The Kid

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE PENGUIN PRESS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in 2011 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Sapphire/Ramona Lofton, 2011

All rights reserved

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

“Your Love Is King,” lyrics by Sade Adu, music by Stuart Matthewman and Sade Adu. © 1984 Angel Music Ltd. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission. “The Kid” from
Vice: New and Selected Poems
by Ai. Copyright © 1979 by Ai. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son,” and “Dreams” from
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor. Copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.
Wise Blood
by Flannery O’Connor. Copyright © 1962 by Flannery O’Connor. Copyright renewed 1990 by Regina O’Connor.

“Have You Ever Been Out in the Country” by Mercy Dee Williams. By permission of Bug Music.

Publisher’s Note

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Sapphire.

The kid : a novel / Sapphire.

p. cm.

Sequel to: Push.

ISBN : 978-1-101-52921-8

1. African American boys—Fiction. 2. African Americans—Fiction. 3. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

[DNLM: 1. Bildungsromans. gsafd ]

PS3569.A63K53 2011

813’.54—dc22 2011001739

 

 

 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

For Angelica

 

 

And now abide faith, hope, love, these three: but the greatest of these is love.

—I CORINTHIANS 13:13

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

—FLANNERY O’CONNOR,
Wise Blood

“Wake up, little man.” Rita’s voice is coming under the covers at me. It’s warm under the covers, smell good like Rita and clean like sheets. I curl up tighter, squeeze my eyes shut, and go back to sleep. In the dream it’s Mommy’s birthday party and she’s holding me in her arms kissing me and dancing with me. Our house is smelling like lasagna, wine, and people, mostly girls sweating and perfume. One girl is smoking weed. Everyone is laughing. Mommy puts me down and goes to open her presents. She’s sitting in the blue armchair under the light. All the people have presents in their hands and are holding them out to her. A lady, who looks nice but when she smiles all her teeth is black, is holding out a pretty present tied with a gold ribbon. No! No! NOOOO! I want to say, but no words come out my mouth, and Mommy takes the box. And I want to stay asleep, even though I know it’s a bomb and I’m not dreaming anymore, and if I was dreaming, the bomb would be exploding now. And now that it’s too late, my voice would be loud. “Abdul.” Someone is shaking my shoulder. Rita. I squeeze my eyes shut, ’cause when I open them, when I stick my head out from under the covers, my mother will be dead and today will be her funeral. “Abdul.” Rita shake my shoulder again. I try to go back to the music, people dancing, and our house smelling like lasagna again, but I can’t. “Nuh uh,” I tell Rita. “Five more minutes,” she say. The music is all gone now. There’s clear plastic tubes stuck in my mommy’s nose, they come out her nose and is taped to the side of her face, go up to a clear plastic bag hanging up above her head. Another tube is stuck in her throat, it has tape around it. Her hands got tubes stuck in ’em too and is all swole up. A machine is going
whoosh-rump whoosh-rump whoosh-rump
. The doctor is from Africa. He talks to me in French sometimes and looks at my homework. He tells jokes. But today he is not joking. “She’s doing her very best to stay here, little man.” He grabs me up in his arms. “But God may have other plans.” He hand me to Rita, but Rita’s skinny, can’t hold me, puts me down. He leaves, comes back with a stool. “Here, stand on this. Come on, little man, your mommy’s traveling. I want you to hold her hand.” In the hall the nurse say, “I’m very sorry her condition is critical, absolutely no visitors except—” “Let them in!” Doctor say. White lady and lady with long dreadlocks come in and stand behind Rita at the foot of the bed. I’m scared to touch Mommy’s hands with the tubes sticking in ’em. I look up at the doctor, frog eyes of his red, but he ain’t cry. I ain’t crying either. He walk over put my hand on Mommy’s shoulder. “Wake up, Mommy.” But her eyes don’t open, she don’t move. Then it’s like when you turn down the TV set and can see the pictures moving around but ain’t no sound. It’s quiet. Mommy cough then go like ahh-ahh. Her head raises up a little but her eyes don’t open then her head falls down. “Oh my god!” Rita say. Then the room is all noisy again, nurse in the hall talking, machine going
whoosh-rump whoosh-rump,
somebody drop something. The doctor pick me up like I’m a baby and carry me out the room. I look back as the door swing shut, the nurse is pulling the tubes out Mommy’s hand.

 

 

I FEEL RITA
sit down on the side of the bed. She trying to pull the covers down. I got ’em pulled over my head. “Come on, little man, it’s time to get up! We gonna have eggs and bacon, and I let you have some coffee.” I don’t want to get up. “Come on, I got the space heater on for you and everything. Come on, git up, go pee, and then come back and wash your face and brush your teeth. Come on, Abdul!” I let her pull the covers off me, she’s lucky I do ’cause I’m very strong. I hop out the bed, run to the door, Rita swing it open. “Hurry ’fore someone else gets in there. Put on your slippers! The floor might be nasty.” I put on my slippers and run down the hall to the toilet. Psssss, feels good to pee. “Close the door if you gotta number two.” “I ain’ gotta.” “You sure?” “No,” I say, and close the door, pushing the little bolt through the loops to lock the door. I doo-doo, flush it down, open the door, and run back up the hallway. Rita hand me a washcloth and point to the sink.

That’s all that’s in the room, really, a bed and a sink in the corner. Rita ain’t got no refrigerator, TV, or nothing, but I rather stay with her than Rhonda or any of my mother’s other friends. I like Rita, she’s nice to little kids. I’m not really a little kid anymore, though. I’m nine. I run the washcloth over my face. Rita come in, wet it, squeeze it out, hand it back to me. “Get your eyes, all that sleepy stuff, then behind your ears! Take off your pajamas and wash your booty and under your arms. Hear!” I nod, she heads down the hall to the toilet. The man in the room next door turn his music on. Tupac. The woman across from us is cussing in Spanish. She ain’t got no kids. The lady next door got three. I only been here for a week. Since my mother died.

Behind me on the bed, Rita gots my underwear and socks laid out. I like Tupac, but not that much. Man next door play him every morning. Rita say maybe that’s all he got, but I looked inside his door once, he got CDs lined up along the walls up to the ceiling almost. My white shirt and black suit my mother bought me is hanging on the nail on the door. I know everybody on my block miss me, my friends probably wondering where I am.
I
wonder where I am. I know my mother ain’t dead like they be saying ’cause I be talking to her all the time just like I always did. But I know we probably ain’t going to Callie, to Disneyland, like she said we was. Two more years—
When I get outta school, we’re goin’ to California, to Disneyland!
Where’s California?
Don’t be silly, look at the map!
But I mean where is it really?
Whatchu mean, honey?
On the map it’s long and orange, near water.
Right, it’s on the coast, like New York, but the West Coast. We gotta get on an airplane to fly across all this land,
she wave her hand,
and then wham, Callie! Look just enter:
www.google.com
, then Disneyland, California.
I do, it’s 1,560,000 listings.

“Abdul!”

“What?”

“
What?
Who you talking to? Don’t ‘what’ me! Put those clothes on.”

“Yes, Aunt Rita.”

Outside the window a train is passing by.

“What train is that?”

“Boy, you be asking some questions 24/7, don’tchu!”

“I only want to know, my mother say if you want to know something, ask.”

“Of course, Aunt Rita’s sorry.” All I gotta do is mention my mother and I can get anything I want. “That’s Metro-North going upstate to Scarsdale, White Plains, and Bedford Hills. We’ll get a schedule and see all the places it goes and go on a trip one day if you want. OK?”

“OK,” I say.

“Now, get your suit on and put some lotion on your face and hands. We wanna look nice.” Rita is getting out her perfume and stuff, putting it on her head, under her arms, then out the bottle behind her knees and neck. “C’mere, we wanna smell nice.” I walk over to the side of the bed where she’s sitting down. She got all her stuff on the windowsill and chair near the window. “Raise up your arms.” She laugh and spray under my arms. “Your mom do that?” I shake my head no. “Well, just for today,” she say, then she puts stuff from one of the bottles behind my ears. I don’t mind, it smell nice. I go put my clothes on while Rita is making her eyes black. I look over my shoulder at her when she get up from the bed and take off her robe. It’s not like girls in the magazines. Rita just look like a lady in her underwears, lumpy like. But when she puts on her black dress, what’s all shiny and got a ruffle around the bottom, she look beautiful. Now she making her lips red. I like that, my mother do that too sometime.

“Ready?” She finish zipping up her dress.

I get my leather jacket.

“That’s nice, your mommy got that for you?” Rita ask about my jacket.