Playground, page 8
GREEN CLASSICAL HAD A LIBRARY that made Medill’s look like a fire sale. Green’s was two rooms and a balcony filled with books—books of every size, color, and thickness. Books about reptiles and amphibians and the Civil War and volcanoes. Maps and Greek myths, biographies of great athletes, how-to books for building your own radio or surviving in the woods with nothing but a pocketknife.
He went in one day at recess, afraid that the librarian might stop him. He went up and down the aisles of the thousands of books, afraid to touch them. A large white book fell off the shelves as he passed. He snatched it up off the floor and scrambled to put it back before the librarian threw him out. But the contents of the book stopped him. It was all about building a castle in England in the thirteenth century. Every page had a picture filled with tiny people swarming together to dig the moats and raise the walls and decorate the passageways of the immense fortress.
He’d never wanted anything more in his whole life than to possess that book for a few hours. He had seen other kids leaving the library with books under their arms, but he didn’t know how it was done. The books were too nice to be free. At last, he mustered the courage to bring the book to the librarian’s desk.
“How much to borrow it overnight?”
The librarian laughed. “Oh, sweetheart! It’s all yours. You can take it home for two weeks. No charge!”
It seemed like a trap. But he checked the book out and walked through the library doors. No alarm went off. For two weeks, while commuting up and down the Edens Expressway, he lived in medieval England. They were the happiest two weeks of his life.
THE WHITE KIDS HAD EVERYTHING. They had backpacks and metal lunch boxes and erasers in the shapes of cartoon characters. From one day to the next, every kid at Green Classical showed up with packs of some new kind of trading card. They traded and obsessed over those cards until kids started coming to class with shoeboxes of them. Rafi floundered in ignorance.
“Are they . . . some kind of baseball cards?”
The others just laughed.
Kids kept charts and tables of the cards they had and the cards they needed. Rafi asked Eliezer Kaplan, “Can you just . . . let me hold one?”
Eliezer hunched up, the helpless enforcer of reality. “Well . . . they’re worth a lot more if people don’t touch them.”
“Can I just look at one?”
Eliezer flashed him a look at one sleeved card. It was a picture of a cartoon newspaper with a headline that made no sense at all.
The packs of cards cost too much money. Rafi didn’t dare nag his mother to buy him one, especially since he didn’t know what they were. So he took a pack that fell out of Joey Blackman’s side pocket when they were sitting on the school steps. He slipped it into his own pocket, and though it burned his thigh, he didn’t look at it until the long bus ride home back to the Near West Side.
He opened the pack of cards and studied them in bed, when his mother and sister were asleep. Every card showed some cartoon—parodies of famous people he didn’t know and jokes he couldn’t understand. He would never keep pace with the kids from Green. No matter what his father and his grandmother and the principal at Medill thought, he might learn everything the North Side had to learn, and he would still be buried.
The next day they summoned him to the principal’s office. Joey Blackman was already there. Dr. Vedral, the principal, looked Rafi in the eye.
“Rafi? Do you have something that belongs to Joey?”
He didn’t want to go to reform school. He no longer wanted to go back to Medill. He just wanted to read until he discovered where all the pain of the world came from.
“No,” he said, a little injured. “I have my own stuff. I don’t need to steal anything.”
The righteous protests of Joey Blackman were impossible to deny. But Dr. Vedral, a trusting white woman, studied the best reader in Green Classical and went with her educator’s gut.
“Joey, I think you must have just lost your cards. You two both go on back to class.”
Now there were at least three things for which Rafi Young would go straight to hell.
WHILE RAFI COMMUTED THREE HOURS each day to Green Classical, Little Sondy stayed home, walking the few blocks to Medill. She turned into Sond for a year, and then ’Dra for two more. She had all the teachers Rafi would have had if the magnet hadn’t gotten him and pulled him up North.
’Dra was not a prize reader or a prize math solver or a prize picture puzzler or a prize anything. But she and her brother were bound together in a pact against all others. In their mother’s tiny apartment every evening, they fought the world to a draw. And on weekends and over the long summer vacations, as their mother drove the bus and their father popped back into their lives at random, they kept each other entertained.
These were their years of radio, when both black and white DJs at South Side stations spun soul and funk and infant hip-hop and all kinds of urban—years of shared late afternoon reruns, where brother and sister learned about the ways of white folks and the things rich people got up to. Their years of Cubs games that taught the pleasure of constantly destroyed hope. Their years of Parker Brothers, of Monopoly, Operation, and Payday. Each of them served as the other’s best opponent. Sworn to blood combat, they spurred each other on, growing fiercer and shrewder with every showdown.
In sixth grade, when he was eleven, Rafi discovered Danish snap-together blocks. Something about those standardized, interlocking components in bright primary colors, all meshing tightly into any clean creation he could dream up, made Rafi feel that the mangled planet might yet be fixed. He spent entire afternoons assembling smooth walls and strong towers, fitting the modules together into solid citadels, secure space stations, and cunning subterranean hideouts.
His sister didn’t like playing with blocks. But she liked playing with Rafi. They worked together for two days, making a wardrobe with a false back to it. Rafi wanted to make it big enough to get inside of, but they didn’t have enough blocks. At least they could make a working prototype.
They talked while they built. Confiding was easier when you could study the blocks and not have to look at each other.
“Do you really like them, Rahrah?”
“Do I really like who?”
“The white kids. The Green kids. Are they really your friends, or . . . ?”
“Why you gotta ask me this? Stop asking me stupid shit.”
“Just tell me. Do you really like being with them? Or you just making nice?”
What was there to say? His classmates had so much confidence it made him sick just to think about. But he knew them, now. Knew what made them anxious or excited. He moved among them without too much trouble.
“I don’t know. They’re okay. Kind of in love with themselves? But people don’t come after you so much, up there. They leave you be.”
“Everyone talks a lot of trash about you, you know. Down here.”
He kept searching for yellow two-by-twos and red two-by-threes. “Who does?”
“Keesha. Little Charles. Janard. Most of the neighborhood. But they don’t know you. Nobody really knows you—not us down here or the white kids up there. Not Mom. Not Dad. Only I know you. Only I know the real Rahrah.”
He snapped together two wardrobe panels and thought: At least that makes one of us.
HIS MOTHER FELL IN with Moody Boyfriend, who all too soon became Moody Stepdad. This man was big and wide and dark and bald and worked as a furniture mover. Rafi didn’t bother learning too much about him. It didn’t seem likely that he’d be around too long.
Rafi and ’Dra got moved again, to a not-great duplex on the edge of the Robert Brooks Homes. The apartment would have been just right for two, as Moody Stepdad often said. Rafi stayed out from underfoot by moving into the public library branch on Taylor Street, while Little Sondy hid at home by making herself very small.
In the temple on Taylor, Rafi played a game. He went to a section—say, old movies, or the Wild West, or boats and submarines. He’d put his finger on a row of books, close his eyes, step forward, and flick down the row until a spine tugged at his finger. He’d take the selection back to his reading desk—they let skinny, preadolescent black boys have reading desks all their own—then read a little, dream a little, and read a little more.
Moody Stepdad didn’t like Rafi going up to Park Ridge for school. “What’s he need to go clear up there for, to get what he could get easier down here? Put him in Whitney Young. Just makes more sense, all the way around.” And in the middle of seventh grade, without enough time to trade phone numbers with his friends from Green, Rafi began life again in a whole new school, once again walking distance from home.
FIVE WEEKS BEFORE RAFI’S thirteenth birthday, Drunk Gramma cornered Rafi’s father with family news. Donnie Young’s younger brother’s oldest son had just been accepted at a private school named after Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, a crazed Spanish Renaissance soldier given to vivid hallucinations.
“Best school in the city. Top three, anyway.”
Saint Ignatius College Prep was right in the old ’hood, close enough that Leon Durham, standing in the parking lot of Rafi’s former grade school, could have knocked out a window of the elite institution with a well-hit baseball and some help from steroids. Donnie Young had walked past the grand old Second Empire–style building a few thousand times in his life. It was one of only half a dozen public buildings to survive the Great Fire of 1871, but it never occurred to the fireman that the place was anything more than an island of whiteness left behind by history on the wrong side of Chicago’s changing neighborhoods.
“Your own nephew. At least one boy in the Young family is going somewhere. Where’s your little reading machine going to high school?”
Donnie Young had no idea. His ex-wife handled that.
“What kind of father are you? You got our best hope in the whole next generation in your hands, and you’re going to drop him any-which-where, while his own cousin goes to the top school in the city?”
Donnie couldn’t afford to send his kid to a place like Saint Ignatius. But now nothing short of Saint Ignatius College Prep would do for his own heir apparent. Donnie took up the matter with Sondra, meeting his ex on neutral turf in a sandwich shop in Little Italy. The proposal smacked her up the side of the head.
“Wait. How much? Is that every year?”
But Donnie Young went over his columns of numbers, which he’d written out longhand on a sheet of copy paper. “I can swing two-thirds.” He didn’t say how that would require his moving into a studio and borrowing money from his own mother, who still did not believe the boy really needed glasses.
Sondra Young, now Sondra Johnson, stared at the remaining balance, the only thing standing between her boy and boundless opportunity. If anyone deserved what the Jesuits had to offer, it was her son. And honestly, she wasn’t sure Rafi would survive any other high school that he could reach from home.
They were late in the application cycle. Very late. In fact, Rafi had only three days to craft a personal statement, take a general knowledge exam, and write a thousand-word essay. Hearing his parents’ rushed plan, Rafi wanted to drop out and get a job washing dishes.
“Three days? Really?” Three days to apply to one of Chicago’s most exclusive schools. He got to work, letting his parents draw their own conclusions from his stoic silence. Once the shock of the initial ambush wore off, he began to feel that he’d been preparing his whole life for this one, ridiculous, thrilling long shot.
The comprehensive exam was more challenging than any he’d taken. But he ran through the questions like a champion contestant on an afternoon game show. His nervousness disappeared, and the rare chance to flex his skills turned into the only blood sport he’d ever enjoyed playing.
The personal statement all but wrote itself: What is your favorite spot in all the world? He wrote of how he felt the first time he walked into the Taylor Street library—how everything in creation had its shelf somewhere in that building, and how he could travel anywhere in time and space simply by browsing the aisles. Maybe it’s cheating that my favorite spot contains so many others.
The thousand-word general essay, however, stopped him cold. What is the most important quality any person could possess? Whenever he wrote essays at Whitney Young, he knew how the teacher hoped he would answer, and he rose to deliver what was expected. But he could not imagine what the Jesuits wanted him to say. Faith, he supposed. Maybe hope or charity. But when he started writing about those, the sentences turned silly and fake. The words were dead before they left his pen.
By late afternoon on the Sunday before the application was due, he still had only one fatuous paragraph. His father was going nuts, begging him to finish the essay any old way and turn it in. “Don’t have to be good. Just done.”
His mother said, “Don’t worry, Rafi. I love you, no matter what.”
Rafi put his head down on the kitchen table, left ear to the paper, defeated. Just as slowly, he lifted his head again, and before he realized what he’d written, he had his first line:
Without the ability to feel sad, a person could not be kind or thoughtful, because you wouldn’t care or know how anybody else feels. Without sadness, you would never learn anything from history. Sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were. A person who never felt sad would be a monster.
In two short hours, he had his introduction, his three examples, and his summary—one thousand words. The argument was strange. But it felt lively and true, and the words didn’t make him sick to read.
His father demanded to see the essay. When the man finished, Rafi braced for his fury. It didn’t come. His father handed the pages back to him and looked away. “All right, then. If those folks don’t take you, it’s time to move to another country.”
FOR A MONTH, Rafi had nightmares of his father punching out elderly white men in long black robes. His sister reassured him. “You’re the best reader in this whole city. Of course they’re gonna take you. They may be white, but they’re not idiots.” His mother kept saying, “Whitney Young is a perfectly good school.” But when the letter of acceptance arrived, she broke down sobbing. A person who never felt sadness would never have been able to feel such pride.
The only thing remaining was to tell Moody Stepdad. Sondra had not wanted to raise the matter until it was a done deal. The man always required a fair amount of finessing. She went to him waving the letter, the imposing letterhead, the flourish of signature, the glowing words about the exceptional application. “Look here! Be proud!”
From across the kitchen table, Rafi watched Moody Stepdad read the letter. The man’s posture alone made a vacuum of the room.
“How much is this pride going to cost me?”
Rafi listened to the two adults advance from probe to skirmish to full frontal assault. Neither of the combatants cared that he was sitting right there and could hear everything they said. He got up from the table, crossed the room, and went upstairs with no one noticing and his fate still up for grabs.
’Dra was sitting in the dark hallway at the top of the stairs. He remembered his first day of school, the two of them cowering on the floor above their warring parents, Little Sondy begging him to make them stop. But this wasn’t Little Sondy. This was another, fiercer person. His sister was only twelve, but she’d had enough of paternal stupidity for one lifetime.
“The man’s a fuckin’ piglet.”
“Leave it. It doesn’t matter.”
But Rafi sat on the landing next to her and kept on listening to Saturday Night at the Fights. His mother was saying that she had it all covered. Moody Stepdad wouldn’t have to sacrifice a thing.
“Whatever comes out of your pocketbook is my sacrifice.”
“The boy’s father gonna handle most of the costs.”
This only seemed to make Moody Stepdad moodier.
“You want to send the girl to an expensive school, too? Make the two of us live on bread and water? Our taxes are already paying for his education. He can go to a free high school, just like you and me did.”
His mother said, “Listen to me. That child is special.”
Moody Stepdad hooted. “Special? What the hell are you talking about? He’s so slow, he can hardly take care of himself.”
On the landing, ’Dra shrieked and jumped to her feet. Rafi grabbed the hem of her sweatshirt, but she pulled away and hammered down the stairs. She slammed into the kitchen with such violence that their mother shouted in surprise. Then ’Dra laid into Moody Stepdad.
“Shut your fool mouth for ten seconds. You’re too dumb a shit to recognize the smartest person you’ll ever meet.”
Rafi smashed his hands against his ears. He stood and stumbled toward his bedroom, the closeable door. Before he could make it, the kitchen erupted. A shouted profanity touched off a surprised bellow, followed by the scrape of furniture and the sound of running. A scuffle, a door thrown open, a chase out into the apartment hallway, a rotted railing pulling out of the wall, another short shout, and the sound of a small, flailing body hitting the apartment stairs four times before coming to rest at the bottom. Then his mother’s wild howls.
He forced himself back around into the nightmare scene and down the dingy stairway. His mother and stepdad were already at the bottom, hovering over his sister’s unresponsive body. He ran back upstairs and called 911. Then the ambulance, the paramedics, and Rafi remembered nothing more until the three of them were huddled in a waiting room somewhere in the endless sprawling complex of Cook County Hospital, on Harrison. His mother kept saying, “You promised to fix that railing.” Moody Stepdad said nothing. Rafi talked only to God, four repeating words.
An ICU resident—white man in white coat—came to tell them that three of ‘Dra’s cervical vertebrae were no longer as they should be and that her brain was badly impacted. Something in the doctor’s voice cowered from the suggestion: survival might be the worst of the two possibilities.
