would be better than Eddie Murphy when he grew up. Rozier invented farting out loud in homeroom. He also invented calling people “ol’ blank-blank-blank-ass nigga.” Like if you ate an apple too fast, Rozier would call you an “ol’ eating-apples-like-they-plums-ass nigga,” or if you failed a test, he’d call you an “ol’ watching-Three’s Company-when-you-shoulda-been-studyinq-ass nigga.”
If you called Rozier a name he didn’t like, Rozier could slap you in the face better than any kid in Melahatchie, except for maybe Shalaya Crump. The summer of ’84, Rozier got jumped by some dudes from Waveland. Rozier had embarrassed one of the dudes in front of his family earlier at the arcade. After the boy called Rozier an f-word, Rozier said he’d never met a boy who smelled like sack and dookie through his church clothes. He called him an “ol’ wiping-your-ass-forward-instead-of-back-ward-so-the-dookie-get-caked-up-under-your-sack-assnigga.” He said the boy needed Mr. Miyagi to teach him to correctly “wipe on, wipe off.” Even his friends started laughing, and when the dude got in Rozier’s face, Rozier slapped the boy across his mouth twice with both hands. That’s four slaps right in front of his family. Then he ran.
The boy who got slapped four times got three of his older cock-strong friends to help find Rozier when he was by himself in the Night Time Woods the next day. Rozier slapped the best he could, but they ended up calling him an f-word and beating him down with T-ball bats. They didn’t ever hit him directly in the head, but they crushed his larynx. He was in the woods by himself for a whole day before we found him beaten damn near to death. Rozier ended up in a coma, and one week later, he was dead. Shalaya Crump and I didn’t speak a word about revenge until the night after the funeral.
That night we planned how we were going to kill the boys, and we planned for the whole rest of the summer. I came up with a good plan, too. But that’s the strange thing about planning to kill boys from Waveland with someone like Shalaya Crump. She had the worst temper of anyone I knew, and she hated how grown folks thought that young people were so basic when they were the most basic invention ever, but Shalaya Crump was also the smartest person I knew. At some point, Shalaya Crump realized that we didn’t really want to kill the boys from Waveland.
“We just want them to hurt like we hurt,” she said. Shalaya Crump claimed that in order to hurt the boys, we’d have to “kill some little boy they loved, but not kill them.” And neither of us really had it in us to kill some little Waveland boy we didn’t know. By the end of the summer, all four of the boys involved got sent to juvenile detention centers for five years.
Anyway, I didn’t feel like explaining to Baize how I’d seen Rozier disappear, too, so I just said, “I hear you. You’re right. I should be afraid.” I pushed the door to the hole slowly so we wouldn’t be slapped across the face by the 1964 Klan. By the smell of the air, I knew we were where we needed to be.
“It’s so dark,” Baize said. She was bent over coughing under a magnolia tree. “Everything is so green here, too.” | was busy looking around for the Klan. She kept coughing.
“Look,” I told her, “we can’t play in this place the way we could in 2013. We gotta be quiet and we gotta always keep our head up, you hear me?” I was trying to make my nostrils flare and make lines form in my forehead. “You got folks around here who will slap the taste out of your little mouth if they think you did something small, like farted in a way that don’t smell right.”
“You got people like that back in 2013,” she said and kept coughing. “I’m talking about straight goons.” Baize’s nose was bleeding. She wiped it on her shirt.
“Yeah, I just feel a little weird.”
I was starting to feel a little weird, too, but not in my body. It was more in my head. I guess there were all kinds of ways to say it, but the easiest way was that I liked Baize more and more the longer we were together. And she liked me, too. It didn’t hit me until we got out of the hole that instead of just wanting to get her computer back, maybe she really just wanted to come back with me. I didn’t want to like her too much, though, because of Shalaya Crump. I could never like her as much as I liked Sha-laya Crump, but still, if I liked Baize too much, I knew Shalaya Crump would be able to tell, and then everything would be ruined.
“Get all that sickness out of you,” I told her. “They got these Red Naval cats around here. And those things will come after you and start talking if you don’t watch it. And these folks here, they don’t even dress like real people.” I picked up a few acorns and tossed them at the base of the tree. “All you can see is their eyes, and if you joke with them, they love to make you suffer.”
“That’s better than it is back home, where them goons look just like you. I’m serious. Female goons get to hating on you, too. The most basic of b—-es wanna fight you for being glamorous and focused.”
“Did you really just say that?” I asked her. “Hard head makes a soft glamorous ass. You gonna be begging to get stomped out by a female goon after the Klan gets ahold of you and throws you up in that colored bathroom with one of them Red Naval cats.” | threw an acorn at her forehead. “You laughing now, but when they start choking you out, don’t say I didn’t tell you.”
“Damn, Voltron,” she said, “can you not hate for like the next five minutes? Damn!”
We walked toward the Freedom School and peeked in the window. There was this slim, light-skinned lady talking to a tired, greasy-looking Black man. The lady was walking around pointing and yelling and holding some paper with her back to us. The man was facing her, sitting at a desk and laughing.
“Who are those people?” Baize asked me.
“I don’t know. Be quiet.” I looked harder. “Is something wrong with that lady’s face? I can’t tell. Just stay behind me”
“Whose babies y’all is?” the lady turned around and asked when we opened the door.
“We ain’t babies,” I told her. I looked at Baize and she looked back at me.
“I’m City and Shalaya’s baby,” Baize said, stepping forward. “But I stay with my great-grandmama.”
YES, INDEEDY. . .
The lady looked at both of us for almost a minute without saying anything.
“Both of y’all look familiar to me,” she finally said. “Sound like both of y’all been educated somewhere, too, with all them questions. Charlie Cobb and them just mailed this down here to us who fixing to help with the teaching. Cobb say children ain’t educated if they ain’t been taught to question.” The lady handed Baize and me two stapled sheets of paper with some typing on them.
“What’s this?” Baize asked her.
“You can read, can’t you?” she asked Baize. “You tell me.”
SNCC’S NOTES ON TEACHING IN MISSISSIPPI
Dear Teacher,
This is the situation.
You will be teaching young people who have lived in Mississippi all their lives.
That means that they have been deprived of a decent education from first grade through high school.
It means that they have been denied the right to question.
The purpose of the Freedom School is to help them begin to question.
They will be different, but they will have in common the scars of the system.
Some will be cynical.
Some will be distrustful.
All of them will have a serious lack of preparation, but all of them will have knowledge far beyond their years.
This knowledge is the knowledge of how to survive in a society that is out to destroy you.
They will demand that you be honest…
Baize flipped the page and kept reading, but I stopped. I just watched as Baize’s eyes moved over the page.
The lady in front of us started explaining what was happening in that school while Baize was still reading. “These SNCC folks think our children ain’t got no more sense than God give a light-head possum. I reckon they got they heart in the right place. My thang is, what’s the use in having a school if we ain’t giving the students no tests? Everybody need a test, don’t you think? We gotta work on that. Yes, indeedy.”
The lady went on, saying words like “organization” and “compassion” and “justice” and “education” and “future,” but I was zoned out. The last thing I heard her say at the end of her long speech was, “Last year this time, our house got fire-bombed. My daughter was hit in the head, and I got my face a bit burnt up trying to see about her.”
“Why’d they bomb your house?” Baize asked. “I mean, I know why they bombed people, but why you?”
“They been shooting in folks’ houses, burning down they churches, anything they can to scare us away from working with them college kids,” she said. “That’s enough questions. What y’all doing up in here? We told all the children to stay in they house this week. Didn’t nobody tell y’all?”
If I had wanted to hear the words coming out of that woman’s mouth, I could’ve stayed in 1985 and watched PBS. I just kept looking at Baize wondering how what she said about her parents being City and Shalaya could even be true. I hadn’t seen any pictures of us in her house, but then again, maybe we looked completely different eighteen years older. Or maybe I was too focused on other things to look for pieces of myself in her place. Or maybe she took down all the pictures because it made her sad.
“Wait,” I said to Baize. “Were your parents married?”
The woman walked over to the man, who now had his head on the desk. She looked at us and didn’t say a word, so I just started looking up at the bird’s nest at the top of the room.
“Before y’all came in, I was trying to tell this one right here to put that bottle down. This one here is in serious need of a test.”
The woman told us that the man sitting in front of us cut trees for a man named Gaddis. That was the same name as the park Baize had talked about back in 2013. Gaddis had a sixteen-year-old daughter named Brianna. Brianna came out to watch the man cut down some trees a week before that Freedom Summer was announced. Brianna and the man had known each other for years, so they talked and laughed for a while. When Brianna got ready to leave, the man patted her on the bottom of her back and said, “Good luck with every-thang, baby. Fine as you is, you sho’ ain’t gon’ need it.”
Baize said, “You can’t put your hand on a Becky or go around calling them ‘baby’ and expect good to come from it.”
Neither of us knew what to say after that. Baize was paying close attention, but I was just looking at her, trying to see if I could find a part of me in any part of her face. People always said I looked like all these people whom I never thought I looked like. That made me think I really didn’t know how I looked at all. Baize definitely had my hips and maybe she had my forehead, but other than that, I couldn’t see or hear a drop of me in her. If she was my daughter, I hoped to God that she had my tiny belly button and not one of those big ol’ country ones like Shalaya Crump’s that made you look like vou had a brown Vienna sausage growing out of your stomach.
“Is your mind or mouth broke?” the woman said to me. “You gonna let your baby do all the talking for you?”
“Yep. You can light a match and throw it in one of the oil spots and sometimes the flame can stay lit for a whole minute. You know what’s really ill? When you come out here and look at the water, you can see the lightning bugs getting their wink on, you know, lighting up against all that black.”
I waited for her to say something but she didn’t. She just cut her eyes at me and blinked in slow motion the same way Shalaya Crump would when she thought something I’d said was ignorant as hell.
“It’s blue,” she finally said. “All of it.”
“Blue? You said it was black?”
“It is, but it’s all so blue, too, because of the black. Don’t you see it?”
“Man, I come out here all the time and imagine this is a beach with palm trees and mountains in the background,” she said, “but no matter how nice I see it, the sky ain’t never quite right.”
“I don’t know,” she said with her back to me. “I hate it. Folks act like they hate the oil now more than the wind, but me, I’d kill the wind, the sky, and water if I could. I ain’t lying. I always imagine that my first video is gonna be me rhyming against a computer-generated dude who looks like he’s made of black water, like Terminator 2, except he’s gonna be called Swaginator and I’m killing that fool in the first minute of the video.”
“Because it took my family. Shit. I told you that.”
“No, you didn’t. What do you mean, the sky took them?”
“I mean, I never got a chance to see them again because the sky took them away from me.”
“If they really drowned, their bodies would have come up sooner or later.” Baize turned around and headed back across the pier and over the railroad tracks.
I grabbed Baize’s hand as we walked by the bathroom again. The cat and the Dobermans weren’t in there anymore. We looked across the road and headed toward the hole. “Look, I hear what you’re saying about your parents disappearing and all that, but l’m taking you home.”
“That’s the only home you got, right?”
“I ain’t going back home without you,” she said, and kept trying to look me in the face. “Voltron? Voltron! Yo! You said you wanted my help.”
“I changed my mind, Baize. You’re too young for this. And you know what else? Folks can tell just from how you dressed that you ain’t from the ’60s.”
“They can tell the same thing about you, Voltron,” she told me. “Don’t worry. I came pre-pared. I just gotta get right with the air here.”
“Look, don’t make it harder than it has to be,” I told her. “2013 is farther away from 1985. So I’m closer to these folks just based off time. Plus, look at you. You got that ugly haircut for a girl and that dumb backpack on and folks in the 1960s, they be knowing things?”
“Okay, for real.” Baize got right in my face even though I was running from her eyes. She grabbed my chin. “No, you did not just say, ‘Folks in the ’60s be knowing things?’ Really? It’s like that? You should feel so lucky that someone thinks you’re kinda cute,” she said, “because…”
“Don’t say that!” | grabbed her by her shoulder blades and shook her. “Don’t ever say I’m cute. You don’t even know cute. Mv line is crookeder than a Smurf house and I fart in m sleep all night long, and when I smile one of my eyes… see it?” I pointed to my left eye. “It’s a little bit crusty and bloodshot all the time. I think I got permanent pink eye. For real! It’s contagious, too. Don’t-“
Baize tried to knee me in the privacy but I turned and she got me in the left thigh. In the middle of our tussle we heard twigs breaking and leaves crunching. “Shhh,” I whispered to her. “You hear that?”
“Don’t tell me to shush,” Baize whispered back. “I only said someone thinks you’re cute. Not me, dummy. Don’t act like I’m trying to get with you. I don’t even roll like that.”
We were both still, but it was too hard to see if someone was coming because everything was so green and full.
“Who is that coming this way?”
Shalaya Crump. I ran over and helped her to her feet. She hugged my neck and held me tight as I’d ever been held without saying a word. I let go, but Shalaya Crump kept squeezing tight. I whispered in her ear not to say my name in front of Baize, but Shalaya Crump was actually crying right there in my arms while looking directly at Baize. It was one of the top two things I never thought would happen. I pulled away from her and asked, “What happened to your Jewish friend, Evan?”
Shalaya Crump tried to talk, but something terrible must have happened. Every time she started to talk, her teeth got to chattering. Baize walked up and started rubbing her back, too. Finally, she got something out. “It’s worse than we think. They…”
“I didn’t know how to turn it on. The mayor… his uncle… if they didn’t stop this Freedom School from being used, the Klan was gonna go after them. They wanted to run them out of Melahatchie.”
“The Klan was going to kill Evan’s family if they didn’t put on sheets. They Jewish and they were gonna help with the schools. They gave Evan a gun. It was Gaddis’s plan.”
“His brother gave Evan a gun and they told him to shoot me in the shoulder.”
“I know you scared,” I told her, “but you doing your own long division right now. Just get in and get out like you tell me. Please! I don’t get nothing you’re saying.”
Baize jumped in. “Wait, who is Evan?”
“Girl, don’t you see grown folks talking?” I told her. “There’s a guy named Jewish Evan. Go ahead and finish. Damn.”
“Evan took the gun and he pointed it at me, then he aimed it at his brother’s leg and pulled the trigger but he missed. Then they beat him even harder.”
“Wait,” I said. “So his family was planning on killing our granddaddies and burning the school? Where your granddaddy at?”
“They made them do it. They ain’t never meant to kill him,” she said. “They only wanted to kill your granddaddy. That’s what they were planning to do when they caught you.”
“That’s the dumbest mess I ever heard in my life. Are you serious? What’s wrong with these folks? This is the stupidest place I’ve ever heard of in my life. I hate this ol’ backwards-ass place. Don’t you feel like this is someone else’s story?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I don’t know what I mean. It’s just that this ain’t our story. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”
Baize walked up between us. “The computer ran out of juice. That’s all.” She went in her backpack and pulled out this weird-looking long cord with a big square head. “This cord right here is what they need.”
I kept asking Shalaya Crump questions when Baize interrupted again. “Wait. Do you have my phone, the little thing Voltron stole?”
“Why do you call him Voltron?” Shalaya Crump asked.
Shalaya Crump and Baize stood there looking at each other. “What y’all looking at?” I asked them. “Why y’all staring at each other like that? Damn. Talk.”
They moved their eyes back to each other. While Baize was looking at Shalaya Crump’s feet, Shalaya Crump was looking at Baize’s forehead. Then they locked into each other’s faces. And you know what Baize said? “You’re hotter than I thought you’d be, up close.” She really said it. “Seriously, you must work out.”
“Just push-ups and sit-ups,” Shalaya Crump said, and went in her pocket and pulled out Baize’s phone. She handed it to her and Baize flipped it open and pushed a few buttons.
“You think that school thing has some electric outlets in it?” Baize asked. “If you can get those people to bring my computer back, I got an idea. Y’all are killing me with all this drama.”
While we were walking, I thought about how I wanted to tell Shalaya Crump about all that Baize and I had experienced. I wanted to tell her about watching a huge TV and eating dinner and shaming myself at that Spell-Off. But after she said all that about fighting off the Klan and almost getting shot in the shoulder and meeting Jewish folks who were forced to act like they were in the Klan, my time together with Baize in 2013 seemed super boring. It really did. You really never know what other folks are doing when you think you’re having the craziest experience of your life. Plus, I thought that if I would have just gotten back in the hole earlier, I would have experienced that crazy time with Shalaya Crump and Evan, instead of making a fool of myself in 2013.
I was thinking of something to say when we heard Pow! Pow! Pow!
KINDLY PAUSE . . .
The smell of gasoline was everywhere when we walked into the Freedom School. Lerthon Coldson was slumped facedown on the desk.
Baize didn’t scream, but she kept gasping and coughing. Shalaya Crump held Baize’s hand, and I don’t even know why, but I went toward Lerthon.
“Don’t touch him!” Baize said. “It’s a crime scene.” | looked at Baize like her bread wasn’t all the way done. “I’m serious. If you get your DNA in it, or compromise the crime scene, the police could blame vou.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I wasn’t about to walk up and touch Lerthon at all. I had never been one of those people who loved blood, and right in front of us was a man who wasn’t alive anymore. And the fact that this dead man was related to me didn’t even matter. What mattered was that he was alive and smiling and lying through his teeth ten minutes earlier, and now he’d never be alive or smiling or lying again.
Baize was actually sitting down in the corner coughing into her shirt. And Shalaya Crump was watching me watch the bod.
“We never should have done this,” I said really low to Shalaya Crump. “I wish someone would’ve told me not to follow you. We never should have done this. I wish I woulda stayed my fat ass at home. Now everything is messed up. I did this for you. I stole Bibles for you.
Went to the future for you. Followed some white boy for you. Made a fool of myself in 2013 for you. You know that, right?”
Shalaya Crump and Baize had their eyes closed. “Open y’all damn eyes. Look!” The voice that was coming out of my body was mine, but it was a voice I’d never heard.
I walked over and saw the blood dripping from the desk to the floor. I let some of it drip on my Weapons, because that’s what I knew they would do in a dumb book.
“You came back so Evan could tell you what happens to you in the future, right? Did he tell you?” Shalaya Crump just looked at me. “Did he? Because I know.” Shalaya Crump stepped toward me. “I know what happens, what really happens. What all did he tell you in between getting his ass kicked? Did he tell you that we get married? Me and you.”
“Please don’t start this mess now, City,” she said. “Why you gotta be so two days before yesterday?”
“I ain’t so two days before nothing! You always telling me not to start something, Shalaya Crump. Always talking about I’m so ‘yesterday’ or l’m so ‘long division’ or I’m so ‘Young and the Restless.’ You ain’t never said I’m so foolish, though.” | stopped to think about what I’d just said to Shalaya Crump. It was the best five sentences I’d ever said to her and I hadn’t even practiced them in the mirror. This wasn’t even GAME. “That’s what I am, though. I’m so gotdamn foolish for wanting you to love me like I love you.”
“I can say what I want. I love you. I do. That’s why I ask you everything under the sun except if you ever had a boyfriend. Because if you’d ever had one, even if it was way before me, it woulda broke my heart.”
“You never told me that,” Shalaya Crump said.
“So what? I shouldn’t have to. You shut that door on me. If you had come back with me, none of this would have happened,” I told her. “None of it.”
“I mean, some of it would definitely happen,” she said. “Shoot. I was trying to protect you. You were hurt and I knew you needed to go home. And I… I think I need to be here.”
‘I believed Evan when he told me he knew where I was in the future. I believed him when he told me he could tell me who my parents are. I wanted to know what happens to them and me on the other end. I know you hate me for this, City, but I really want to change the future.” Shalaya Crump got closer to me in a way that would have made me so happy in 1985. “I just wanted to change it so bad that I didn’t care. And to change it I just had to know what happened.”
“Oh. Okay,” I said. I kept finding the body of my granddaddy out of the corner of my eye, no matter which way I tried to look. It made me sadder and madder. “You just wanted to know? Well, I want you to know, too. Baize, tell her who your parents are.”
Baize sounded like she was whimpering, but I figured it was just that her nose was stuffed. “Why? Don’t yell at me.”
“Tell me what?” Shalaya asked.
“City Coldson is… was my father’s name… my mother’s name… was… Shalaya Crump-Coldson.”
“Who?” I said. “Say it louder.”
“Shalaya Crump-Coldson was her name.”
“Tell her what happens to your parents, Baize. And stop crying.”
Baize wiped her eyes and opened her phone. She pushed a few buttons and looked at something in the phone that made her close her eyes super tight. “These are my parents,” was in front of the computer ended up on the screen. The bigger Klansman looked down at the screen and saw himself. “I can show you how to work it,” she said.
Just like before when all the words I typed on the screen were famous, whoever walked in front of the computer looked famous on the screen, too.
The bigger Klansman handed the gun to the smaller one. He walked in front of the computer and started moving his arms like he was an Egyptian. If the past day hadn’t been filled with more craziness than a little bit, this would have been the craziest thing I’d ever seen in my life. Baize knelt down and pushed a button that made these twinkle sounds come from the computer. A voice from the computer whispered, “… 1,2, 3, uh.”
It wasn’t loud overall, but the specific sounds in it were louder than anything I’d ever heard. It really sounded like something from the future. Not the 2000s, either–more like the 3000s. Baize actually stood up and started dancing in front of the computer screen as best she could. She started dancing near me and said, “When I give you the sign, clothesline the big one.”
I said okay and kept watching her dance. I couldn’t believe I was watching her dance on a TV screen with Klansmen in the background and a dead man slumped over a desk with a bloody hole in his back in 1964.
After a while, though, Baize had all of us, including the two Klansmen, dancing in front of the screen and trying to move in front of each other to see who could look the most famous. Baize made us form a version of a really tight Soul Train line. Two of us danced on the side and one person jammed in the middle going toward the camera.
I started it off by doing a robot into the Pee-wee Herman, and then I mixed it with a Prince move, where I looked at the camera and licked in between my fingers right in front of the computer.
Then Baize came through trying to do some dance where she acted like she was hammering really fast with her whole body but her whole body was shutting down. Her nose was bleeding and her eyes were glazed. She broke the hammering thing off into some hard locking, too. Boom! Bam! Lock! Lock! Then she acted like she was riding a bike side to side, and she ended it doing this dance I saw Doug E. Fresh do.
Next came Shalaya Crump, who tried to do a back glide into a moonwalk and a Michael Jackson spin, and then she got right up on the camera and started prepping. She put both hands in the air and worked them back and forth in sync with her long neck. Those other years didn’t have nothing on 1985.
Finally, the bigger Klansman stood in the middle. He asked for the rifle back from the smaller one and just stood there posing, with his hands folded up like he was on top of a mountain. At this point, the voice in the song started chanting something about a Polaroid picture: “Shake it…” The bigger Klansman didn’t move at all until he handed the rifle back off to the smaller Klansman and broke down into this mean twist, super close to the ground.
When he was right up on the computer checking himself out, the dude copied Baize and did the Doug E. Fresh dance, too.
I kept looking at Baize for the sign, but I didn’t know what the sign looked like. Then she looked at me and raised her eyebrows a little bit.
Out of nowhere the smaller Klansman swung the butt of the rifle like a baseball bat and hit the bigger Klansman right upside the head.
He went down, and a small box of matches fell out from under his sheet. I picked up the box of matches, jumped on the man, and grabbed him by his neck. While I held him down, Baize was kicking him as hard as she could in the privacy while the song was still playing.
Standing above us were Shalaya Crump and the smaller Klansman. He dropped the rifle and both of them looked at it.
“Take the rifle, Shalaya. What you doing? Pick it up.”
She looked down at me. “Just shoot that asshole somewhere!” It was the first time I’d used “asshole” around a girl.
Shalava Crump tossed the rifle back down and took the sheet off the smaller Klansman.
“Oh. My. God,” I said to Baize. The smaller Klansman under the sheet wasn’t a man at all.
CONSIDERED THINGS . . .
The room was silent, except for more music that came from Baize’s computer and her constant coughing. Evan and Shalaya Crump stood in the middle of the room touching fingertips while Baize and I managed to tie the hands of the bigger Klansman with this cheap-looking black belt that she had in her backpack.
Shalaya Crump saw me watching her so she pulled her hand away from Evan’s. I didn’t know where to throw my eyes, so I threw them at the tied hands of the Klansman. His hands were so small for his size. They couldn’t have been much bigger than Baize’s hands. And you know how grown white men have a lot of hair on the outside of their hands? This Klansman’s hands were bare as mine.
Baize pulled out her phone and started taking pictures of the man. “Should we take his sheet off, too?” she asked me.
“Nah. It’ll be harder to hurt him if we take it off. He looks like a monster now, right?”
“Not really,” she said. “More like a white boy in a white sheet.”
Baize and I started busting more jokes about monsters, goons, and Klansmen when Sha-laya Crump hugged Evan with her back to me. I looked up and his eyes were closed. When they opened, he pulled away from Shalaya and walked toward me.
“City, I ain’t mean no harm with all this,” he said. “You think you can save someone’s life, you do it. I reckon it can get messier than you think. You know what I’m trying to say?”
“That’s my brother,” he said and pointed to the Klansman. “Never thought in a million vears I’d have to let loose on my own brother with a rifle.”
“I never thought in million years I’d follow a white boy who calls himself Jewish into a hole in the ground in 1964,” I told him. “Thangs happen, I guess.”
“Ev, come on, man,” the Klansman said through the sheet. “These folks ain’t none of your friends. Tell ’em why we did it. I never did nothing disrespectful to a Negro in my life. You know that.”
“You shot my granddaddy,” I told him, “just because you could. That ain’t disrespectful enough?”
“City, you know he didn’t shoot no one,” Shalaya Crump said. “Quit being so Perry Mason.”
“How do I know? Just because y’all went through something, I’m supposed to trust him.
His plan got all us in trouble in the first place. How come you can’t see that?”
Baize went in her bag and started blowing her nose and hocking up mucus. She spit it in these blue napkins she’d brought with her.
“Mr. Gaddis probably did it,” Evan said.
“Wait. It’s real convenient that folks can blame everything on Gaddis, ain’t it?” Baize asked, but she didn’t wait for an answer. “And how come you ain’t the real Klan? Y’all were gonna burn up this building with a Black man’s dead body in it, right? And y’all wearing white sheets with holes for eyes, right? That’s real Klan-ish of someone who ain’t in the Klan, don’t you think? Maybe all white folks in the Klan are just Klan-ish, you feel me?”
I looked at Baize and loved her smart mouth so much in that second. I didn’t love it because I was somehow responsible for it. I just loved that there was someone alive who could say the things I thought but didn’t know how to fully say. It would take me a week of planning to come up with the clever stuff she could come up with in seconds.
“Yeah,” I said to Evan. “Y’all might not be all the way Klan, but y’all both are mighty Klan-ish to burn down a building with my granddaddy in it.”
“But they didn’t burn down the building,” Shalaya Crump said. “Nothing got burnt down.”
“We was just trying to save our family,” his brother said. “That what y’all were fixing to do, too. If it’s right for y’all, it’s right for us, ain’t it?” It was so odd to hear a teenager’s voice coming from under a Klan sheet. “Some of these folks hate anyone who ain’t them. If you ain’t the right kind of white or you ain’t Christian or you ain’t Southern or you ain’t whatever they want you to be, you might as well be a Negro, especially with that Freedom Summer coming.”
“But y’all can hide,” Shalaya Crump finally said to the brother. “Don’t you see what we’re saying? We can’t ever hide.” She looked hard at Evan. “That’s all I was trying to say earlier.”
“We been trying to hide long as I remember,” Evan told us. “And hiding, it’s damn near worse than the getting caught. Because you only hiding from yourself. How you supposed to like yourself or anyone else if you done convinced yourself that you deserve to be hunted by vourself?”
“First, that’s too many ‘yourselfs’ in one speech,” Baize told him. “And whatever you talking about, y’all decided to fix that by walking around in sheets, acting like the Klan?” She looked up at me. “Can I cuss?”
“Fuck that, Mr. Klan man,” she said. “This ain’t Halloween, yucka.”
“Yeah,” I said. “This ain’t Halloween, yucka. What’s a yucka?”
Baize laughed at me and shook her head.
“Say what you want,” his brother broke in. “They was coming for us just like they came for y’all and we was just trying to survive. What would you do if y’all were in our position?”
“But that’s the point, dummy,” Baize said. “We can’t be in your position. They came to you to get us. Would they ever come to us to get y’all? Ever?”
“But if they did come to you to get us,” Evan asked, and looked up toward the trees, “what would y’all do?”
I looked at Baize, who looked at Shalaya Crump, who looked at me. Then I looked at Evan and wanted to want to say something so much that my throat muscles started cramping, but nothing came out.
“What y’all think we should do with him?” Shalaya Crump asked me and ignored his com-ment. “Can we just let him go?”
I looked up at her and the strangest thing happened. Jewish Evan Altshuler, Shalaya Crump, Baize, and the teenage Klansman were staring right at me. Somehow, some way, I was supposed to have a plan.
“Um,” I said and snuck a look at Baize’s face. I kept my eyes focused on the wooden desk and thought about how much I hated eyes. I had this dream one time where I was back-stroking in a bowl full of pound cake batter. In between strokes, something exploded. The explosion made the bowl turn upside down, and all around the outside of the bowl was this slow-dripping pound cake batter. The batter started forming these eyes that stared and blinked slower than human eyes. I knew the eyes couldn’t touch me, so you’d think I would feel safe, but being surrounded by blinking pound cake eyes was the scariest thing I ever felt. At least, that’s what I thought before I was sitting in a desk in the middle of that Freedom School in 1964. Three sets of eyes in that room belonged to people I wanted to love me, and those three sets of eyes were burning my insides out.
“I got an idea,” I told them. “Let’s put him in the hole and send him to another time.”
“But how do we know that’ll work if we’re not sure if it’s the hole that’s special or if it’s us that’s special?” Baize asked.
“You’re special, Baize. You are, whether you were born a time traveler or not,” I told her.
“Just because we’re blood doesn’t mean you have to say even wacker stuff than usual,” she said. “I’m for real.”
“Good point,” | said. “Look, we got a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right. Let’s go.”
We kept the hood on Evan’s brother and walked toward the hole. He talked the whole way, mainly to Evan. “Evan, come on, man. Take off the gotdamn hood. What was I supposed to do?”
Evan never said a word back. He just walked with us, but I could tell he was nervous about what was about to happen to his brother.
“You sure vou want us to do this?” Shalaya Crump asked him. “You might never see him again. You don’t have to do it to make me happy.”
“Where vou think he’ll end up?” Evan asked her.
“You know what’s messed up?” I said. “If your brother ends up in 1985, I don’t think nothing bad would even happen to him. Without the sheet, he’s just a regular white boy. No one would know he was Jewish unless he told them, right?”
“I don’t know about that. He wouldn’t be safe in 2013,” Baize said. Her voice was cracking at this point.
“Why? Because the goons’ll get him?” | laughed.
“Yep,” she said. “They would! They wouldn’t even care if he was Jewish or Italian or none of that. You show up wearing a white sheet like that and it’s a wrap for you.”
“Girl, are you a secret goon? You act like Melahatchie goons are worse than the Vice Lords or something. Only thing is when I was there I didn’t see no Melahatchie goons.” | waited for Baize to say something back, but she just smiled at me, shrugged her shoulders, and tried to catch her breath.
“Wait,” Shalaya Crump said and stopped walking. We all stopped, too, even though we were just a few feet from the hole. “My question is, why send him to another time if he’ll be fine no matter where he goes? Ain’t that so lip sync?”
We all looked at Shalaya Crump, including Evan’s brother. I tried hard to think about what it meant to be “so lip sync” but I couldn’t get it. “Lip sync?” I asked.
“Yeah, like Puttin’ on the Hits. Why go through the motions if it’s just a motion?”
That was a good question, but if I said I didn’t know, it would have made my plan look half-baked. “We want him to experience what we went through, right? All the e-motions.”
“Does that mean he has to suffer?” Shalaya Crump asked.
“We suffered,” Baize told her, and walked right up to the hole.
“Right, but we’re gonna remember suffering whether he suffers or not,” Shalaya Crump said.
We opened the hole and after tons of punching, scratching, screaming, and kicking, Baize and I got Evan’s brother in the hole while Evan and Shalaya Crump watched. Evan grabbed the hood off his brother’s head. His brother had a young face, but half the hairs on his head were actually gray.
“Why’d you take that off?” I asked him.
I don’t know,” he said. “Just didn’t seem right to send him to another time with that thing on his head. We gotta be fair.”
“Who put ‘that thing’ on his head?” I asked him. “Ain’t nobody make him wear it, did they?”
“You’re right,” Evan said. “But we can’t put it back on him now.”
“Gimme the hood,” Baize said. She was sitting at the base of a magnolia tree. The color in Baize’s face was fading. Part of me thought she was gonna put the sheet on her head just for fun. That’s kinda what I wanted to do.
Evan handed it to her and she put the hood on her little left hand like a huge glove. “Don’t you think it’s crazy how all the Klan members are always boys?” Baize asked. “I mean, what would a Klansairl even sav? If I was white and messed up in the head, I’d be the first Klansgirl in Mississippi. Then I’d change the whole Klan style, too. I wouldn’t be messin’ with no fire or lynching nobody. My Klan would go town to town with coloring books asking folks who didn’t get along to color together. If they didn’t color right, they’d have to spit a six-teen-bar freestyle about sheets. I’m for real.”
Baize took out her phone and snapped a few pictures of the hood like it was a puppet. After she was done, she threw the hood in the hole and started coughing. With Evan’s brother begging and pleading, all four of us pushed the door to the past, present, and future shut. Well, two of us did. Evan and Shalaya Crump acted like they were pushing but I saw them both keep their eyes closed, gritting their teeth, just going through a motion.
After a minute of silence, I opened the hole and looked in. We couldn’t see anyone, but none of us knelt down and really looked all the way in. “I wonder where he went?” | said. “You think y’all would’ve sent him away if you were by yourself?”
“I know I wouldn’t,” Shalaya Crump said.
“Me either,” Evan said and looked at Baize. “Is she okay?”
Baize, who was already on her knees, put her head in the hole to make sure he was gone. “I’m telling you,” she said. “I would’ve done it by myself. Ride or die. You think that dude can just come back tomorrow, though? Or like, do you think he’s gonna just fuck up whatever time he lands in?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Anyone who says they really know anything about yesterday or tomorrow is a liar. Look, we need to get you some help.”
Baize turned her head toward me, forced a smile, and said, “You’re too worried. Don’t worry. I’ma be fine.”
We were all lying on the ground outside the hole. I was on the end next to Baize; Shalaya Crump was next to her; Evan was on the other end. The whole time I’d been in those woods, I’d never stopped and looked up. The tops of the pine trees swayed in tiny circles like long green index fingers. Behind those fingers, the sky was changing from faded-blue-jean blue to new-Levi’s blue, and drunk-looking lightning bugs were starting to get their wink on. “Baize?”
“So you knew all the time, didn’t you?”
“After you stole my computer, I kept wondering why your eyes seemed so familiar.”
“I wasn’t all the way sure, and I didn’t want you to disappear again. I figured if I played along, we would all be friends. All of us. That’s the most I was hoping for. We ain’t got to be family again, but I at least wanted us to be friends.”
Shalaya Crump turned her head toward Evan, then looked back at Baize, who was still looking up at the sky. Then Shalaya Crump slowly turned back toward Evan. “Do vou even care about how the time travel works?” she asked him. “I mean really care.”
“I care,” he said, “but, like I said, I think I know.”
I grabbed Baize’s hand. “Forget them,” I said under my breath because I didn’t know what else to do. “You think the sky changes when people jump from time to time?”
“If it don’t change, can you imagine what the sky sees? Like the sky, it probably knows how the time tunnel really works.” | looked at Evan. “The sky probably knows what’s gonna happen next. It probably knows what’s happening in the Freedom School and the Shephard house and that community center right now. I bet no one else knows how truth can change except the sky.”
“Yeah, but what’s the point in knowing if you can’t change it?” Shalaya Crump said. “I’d rather be able to change it than to know it.”
“I guess you’re right, huh? That’s kinda worse than even watching a bad television show you’ve already seen. Then at least you can change the channel when you know exactly what’s gonna happen next. The sky, it’s gotta just watch everything and sit there changing from dark to day to dark to day no matter what.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Baize said.
“Wonder what?” Baize asked me.
“Well, if you could ask the sky anything about change and time, what would you ask it?” We were all quiet, listening to the wind, blowing at the lightning bugs, and squeezing the
hand in our hand whenever we heard a car or footsteps move down Old Ryle Road.
“I’d want to know who my parents were,” Shalaya Crump said, “and why they left when they did. And can I have two questions?”
“Yeah,” Baize said and coughed nastier than she had all day. “Some people are the sky, though.”
“I’d wanna know what I’m supposed to do now to help time and change in Melahatchie be less painful ” Shalaya Crump kept talking. “I know that’s so Agatha Christie, but I wanna do the right thing. It’s hard when time and people keep on changing, though.”
Shalaya Crump didn’t say a word. I raised my head off the ground and looked over at her. She was looking right at Baize, who was looking up toward the sky. “I just never meant to hurt you,” Shalaya Crump finally said.
At that point, Shalaya Crump understood what I figured only parents could understand about their children. Baize was more than just sick. She could only be born if Shalaya Crump and I had her in 1999, but the longer we were in 1964, the more Shalaya Crump and I knew that Baize would have to eventually disappear.
I wanted to beg Shalaya Crump to save Baize’s life and come back to 1985 with me. I wanted to tell her that we could close the hole, go home, eat sardines together, dig in the dirt, and never travel again. We could do all the stuff we were supposed to do until 1999. Then we could kiss with tongue. And we could act like we were on HBO after dark. And we could get married. And we could have our baby.
Deep down, I knew it couldn’t work like that anymore.
Shalaya Crump didn’t say a word when Baize asked her, “What do you mean?” She seemed stuck in a long, lonely silence that, I figured, only pops up when a parent has to decide whether to save the future or save the life of the child they never really knew.
Baize raised her head and asked Shalaya Crump again, “What do you..
I interrupted Baize and tried to take the attention off Shalaya Crump for a second. “What does dot-dot-dot mean, Baize? You know, like when you write it on your computer, in those rhymes. What does dot-dot-dot mean?”
Baize didn’t say anything, but Shalaya Crump answered. “It’s what you use when someone is about to cut someone else off, right?”
“Naw,” Evan said. “I think it’s just a long pause.”
“Ain’t a period or a semicolon a long pause?” Shalaya Crump asked Evan. “Like long compared to a comma?”
“Maybe,” he said. “You talking about them three periods in a row, I thought?”
Baize started coughing again and squeezed my hand. “If you could be any punctuation, City, what would you be?” It was the first time Baize had called me by my real name, and it felt better than anything in my whole life.
“Um, I think I’d be a question mark,” I told her. “Like if I had my own book, I’d want a cover with shades of lavender and blue and green, like this forest right here, on the front and back. And in strange places on the cover, I’d want there to be all these different kinds of eyes of people I love on it. And on every page, I’d want there to be one question mark. I wouldn’t even mind if a Klansman was on the cover.”
“But why?” Baize asked. “If every page is blank, ain’t a question mark kinda understood to be there anyway? Like that book I was reading, Long Division, the last chapter is just blank pages with ellipses.”
I thought about what she was saying and it made a lot of sense. “I guess you’re right,” I told her. “What would you be?”
“That’s the dot-dot-dot you were talking about. That’s what’s on all those pages in that book.” She let go of my hand and sat up while leaning on both of her hands. “The ellipsis always knows something more came before it and something more is coming after it. It connects sentences, but it holds space for itself, too.” Baize started coughing and grabbing her chest. “It’s hard for me to breathe, City.”
I stood up and made sure Long Division was in Baize’s backpack. I had the computer under my arms. “So you’d have pages filled with dot-dot-dot in your book?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “I’d have two front covers with the words Long Division’ in the middle and below ‘Long Division’ would be an ellipsis. That ellipsis is me if it’s my book. It’s our book, though. We’d all be inside the book, too, with those other characters already in the book and we’d all fall in love with each other.”
I got everything ready to leave and looked down at all three of them. Evan’s left hand was in Shalaya Crump’s right hand and Baize was nuzzled under Shalaya Crump’s left arm. “Come on, Baize.”
“We should be going home,” I told her. “We can come back next week.”
She laughed at me as I helped her up. Shalaya Crump and Evan started to get up, too. “Y’all don’t have to get up,” I told them. “We’re fine.”
Evan walked over and hugged my neck. “I’m sorry,” he said in my ear. “I didn’t think it would happen like this.”
“Yeah. Me, either,” I said. “I’ll see y’all soon, though. For real.”
Shalaya Crump walked up to me when I was thinking of cussing Evan out and she had these humongous tears in her eyes. “We did it,” I told her. “We changed the future by changing the past.”
“City,” she said. “It wasn’t supposed to hurt. Not like this. But I can make it worth it.”
“That’s how we know we’re changing the future in a special way, though, right?” I asked her. That was the best thing I’d ever said to Shalaya Crump. I didn’t have to think about whether or not it was GAME. All four of us knew that special change, the kind that lasts, hurts.
I watched Baize and Shalaya Crump hug for what felt like ten minutes. Neither of them wanted to let go. But eventually Baize did. “I’ll holler at y’all soon. Wipe away that stank face.” she said. “I understand. I’ll be back. It’s our book.”
I took Baize’s hand and walked toward the hole, away from Shalaya Crump and Evan. I wanted so bad not to turn around and watch them watch us leave.
“Bye,” Shalaya Crump said. “Maybe we’ll see y’all tomorrow. I’m sorry.”
Baize started to turn her head, but I tightened my grip on her hand and pulled her toward the hole.
“Forget tomorrow,” I said loud enough for Shalaya Crump and Evan to hear as we walked off.
When Baize and I got in the hole, I pulled out a book of matches I’d taken from Evan’s brother. There were three matches left in the book. I struck one of the matches and gave it to her. Baize looked at me like we tied for last in the longest uphill three-legged race in the world. We slumped against the sides of the hole and both slid down to the ground. She leaned her head on my right shoulder.
Baize buried the left side of her face in my shoulder so I wouldn’t see the tears flooding the gutters of her right eye. All the tears that didn’t fall onto her computer fell into her mouth. “What happens to us now?” she asked. “I’m so tired.”
“Hold your face up.” I looked up toward the top of the hole to keep my tears from falling. “It’s gonna be okay. Open your computer. Let me hear one of your songs.”
Watching Shalaya Crump love Evan smashed my heart, but lying to my daughter about what was about to happen to her made every living thing in my body just quit.
I wondered if Baize knew what was coming.
The computer made her face glow blue. She played some instrumental and started rapping the lyrics really low. Not your everyday rapper but everyday is haze. Then she stopped and closed the computer and talked to me in the dark. “I guess we can’t go back to 1964 and all just stay together again, huh?”
“Nah,” I told her. “We’re right where we need to be. And your mama, she’s where she needs to be. We’ll come back one day and see her and she can come back and see us.”
“You know I made the high honor roll every quarter since y’all left, right?”
“I figured,” I said. “Hell, I make the honor roll every now and then and I ain’t nearly ’bout sharp as you are.”
Baize fake-giggled to herself. “You wanna stay with me for a while when we get home?” she asked and found my hand in the dark. “I just need to take a nap for a few hours. Here.” She went in her backpack and got out Long Division. “I think you should read this while I’m asleep.”
“It’s just all starting to make sense now.”
“Yep. You’ll see. Read it from the beginning.”
My match started to burn the tips of my swollen fingers too, so I held it with my fingernails and I looked at Baize’s slick face until the match burned all the way down. I tapped Baize on her leg and let her know that I was about to get up.
“Don’t say that. Not now. Please don’t say that.”
“Why? We took care of each other today, like a father and daughter goon squad are supposed to,” she told me with her voice hollowing out. “I’m just keeping it one hundred. I knew y’all wouldn’t disappear forever.”
I turned my face from Baize, closed my eyes, counted to ten by twos, and pushed the door open. Then I climbed all the way out of the hole and, slowly, slowly, slowly, I turned back toward the hole in the ground.
Long Division was in the bottom of the hole, but Baize Shephard was gone. Forever. I made my daughter disappear.
PASSING TESTS
I couldn’t tell where I was because the air was as thin as it had been in 1964 and the forest was only a little less lime green than it had been in 2013. Before heading to the Freedom School, I looked across the road where the Co-op and Mama Lara’s house were. There were sidewalks where the ditches were and lots of Black folks and Mexican folks of all ages walking down the sidewalks talking and laughing out loud. Across the road were these cool-looking trailers on wheels. Each trailer had a different shape and a huge garden in the front yard. Down the road was a huge grocery store called Shephard’s Co-op.
I looked toward the Community Center and there was a woman out in front. She motioned for me to come in the building, then disappeared in the door.
The building had changed. It wasn’t a church and it wasn’t a community center. It was actually a museum. At least that’s what the sign said. It read, “The Lerthon Coldson Civil Rights Museum.” It made me kind of mad that the museum was named after a grimy drunk dude who called a girl “baby,” but I figured lots of museums were named for part-time losers.
In the middle of the room were two desks that were bolted to the ground. All around the walls of the room were glass cases holding sheets, rifles, and books, between doors that went to other rooms. The bird’s nest at the top was still there, too.
I walked right to the middle of the room and sat in one of the desks. On the desk was a sheet of paper.
-
Desperation will make a villain out of you.
True/False -
Only a fool would not travel through time and change their past if they could.
True/False -
You were brought to this country with the expectation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
True/False -
If you push yourself hard in the direction of freedom, compassion, and excellence, you will recover.
True/False -
Loving someone and loving how someone makes you feel are the same thing.
True/False -
Only those who can read, write, and love can move back or forward through time.
True/False -
There are undergrounds to the past and future for every human being on earth.
True/False -
If you haven’t read or written or listened to something at least three times, you have never really read, written, or listened.
True/False -
Past, present, and future exist within you and you change them by changing the way you live your life
True/False -
You are special
True/False
Write three stories in three different time periods.
The three stories should explore a question you’ve been afraid to ask. What is that question?
How do you get good at love when your family disappeared and every day it feels like you and your friends are getting written off the face of the earth?
I put the test back on the desk. When did Baize even take this test? I knew there were more important questions on the test, but right that second, I wanted to see those three stories
Mama Lara walked out from one of the rooms while I was thinking. She looked exactly like she looked back in 1985.
“You’re a witch, ain’t you?” I asked her. “And you watched it all happen, didn’t you, just like the sky? Please just tell me, is any of this real?”
“Even after all you been through today, does my baby still believe in witches and magic?”
“Hell yeah,” I told her. “I’m sorry for cussing but witches, magic, and niggas might be all I believe in right now.” | held my head right there in that desk and tried to listen to my heart-beat. “I don’t understand, Mama Lara. If we changed the future, how come I’m still here? How come you look the same in 2013 as you did in 1985? Say something. Why would my mama and daddy still have me if we changed the future? It just doesn’t make sense.”
Mama Lara had what looked like Baize’s laptop computer in her hand.
“Where’d you get that from?” I asked her.
“People disappear, City,” she said, ignoring my question. “We live, we wonder, we love, we lie, and we disappear. Close the book.”
“Are you for real? That’s it?”
“And sometimes we appear again if we’re loved,” she said. “Accept it. Which answer did you get wrong on the test? I know you know.”
“I don’t even know when I took that test, Mama Lara,” I told her. “I’m not trying to be disrespectful. I’m just so tired.”
“The test ain’t going nowhere,” she said. “When you’re ready to find out what you got wrong, you will. Close the book.”
“Close the book? Then what? Then can Baize come back? Is that Baize’s computer?” | asked her again. “Is she here somewhere?”
“Take it.” She handed me the computer. “You’re so close.”
“I know she’s here. I can feel her. Where is she?” I asked.
“Wait.” | looked up from the computer. “Is Shalaya Crump the governor of Mississippi, or is she like the president or something?” Mama Lara just looked at me. “How old is she now?” I did the math in my head. “Damn near sixty-five? I bet she’s still fine as all outdoors, though. Did she marry that dude, Evan?”
Mama Lara stood there smiling with her hands folded across her chest. Honestly, I didn’t know what it took to be a good president or governor, but I knew Shalaya Crump had it. I knew it from the first day I met her. In her own way, she was as compassionate and thoughtful as a girl could be, but her mind was stronger than yours and no one could ever really break her heart. You could sprain her heart, and her heart would bruise a lot, but it could never ever be broken. Never. I figured that there were probably twenty-seven people like that in the world at one time and they were the only people who should be running for president of anything that mattered.
With all the windows in the museum open, and the lightning bugs outside winking like it was going out of style, I looked at Mama Lara. “So this is it?” I said loud enough so she could hear me.
“No,” Mama Lara said. “This ain’t it. You know how movement works now. You know how love and change work. And you know that sometimes, just sometimes, when folks disap-pear, they come back, don’t they? Did you do your bonus question?”
“I hear you, Mama Lara, but you don’t get it. Right now, all that goofy witch type-talk don’t help me. I just need something to hold on to. I need to know what’s gonna happen tomorrow. Don’t you see what I’m saying? If you can’t help me get Baize back, can you just stop talking for the rest of the day?”
“Think about what I’m asking you, City,” she said and sat in the desk next to me. “The book is open. Close it and get to work on the bonus question. How else do people disap-pear?”
1 looked down at the desk and thought about everything I’d experienced in the last few days and, I guess, the last fifty years. “Water,” I told her.
“Who uses words to make folks disappear?”
“And who makes people we love disappear?”
“Um, people make people disappear,” I told her.
“That’s it,” she said. “And everything that makes people we love disappear can make people what?”
“It’s all in y’all hands now. They’re waiting for y’all.”
I sat there at the desk, looking at my hands and thinking about water, fire, wind, words, and people. Both sides of my hands looked so worn, so bloody and smudged and ashy. From typing on a laptop computer, to brushing my hair at the Spell-Off, to tying the hands of a fake Klansman, to reading the first chapter of Long Division, to holding my daughter’s hand, my hands had done things I’d never imagined wanting them to do.
I wanted to walk out of that museum ready to explore, knowing that I’d done new things with my hands and new things with my imagination. Maybe I could find Shalaya Crump and Evan tomorrow, I thought. There was so much I wanted to explore. But before I could go for-ward, I had to go back under.
So l grabbed the computer, told Mama Lara thank you, and headed back toward the hole.
I loved the slice of the new Mississippi that I’d seen and I respected Shalava Crump’s decision to stay and fight for us, but I needed Baize back. I didn’t care if it was right to anyone else but my daughter and me.
When I got in the hole, I opened the computer. A revised version of the paragraph I’d written when I first took Baize’s computer back to 1985 was on the screen:
1 didn’t have a girlfriend halfway through ninth grade and it wasn’t because the whole high school heard Principal Jankins whispering to his wife, Ms. Dawsin-Jankins, that my hairline was crooked like the top of a Smurf house. I never had a girlfriend because the last time I saw Shalaya Crump, she told me she could love me if I helped her change the future dot-dot-dot in a special way.
I reread it. And I wondered. And I wandered. And I wrote. And I reread that. And I wrote more. And I erased some lies. And I wrote more. And I erased some truth. And I thought about honors English teachers and librarians. And I forgot about them. And I thought about what people like Shalaya, Baize, Evan, and me needed to read in school to prepare to fight, love, and disappear. And I forgot about that. And I wrote more. And the more I wrote and erased, the more I felt Baize and other characters slowly word by word, maybe even sense by sense- coming back.
That fat-headed black cat, with the “Red Naval” collar around its neck, appeared and started meowing right outside the hole. I grabbed the cat and brought it down in the hole with me. “Don’t call me an asshole, okay?” I told it. “You were right last time, but still, I ain’t in the mood for that. Man, I lost my daughter and my half wife and now I’m stuck in 2013. You hear me? Ain’t you supposed to be old and dead?”
The cat licked its paws and pawed at something in the shadows of the hole.
I reached over toward the shadows and saw that it was pawing at Long Division.
“Wait,” I told the cat. “Can you tell me who wrote this?”
I opened the book to the last chapter. With the cat lying on the side of my lap, the top of the hole open, and the light blue of the computer screen cupping my greasy face, I closed the book and wondered if I was the reader or somehow, actually, the writer of the book I had in my hands. Or if all of this somehow belonged to Baize’s memory and imagination.
“Wait,” I said to the cat. “Did my daughter? When?”
The cat ignored me and kept scratching its ears.
“I know this is supposed to be all dramatic,” I told the cat as it just kept licking its own ass and giggling, “but can you just help me understand what this book has to do with me? Somebody knows and I’m just tired of not knowing.”
Helping Baize really reappear was going to be harder than making her disappear, harder than anything I’d ever done in my life. And I was going to have to do it all with a book without an author called Long Division, Baize’s computer, an annoying cat that used to talk, and a hole in the ground. That’s one of the only things I knew. I also knew that “tomorrow” was a word now like the thousands of other words in that hole. I closed my mouth, pulled down the top of the hole, and imagined more words in the dark.
Someone else was in the hole with me.
1 heard loud breathing and more clumsy fumbling from the dark. I walked toward the noise until I was close enough to smell dried sweat, a pinch of pine, and all that ink. Ter-rified, I gently rubbed my hands up, down, and all around their noses, their eyelids, their dry lips, and their earlobes. I found their thighs, their flimsy T-shirts, and finally all of their sweaty hands. I had one more match left from the book I’d taken from the 1960s, so I went in my pocket and struck the match.
“This feels like love to you?”
Hand in hand in hand in hands, deep in the Mississippi underground, we opened our eyes in that lavender darkness and taught each other how to revise until all of our characters were free.
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