Clock on the wall next to the token booth says three minutes after four o’clock. Jaime’s checking the salt and pepper shakers, setting the table for dinner. He got KP. I wonder who was calling me on the phone, some kinda way I got to see Jaime, get a message to him. I ask the guy in the token booth.
“What day is it?”
“Thursday.”
I stand, blink. Thursday? That’s dance class, maybe I catch him at the door before class start.
“You OK, buddy?” the token-booth guy ask me, his voice strange coming through the microphone behind all that Plexiglas.
“Yeah, I’m OK,” I say slowly. I touch the top of my head lightly, and when I look at my fingers they’re all bloody. Then I flash—BING!—
my jacket’s at Harlem Hospital!
I run for the stairs. Token-booth guy probably really think I’m crazy now. My T-shirt all bloody. Something’s sticking me. I got a piece of glass from the damn mirror in my jean pocket. I didn’t even feel it. Just lemme go git my fucking jacket! Whoa! Glass in my fucking shoe, now, well, it’s really my sock, which makes shit easier, I just take ’em off. So I’m leaning against the wall next to a bodega on 145th Street taking off my shoes and socks. People coming home from work stare at me, but only for a minute. They life probably ain’t no cupcake either, even if they is grown up and got a job.
I, SHE?
No, it’s me I think, make the nurse in Emergency crack up laughing. I look at her, she look at me, we both say at the same time, “Wasn’t you here yesterday?”
Even though I was out of it, I remember her: black black skin, blond afro, and a pink metal nose ring hanging down to her blue lipstick. Forget that? I don’t think so.
“I left my jacket here.”
“You got a hole on the top of your head,” she says. “What’s your name?”
“I jus’ want my jacket.”
“Well, I need to know your name, people leave stuff here every day, we put it in a bag with their name on it and hold it here thirty days, then we dispose of it.”
“Jones.”
“Jones
what
?”
“J.J.”
She comes back with my jacket and a big bag. “Jamal Jones?”
“Yeah.”
She points to the top of her head, then slides her finger across the side of her face like a knife cutting it open. “Who did that to you?”
“I just want my jacket.”
“OK, OK, big man! No more questions! Do me one favor, pleeease!”
OK, she did get my jacket. She look like Village people. I listen for her program.
“No questions, no problems, no nada! Let me get one of the students to sew up your head and put something on the side of your face.”
“I’m getting my face tattooed where that shit is!”
She looks at me like I’m crazy.
I
don’t even know why I said that.
“No, no! Honey, you let that bad boy heal, you hear me. Give that three or four
months
before you get any damn tattoo.” She looks both ways, then pulls the short sleeve of her white uniform up and shows me her tattoo, one of those Maori kind. “Is it phat or what!”
It is.
“When your face heals—Oh, here come gonna-be-a-doctor-one-day Wang. Don’t say
nothing,
hear? Just let him do his thing. I’m gonna spray some stuff on your head and face, numb you up a little, OK? And I’m gonna wipe some of that dirt off the side of your face, OK? Then I’m gonna have Wang give you a little shot. He’s cool.”
“What do we have here?” Wang look like he could be my age.
“Just do it, Wang. Look at his head and hurry up. J.J.’s in a hurry, ain’t you, J.J.?”
“Yeah.”
“I was telling him where to get his tattoo. I got mine at Hades in the Village. Where’d you get yours?”
“Same place,” Wang say. “I got my piercings there too.”
“Cool,” Blondie say.
“We gonna do the right thing, stitch you up and stuff—”
“Give him some of that time-release.”
“Don’t worry, Williams. I got my mojo working.” They crack up laughing!
The whole shit, stitches in my head, shot, seems like it don’t take but ten minutes. I don’t know how I look, but I feel better, my face feels better, my shoulder too.
When I go to leave, Blondie hands me my jacket and says, “This nigger won’t be needing this no more!” and hands me the bag she had brought out earlier.
When I hit the street again, I’m right on Lenox Avenue and 135th Street around the corner from dance class. I open the bag. Whoa! A pair of black leather pants and like a leather jockstrap or some shit? I’m not sure. I open a sealed manila envelope, there’s a watch, two little gold hoop earrings, and a gold chain in it! Well, whatever, Blondie! I wanna run back and give her a hug, thank her, or do something! But I don’t want to get her in trouble. Shit, probably everything she did was illegal! But shit, it was
right
.
I was gonna warm up for class if I was early by running around the track upstairs, but when I get there I scope Imena sitting in a little circle with some of the students. Some blue-black dude in African clothes is in the middle of the circle with some statue or something. Everyone’s eyes is on him. I go over to see what they’re looking at.
“Nkisi is a religious power object,” the guy is saying.
It’s horrible-looking, whatever it is! It’s about two feet tall, a statue kind of. Of a . . . a African? It has real big lips.
“This is from the Congo peoples.”
He’s carved from wood and has nails stuck all over him! They should keep that shit in the Congo. I look upstairs at the track I could be running around. Poor little thing even got nails in his head! Beads and rags is hanging off him and in his chest it looks like a—
“Yeah.” The African guy notices me scoping. “That’s very old, but it’s a mirror in his chest. I guess if it was made in America nowadays we would put a TV screen in his chest, that’s how we see ourselves reflected in this culture? But this is a nineteenth-century art object.”
Art?
Please! I hope Imena ain’t paying this dude to talk to us. She don’t need this, she already got a bunch of people taking class for free. Blondie say the spray will wear off in an hour, the shot won’t wear off until tonight.
“When was the nineteenth century?” one of the girls ask.
Stupid bitch,
I think.
“From 1800 to 1899,” Imena answers, but the girl still looks confused.
“So yes, it was in the 1800s, I’m pretty sure, late 1800s. Wood objects are now known to have a much longer life than we thought. But what you see here is not the original sculpture. A lot has been added to it since it was first created. Each nail was driven in by a member of the community, or ‘tribe’ as you like to call it here. Beads, bits of birds’ nests, feathers, and scraps of folks’ clothing were added during the time the object was residing with the tribe. Each nail driven in or scrap added speaks to some moment in the life of the owner or owners—some of these objects were owned collectively.”
“How does the Nkisi speak?” Imena asks.
“Well, some of this is conjecture. But I imagine that the power of the Nkisi is one of transformation. Think of Jesus on the cross, his suffering for the people. Instead of them dying for their sins, he died for them. Nkisi absorbed and transmuted the pain and suffering of the tribe. So when starvation or the suffering and dislocation that came as members of the society were either attacked or put on the run by slave traders, the people drove a nail into Nkisi, because Nkisi could take what they no longer could.”
Dope! Dope! Dope! I believe it! But, “What’s ‘transmute’?” I ask. Mrs Washington say ask questions, even if you feel like a fool asking ’em. Don’t ask and you’ll
be
a fool! Ha! Ha!
“‘Transmute’ means to change from one form to another,” Imena answers me.
The African dude looks like he’s getting ready to cry. He leans over and hugs Imena. “This class has been like a refuge for me while I was studying with those depraved people. Every day was a psychological genocide. You think you can imagine that shit down there, but it’s unimaginable how they hate us. They have projected their evil onto us and institutionalized it. What’s worse than white people?”
What the fuck is he talking about! It feels like the shot is getting stronger in my body, not weaker. I got to move! Imena looks like she don’t know what to do—the guy is crying now. He gives her the thing. “I leave Nkisi with you. It means what you make it mean.” Then he stand up over it. “It can’t take any more real nails, so I drive in a metaphoric nail.” He raises his hands like he got a hammer in one hand and a nail in the other. “I won!” He comes down with the hammer. “NYU, you didn’t kill me. I won!” He comes down again and again. “This nail is for all the crazy shit, four fucking years of it, then the internship and the residency! Nkisi!”
“Well, let’s thank Brother Abubakar and wish him strength on his journey.” Everybody claps except me. I just wish he would get his crying ass out of here so we can dance. What kind of kid wants to see a grown-up cry? I look at Nkisi. Imena is looking at me, at the side of my face. I look at the piece of glass in the creature’s center, the mirror. He’s scary. I blink at the faded mirror in his chest, think of my kaleidoscope revolving, the picture changing. An illusion Brother John said was created by mirrors at right angles. Fuck it! Fuck it!
FUCK IT!
NYU, Nkisi too! Forget all that shit! I came here to dance. I get up, take off my jacket. Lay it casual against the wall, put my bag from the hospital next to it, and like nothing has happened begin stretching out. I look up from the floor where I’m spread out in second position and Imena is staring at me again. I look down at my T-shirt, spattered with blood. I pull it over my head, ball it up, and throw it in the corner with the rest of my stuff. A lot of guys dance without shirts. Imena is saying something to the drummers, meaning we’re gonna start in a minute. I get up, roll up the legs of my pants, and go get in the back line with the rest of the men.
“This is a dance for Xango,” Imena says. She raises her arm. “He got the
oshe,
that double-headed ax. He’s the Orisha of lightning, dance, and passion.” She looks at us. “That’s what a dancer does. We’re like lightning rods, channels, for God. African dance ain’t about kicking up your leg, African dance is about spirit!”
I listen to the beat, bah dah dah DAH! One two three FOUR! I don’t care what it’s about, I just wanna do it! I start to move across the floor, the drums seem like my own heart beating. A guy has a long string instrument, it’s pure fire! The music rocks, my body turns into an ear hearing it. My body is not a stranger, not a traitor tricked by white homos in black robes, not a little boy in a hospital bed, not a
man
—big, shiny, and black that makes the brothers look at him. Here my body is my own, here I am a Crazy Horse dude who never gave up. Here I am like that dude Brother John told us the Schomburg got started by, here I am music, I never been to no police station for lies about little kids, here I got a mother and she ain’t no ho die of AIDS. Here in the beat is my life. The flute shrieks and I come again and again and can’t nobody stop me.
Sweat is pouring down my bare back. I could do this forever. Some of the niggers here is professional. What’s that? They do they shit for money that’s supposed to be better? Shit, I rob if I have to, beg too, as long as I can do this. Sound wreck me it’s so beautiful!
“Shit, man, what the fuck is that?” I ask the dude next to me.
“Oh, man, that’s a Brazilian instrument, the berimbau! It’s out there, ain’t it?”
I never heard a sound like that before in my life. It gets me open. I want to get the fuck out of these jeans. MOVE. Shit, I’m dressed, it ain’t like I ain’t got on no drawers. The sound cause me to float. My head opens up, and I go with my heart. I feel so sad I could cry, but I don’t. I just listen harder to the music, the sound between the one, try to move my body more better like the professionals, like some of the big sisters who ain’t professionals but dance better than them dance like . . . like Crazy Horse LIGHTNING! I am too gonna get a tattoo across my cheek like zigzag lightning. A picture like of a finger with a gold ring, no hand, just a little finger, a gold ring on it, bleeding, floats through my brain. Why that? That shit Blondie spray me with ain’t no joke! What it be like to stick someone like Blondie, lick Wang boy’s tattoos? What I’m gonna get pierced? I seen a picture of this dude what got his joint pierced once. The berimbau music is slowing down even more strange and beautiful. And I feel like Cinderella one minute to fucking midnight, except it’s my head gonna come off, not no fucking glass shoe, and instead of a mean stepmother I’m gonna have a psycho slave walking around talking about,
Boy! Whar you was at!
Or I’ll be fucking homeless. January I’ll be fourteen years old. A man if I wanna be. Who’s to tell me different? Before I hear the last drumbeat, I know it’s gonna happen—that
when
I hear the last drumbeat, I’m gonna collapse. That all of a sudden my body will feel like it’s been arrested, jumped on, arm twisted, run all over Harlem twice, chemical sprayed, sewed up, and drugged up—that when the music stops, the room will go round and round and I’ll fall like broken glass.
“My jacket!” I point, falling.
“Get his jacket!” I hear Imena say. “Is that bag yours too, J.J.?” I nod. I want to get up, run away, but can’t, I’m tired, real tired. I feel my heart beating. My head is beating too—bong! bong! Shit it hurts! I turn my head—Jaime! He looks away from me and runs out the door.
“Where you live, man?” one of the drummers asks me. I think of the roaches crawling out the cracks in the green and black linoleum, sigh, think, just for the night, just for the night.
“805 St Nicholas Avenue, man.”
“Avenue or Place?”
“Avenue.” I guess. My head is going BONG! BONG! now. My arm feels like it had a thousand little needles in it that was asleep, that’s starting to wake up and prick me. I feel like shit, but I feel OK too. Yeah, I hurt, I got to go back to the roach motel, but I danced! I never danced before like I did tonight. Brother Samuel, pit bull police, my mother checking out, my father dying in the war, none of that, nothing,
nobody,
no-fucking-body can take that away from me. Fuck Jaime! Fuck everybody! I take my jacket and bag from Imena, let the drummer put his arm around me and help me up.