In Defense of Negroes

Some years ago, I began my remedial English class with what I believed was a slam dunk: Richard Wright’s autobiographical sketches, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” We were just getting into annotation techniques, so this was definitely an ambitious text to begin with. To be sure, the space and place in the writing was often unfamiliar to students, though the racial violence articulated certainly wasn’t—stop and frisk New York was full of episodes racial violence against Black and brown bodies. 

For me, one of the more painful parts of teaching Wright, love him as I do, was a matter of idiom. Wright is of a different era in America—for him, Black folks weren’t “Black” or “African-American”---they were “Negroes.” And as a self respecting person proud of his race and teaching all students of color, I just had to say something. 

 “It’s ok for Wright to use “Negro,” I’d tell my writing class, citing the early 20th century depicted, “but you should studiously avoid it. It’s offensive.” And that would be that—offense mitigated!  

In Wright’s world, “Negroes” were subject to police brutality. They were beaten for “looking like they might do something", castrated for the mere suspicion of miscegenation, and brutally oppressed for “putting on airs” by using vocabulary that seemed “above” them. Wright talks about his learning to dissemble and outright lie in the Jim Crow south as a way of surviving his youth. 

But, when Wright moves north to Memphis from Mississippi, and then eventually to Chicago and New York, he is still marginalized. In Black Boy, Wright tells us that the “Negroes” around him are wage workers, low paid with few prospects for social mobility. Many are under educated, living in squalid ghetto conditions. Others are incarcerated. Wright himself suffers from food insecurity, terrible housing, poor health care, and a world that seems destined to snuff out the light of him and his dark skinned community. 

By the 1960s, Wright had died (after becoming an expat having moved to Paris some years before), but America still continued on with “Negro.” It was a hopeful era.  Kennedy announced in his inaugural address at the top of the decade that the USA would go to the moon by the end of the decade, and through ingenuity, political will, astronomical capital  (get it?), leftover Nazi personnel, and maybe a little dumb luck, we did it—we were moon bouncers by July of 1969!

 “Negroes” of the era had a ton of gains that old folks of all ilks love to gloat about. Lots of legislation was passed. Voting! Fair Housing! And yet caste oppression cemented into an” intractable problem” in the middle of the civil rights movement.

In many cases, Black folks still lived in squalid conditions, unable to get loans, stymied from getting higher education and higher paid jobs.  Many “Negroes”  were mourning the death of Malcolm (shot) and Martin (shot) and Bobby (shot) and all the boys who went to war for a country whose founding document, the constitution, makes him 3/5ths of a man (shot shot shot).  We’d figured out how to safely carry humans more than two-hundred-thousand miles from Earth, but somehow, truly changing the abhorrent living conditions of Black Americans—well, it just couldn’t be done.

The 1980s was a transformative decade: Martin Luther King day was given to us. The Ivy League was heavy into affirmative action, and Michelle got into Princeton. Barack eventually went to Columbia. Political ads always featured a Black face somewhere, and Michael Jackson became the biggest star ever. Oh, and, we weren’t “Negroes” any more. Thanks to folks like Jesse Jackson, we were now African-Americans, seven syllables over 2 words to replace that old “Negro.”  

By the 90s, Michelle and Barack? They’d graduated from Harvard Law! Yes, the 80s crack epidemic had spilled into 90s crack mass incarceration. Sure, the living conditions in public housing in many cities were absolutely horrific. Ok, Property taxes soared, leaving many Black folks, still living on the margins, with terribly funded schools. Alright, Rodney King was assaulted by the police, and he was just the most high profile case of the decade. We weren’t “Negroes,” Goddammit. Celebrate that fact. We certainly did in the 2000s and 2010s!

Two years ago, in 2020, after George Floyd was murdered and Breonna Taylor was murdered and Ahmaud Arbery was murdered—this was a few years after Sandra Bland was murdered and 12 year old Tamir Rice was murdered and teens Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were murdered and Eric Garner was murdered—two years ago, we really hit the jackpot. Juneteenth became a national holiday. Post office is closed. African Americanas mourned John Lewis’s death and talked about “good trouble” with white allies everywhere. Portland white folks lost their minds with all that chanting and marching for Black folks. Oh yes, we weren’t just African-Americans that summer: we were Black, and our lives mattered too. One could see it by the spray painted BLM signs on the street, as faded now in memory as it is on the pavement, trampled under foot or rolled over by cars. Black Lives Matter!

Armed with a new federal holiday and a new honorific, America kept right along incarcerating Blacks, killing Blacks, relegating Blacks to terrible schools and squalid housing, and limiting our life chances. But, and really, I can’t stress this enough, especially to my students: “The term ‘Negro’ is offensive.” 

It is offensive because it recalls the violence of the Jim Crow south. Of the limitations imposed on Black folks up north. Of the seeming indifference to actually change structures of oppression, Black president or not. It is offensive because it calls out our white supremacist nation that did not need a white supremacist in the Whitehouse to firmly and consistently espouse those values. It is offensive because it exposes a secret that’s not really so hush-hush: That America is more interested in changing the title of my subjugated caste than it is in actually overturning the heinous conditions of my oppression. The will that sent us to the stars some fifty-odd years ago does not exist to liberate me from my subjugation. “Negro” is offensive because it is jussst right, a little too“on the nose.” I am a Negro. And so too are many of my students. 

Camp Ghost: Part III

 I used to think that eventually, I was going to kill Gramps. It was a fleeting notion, the kind of thing that would hit me when he was walking me home from my after-school program by Marcus Garvey Park, way over to where we lived on Amsterdam and 1-2-4. 

Keep in mind, I’d been making this trek home myself for weeks since Moms had taken an afternoon shift at the hospital. But somehow, she believed traipsing across Harlem together would bond us. I wonder if Gramps believed it too, because he never failed to show up, always punctual.

No matter the weather or the temperature, Gramps walked to Harlem from his teaching gig  across the 3rd Avenue Bridge in the Bronx. There he was an instructor of remedial mathematics at the community college, which mostly meant he taught grown folks algebra. 

“It’s a skill most normal kids master by 8th grade” he’d huff, usually after complaining about his students’ “inferior minds.” I guess you could say he was equally brutal to himself, insisting that he be “honest” about his role at the college. 

 “I’m a lecturer, NOT a professor,” he once snarled at Ms. Johnson, the after school teacher, after she’d called him “Professor Owen.”  

Then, he’d turned sweet, batting his eyes at her in a flirtatious manner that I suppose most have worked for him when he was younger. 

“The boy told you I was a famous thinker, huh? He just loves putting on airs.”

To be fair, I had started telling people Gramps was a “scientist,” hoping that folks’ own imagination would do the rest of the work. Sometimes I said he was an “astrophysicst,” a word I’d learned after watching a late night special on the 1969 moon landing. Sometimes I said he was a biochemist, a term my fifth grade teacher kept saying that all of us “dark skinned children  of the sun” might become, if we just believed and achieved. 

Making Gramps out to be something greater than he was seemed like the biggest insult I could deliver, but I can’t explain quite how I came to that conclusion.  It was likely an unconscious nod at what I came to understand was Gramps’ deep insecurity about not having a PhD, but I was a long way from figuring that out.  Maybe, I thought, the other kids at after school would believe that the man who’d started picking me up from after-school every day was some sort of high yellow Albert Einstein. 

I mean, he sort of looked like Einstein, with that huge uncombed pure white ‘fro.

“You remember what I taught you about addition and subtraction,” he’d say, launching into teacher mode as we began the journey west across town. He insisted that we walk the whole way, decrying buses to be a “waste of capital.” It was a perfect opportunity for him “to sure up [my] algebra fundamentals,” young as I was. 

“The game is ‘seventeen’,” he announced one freezing afternoon on our odyssey across Harlem. I nodded like he’d asked me if I'd wanted to play. 

“Four” he’d spit out in that tremulous voice of his, dry and pedantic. 

“Thirteen.” I’d reply.

“Sixteen,” he’d say, somehow fitting a whole lecture into a single word.  

“One,” I’d snap back. 

“Twenty-Five”

“Negative eight” 

“Forty-two”

“Uh, negative, uh, negative—”

But by the time I’d find “negative twenty-five,” I was already bracing myself for a blow to the back of my head that would invariably cause me to bite down on my tongue. You could always tell if Gramps was living with us based on whether I lisped or not. 

“Let’s try again,” he’d say after a while, the cheerful didact. “Excellence takes discipline, you hear?”

Tears in my eyes and murder on my heart, I’d mumble “Yes sir,” my goal to please Gramps, or at least to avoid getting walloped upside the head.  

“What are you thinking about?” asks Hearts, next to me in the passenger seat of his whip, a Jeep Cherokee that’s probably a decade old. I don’t have my driver’s license, but it’s a straight shot down Brunah road, from the school house back to campus. It’s crazy to think that just yesterday I’d walked this distance—it now feels an expanse of interminable darkness. 

The car’s back seat is crammed—Bryant and Paolo, and a dude I don’t know very well named Willie. He’s an old man who will soon be 30, a counselor who'd actually been there even back in my earliest days here as a Peewwee. He comes back year after year, his gig as an English teacher accommodating his Neverland habit, what he manages to unironically describe as his “vernal lust” for camp.

“What if I just kill him?” I say to no one in particular, pulling into the counselor parking lot just above main campus. 

“Ahhhhh” yawns Hearts, blazed as fuck. “There’s no killing an unblemished spirit.”

Gramps liked going to a Columbia bar at 110th and Amsterdam. A lot of nights, he ordered a sloppy burger called “The Chubby Mexicano,” with guac and salsa. Then, he’d down six to twelve beers followed by two 40s of Tecante for the wavering stagger home.

 I never observed all this myself of course, but I caught it from the back and forth Mom would have on the phone, tense and teary and always hush-hush. I think she believed she was negotiating with Gramps’ wife, a formidable woman both Moms and I both called Miss Roxy. Mostly though, she was just taking orders. 

“That woman has some nerve kicking him out of his own apartment,” Moms would say, frantically vacuuming the tiny living room that would become Gramps’ bedroom while he stayed with us. “He doesn’t have a drinking problem, I mean not really,” she’d continue, looking at me as though I’d said otherwise. “He’s a math whiz for heaven’s sake!”

Health professional that she was, common sense just didn’t seem to apply when it came to Gramps. In her mind, his occupation somehow negated his compulsion. 

Around the third or fourth week Gramps came to live with us that first time, he barreled into my room real late. In fact, it was 2:04am, the exact hour and minute immortalized in my mind by the Nickelodeon alarm clock I’d received for Christmas that year. Incidentally, I’d also gotten the TV in my room that Christmas. Moms said my father had finally sent her a check, and it was a big fat one too.

“The game is 'ten',” Gramps shouted, storming in with Hulk-like vigor. He’d flung my bedroom door so hard against the wall that the knob left a dent still there to this day. 

“Hey Gramps, um, I thin—”

“Shut up,” he’d blasted, sitting heavily on my bed. 

“Four!” 

“Uh, uh, Six”

“Uh uh, NOTHING,” he’d said, snatching the sheets from my body and pushing me to the floor. 

“Eight” He barked. 

“Two,” I fumbled, rolling to my knees. 

“What are you, a street whore now? Stand up, God Dammit!  Negative fourteen!”

I struggled to my feet, desperately trying to see straight and wipe away the sleep somehow still grasping at me. Moms must have been home, had probably been there for a couple of hours, but I heard no stirring next door, no marshaling of the cavalry. 

“Don’t play dumb with me boy,” he hissed, grabbing me by my thin t-shirt, and viciously tossing me into the steel-poled corner of the bed bedframe. “Negative fourteen.”

“Gramps,” I pleaded, “I wanna sleep, I wanna—can we just do this in the morning?”

His blood shot eyes stared deep into mine, unblinking. He’d bent down to within inches of my face, the malt liquor filling up my nostrils. 

"Don't make me say it again," he husked.

I liked reading horror books back around that age. You know, like, the Goosebumps series with ghosts and evil spirits, and creepy magic. From my “research”, I could have told you that fear has the power to paralyze your limbs, and make them want to fling themselves into violent action. I could have explained that fear can make your heart beat something wild, and halt it in your chest. I could have pontificated on fear’s ability to wipe your brain clean, and yet overload it with trillions of disjointed thoughts. I could have written my own novel about how fear can freeze your tongue and at the same time make you want to scream, top volume. I could have riffed on fear’s ability to make you thirst for water, yet quake with the need to release an overloaded bladder.  

I’d read a lot about fear. But that night, I really learned about it.

“Take off your drawers,” he said simply, pulling the belt from his corduroys. 

With trembling hands I pushed down the “Aaahh-Real Monsters!!!” boxers that covered my junk,  and stood before the old man, wondering at the nightmare I’d found myself in. I still hoped Mom would bust through the door at any moment, but I’ve since learned that hope is not a particularly useful strategy, especially in crisis. 

“Turn around,” he commanded, standing me before the wall adjoining my bed. 

That night, Gramps gave me eleven lashings, one for every year I’d been on earth. He managed to land them mostly on my ass, but a few of them, I think lash 2 and 4, struck me in my back, causing me to convulse all over. I’d never been hit like that before, with the full strength of a grown man.  

“Excellence takes discipline, '' he slurred on his way out, twitching from the tremendous effort he’s just exerted. 

I'm shaking now as we make our way over the massive hill that blocks the upper lot from Main Campus. Hearts, Paolo and Willie break towards the woods by Swim Station where the older kids’ cabins are situated, while Bryant walks next to me toward the Peewee units.

“You hearing music tonight?” I ask, just to disrupt the reverie threatening to overwhelm me. I point at the Hall, all barnlike and spooky. 

Bryant looks over at the darkened theater and laughs out loud. 

“Black people imitating white people imitating Black people,” he says, like he’s quoting from a school reader. 

“Jazz, right?” I’ve moved over to 3rd base of the Peewee baseball field to relieve the sudden urge of my bladder. 

“Not jazz, man. Ragtime. Early 20th century.”

“Right,” I say, shaking out the last drops of piss. 

“Hey Bryant, listen,” I blurt, the idea suddenly coming alive in my head. “Is… Is Owen really gonna run Swim Station this summer? ”

“I don’t know, are you?” Bryant shoots back, his voice distant and cold but somehow mirthful at the same time.

We walk a couple steps in silence, and then I just can’t help myself. 

“Hap promised me if I came back this summer I could be in charge, and I got my lifeguard certification and everything, so I just feel like it would be fucked up it—-”

“Dude, please give it a rest.” 

Bryant turns so the maglight he’s been using to guide us shines straight into my eyes.

 “It was funny for a while, but like, everyone’s laughing at you now.”

“Oh,” I say. 

I know what he means, but I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. I want him to explain, but hope he’ll just let it hang there. Fear is a tangle of contradictions, and hope is never a strategy. 

“Seriously, man,” continues Bryant, “ I’m just being a pal.” He holds the light steady in my face, and I stay stock still, taking it. 

After a while, he swings the flashlight away from me, heading towards the trail to his cabin. 

“I don’t care what you call yourself, but it’s getting fucking weird,” he concludes, disappearing into the woods. 

Beside me, visible in the dark, Owusu cheeses big and nods his head in agreement.

Camp Ghost Part II

 The winter before my first summer at camp, when I was still 11 years old, I started staying up real late watching all kinds of trash. It was around the time Gramps started living with us, so I sort of just retired from the business of sleeping regular hours. Or like, at all.  

One ass-o-clock night, I saw this interview from the ‘70s judging from the host’s bell bottoms and groovy scooby-doo lingo. The featured guest was a former Hollywood starlet from way back when everything on screen was black and white, but mostly just white—the era of America everyone calls “classic.” 

By the '70s it looked like this former glamor queen was pretty beat up, with river-deep wrinkles and a chain smoking rasp.

“Well,” says the foppish host with a combover, “you’re in a movie, 2 theater productions on the East Coast, and of course, your television show here in LA. You also run your own studio lot for which you preside as chair of the board, and you famously manage to make it home to cook and eat dinner with your 5 grandkids, 6:00pm sharp. Oh, and did I read this right?  You’ve started a charity to feed starving children in Africa?” 

“Just hungry kids, darling, not starving” croaks the star, cigarette in hand. “And anyway, they’re youths from Harlem, not Haiti.” 

The host joins the crowd in nervous chortling, his bizarre “te-hee-hi-hee-hi” picked up by the hot mic on his lapel.

“Ok,” he says, wiping the tears from his eyes, “well, I guess what everyone wants to know is, how do you do it all? I mean, where do you find the ENERGY?!”

The wizened star purses her lips coquettishly and muses for a long moment. 

“Johnny, I’m divorced,” she drawls.

“Well, er, yes” stutters the host, whose name decidedly ISN’T Johnny, but who also hasn’t bothered to correct her. “So you’re divorced? So what?”

“So what? SO WHAT?”  She’s staring at him incredulously now, like she might remove the violent red fluff of a wig from her scalp, and beat him with it. 

“You wanna know how I got the time, baby?” she warbles, leaning into bedroom talk on a program that was, in its day, probably broadcast on primetime national TV. 

“It’s because I’m not doing any FUCKING!” Top volume. Full theatratics. Pandemonium. 

They’d bleeped out the word of course, but you could still see that’s what she said, the word stretched across her mouth like a dildo sized turd. 

The camera pans the red faced Americana studio audience, raucously clapping, whistling, stamping their feet in approval. That shit made Arsenio look rated G.

The guys here love Owusu. At breakfast, the meat head types are swapping lifting regimen while gobbling boiled eggs. In the breaks during the first-aid orientation on the field outside of Mess, the thespians are ogling about one show or another that they might put on this summer, with Owusu the star naturally. Over the cold-cuts at lunch, the intellectuals are trying to laugh at Owusu’s “aw shucks“ routine when they attempt to suss out his views on Don Rumsfeld, war criminal or American hero? Everyone calls him “Owen”

 I’m not sure anyone really cares what he’s saying, I mean, not really. He’s just “a cool bro.” A “solid fucking individual.” Someone who’s just “wicked awesome, ya know?” 

It’s the aged rouge-wigged Hollywood icon on a friendly sound stage.  Curated pap, piped to the masses. 

“Jealous?” sniggers my dude Bryant, leaning into my left ear from behind. We’ve moved to the afternoon portion of the day’s training, seated once again on the wooden benches in the great barn theater, “The Hall.”  Our post lunch seminar: “Important conversations.” 

“What are you talking about,” I whisper back.  He’s been too hung over to say anything to me all day, though I did see him dap it up with Owusu before lunch when they were taking a leak side by side at the urinals 

“Owen, dude. He’s gonna be in charge of the swimming and diving program this summer. Guess that means you work for him.”

I let that hang as Camp’s director, a balding fat man everyone calls “Hap,” begins talking at us. He’s on a roll with the day’s orientation, using his former life as a stage actor to connect with us with Shakesperian poise. 

Now, Hap lands on the hot and heavy: something about how if any of us feel even remotely attracted  to one of our campers, “and I mean sexually,” we should have an “important conversation” with him, post haste. 

“Get outta here” I finally shoot back, swiveling my head toward Bryant in the most inconspicuous manner I can muster. “He can’t even swim.” 

When Bryant doesn’t reply, I turn around to look at him full on, not caring that Hap has us all sitting in one of his measured “beats,” clearly wanting us all to consider the import of pedophillia. Bryant gives me a classic gesture, the ole shrug and raised eyebrow. 

“Excuse me, um, Hap,?” says Chock from next to me on the bench, lumbering to a standing position with the most earnest of expressions. He looks like a pupil issuing forth before his headmaster, a caricature straight out of that prep-school movie starring the comedian-cokehead actor who everybody says is so talented in dramatic roles. 

“What if a guy here, um, expresses feelings for you. You know, like sexually?”

I always thought Chock was a little slow. Fortunately for him, that kind of thing doesn’t matter too much at camp. There was a summer when we’d been best friends, back when we were second year  “Apaches.” We’d played “Marco-Polo” at Swim Station every day during afternoon “freetime,” and had even kept up a pen-pal correspondence for 6 months after camp ended that summer. 

 If I’m honest, Chock had been an unremarkable Camp Brunah kid. Now he’s an unremarkable Camp Brunah grown dude. Light brown hair that isn’t quite blond. Eyes that can’t decide if they're green or blue. A body type that toggles “overweight” and “obese”. Chock goes to Villanova. 

“I mean,” continues Chock, when Hap presses him to elaborate on his wild hypothetical, “say Cassius here thought that another counselor was, like, cute. Like…like what if he had a crush on someone, let’s call him ‘Owen’ ?!”

Paolo, sitting on the other side of me, begins shaking silently, his whole body writhing in spasmodic bursts as he sneaks me glances.

He and I traded victories in camp swim meets events when we were 14, our sophisticated “Senior Year” as campers when dominance in any sport meant prestige. He’s one of those HGH dudes who’d grown a foot in two years since we were junior counselors, and his lanky 6’4 frame can’t hide the fact that he’s laughing his ass off now. 

Paolo doesn’t swim competitively at Dartmouth, which, in my opinion, makes him a waste of talent. And as he melts into fits of repressed guffawing, I’m thinking he’s also a waste of space. 

When I look around, I realize that Paolo isn’t the only one getting a chuckle at my expense. Even Hap’s eyes are twinkling, with an avuncular Santa Claus mirth of course. He makes as if to carry on with orientation but, too bad for me, Chock isn’t done.  

“What if Cassius was like ‘yo Owen man, I wanna jump yo bones man. Lemme make you my mans, man! We can like jump the broom, know what I’m sayin? You my BITCH.’ ”

I’m considering doing to Chock what I’d seen some girls do to some nigga at school last year, who’d pledged his love to a chick from homeroom and then publicly courted another one from 10th period. The girls learned of each other somewhere in the second week of school, fought one day during lunch (destroying each other’s weaves), made up (in a wonderfully restorative conversation over haircare), and collaboratively (and ruthlessly) stomped the shit out of the dude playing them, such that he was pissing blood and barely conscious by the time school police officers could break it up only moments after it had begun. 

Before I can rain down the sound and fury on Chock, I hear Owusu’s voice.

“Chock, sweetie, you know we’re into kinky threesomes. Ain’t that right Cass?” He’s flashing that celebrity grin all around the camp theater, absolutely bringing down the house. 

 Chock trades a few more verbal friendlies with Owusu before he sits down, while Bryant behind me grabs my shoulders and howls. Paolo’s long ass body drops head first into my lap, gurgling buoyantly like someone’s stabbed him in the throat. 

It occurs to me: Owusu’s the kind of dude who makes everyone everywhere know that everything is alright, everytime. There’s no fighting that kind of energy. While everyone gets a good laugh, I just smile big, trying to look cool. 

A century passes before Hap finally clears his throat loudly in a failed attempt to cover his approval of us boys being boys. In a rambling soliloquy,  he launches into the next item on his list of “important conversations”: discrimination, of any kind will not be tolerated…

—---------------------------------------

“Hey baby!”

“Hi Cass.”

“You sound distracted, are you busy?”

“I ain’t busy.”

“Well, you’re just being...like…are you ok? 

“I’m fine Cass.”

“Ok.”

It’s downright cold tonight, a modest breeze prickling my skin from where I stand, deep in the cornfield. I can hear the guys shooting the shit at the school house some distance behind, beer bottles clinking, the whiff of cigarettes and weed corrupting the pure mountain air. Everyone’s beat from the spirited soccer match we’d had post dinner, letting off steam after a long day of sitting. The occasional bursts of laughter over the mingling voices convey a satisfaction of self that I wish I could feel. 

But the pause on the line is more pregnant than a street cat getting ready to drop 10 kittens. I glance up at the ADK sky to steady myself, just barely making out the wisps of the milky way.  

“Listen,” Shalla finally says into the phone, drawing out the word like it’s 15 syllables long.

I know what she’s about to say—-can hear it in her voice. 

“I love you Shalla,” I blurt, like we’re two star crossed lovers in fair Verona. 

“Yea,”  Shalla acknowledges, as a preamble. Then, she presses to the thesis. “Say goodbye to Ebbie.”

“Goodbye?”

“Uhuh,” she says rolling over me, “tell her you ain’t gonna talk to her for awhile.”

“But–” 

“Shut up Cass, ok? You're in the woods this summer. You’re gone to the University after that. Say goodbye, ok? You two… us…it’s just illogical. ” 

She’s got a point, but we’d had this conversation already as I'd packed up the last of my things for camp. Then, we'd decided that long distance could work for us. 

“Fuck logic,” I spit out, just as I had a few days ago. In my head it’d sounded braver than it came out. 

Shalla sighs, and then the sound gets all muffled, like she’s holding the receiver to talk to someone in the room. After a moment, I hear a man’s voice near the phone, crystal clear. My anguish turns into straight up despair. 

“Yo, is that Jayvon? I been gone 2 days and you already talking to THAT dude??” 

Jayvon’s a Spanish nigga from the block. He’s only a little older than me, but he’s got no prospects and limited up-side save for whistling at fat asses that sashay by the stoop he usually occupies. Still, girls fuck with him presumably becasue he’s got a monster dick and knows how to use it. That’s at least what Shalla tells me when she’s feeling real low and wants to be mean. I should also mention: Jayvon is Ebbie’s daddy. 

“You sound manic, Cass, seriously. I don’t know what’s going on up there, but we got too much to handle to deal with it right now. You was good to Ebbie, so, Imma let you say bye to her.” Apparently Shalla’s a fucking charaitable organization now. She’s the Red Cross and the Catholic church, conferring upon me favors of immense magnitude. 

I’m getting ready to really tell this bitch about herself, when the sweetest voice hits the line. 

“Hi Cass-Cass” says Ebbie. “Mommy says I’m not gonna see you no more. She say everybody gotta grow up sometime.”

“BB, hey girl,”  I say, surprised at the tears springing to my eyes. I call her “BB” because that’s what she is: Black Beauty. 

 “Mommy don’t know what she talkin’ about, ok? It’s like I said the other day—I’m just gonna be gone for the summer, and then Imma be home. Nothing’s gonna—”

“Uh,  I gotta hang up now,” Ebbie says simply, a jumbled mash of voices hissing in the background.

“No, wait! Give Mommy the phone. Matter of fact, put your daddy on the phone.  I wanna—”

“Bye Cass-Cass!” 

And then she’s gone. 

It takes me a good 10 minutes to find my way out of the field, even with the benefit of a brilliant night sky. It’s the buzzing in my skull that makes it hard to focus on anything.  Still, I follow the murmuring voices and after some time, I make it to the school house and it’s contented din. 

Hearts is wasted tonight, smoking a huge blunt while holding court about stolen land that we stand on. He’s a long haired brainiac who claims that somewhere in his line he’s got Iroquois blood, but he looks just like a white boy to me. I wonder if he put his supposed Native heritage down when he applied to Vassar. 

“We’re thieves, man” he’s saying to his rapt audience in the dark, “and some day, all of this land, and shit, all of us, are gonna be swallowed up in retribution.”

The guys around him protest at this, and I take it as a cue to grab a can of Natty from the case laying at his feet. 

“The only ones here got a chance is me an’ Cass,” he says, pointing his blunt at me and nodding significantly. “And Owen too,” he adds slyly. 

“Shit, prolly Owen more than anyone. That dude is pure, man.”

I can’t tell if he’s being earnest or supremely ironic, but I laugh along with everyone else.

Out of nowhere, an explosion of pain radiates from my neck. 

“WHAT THE FUCK” I hear myself shouting, polka dot floaters filling my field of vision.

I feel a trickle of blood from where the lip of the can I’d begun sipping has sliced deep into my own upper lip. My throat throbs like a bruise is tryna pop out right then and there. Worst of all, I’m completely soaked, as though a special delivery deluge has opened up exclusively for me.

“Somebody ‘bout to GIT it” I menace through gritted teeth, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Woah, woah! Cass! Buddy, chill!” 

It’s Skittles coming towards me, emerging from the cornfields. Just behind him is Owusu, smiling big. Neither carries a flashlight, but the light of the others illuminate us. 

“It’s just a water balloon man,” says Owusu, “No harm, no foul!” 

“You...was this YOU?” I ask, my tone barely quieter. I’m getting ready to kill this dude. 

“Bro, it’s not a big deal,” Skittles says. “Honestly, I heard that there are townies that have those balloon launcher things, so it’s prolly one of them. “

“You’re not mad are you,” begs Owusu, throwing out his hands in a pleading gesture. “They was just prolly having some fun is all.”

I squint around at the guys, trying to gauge how to feel. Hearts takes a long drag of his blunt, staring like he’s trying to work out some truly mystical conceit. Bryant, my main man, concentrates on a spot on the ground. Paolo and Chock  both wear eat-shit grins, clearly enjoying the evening’s spectacle. 

“Naw man” I say after a while, turning  to Owusu and forcing a smile into my voice. “I ain’t mad. I ain’t mad at all.”

“Aww, you’re so cool” Skittles says, congratulating my good humor. He’s made it all the way over to me, and throws his arm around me, like he doesn’t care that he too is getting a little wet.  

Suddenly, the whole gang is shouting:

We’re Lake Champlain Ordained

And 20 Beers deep

We’re just a touch Insane 

And make grown men weep 

Oh! 

Rah! Rah! 

For CASS, Rah Rah!

Rah! Rah! 

To CAMP BRU-NAH!