Disgruntled: A Novel Page 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

  Johnbrown flinched.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Ba-ba,” Kenya gasped.

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

  * * *

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

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

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

  Johnbrown, before he conceived of The Key, while he was between crap jobs, was the one who had come up with the Seven Days, and later he seemed to forget that Sheila nearly had to wrestle him to the ground to get him to read the Toni Morrison novel. He thought the organized murdering in the book was brilliant, an ideal combination of what he saw as Eastern discipline and black anarchy, but, as he saw it, the times did not quite call for that.

  His original idea had been a combination of service and confrontation. In addition to the volunteering, he wanted to stage raucous demonstrations at the suburban houses of city slumlords. He wanted to block streets in the Northeast or in the Irish Catholic part of Southwest Philly, where the white people regularly harassed black pedestrians; to patrol the neighborhood borders of South Philadelphia, where black met Italian; to picket racist unions and sabotage the Mummers Parade, the white trash blackface spectacle that was the city’s sole indigenous tradition.

  Johnbrown had several ideas, but perhaps his favorite involved provoking the police. For as long as she could remember, Kenya’s father had owned a gun, which lived in the basement in a locked metal box that she had imagined but never seen. Johnbrown wanted all of the Days to own handguns—“legally, of course.” His idea was that they should take their guns to the local police station to stage their right to bear arms—but without the “fascist theatrics” of the Panthers. But no one else was interested in spending their evenings in the city jail or getting their heads cracked with billy clubs. It might have also been the case that no one trusted Johnbrown at the police station with a gun. In any case, the Seven Days had become what they were.

  When Johnbrown started his “burn it all down” talk, the others would become sullen as they listened to him rant about how even though Philly now had a bullshit black mayor, it was still Rizzoville. “And why,” he would ask, his voice climbing octaves, “are we putting ourselves at the mercy of those ignorant racist thugs y’all call the police?” This was Yaya’s cue to pick up the hat she was endlessly crocheting and unraveling, and Alfred’s to stare thoughtfully into his can of beer. Kenya’s mother had a special sigh and a dark expression for moments like these. In the end, Johnbrown usually wore himself out and things continued on as they had before.

  One Saturday night, after a particularly gloomy spell of several days, Johnbrown announced, “It’s no secret that I think it’s time for us to really talk about what’s going on in this city, this country, in 1984. Yeah—1984. Does that ring a bell for anyone here?” His pouty tone reminded Kenya of the afternoon not long ago when Charlena had been upset about her parents’ fighting.

  “Look, we’re doing what we can. Just give it up, John,” Sheila snapped. He’d appended brown to his name when he was kicked out of Cornell. Kenya’s mother left it off when he seriously displeased her.

  “Maybe we should hear him out,” said Cindalou.

  Sheila continued. “Look, if y’all want to go moon the local precinct—”

  “Aw, Sheila,” laughed Yaya. “That ain’t right.”

  (“Umph!” agreed Alfred.)

  Johnbrown stood up abruptly, rustling the hu
ge corn plant beside him. “Moon the police station? Oh, fuck that! Who started this whole thing?” he yelled.

  Suddenly Yaya stood as well, and Kenya found herself slung over her shoulder, receding backward away from her father’s bulging eyes.

  “Who started this whole thing?” Johnbrown yelled. “I mean, what the hell were y’all doing with your lives when I came up with this? Going to the disco? Pledging the alumnae chapter of Wine Psi Fi?”

  Behind her door, Kenya heard her mother’s voice getting louder, her father’s going high. “It’s not like I can’t hear them,” she said to Yaya, rolling her eyes though her chest was tight with terror.

  “That’s okay,” Yaya said. “It’s better as background noise. So what’s your favorite bedtime story?”

  It was very difficult for Kenya to carry on a conversation with Yaya and still listen to what her parents were saying, but she couldn’t help being indignant.

  “My mother is a librarian. I read my own books!” she said.

  Yaya grinned. “Well, excuuuuuse me. I forgot you were a genius.”

  Kenya’s face burned. She bragged about her reading but she was no Charlena. It had always seemed to her that if she was going to be so unpopular at school, the reason should be that she was so smart it put others off.

  “I’m just playing with you,” Yaya said. Then she perused the stacked orange crates that held Kenya’s books and few remaining toys. “How ’bout I read this one to you anyway?” she asked, picking up The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a book that her parents had fought about. “Atonist” bullshit, her father had called it, using his mysterious epithet for Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

  Kenya had just begun reading the Narnia books. She nodded, and in the brief silence before Yaya started, they both heard Sheila’s voice snap across the word brat. Yaya had to leave eventually, and Sheila and Johnbrown Curtis argued into the night while Kenya fell asleep clutching her stomach.

  * * *

  The fight over bringing it to white Philadelphia was the only real disagreement among the Seven Days. But it was not the only battle that Kenya’s parents fought. Though she really only began to pay attention because of the talk with Charlena, there had been two main kinds of fights for as long as she could remember.

  One was always initiated by Sheila, and it began with her saying something like: I’m supporting this family financially and the least you could do is the dishes I don’t care what Karenga says I’m not married to him and I don’t know where your fucking (sorry, Kenya) socks are. These fights occurred more frequently after Kenya went with her mother to the library downtown, where they listened to a woman named Audre Lorde read poems that did not rhyme.

  “I don’t go in for that gay stuff,” Sheila told Johnbrown, “but everything else that sister said is all right by me.”

  “She’s probably an FBI informant. A lot of those people are,” Johnbrown said.

  “She certainly informed me about why I’m not ironing your shirts or pouring your cereal anymore.”

  “What people?” asked Kenya, but no one answered.

  Shortly after that conversation Sheila moved from cooking an unpredictable array of fatty, fancy meals into a rigid dinner schedule featuring flavorless baked fish on Mondays accompanied by a glop of spinach, and hot dogs with a gross salad on Saturday nights.

  “I’m not a housewife and I’m not the cook,” she announced defensively when Kenya and her father poked at their iceberg lettuce. “Eat until you’re full.”

  Kenya considered it a mercy that their tradition of Sunday-morning pancakes remained.

  There was another ancient fight, this one always started by Johnbrown. It was You Don’t Need Me Anyway. Shortly after Charlena had confided her fears about her parents’ splitting up, Kenya was up in her room practicing jacks when You Don’t Need Me broke out. It was because of Charlena’s parents’ imminent divorce that she ran downstairs yelling, “We need you! We need you!” and grabbed her father’s leg. He ignored her, bulging his eyes in the direction of her mother, who said, “Upstairs, Kenya.”

  “Stop fighting!”

  “We’re having a discussion,” her father said through gritted teeth, trying to shake her off.

  “I won’t go until you stop having it!”

  “Oh yes you will,” her mother said, folding her arms, and of course she was right. “And don’t be sitting up there at the top listening to grown folks talk!” she called, but she didn’t need to yell, because Kenya could hear her very clearly from her perch at the top of the stairs.

  “Just don’t get a divorce,” yelled Kenya, before going into her room.

  “We can’t,” her father’s voice floated up. Then he laughed. She heard her mother laugh, too, then say quietly, “You think you’re funny, Johnbrown.”

  * * *

  The shame of being alive was a phrase Kenya would hear in her father’s voice; it wafted in and out of her consciousness like the chorus of a song. What he meant by this it took her years to understand, since just as often he said, “Sure, that’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Things that were “nothing to be ashamed of” included bodily functions, growing up poor, as her mother had, and feeling lonely, as her father had when he was a child. And of course, though both white folks and some black—like his parents—tried to make you feel it, there was certainly no shame in being black. But during the time of her supposed stewardship of Duvall (which only amounted to her trying not to hate him) and the time of joylessly making out with Charlena, Kenya came into increasing consciousness of how fitting it was that Johnbrown had provided the language for this shame. After all, he and Sheila had created a world of opportunity for her to experience it.

  In December of Kenya’s fourth-grade year, Sheila decided that she would use her library connections to stage a Kwanzaa presentation with the Seven Days at the library on Fifty-Second Street, a few blocks away from their house. When it came time to start on that Saturday afternoon, the small Programs Room on the first floor suddenly looked big as a ragged handful of families scattered themselves among the rows and rows of chairs. Kenya counted technically more participants than Seven Days, though it certainly didn’t feel that way. And then, on the border between presenter and participant, there was an enthusiastic drunk in a bright red wool cap with a surprising amount of knowledge about Kwanzaa. “Ujima!” he shouted as Sheila lit a red candle, before she’d even had a chance to name the principle. “Ku-uuuuuuuuu-maaaa-baaaaa!” he growled, giving the word an extra syllable. Sheila ignored him, her jaw growing steely. Johnbrown stared into the middle distance.

  As her parents and their friends took up a chant that Yaya had designed to help the day care kids memorize the principles, Kenya’s eye was suddenly drawn to the cracked-open door. There stood an openmouthed L’Tisha Simmons and her mother. The two sported the same ponytail, spiky with escaping bits of straightened hair, and even though L’Tisha was only nine, they also wore matching leather pants. At L’Tisha’s side was her minion Fatima.

  Kenya could see herself in the girls’ eyes, sporting an orange, yellow, and brown dashiki and a forehead-straining vertical braided hairstyle that was her mother’s imitation of an African mask. The chanting and clapping were not loud enough to drown out the sound of L’Tisha and Fatima laughing, or the sound of L’Tisha’s mother admonishing the girls for having no class.

  L’Tisha’s laughter was the soundtrack to the shame of being alive; it burned Kenya’s stomach and cheeks even when L’Tisha was clearly not laughing at her. There had been one time, which Kenya recalled desperately as the Kwanzaa presentation dragged on, one incredible time when L’Tisha had laughed because Kenya made a joke. Before Duvall became her charge, she had said his breath smelled like cheddar cheese and L’Tisha had howled. Kenya had floated for the rest of the day.

  Actually, Kenya wasn’t sure which was worse, being laughed or gawked at, or simply being in a place where shame coated the walls, floor, and ceiling. In February, a week after she turned ten, Kenya�
��s parents took her to a Black History Month celebration that had been advertised in The Philadelphia Tribune. It was at a poorly heated community center in North Philadelphia where Johnbrown had gone to the occasional Black Marxist meeting. Kenya’s fingers grew stiff with cold that night as she watched presenter after presenter make the same joke about the shortest month of the year. A giant man wearing a beret and a green army jacket who reminded her of Brother Camden brandished a flyer about salmonella poisoning and repurposed kangaroo meat in the chicken at McDonald’s. Then a spotty filmstrip about a black junkie named Charlie got chewed up in the projector. Taking up the theme of the destroyed film, a black-clad man did a mime performance about being trapped in a box. The box, he said, was heroin. Finally, two women in colorful bikinis jumped around to some Africanish disco music. As their dance was winding down, they invited people from the audience to get up with them. Many of the men went, including Johnbrown, who jutted his hip bones forward and waved his hands in the air. Sheila’s mouth closed in a line. One of the women’s tops fell open and a thin breast jumped out. As the minutes passed, Kenya veered wildly between the desires to laugh and to cry; she fought a mounting nausea.

  At least L’Tisha wasn’t there laughing and saying “boogeddy-boo.” But she was there in school the afternoon Duvall raised his hand the way he always did, abruptly and with the force of a rocket.

  “Mrs. Preston, my stomach hurts and I really have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Boy, you just went to the bathroom!”

  “I know, but my stomach hurts.”

  “Duvall has to fart!” yelled a boy whose intriguing name was Aaron Hurt.

  “Aaron said I had to fart,” said Duvall.

  “Boy, you do have to fart!” snapped Mrs. Preston. “Go do it in the bathroom!”