The four corners of the street are ice floes now, the one I’m standing on starts to crack. I see the face of a girl in dance class. Her eyes don’t have the fan in them. The piece of ice I’m on breaks off, separating me from her. “Jump!” I feel scared, I should have jumped. I’m going to lose her, I’m here looking in the mirror, my face is a mask, my eyes hollow holes fans going whir whir—
“Telephone!”
Huh?
“Git up! I ain’ nevah seed a child sleep as much as you do!”
I’m sweating, my heart is beating like the time Jaime and me was rolling and damned near OD’d. I got so dehydrated, I was having convulsions and stuff—
“Telephone!”
Oh, who cares if this bitch is calling, but I go ahead and get up anyway.
“May I speak to Abdul Jamal Louis Jones?”
“This is me,” I say.
“I know it’s you. Look, Abdul, you’re only thirteen—”
“I know how old I am.”
“Let me finish, Abdul. What I have to say is hard enough as it is, OK?”
“OK,” I say.
“I’ve only been with the Bureau of Child Welfare six months. I’m actually a sculptor. You should see my stuff one of these days. I make these life-size sculptures of people, I mean, they are the people. I cast the people in plaster, then make a mold, then voilà! It’s amazing! At least that’s what people tell me. I’ve done ten of my son, one with his arm up, getting ready to dunk a basketball. You still with me?”
“You said to let you finish.”
She sighs, exasperated-like. I feel not what she’s going to say but the . . . the
suffering
that’s going to come with it. In school once we saw a picture of a girl in some magazine from Sierra Leone. They had chopped off her arms. I forgot why. Both arms.
“I’m going to tell you this even though maybe I shouldn’t, and I don’t have to. But then, I have to since I know. At least that’s the way I look at things.”
I haven’t been here a week yet. I avoid the old lady as much as I can. Tomorrow I start dance classes downtown, and Monday I go to school. That’s all I need to know—how to get there, some money, and some clothes.
“Well, a big part of what happened to you is . . . um, uh, I guess what you could call a kind of reverse synergy. Do you know what synergy means?”
“Yeah, synergy, when two things act together to make more happen than they could by themselves?”
I’m sick of her, just do your job, lady.
“Well, yeah, that’s exactly right, when two events happening simultaneously create more, in your case, havoc, than they would have alone. Not only did these two events make a disaster, it seems likely they, along with just plain, old indifference, worked together to create a bizarre cover for each other. You’ll see what I mean when I explain it to you, if it can be explained.
“Well, the first thing, and probably the most significant, the brothers or a brother—or a ‘paperwork mistake,’ they’re saying now—essentially didn’t
know, forgot,
or
ignored
the fact you were a temporary emergency placement, and they processed you as if you were ‘in-domiciled, an orphan, permanently placed in the care and custody of St Ailanthus School for Boys until the age of eighteen.’
Someone
signed papers to have you placed as a permanent placement. That’s currently being investigated—”
Shit, I’ll never get back in now!
“The second incident that conspired, I guess you could say, against you—and by the way is
not
being investigated—is that someone, some people actually, it had to be at least two people, and one of them had to have worked for or had some kind of in with the Bureau of Child Welfare, as far as I can get it—and by the way it was me that got all this dope—”
Stan is all fired up. I see that girl’s face in Sierra Leone; it was a black-and-white picture. Her skin is even darker than mine, shiny. I’m breathing fast, starting to sweat, I have the feeling if I was talking, it would be in the voice of a little boy, high. I’m the opposite of Stan’s happy excitement. I’m filling up with a black panic. Do I want to hear this shit?
“You know what it was? Your name. When you kept going off about you know, ‘My name ain’t no J.J. My name is Abdul,’ it just . . . I don’t know. At first of course I was mad, reacting, and then it hit me, there’s something in this. I don’t know how I knew, I just did—”
Whoop whoop-de-doo!
“So anyway, some woman in the Bronx, who evidently went to school with your mother, a ‘friend of hers’—believe me when I say ‘friend,’ it’s with quotation marks around it—anyway, she got all your mother’s papers, assumed her identity, and continued collecting your mom’s SSI checks. She started out receiving AFDC for you in addition to a Social Security check for permanent disability for ARC, as they called it at the time—”
What does any of this have to do with my mom’s car accident, finding my father, or going to school? I didn’t ask to hear all this shit; I don’t
want
to hear all this shit.
“Maybe because AFDC requires a different kind of record keeping and reporting, and this woman just plain old knew the system! And she didn’t want to be—
couldn’t
be—bothered with face-to-face appointments, home visits, and all that, and this woman had to have access to or was in the social service system. She actually got possession of your mother’s death certificate—don’t ask me how—copied it, and altered it to say a . . . a little boy,
you,
had died. This false certificate was actually filed with us, and you went on record as dead.
“So none of this is an excuse for what happened, just some insight into
how
. How we, as you said, and I agree, ‘fucked up’! No one looked into what was going on with you because they thought you were dead. Which of course you weren’t, aren’t. You were . . . were, you were lost. Lost. I don’t know. Like I said, when you said that thing about your name, I just got chills. When I got back to that office, I got on the computer, I started worrying people, making phone calls, digging in file cabinets and stuff. ‘My name ain’t no fucking J.J.!’ That’s it! That’s it! I said to myself, ‘His name. Why are those men over at that place calling him by a nickname as if it was his real name?’ Then I said, ‘You’re crazy, Marie,’ but I don’t know whether I had picked up a discrepancy before this or what and just never made the connection, but whatever, it just hit me in the gut. Go for it, I thought, what do you have to lose?”
She’s all excited now. I’m supposed to be too? For what, finding out somebody said I’m dead? What am I gonna get out of this? Like, does that girl in the picture in social studies care why someone chopped off her arms?
“So, like, can I sue, get some ducats or something?” You know, like get my life back, bitch.
“I don’t know what you mean, Abdul.”
“I mean why you tell me all this . . . this
injustice
if it ain’t gonna help me or change nothing?”
“Because it’s the truth, and you should know it.”
“So why can’t it help me, get me a different house, some people aside from this to take care of me or adopt me?”
“Abdul, oh, Abdul, honey, honey, it’s . . . yeah, I hear what you’re saying. It’s not going to be like that. What’s done is done. I just thought you might want to know what had been done. Abdul?”
“Yeah?”
“You ever been walking on the beach?”
“Uh, I guess.”
“You know how your feet leave footprints in the sand?”
“Yeah.”
“And the water comes behind you and washes the footprints away? Most of what I’ve told you is being washed away as we speak. They’re not going to admit shit, or as little as possible. A lawsuit would take years, access to . . . I don’t even know what. Well, for one thing lawyers, information—I had to break a few rules,
laws,
to find out what I did. I got a kid in college, which is hopefully where you’ll be in a few years.”
“So I just got fucked.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’re a kid. No matter how bad it’s been, you’re still young. Young, beautiful, and extremely gifted.”
Aw, shut up. I start thinking about what I’m gonna get with the money I get from Slavery Days. Gear! A black leather jacket to match my pants, a pair of Timberlands for winter—
“Still here?”
“Yeah.” Where else would I be?
SHE SAYS IF THINGS
don’t work out (and what does that mean?) I don’t have to stay here. How many days have I been here now? I wish for that mirror I broke, to see my body. There’s no mirrors in Imena’s class, I
can
feel myself from the inside. Still, I wonder how I look executing a step on relevé or in plié. I can almost feel myself growing sometimes, it’s weird. If I did go to a group home, you know, so fucking what nobody’s gonna bother me.
Some addict stole my mother’s identity, declared me dead. What kind of wack shit is that and why should I care? Why should I have to? Ain’t I a kid? Maybe a group home would be better than this, whatever
this
is, maybe I could just forget everything and go back. I really want to go back to St Ailanthus—at least I was close to my future there. If I went back, I could just put all this behind me—805 St Nicholas, Slavery Days, the police, lying kids—everything. Just forget it and start over again.
Stanislousy said my father is dead. I kinda knew that, or maybe I did think my mother was keeping him from me because he wouldn’t pay child support. So Slavery Days? I ain’t into that no kinda way. I reject that shit as having anything to do with me; the old bitch gives me the creeps. Why she’s still alive if my mother and grandmother is dead? Creeping around!
I could ask her about my father? Maybe he ain’t really dead. But I don’t know if I want to hear whatever crazy shit she gonna say, she ain’t normal. When she talk, it’s like fingernails going down a blackboard, I wanna scream!
How do I feel? How am I holding up, she ask? Fuck Stanislousy!
I’m
the one staring at a translucent sac on the kitchen table, watching the teeny baby roaches bust out the sac, transparent little crawling white shits, crawling all over the table, nasty, nasty, nasty.
THREE
“Stand with your feet pointed straight ahead and then without sticking out your butt pull up your gut, and from your hip socket turn out your feet. OK, see that? How much your feet turned out when you did that, that is your turnout for now. If—OK, come back, come back! Turn your feet back in pointing straight ahead. Now, without engaging your gut or your hips, turn out using just your feet. See, you get almost a straight line, a hundred and eighty degrees. But where do you feel it? No, no just stay there for a while and tell me where you feel all that hundred-eighty-degree turnout coming from. Yes, you feel it in your knees because your hips is still turned in, parallel, and the turnout, yeah, it look good on the ground but it’s coming all from below your knees, so the knee joint is very stressed. And notice how your butts is stuck out and your guts hanging. Please, please come out of that terrible position! Now stand with your feet pointed straight ahead, suck up your stomach muscles like a straw, suck ’em up, up! Now, without rocking back on your heels, which will release your butt muscles, which is what we don’t want, visualize your thighs turning out in the hip socket and turn your feet out as a result of the opening in the hips. See that!”
I look down at my feet splayed open in first position. Good for me!
“For now that is your turnout! You wish for more, you work for more, but right now that is what you got, and dancers we live in now.”
I stare at the small man in loose sweats and a black T-shirt, his feet in white canvas ballet slippers. The front of his body is flat as a piece of paper. I can see that even with the baggy sweats he got on. He turns his feet, which were pointing straight ahead out. His heels are touching, but his toes are pointing in opposite directions and form a 180-degree angle. His arches are so high a mouse could run under them. He can’t be any taller than five feet three or four inches.
“This, I repeat, is first position, for me, now.” He is so perfect. The picture of him I take it into my head, but my body, twice as big as his, can’t do what he’s doing. My feet won’t line up like that, like his.
Yet,
I tell myself. He brushes and points his right foot out in tendu (I know that from Imena’s class). Both feet are still turned out, but now his legs are separated.
“This is second position. The butt, the gut is still pulled up. The action is in the hips. Now plié. Plié just mean open the hips even more and bend the knees, not all this here,” he says, sticking his butt out.
Some people laugh. I’m not one of them.
“You keep this here pulled up.” He pats his stomach. “Now from second position everybody plié, that’s it, down two, three, four. Up two, three, four. Learn to love working in second.”
Imena says your hip sockets are like a lid on a mayonnaise jar turning, turning, yeah open! Roman’s head snaps around to glare in my face.
“What you is smiling at!” Was I smiling? I mean, he was talking about second position, right, loving it?
“I . . . I love second position, like you were saying,” I stutter, feeling as stupid as I’m sure I sound.
“You think you cute? You think you gonna be a dancer, huh? Huh? I seen hundreds of boys come through these doors every year just like you! They don’t go nowhere!”
I look at the other faces in the class, they’re all looking at the floor.
“They gonna show me! They gonna prove me wrong! Little ones, big ones, pretty ones, black ones, white ones—so wipe that smile off your face, big boy.
Parlez-vous français?
”
I don’t know what to say, so I say, “Not yet.” Thinking he wants an answer. And it’s true, I would of, maybe still will take it next year at St Ailanthus.
“Learn, stupid! You here to learn. You can’t impress me. You can’t hurt me. You ain’t got nothing I want. Understand?”
“I—”