So Daddy cut off all ties and ain’t speak not once of his father to us. A professor up at the teacher’s college one time pull me to the side and he say, You look just like your uncle, boy. I just blink, not sure what he talking about. Later I find out it have a justice in Port-of-Spain, Garvin Samson, but I never knew the man.
Everything about Daddy steady and quiet. He have he own way of teaching you, eh. I tell you, when your father the headmaster, you have to be a little tough. Back in elementary school I supposed to stay in class during the first ten minutes of recess to get some extra help in maths. My friend Kelvin schups and say, Why we have to stay inside while everyone out playing? Well boy, three of us out of seven choose to go to recess when we supposed to be inside. Me, Kelvin, and John. We playing football and laughing it up. We even go by the window and point at the fellas who stay. No one telling us nothing the whole time. Later in the day my father announce that he giving the whole school some free time. An hour to play outside instead of sitting in class. Everyone start clapping and laughing and thing.
We get up and my father say, John, Kelvin, and Neville, please step to the front. Instead of the ten minutes we was supposed to have on lessons we spend the whole hour going over maths, listening to everyone outside, watching people come by the window and point. Daddy, boy.
Now later, when I get older and I’m in line for a scholarship to go London, I make the score, but they give it to some whiteboy in my class. Teacher say, Neville got the brains but he too fast by he mouth. He not England material. Well, Kin, I feel defeated. Deflated. You hear certain things, like one of the Irish priests who teach in my high school always telling us that negroes in America too out of place and thing, but that’s the first time I was make to feel… look, I wasn’t no shrinking violet. I was kinda like Laina, oui. I ain’t hold my tongue. Teachers and them don’t like that. After that happen, I just stop doing the work. I do it, but I do it in ten minutes before I go play football or cricket, and it show when my marks come.
Daddy call me to his office in the back of our house and say, You comfortable with that?
I say, No. I mean, Kin, what you think I go say?
Then he pause and he look away and he sigh. He say, You shouldn’t be comfortable with those marks. But you going to be a big man soon. I can’t tell you what you should be comfortable with. You have to decide what sort of man you going to be. Someone who comfortable with these sort of marks or someone who want to show the world what kind of light he got.
He ain’t say no more, but I tell you I never brought home marks like that again. He ain’t have to rant and yell like… well, like I used to when you was being hardheaded. I guess I could take a lesson or two from Daddy, but you was something else, Kin.
It’s not long after that — it’s not along after that that Daddy—
When he pass, we was all together. Except Raoul. He was off in Canada already. It was strange for us to all be in the house at the same time. Except Alton, we was all grown or nearly grown. So much running around to do. It was the Christmas holiday or thereabouts, and Daddy come home saying he not feeling too well. I remember he and Mom have a community meeting to attend that night. Mom go without him and let him rest, and it happen just after she get home. I hear she call out, Come, something happening with your father!
We rush in, all of us, and—
Well, boy, that is why you never get a chance to meet your grandfather. I happy as hell I get to wrestle with Djassi and all the rest of the grandchildren. I know your grandfather would have loved y’all like nothing else.
All that going and going and going. Never holding still from after Daddy’s funeral to the time I left the island. All that stop me from dealing with how sudden, how unfair it was. Becoming a father ain’t even offer me space to deal with it. I ain’t even realize that I never reconcile it until you make me talk about Daddy right now. Even after I leave the island, there was school and football and shutting down the campus in protest and getting adjusted to America and then they kill the King.
For that somebody must pay. So the riot happening all around me. It feel like J’ouvert morning. A swarm of us walking down the street and don’t no one know where we supposed to end up. I feel protected from the chaos, but a part of it too. Any moment the police go come break us up, I feel. Or someone in the crowd go start something. I don’t know these people, but quick, quick, quick, it come like all for one.
Our swarm, it move like a flock of birds. All these beautiful black people in motion. Moving and shifting with a kind of intelligence. When we reach the destination, we just know it. That shining palace on the hill overlooking Rhode Island Avenue. Ha! The Safeway.
We get to the place and all of we stand there watching it. And the manager, a short, little, bald, pink, fat white man in an apron standing out front. I recognize him and his tiny, condescending eyes. A black person ask him questions, and he real curt. That man wouldn’t let me return some bad chicken I bought there earlier in the day one time. You think they could act like that out Bethesda? Safeway had a lot to answer for, Kin. I hated going to that place.
Please don’t do this, the manager say.
I’m thinking, Why put your life on the line for a bunch of groceries? He must think Mr. Safeway go cry big tears at he funeral. Some guys surround him and they start shoving him back and forth and all around, passing him from man to man like a basketball.
The manager pull away and run into the riot. Bad move. One of the fellas catch he and hit he one — whap! — to the back of he head.
I ain’t feel bad about what happen to the Safeway. You go in there, you never see one of us working in front. The meat bad sometimes, and you point that out, you get one cussing from the manager or someone under him. Prices always a dollar, two, three, five higher than some other places like the Giant up Georgia Avenue, but it not easy for me to get to the Giant most times. I never realize it before, but I resent Safeway like hell from the moment I start shopping there until the moment we standing in front of it. No one talking, but as a group we decide the store’s fate.
A teenager grab a big rockstone and crash the thing through the store window. I want to say, Hey! We not done deciding, but I guess we finish.
Something in me, maybe is something by my heart, it tell me turn around. Go home. But then I see it clear as clear, the man King standing there on the cover of his book with his arms folded. Title say, Why We Can’t Wait.
I had it out on my desk in class one day back in teacher’s college. I pick it out at the library. You know, you hear bits and pieces about what the negroes in America is doing, striking and sitting down and thing, but I needed to know more.
The teacher come by and she tap my book. This why you didn’t do so well on the last test, Neville?
But I get an 80.
Oh, excuse me. I took it from your earlier work that you’re not the type of student who is fine with an 80. My mistake. Careful with this stuff you reading, Neville. Careful.
I take it back to the library that day and I ain’t read it till I get to America and realize everybody reading these books. Teachers assigning it in class. People talking about The Communist Manifesto and thing. Howard was real. That afternoon when I take it back to the library, I supposed to go play cricket, but when I get to the library, I see the book. The Book. The fires burning on the cover. Like an animated thing, you know. Like the whole table on fire, and when I sit down the flames start to speak the pages. Three Insurrections. I have a cricket match, you know, but who could remember cricket staring at all that beauty? I miss the damn game to read the book. All the insurrections sewn together like a beautiful garment on each page. The Haitians have a insurrection. The Riverbabies — the Cross Riverians — they have an insurrection. And there is one to come and it’s mentioned with the ones that happen like it’s a piece of threaded gold passing through the garment. I don’t see my name, but I see me. I see you and you don’t even exist. You just a vague daydream in the back of the mind of two people who was on the same island, but ain’t meet till they travel thousands of miles to go Howard. You was just a sperm that’s fifteen-plus years from being manufactured and an egg resting inside your mother.