Garrett Hadnitch. The name rang a bell, but it was too faint.
Johnbrown continued. “Anyway, he’s a writer. He’s even written two novels in here, really good stuff. We talk about books. I was telling him about Julian Carlton—and he already knew the story. He’s an architecture fanatic, really into Frank Lloyd Wright. Anyway, the story is part of The Key.”
“But why are you sending them to me?” Kenya asked before she could stop herself. She tried not to sound how she’d felt reading them at first. It was like when she was little and helped with the laundry, finding frayed edges and holes as she folded her father’s boxer shorts. When she was eight, the sight of that ragged underwear had made her sad. It looked like the shame of being alive.
Her father leaned back, looking a little sad. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I think I wanted you to keep them safe. I’ve been working on more. Do you want me to stop sending them?”
“No,” Kenya said quickly, unsure if she was telling the truth or not.
The guard announced that the visiting hour was ending.
Johnbrown looked at Kenya, and she watched him pick up his shoulders and force a smile that would have earned Sheila’s disdain years ago.
“Don’t kill any white people, okay, Baba?” she said, giving him her own brave smile.
“Just in the mind,” he said. “Maybe on paper.”
As they hugged goodbye, Kenya’s father spoke in a stage whisper. “Say, Monkey. What the hell did your mom go and do to her hair?”
* * *
Though eleventh grade was the most important for getting into college and her SAT scores had only been okay, Kenya often found it impossible to concentrate on school. Her rank had slipped to near the middle of the class, which stung, but not quite enough to move her to action. Just as at Lea School, where she would have rather felt separate from her classmates because she was a prodigy, she knew she should have been the “brilliant black girl” in her class at Barrett, the heir to those brave children in the South who’d shined their shoes each morning only to get kicked and spat on in their fight for a good education, the descendant of all of those remarkable Negro Firsts. She should have been proving herself more worthy of a mother who had used education to catapult herself from a housing project to a large house in the suburbs.
Alas.
That year, Kenya got a mind-numbing part-time job filing and organizing the supply closets at the office of her grandmother’s old friend Dr. Walton. Social life mainly meant getting into a car with Lolly, Zaineb, and Phyllis and going to Bennigan’s, TGI Friday’s, or the movies. On the nights she stayed in, she read desultorily in her bedroom with Sheila’s tiny old black-and-white TV on in the background, keeping her company.
Teddy Jaffrey, who had finally passed the real estate exam and quickly become successful, had offered to buy Kenya a big new color set, but she said she didn’t need it. “Kenya doesn’t go in for that kind of thing,” her mother had said, sounding both nasty and admiring. Sheila herself had initially seemed apprehensive about Teddy’s lavish new ways. But she finally warmed to his gifts of jewelry and her first fur coat. As for the kind of thing Sheila herself went in for now, one evening in November she came home to a (leased) black Mercedes-Benz to match Teddy’s blue one. He’d actually had a bow tied on it, like in the commercials.
“I couldn’t wait for Christmas,” he said, because now they celebrated Christmas, as well as a rather cursory version of Kwanzaa.
Teddy convinced Sheila to get rid of the couch that had been one of her signature purchases with Lars after they moved into Grandmama’s and replace it with beige sectionals that took up twice as much space. He also offered to pay to put a sun porch on the back of the house. Sheila bubbled about it for months, looking at magazines and drawing up plans. Finally, in the spring, construction workers showed up, filling the backyard with stacks of wood and bags of cement, carelessly squashing Grandmama’s rosebushes.
Since Teddy seemed wholly preoccupied with being the Man, Kenya felt sure that he would not come into her room again. Still, what she most enjoyed about going out was the chance to escape him and her mother on weekend nights. Sometimes they entertained Teddy’s friend Bert, who sounded like a black person, and his latest black girlfriend, usually a thin, whispering type. Sometimes Alma Lewis and her husband came over to play pinochle. But even if it was just Sheila and Teddy, they always drank wine and got loud. Louder still were the four-foot speakers that Teddy had bought for a spare room upstairs that he now called the Surround Room. Unfortunately, the Surround Room, which had been so designated because it had a particular electrical hookup, was next to Kenya’s room. She could hear her mother and Teddy’s friends laughing into the nights. She also had to listen to their music, as well as Sheila and Teddy’s playful arguments over music. Incredibly, Teddy’s favorite song was “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” which always made Kenya remember the humiliating May Day performance at Lea School. Back then, while doing the imbecilic steps, she had noticed just how slow and depressing the song actually was. As the fifth grade had shuffled to the right and the left, she had thought of how easily they could be stopped.
Meanwhile, Teddy made a show of “banning” Sheila’s music from the stereo, especially her beloved Donny Hathaway.
“That nigger,” he said, “can turn anything into a funeral song. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t a song called ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’ supposed to sound
inspirational
? Shit makes me feel like eating a gun.”
“Or getting really high and falling out of a window,” said Bert, and Kenya remembered that this was the story of how Donny Hathaway had died.
“Y’all leave Donny alone,” said Sheila. “He was a tortured genius.”
“You can play them sad songs downstairs on your sad little stereo,” Teddy said.
* * *
Kenya spent the occasional Friday or Saturday at a party that would have appalled Sheila as much as Sheila’s carrying on irritated Kenya. Kenya thought about this with some satisfaction one night as she sipped a beer in some girl’s crowded kitchen somewhere in Devon. She wanted to go sit down in another room but didn’t feel like fighting the crowd that was clumped up in the kitchen, avoiding the music until they got drunk enough to dance. Across the room, she saw Tuff Wieder. She nodded coolly, then went up the back stairs, Sharon McCall hot on her trail.
“Those crazy kids,” she said to Phyllis, though she wished Zaineb had been there instead.
“What?” Phyllis yelled. “Oh my God, Zach Vito is here. Oh my God. Did he see me? Is this zit terrible? Where are you going?”
Kenya began pushing her way into the living room. These parties were all the same. They took place at sprawling but not overly interesting suburban houses crammed with extras from John Hughes movies. Tonight, as on many of those nights, she and Lolly seemed to be the only black people in some stranger’s house, and Kenya worked to stifle her instinctual fear of too-many-drunk-unknown-white-people—especially boys. As she made it into the living room, where people were beginning to fling themselves around, she could not help but be afraid, for example, that if she spilled her drink on some wild dancer, he might call her something nasty. Maybe it was crazy, but these parties recalled nothing so much as scenes of rabid segregation enthusiasts in
Eyes on the Prize
. It was not comforting that the soundtrack to these nights always included a lot of rap music, especially Public Enemy and N.W.A. Kenya wondered what kind of music the young racists of the fifties got pumped up to before going out to spit on children trying to integrate the schools. Black folks made all the music with a good beat back then, too.
Still, though Kenya sometimes blew off invitations to eat mozzarella sticks or watch horror film sequels, she always rallied to go to parties, telling herself that anything could happen. And yet no matter how frantically she danced, how long her braids, or how tight her pants, nothing ever did.
It was a serious improvement when Barrett social life suddenly brought Kenya back to the city, via Zaineb’s cousin Reggie, who lived in an actual house in downtown Philadelphia. Kenya had seen near-mansions on the Main Line, but had never been in anything as chic as a town house in Society Hill. Reggie threw spontaneous get-togethers at his parents’ glistening home on nights when his mother was away for work and his father had to report to the hospital. Reggie didn’t care much for people, but he loved drugs. He threw parties like nets, to draw in as many as possible.
Partying in the city brightened up Kenya’s friends. Lolly would pretend to get drunker than she was and start grinding on the nearest girl, something she never did at parties on the Main Line. Phyllis, who shared Reggie’s passion for drugs, had a talent for figuring out who was holding the hardest thing and getting some for free; traditionally, she then made out with whoever had gotten her high. So it was that she became the only Barrett girl known to have tried crack. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Zaineb, the designated driver, was haunted by a TV special she’d seen about drunk driving, which featured a shot of bloody prom dress bits on a lonely highway. She wouldn’t touch alcohol, not even the one drink Kenya usually allowed herself, but in the city, she talked more animatedly than usual, preening about her connection to Reggie.
There was always a smattering of black kids at these parties, but, as on the Main Line, the boys seemed not to notice Kenya. Besides the white girls with their obvious allure, there was Cary Benin, a creamy brown Jessica Rabbit type who went to the Catholic school across from Barrett, with her long, shiny, naturally straight hair. Cary dressed in February as if it were August (and don’t even ask about August).
Even if no one seemed to see her, Kenya watched everything, and she always noticed the boy, white or black, whom everybody else noticed. There might be a group of contenders, but she always tried to narrow it down to the Man
,
the one who moved around with the most ease and commanded the most feverish greetings. Sometimes he was cute, sometimes less so. Sometimes he was white, other times black, or even racially ambiguous, as in the era of dashing Vincent Tran-Garcia, with his sumptuous swirl of hair. When Kenya came home, she shunned the bed that Teddy Jaffrey had threatened to climb into, secreting herself in her bedroom closet to entertain herself with deliberate fantasies of how the Man would approach her in the crowd. She didn’t even need to get to the part in the sequence when they touched. Just the image of her, the boy, a café table, two hot chocolates with whipped cream, and done.
Of course she had preferences. She was not at all interested in Ned Samuels, for example, who was evidently the most popular boy at a party she ventured out to on a chilly April night. He went to the arts magnet high school in the city and there was a lot of murmuring about his talent as a painter. But with shockingly bright red hair and freckles so numerous they looked painful in the harsh light of the kitchen—where everyone milled near the liquor—Ned Samuels was a stretch for Kenya’s masturbatory fantasies. Then she noticed the black boy at his side.
“Commodore!” she screamed.
“What?” he yelled back.
“Commodore!” she called again.
“OOGABOOGAAAAAAAAAAAA!” he screamed, jumping up and down. He was tall, and the jumping made him almost freakishly so. “Oh my Gaaaaaaaaaaawd!” he yelled. They hugged each other, and since Ned Samuels was looking, everyone else in the kitchen looked, too. Kenya felt triumphant as Commodore introduced her to Ned, who nodded and pronounced her name to be sure he had gotten it right.
“Whew, what’s it been, a hundred years? You look
great
,” Commodore said.
“You look tall,” said Kenya, her face growing warm as she exaggerated an effort to look up at him.
“I think you might be the same height you were in, what, third grade? Who knew you’d turn out to be such a squirt?” Commodore said. “Hey, want something to drink?”
Kenya allowed him to make her a second drink for the night, something tasting of Hawaiian Punch. She felt both at home and in outer space as their conversation took them from the kitchen to a quiet corner of the living room.
He went to the arts high school with Ned and had never heard of Barrett. He remembered Yaya saying that Kenya went to “some private school.” He lived in the same house Kenya remembered, in the area of West Philly called the Bottom. He told her that the neighborhood had gotten a lot worse.
“It’s really fucking scary,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know who’s worse: the basehead zombies or the dealers. Our next-door neighbor got shot standing in her kitchen window. Guess you don’t know nothin’ about all that out in the burbs.”
“We hear about it on the news. You know. We send money,” said Kenya. The punch thickened her tongue, but she congratulated herself that her mind still worked.
“So what’s it like out there?” Commodore asked.
“Everything is perfect. My mother married this great guy, and we live in a big house and I go to private school and…” Commodore’s eyes widened.
“I mean it sucks dick like everything else,” she said, suddenly feeling as if she might actually blush, having raised such a specter, even in slang.
“Your mother got remarried?”
“Unfortunately,” Kenya said. Then she paused. “But actually ‘remarried’ is not the way to put that. It turns out my parents were never actually married.”
“Say what?”
“Yup.” It was delicious telling Commodore things that she usually couldn’t talk about in the world where she lived.
“Why not?”
“You know, Movement bullshit.”
“That’s
deep
,” said Commodore. It was something the Seven Days used to say. They laughed. He said, “So not a fan of the new husband, huh?”
“No,” she said simply.
Commodore said, “I almost ran into one of those situations myself. A stepdaddy. Well, maybe more of a brother in this case.” He giggled.
“Yeah?”
Commodore told a riveting story about how his parents had briefly separated. Yaya had left to live with a local conga drumming legend barely out of his teens, who deserted her after a few weeks. Alfred had let her come back, but he was so angry that he hardly ever spoke. Three years later, they still spent much of their time together in silence. Commodore suspected that Yaya might have another boyfriend.