When I arrive at the restaurant, he and Ariyeh are already seated. He’s small, the color of peanut brittle, with shoulder-length dreads. He’s leaning over the table, gesturing with strong, slender hands. “Even if all they do is play games, the cost is justified.”
“How?” Ariyeh says.
“Baby, I gotta go through this again?”
“How is it justified?”
“See, even before the American Revolution, this country locked a power structure into place — ”
“Reggie, seriously, what do your damn conspiracies have to do with computer games?”
“Hi,” I say.
Ariyeh smiles, stands, introduces us. “Good to meet you,” Reggie says. “I’d just like to finish this point, okay?”
I nod. We all sit down. A plastic cover overlays the table, red and white checks.
“South Carolina, 1739, all right?”
“Oh Christ, Reggie, don’t history me again — ”
“It’s the facts, baby. Listen to me, now. What did the legislators do?”
“Let me guess.”
“Banned reading and writing for coloreds, that’s what, and even outlawed talking drums.”
“Okay, Preacher-Man.”
“The point I’m making is, the Internet is the new talking drum. In the twenty-first century, guaranteed, baby, every important social connection is going to be on-line — ”
“But one computer — ”
“It’s a start, sugar. I showed you those stats, right? Thirty-three percent middle-income whites own PCs, compared with nineteen percent blacks. Nineteen percent.”
“All right, but — ”
“We’re two separate nations: white and wired, black and unplugged. Seventeen thirty-nine all over again.”
Ariyeh tells me, “Reggie wants to buy a computer for the Row House Project, get the neighborhood kids comfortable with technology. I think what he and the boys really want to do is sit around and play Doom Master or Master Doom or whatever the hell it’s called.”
Reggie grins. “Part of the education. You hungry?”
We stand in a long line at the counter. The walls are covered with beer signs, football posters, cartoon armadillos, Louisiana license plates. A sign above the men’s room door says CRAWFISH GIVE GOOD HEAD. We order cornbread, corn on the cob, and a large bucket of crawfish. The room is pungent and hot, buzzing with talk and the sizzle of frying foods. At a table next to us, two white men the size of Frigidaires, in white shirts and blue ties, paw through a basket of hush puppies. On our other side, three black men wearing oily gas station uniforms bite the heads off their crawfish. They suck the meat.
Ariyeh is tense. Another child has disappeared from her school. “That makes four boys in two months,” she says. She tucks her napkin into her light blue blouse. “Cops are getting nowhere, and the kids are scared to death. I mean, what if there’s some wacko on the loose? I don’t know how to protect — ”
“You conk your hair?” Reggie asks me, pointing at my head with his chewed-up corncob.
“Reggie!”
“Not anymore,” I say, flushing. “But I used to.” I’m holding a crawfish in my hand; it feels alive to me, its stiff legs wedged between my fingers. The food is spicy. It’s like swallowing straight pins.
“What about the kitchen?” He fingers the nape of his neck. “You know, this real kinky part here. Must be tough to keep straight.”
“Not so much nowadays.”
“Ever Jheri-Curl it?”
Ariyeh says, “Reggie, that’s enough.”
“You can pass, can’t you?” he says.
“Yes.”
“It’s how you get by.”
“Sometimes. Most of the time.”
He nods thoughtfully. Encouraged by his bluntness, I ask him, “How come you don’t like Bitter?”
Ariyeh squirms.
“Shit, that shuffle-and-jive he does, that ‘uncle’ business, it’s the kind of self-hating crap let whites dog brothers from the start. I can’t fucking stand it.” He touches Ariyeh’s arm. “I’m sorry, baby. I know he’s your daddy. But she asked.”
“It bothers me too,” I admit. Ariyeh turns to me, surprised. “I mean, I didn’t know any better as a kid, but since I’ve come back this time … still, it’s who he is now, isn’t it? For men his age — ”
“Don’t tell me he didn’t have a choice. He did. Just like you do. You’re not the ‘anguished mixed-blood child,’ are you? Tell me you haven’t accepted a stereotype as the way to carry yourself?”
Again, I feel my face go hot. “And you? The ‘angry black militant’?”
He smiles. “You’re right. I like your pluck, girl. And you’re right on target. It’s damn hard to escape the boxes hammered out for us.” He leans forward. “Who are the biggest consumers of television in this country? Black folks. And what kind of pictures of themselves do they see there? But I tell the neighborhood kids: self-awareness — especially awareness of your own clichés or the ideas the culture wants you to swallow — is the answer to kicking all the shit. The way to shoot past whatever the Man expects of you. You, I don’t know,” he says to me. “You seem smart about yourself. But your uncle Bitter’s faith in mother-wit and soft-shoeing it … I think that old man lost his soul a long time ago.”
“I don’t agree,” Ariyeh says. “Let’s change the subject.”
“I can’t imagine you two growing up together.”
Ariyeh and I look at each other and laugh — because we can’t believe it now, either. The big men beside us rate the Houston Rockets. “Ola-juwon’s lost a step.” “Barkley’s been slacking for three seasons now.” “Drexler’s legs was good for one more run.”
“What about you?” I ask Reggie. “Where did you grow up?”
“In the Fifth Ward here. Me and my walkies, my cornerboys, you know, we were groomed to do bids. Ass out. Convicted before we were born. It’s just luck I’m not serving time. Went to a school that should have been condemned for safety violations in the fifties. Scrubbed each night with Pencor Soap. Funny how I still remember its name. My mama told me, ‘This here soap is made by guys in the penitentiary, which is where you’re going to end up.’ Destiny. So I learned to live for props — ”
“What’s that?”
“Props. You know. Proper respect. You earned it on the street by doing something cool. We all knew who’d earned the most props. Taking something. Ripping someone off. All the way live. We knew we were eighty-sixed from the good life, see, so we figured we were owed whatever we could steal. Let me tell you, BMT — ”
“Black Man Talking,” Ariyeh interprets for me. “Means, ‘Listen up.’”
“That’s right. We learned to express only one emotion, sister: rage.”
As he talks, Ariyeh wears the same bored expression Barbara Jones did, listening to Kwako. She, too, has hooked up with a visionary, a man who’s changed his frustrations into creative energy, but who, in his grandiosity (I’m guessing), overlooks daily chores and the immediate needs of others. But maybe I’m judging unfairly.
“On my ninth birthday, to impress my cornerboys, I swiped a starter pistol from the school gym — one of those guns they fire to begin a race? After classes I caught a guy from another gang — we all marked ourselves with different-colored rags. I knocked him down and shoved the pistol into his mouth. When I pulled the trigger, it flashed and broiled about half his face. Teachers caught me, and that was my ticket to the system. They sent me to YSC, Youth Study Center — first of about half a dozen trips. After that it was BCC, the Bureau for Colored Children. These are prep schools for the pen, you dig? I was learning to be a criminal.”