Riot Baby, page 8
So that’s what I do.
Introduce myself: name, no NYSID number, then make some crack about how “I didn’t do it” or something like that, not because it matters at this point but because, for the younger cats, maybe it helps to hear it come up. I used to talk about how shitty the food was but then I would remember what I used to get when I was in the Box, and I’d remember that their shit probably has worms in it. So instead, I tell him about the others. I tell him about Rick, who’s practically an institution he’s been here so long, and I talk about Bobby, who did a bid at Folsom in California and used to be a vegetable smuggler, like he actually worked on a garden with some other inmates on China Hill and they would sneak food back into the prison in their clothes: a jalapeño pepper wrapped in a sandwich bag and smushed in his left boot and in his right boot a bundle of tightly wrapped green onion shoots. One guy brought back a watermelon slice, another some tomatoes. And I tell the kid now about what Bobby once told me, which is that they weren’t supposed to garden per se, they were landscapers, but they weren’t gonna not garden on that grassy knoll.
And then I tell this kid who may or may not be asleep about the book club.
It’s not just a story about a buncha niggas reading a book but it’s also a story of some of those niggas being cats locked up for a backpack and some of those niggas being neo-Nazis. A story that makes you ask what’s the point of a neo-Nazi learning to treat a black person as a human if he’s just gonna die in a year and a half anyway, or maybe the lesson is that the only whites ready to look at black folk as human are the ones getting ready to die anyway. But then I chime in on this conversation I’m having out loud to myself, and say Rikers is weird like that. Jail’s weird like that. Prison’s weird like that. All types of absurd shit happens here, and you just need the patience to step back and watch it happen. Maybe that comes with time. Maybe not. Maybe you spend your entire sentence here getting the shit kicked outta you. Maybe they kill you in here. But maybe you make it out. Not out from behind bars, but out of wherever it is they try to put you when they put you behind bars.
I’m telling the kid about how everyone in the book club had to sit at separate tables, and you had to swivel around to talk to people so nobody felt left out. And if someone wanted to read something out of the book, you had to toss it to them and hope they caught it or it landed within reach.
“How long you been here?”
The kid’s so quiet that anybody not trained to listen for any little noise might have missed it, but I stop dead in the middle of my sentence.
“You sound like you been here long.” He’s drugged up. His words slur. He’s got that wooziness in him, drunk-tired.
“You just see a lot here pretty quickly,” I tell him. But then I add it all up. The arrest, the time in Central Booking, then my arrival at Rikers. Me trying to get my case tried separately from the niggas I was with at the time. Seventy-four days later is the first time I see a judge, and I hear my charges for the first time. Mama wasn’t there. Ella wasn’t there. But I knew it’d kill them both if I pled guilty, so I tell the room “not guilty,” and I get a trial date for six months after that. Two hundred and fifty-eight days later, I’m in court again, bigger from what RNDC has already done to me, and the prosecutor requests a deferment. “People Not Ready” like it takes more than just the DA to do what needs doing to me. Then more deferments, such that I ain’t even need to be in court. Two weeks, one week, one week, two weeks. Then fights with inmates and time in the Box and admin charges added to what ain’t even technically a sentence, and it blurs. In that blur are more fights, COs attacking us, COs trying to rape us, beating us in the showers, us fighting back, slashing, trying to get our ass-whoopings caught on camera. More time in the Box. “Eight years.”
“That’s gotta be some sort of record.”
I’m stunned. I’d never counted it out like that before. Makes me gulp and need to take a few deep breaths. “Yeah. But I’m getting out soon.” I don’t say I’m eligible for parole or that I got a hearing coming up, because there ain’t enough certainty in those sentences. I need to say I’m getting out. The kid needs to hear that it’s possible.
I need to hear that it’s possible.
“I’m getting out.”
The CO who’s still awake taps his shock-stick against the ground. Time’s up. I move my chair to the next cell and start talking.
* * *
The closer to Kev’s parole hearing they get, the more exaggerated his moods. Either he’s electric with hypomania or catatonic with depression. Their first of the two hugs they’re allotted is swift. Perfunctory. They sit down less like a sister traveling to visit her inmate brother and more like prospective business partners.
Kev fiddles with his fingers, forearms resting heavy on the table, his brows so furrowed they nearly cover his eyes.
Twice he tries to start speaking, but something swallows the words in his throat. Finally, “I wish I’d talked to Mama more.”
Confusion and sorrow war in Ella. She blinks her surprise, then flexes her toes.
Strands of white light peel out of thin air and wrap around her, spawning more threads, tree-branching until whole cloth covers her, bathes her in ivory that takes the sun’s light and makes her glow.
This is a new thing. Ella takes Kev’s hand and smiles. “Come with me, Kev. I want to show you something.”
Two steps forward take them into a field overgrown by weeds where, in the distance, railroad tracks cut through overgrowth. A ghost train, translucent against the blue sky, thunders past and Kev squints and sees in one of the compartments, a family, laden with a single suitcase, and sees within that suitcase the clothes and the bags of chicken that are meant to sustain the two children on their journey northward. He doesn’t know how he knows they are heading north, nor does he know how he knows where they stand, that it is the Delta, but the conviction rocks him. He watches in wonder as the train passes, its billowing smoke outlined in luminescence by the golden orb that gilds everything its light touches.
They walk through the fields. By now, Ella has let go of Kev’s hand, but Kev follows, trusting his older sister to lead him to security, to answers, to certainty. At a vacant lot, a still pool of water fills a parking lot so that the buildings lining the lot see their undisturbed reflections, the auto body shop whose sign is missing half its lettering, the red brick factory building hollowed out into nothing more than a husk with its broken windows like a tiger’s teeth. Telephone lines on which stand a murder of crows, the poles untouched but bulging with captured moisture. They walk further to find empty houses that stand in defiance of all natural law, the cement of sidewalks peeled away to reveal the toll of the battle waged between concrete and grassland. Paved roads made brown where the asphalt has vanished. Clouds swim above them. The buildings, homes, warehouses, a courthouse, all of it wears a coat of brown, varying shades, the color of sand or the color of mud, but all brown. The entire town coated in it.
If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.
A river runs.
Two hundred miles long and sixty miles wide, cutting through nineteen counties, its ebb and flow enriching the land it touches such that wealth could grow straight out of the topsoil that runs more than sixty feet deep, pregnant with life and black bodies. On the outskirts of the town, along a lonely stretch of road, phantasmal stalks of corn sprout, row after row after row, with spectral farming machinery, rusted and pitted, hanging over the entire enterprise.
The church is plain and white, and if Kev squints, he can see the cracks and rifts in the white paint of its steeple. But from where they stand, the place looks untouched, neat and orderly while the overgrown cemetery behind it holds tombstones like more broken teeth. Wisps of smoke rise from the air to become silhouettes of people working a field while a plantation house builds itself, ghostly tendril by ghostly tendril, out of the ground on its hilltop perch. Streams of black folk dressed in Sunday white flow in and out of the church. Mothers with their gloved hands holding their children’s. Husbands with their elbows out for their wives to wrap their arms through. Silent, but Kev strains to hear the giggling and the chatter and the warmth and the love nonetheless. Ella stoops as a ghost child comes by her and reaches out to touch the child’s cheek only to have it melt around her finger, then her hand, then vanish completely.
Dusk breeze cuts through the vision, and the people disappear, so that all that remains is the church. The heat settles on their shoulders like a blanket. Gnats and mosquitoes sing all over their legs and fingers.
A step forward, and they cross so much ground that Kev falls to his knees, sick, and finds he is kneeling in water. His head darts left and right, and he knows without knowing how he knows that it’s the Yazoo River that darkens his DOC-issued orange jumpsuit.
Looking up, he sees more ghosts. A minister with one hand cupped over a woman’s nose and mouth and another pressed against the small of her back, their waists rising out of the water, their white gowns pooled around them, and the minister dipping the woman back like they were dancing and no one else could see them, then bringing her back up out of the water, her gown soaked through and clinging to her angles and curves, her black hair curled and clumped about her ears and neck, her skin a-sheen, and Kev knows without knowing how he knows that he and that woman share blood. His hands go to his face, fingertips shivering against cheeks wet with tears. Then the wind takes the ghosts from them, and Kev’s gasp catches in his chest, and he stares while that spot transforms into a street in downtown Greenwood, two lone black boys in suspenders with books slung by straps over their shoulders, talking like no one else can hear them, none of the white store proprietors staring out through their windows or the man showing his neighbor’s son the contents of his toolbox, the box itself splayed open on a front porch. None of the girls walking back from school with their mothers suddenly wrapping them into forced silence with their arms, pulling them away so that wherever the black boys who share his blood go, the rest of the world spread apart from them, until the road empties and all that can be heard is the car that races toward them, full of white boys holding bats and chains, in full pursuit of the young black men who had dared to walk through their part of town without their permission. Kev knows what happens after without knowing how he knows: that the two boys, cousins to each other, have found sanctuary in a nearby river and how they nearly drown for holding their breath so long while the white boys with their lights search the bank, then the daring black boys getting home with their chests heaving from panic and effort to face a mother, an aunt, livid, purple with worry.
The images spin into stories, so many stories, so that he sees another young man working under the sun as a sharecropper on a plantation, finding a bumpy log on which to sit, taking his hat off and running his forearm along his forehead, then finding the water pump and pouring some into his hat’s brim to splash on his head and face. The overseer comes out without his whip because why would he need it? And from the porch, he shouts at the man on the log, and it’s as if Kev’s in the dream, he can’t hear the words only see the white mouth contort in disgust around them. The black man stands up, not quite to his full height, but instead of turning back to his hoe, he turns to the overseer and says something back. Kev can’t hear the words, but he can see the words straighten the man’s back, can see each syllable building pride inside him, and he’s not angry, he just wants the rest he’s earned. The wind churns, and it’s dusk, and the young man who dared to rest has fled to his grand-aunt’s clapboard house and his grand-uncle girds himself with a Winchester rifle and a long-nose .38, and sets on the front porch waiting for the mob to come after a man who dared to assert his worth.
The ritual: a social code broken, then fleeing to the sanctuary of family members who gather to protect the loved one on the run, the loved one now in danger, until plans can be made, slapped together, to spirit that person up north.
The ground falls out from beneath Kev. When he opens his eyes, he and Ella are standing on air. Ella looks as though she has not moved this entire time, as though she were a piece of furniture or a tree having withstood all manner of storm. Staring at this woman, Kev realizes what he has seen and feels anger and jealousy that this woman has gained access to more of their mother’s life than Kev had ever been granted, that so much of the mystery of Mama has been solved.
Shotgun shacks and unpaved roads and cotton fields. Young men “progueing,” strutting around and being seen, and rivers swollen with black bodies. Patchwork streetlamp grid that turns some neighborhoods into lightless blocks, churches set up to register neighborhood denizens to vote with lines stretching out the entrance and down the block and those churches being reduced to splinters on a night where it didn’t matter if there were people in it or not, just that what they wanted to say got said. A man putting on a white hood and mounting a horse and galloping to an agitator’s house to light a cross on fire on that front lawn, burn a crucifix into that grass when the wood falls, then finding himself the next morning at the State Capitol in a bespoke suit debating the merits of a piece of legislation. Men turned into pieces of meat, having been dragged by a car or a truck down backstreets where mosquitoes and alligators and gutter snakes roam. The smell of sweet barbecue sauce wafting up from a grill in a backyard while uncles and aunts slapped at their necks or their legs and where kids scurried underneath chairs or flirted or did the things people do when they’re no longer unfree.
“Mama,” Kev whispers.
He reaches a hand out and takes a step toward one of the little pig-tailed girls being bounced on an older woman’s knee.
“Mama.” Tears blur the vision. “Mama. Oh, Mama.”
It feels like forever, but it was only a few seconds. And in the visiting room, Ella sneaks her hand away before the guard can catch her.
Across the table, Kev smiles his thanks. Tears still pool in his eyes, and he lets them rest there for a moment before sniffing them away and becoming his hard self again.
“They’re really gonna let me out, aren’t they.” When Kev says it, it doesn’t sound like a question. It doesn’t sound like an acclimation. It sounds like an accusation. It sounds like Kev himself peering sideways into Ella’s head, a passenger in her mind as she spoke with Kev’s public defender and handed over the materials to help the defender make the case for parole with the review board—the proof of lodging, the contact info for Kev’s eventual employer, the location and admission requirements for nearby schools. It sounds like Kev watching her brush past every correctional officer whose path she crossed, grazing just enough to let her Thing flow through them and convince them of what a model inmate Kev has been. It sounds like Kev watching Ella cheat.
“When you get out,” Ella asked. “Where do you wanna go?”
For a while, he doesn’t say anything. Ella watches the potential answers wash across his face, watches him catch them, bounce them from hand to hand or turn them over, then toss them away. Watches him carry in his arms the whole time a simple desire to be away from violence. Until finally he comes to the one word Ella never wanted to hear again.
“West.”
IV
WATTS
WATTS is a Sponsored spot.
I didn’t really know what that meant until I got out here. The parole board picked it when they put all my shit through the algorithm. My records, my time in Rikers, the stint upstate, my mental health assessment, the Urban Wounded program Ella set me up with out here, job prospects, all of that. I told them I wanted to be out west, away from people, places, and things that’d bring me back to jail, and Watts was the best option that came up. There are Sponsored communities all over the country, and you can tell them where you’d prefer to be and why, like maybe somewhere closer to family or somewhere away from where you have an outstanding beef, and the humans on the parole board will pretend to have the final say, but they pretty much rubberstamp whatever the algo spits out.
I’d worried about pushback. The logistics of having the System follow me all the way out there, but apparently it wasn’t a problem. They got it all figured out. They even contacted a mechanic that’ll put me to work right away. No more job applications with the Box on it.
Ella never asks me why I wanted to go out west of all places, and I never ask her why it bothers her so much. I know she and Mama lived out in Florence, in South Central, for a bit before I was born. But I remember I was born there, and it’s the only time I can remember both Mama and Ella smiling at me.
Either way, when I get there, I see sprawl. Newly painted stucco houses. Everything’s one or two stories. And there’s a daytime brilliance to everything, gives it a shine I never got from the crowded, leaning tenements in Harlem. But there are logos everywhere. A large billboard over the Pacific Electric tracks with the same three-bar logo as what was on the machine that told me to come out here. No ankle monitor for me. Instead, after the hearing, they cut my thumb open and put a chip in, which I heard they’d started doing a few years back. No chance of snipping your monitor off or having it malfunction when you go for a swim. While there’s now no way to get away with a drink or a hit or a Xanax bar, I don’t have to pee in front of a guy I don’t know who could send me back to jail if he had a fight with his girl the night before. The chip had the three-bar logo on it before they put it in me.
I walk by the abandoned train tracks and half expect to see bottle shards from when kids come by here, bored, to break something. But there’s nothing. No needles, no broken bottles, no empty dime bags. Tin cans, nails, nothing. A couple blocks away, kids play on a jungle gym.
A part of me expected post-apocalypse when I got here. On the inside, you hear about what’s going on outside, new presidents elected, rise in hate crimes. Nazis in the streets killing black folk. Folks getting locked up for whatever again. Important shit getting lit on fire. You remember the old heads in jail telling you about riots in the ’60s, riots in the ’90s. Younger cats my age telling me about the riots in the 2010s. What’s left after all of that? Pigeons congregating on the red-tiled roof of a police substation, vacant lots still charred around the edges, shards of broken port bottles winking at you in the sun. All types of refugee-type kids walking barefoot with pieces of glass in the bottoms of their feet, not even flinching because living through the End of the World enough times does that to you.
