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  “It’s me. Grandma got sick! She passed out at my school and we’re going with her in the ambulance to . . . Mister, where we going? . . . East Franklin Memorial. Get there as quick as you can, Dad! Please!”

  The whole ride to the hospital, Grandma was squeezing Mom’s hand with more and more strength.

  “You had us so worried,” Mom told her, between a smile and a cry. “You’re not allowed to do that to your family. Right, Noah?”

  My insides had nearly gone numb. But without Dad around I knew I had to step up and act the man. And not be some scared kid.

  “I’m the one who studied to get those good grades,” I teased her, raising my voice over the siren. “But it’s Grandma getting all this attention tonight.”

  Grandma’s mouth and nose were covered by an oxygen mask, so she just shifted her eyes between Mom and me.

  I could feel the vibrations from every bump and pot-hole we hit in the street.

  And every time I shut my eyes to pray, all I could see was that scene with Hendricks breathing life back into Grandma.

  The doctors in the emergency room told us that Grandma had suffered a heart attack.

  “She’s very lucky. Whoever administered CPR probably saved her life,” said a black doctor in a white lab coat. “But there’s more to be done here. We need to perform a procedure where we reopen the blood vessels to the heart by inserting a tiny balloon.”

  Mom’s hands were shaking as she signed all the paperwork, and they took Grandma upstairs to get ready. I put both my hands on Mom’s shoulders to hold her steady. But I kept looking behind me, too, praying that my father would show up soon.

  PROTECTIVE CUSTODY RECREATION Yard/ CITY JAIL

  A small cement courtyard surrounded on all sides by the jail is broken up into four fenced-off rectangles where groups of inmates exercise. Each rectangle has a basketball hoop, and there is a walkway between divisions for corrections officers to monitor the recreation activities. Charlie Scat occupies a rectangle with two other inmates—one black and one white. In the rectangle to Scat’s right exercises a lone black inmate.

  CHARLIE SCAT: (Paces the perimeter of his rectangle.) Locked down alone for twenty-three hours a day with one stinking exercise period. Hoo-fuckin’-ray for me.

  BLACK INMATE #1 (From the rectangle to Scat’s right.): Hey, you—Fatty-Vanilla Donut. What you in for? Boosting Krispy Kremes?

  CHARLIE SCAT: Maybe I’m a mafia don, Buckwheat. (Continues to pace.)

  WHITE OFFICER (To Black Inmate #1.): You don’t know who that is? That’s the Babe Ruth of Hillsboro. He’s got no problem playing baseball with the brothers, as long as he’s cracking heads with the bat.

  BLACK INMATE #1: Word. That’s him? They better keep this fence up in front of me. I’ll smack the shit out of that coward.

  CHARLIE SCAT: Go mug another old lady for her pocketbook! Then hit the pipe! (Inhales deeply and, holding his breath, pretends to get high.)

  VOICE (From a barred window above.): Suck on this, Bat-man!

  BLACK INMATE #1: See, you’d be somebody’s bitch if you were in population, cracker.

  CHARLIE SCAT (Loses his temper.): Crackhead!

  BLACK OFFICER: How many years you looking at, Scaturro?

  CHARLIE SCAT: Twenty-five. That long enough for ya, Ace?

  BLACK OFFICER: After I retire, my kids can finish watching your racist ass. (Laughs.)

  CHARLIE SCAT (Snidely.): I’m not looking for years. I’m looking for justice. And that tin badge you’re wearing ain’t gonna get it for me.

  BLACK INMATE #1 (To Black Inmate #2, inside Scat’s rectangle.): Yo, Black, you gonna represent and whip this boy’s ass or what?

  CHARLIE SCAT: Bring it! I don’t care. Just ’cause it’s two on one, don’t let that scare you. (Other white inmate walks as far away from Scat as possible.) Go ahead! Punk out! (To white inmate.) I got two ex-friends just like you. It’s all on me anyway!

  WHITE OFFICER (To Black Officer.): How long you think it’s gonna take us to open that gate if something jumps off?

  BLACK OFFICER: I figure at least thirty seconds. (Grins wide.) Maybe more.

  BLACK INMATE #2 (Inside Scat’s rectangle.): I ain’t picking up another charge for killing this piece of crap. That’s nothing but a setup, right there. (Shakes his head.) Just tell me, Fatty, how come you hate my people so much?

  CHARLIE SCAT: I don’t hate black people! (Screams to the walls of the courtyard.) I don’t! I love them all! I love them so much I wanna fuck ’em! All right?

  VOICE (From a different window above.): We don’t love you, asshole! But we’ll fuck you, too.

  CHARLIE SCAT: Come on, man. One on one then. (Points to the worn-out basketball in Black Inmate #2’s hands.)

  BLACK INMATE # 2 : Here! (Nearly knocks Scat over with a two-handed chest pass.)

  CHARLIE SCAT (Wildly angry.): I don’t need no bat! I got skillz. Wanna see? Watch me! (Scat slams the ball down to dribble, but it flies up off the concrete, nailing him hard in the chin.)

  Hysterical, howling laughter from a dozen windows and everyone else on the ground echoes through the courtyard.

  CHARLIE SCAT: Fuck you all! (Kicks the ball into the chain-link fence with a thud.)

  Chapter NINE

  IT DIDN’T MATTER THAT THE DOCTORS SAID Grandma would be all right. Those few hours in that waiting room while they did a simple procedure felt like forever. I was wound up so tight I couldn’t keep still, pacing back and forth till I memorized every magazine cover and stain on the couch cushions inside those four walls.

  I looked around at all the other black faces of the patients and their families, and wondered what was the only difference between East Franklin Memorial, where Grandma was, and St. Luke’s hospital in Hillsboro, where I got took. Was it just the neighborhoods they were in? Or did people in Hillsboro get better doctors because they owned their own houses and had more money to pay?

  Then I started to wonder if I’d still be alive, or maybe some kind of brain-damaged vegetable, if I got attacked on the other side of Decatur Avenue and that ambulance had brought me here instead.

  Mom was a wreck, sobbing almost the whole time.

  And anybody would have believed it was her mother that was sick and not my father’s.

  Then Dad walked in and she buried her face in the shoulder of his blue conductor’s shirt.

  “Lord knows, this family’s seen enough of hospitals in the last four months,” said Dad, who had to stay with his train till it reached the end of the line after he’d got my message. “But if I could, I would have sprouted wings to get here faster.”

  I stood up straight, looking him in the eye.

  He felt the wet patch of tears over my heart, from when I’d been holding Mom. Then Dad put his hand behind my head, pulling me in close.

  By the time Thanksgiving came, Grandma was back on her feet, and to celebrate we had a big dinner at our house. Deshawna and Destiny Love were there. Deshawna’s dad was invited, too. That was the first time we’d all mixed together around a holiday dinner table, like one big family.

  I noticed that Deshawna’s dad treated me better in front of my family than he did over at his house.

  “Please pass me over those fried peas,” he said, proper. “Thank you kindly, young man.”

  That’s when I started to wonder if it was possible I could just talk to him over here on holidays and nowhere else.

  Mom found an old picture book from when I was young for Destiny Love to look at. It had drawings of the pilgrims and Indians at the very first Thanksgiving. I remembered that book. When I got a little older I played cowboys and Indians, and I always wanted to be the cowboys. Then one day in sixth-grade history class it hit me how the Indians were just like black people. They got pushed off their land and shoved into places where white people didn’t have to see them. After that, I never rooted for the cowboys to win again. Instead, I wanted to see them all get scalped.

  “Come here, Noah,” Grandma called out afte
r dinner, with the stripped carcass of a twelve-pound turkey in the center of the table. “You and I got a right to give special thanks for still being here. I guess God’s not through teaching either one of us yet. We still have lots of blessings coming our way. Now grab on to the other end of this wishbone. Pull as hard as you can. Your grandmother still has some strength left in her.”

  “Amen!” hollered everyone, almost all at once.

  I didn’t know what to wish for, and my mind couldn’t focus on any one thing.

  When that wishbone split in two, Grandma had the bigger half in her hand.

  “Don’t fret,” Grandma told me. “My wish had to do with good things coming your way, child. With lots of understanding for people.”

  I needed it, too, because I didn’t know how to look Mr. Hendricks in the face anymore. He kept that smug grill on all the time during PE now, like I should bend down to kiss his feet for what he did.

  Everybody at school knew about him saving Grandma. And one day in the locker room, Bonds and me heard Spanky running his mouth to his friends about it.

  “I hear Hendricks got himself a new housemaid,” cackled Spanky, from a couple of rows of lockers away. “That’s the way it works, right? You save somebody’s life and they owe you. It’s like they’re your personal slave now.”

  My blood boiled inside my veins.

  I slammed my locker shut, pretending Spanky’s melon-head was between the door and the doorjamb.

  “Better ask somebody for the address of the state pen!” barked Bonds. “You’ll be visiting your fat-ass cousin there soon.”

  “I should be able to get it from anybody that’s black,” Spanky shot back. “Half their family’s usually locked up.”

  I just kept my mouth shut and let Spanky and his whole Hillsboro crew clear out of there before I finished getting dressed.

  I had to deal with it at home, too.

  “I phoned your gym teacher while you were at school today. The Holy Spirit just moved me to do it,” Grandma told me while I was trying to clean the mess of my clothes and Destiny Love’s toys in my room. “Mr. Richard Hendricks. His private number wasn’t listed, so I called him at Carver.”

  “W-w-why, Grandma?” I asked through a stutter.

  “It’s only right, Noah,” she answered, short.

  It took me a few minutes to get up the nerve to say what was really on my mind. But when I finally did, I let the words fly out fast so they wouldn’t fall flat on my tongue.

  “Don’t it feel wrong to you that a racist from Hillsboro—’cause I know that’s what he is—saved you?”

  “Is that what’s been eating at your insides?” she said.

  “Noah, no matter what the world puts on us, or what we put on other folks, we’re all God’s children. Black or white, or any color in the rainbow.”

  “Hendricks is just like those kids who split my skull with that bat,” I said, charged up. “He’s no better.”

  “Noah, you’ve every right to be angry. But don’t let it consume you. A life is measured by the impact it has on others. I pray that one day you’ll find a way to take what happened to you and shine a light on it for people to see,” Grandma said. “I hate lots of things I’ve seen and fought against them all my life. And I wouldn’t want to be standing in some folks’ shoes on the Judgment Day. But it’s not up to you or me to do the judging. That’s for God to do. I suppose when there’s no hope left for any of us, there won’t be the grace of another flood. He’ll send his fire next time to burn this world clean.”

  “I guess,” I said, frustrated.

  “All I got at your school was an answering machine. I left a message, but I know those things have a way of getting lost in a busy building like that,” Grandma said, handing me a sealed envelope. “I want you to deliver this letter to Mr. Hendricks for me. Just to make sure he knows my feelings.”

  That night, and on the way to school the next morning, I thought about opening that envelope and reading Grandma’s letter. I was worried that she was going to give Hendricks the kind of props he didn’t deserve, and let him off the hook for looking down on anybody who wasn’t white. Then that smug grin on his face would be set in stone forever.

  Grandma had always been hard as nails against his kind. So I couldn’t figure it.

  I wasn’t sold on everything she’d said straight off, either. I wasn’t happy about leaving the judging to anybody else. I’d already seen too many big-time haters on the news get off with a puny slap on the wrist.

  So maybe God wasn’t watching all the time.

  I didn’t know if Grandma had gone soft from being so close to dying. I just knew that growing up she’d seen racist things go down a hundred times worse than I ever did.

  Deep down, I had too much respect for Grandma to read her private feelings.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to put that letter into Hendricks’s hand. So I shoved it into his mailbox inside the main office and walked as far away from it as I could.

  That same day, there was a fight in the cafeteria maybe two minutes before I got there. I stepped inside and half the kids were standing in a wide circle watching security get whoever was fighting pinned down and under control.

  The circle was mostly white on one side and black on the other.

  It reminded me of that Chinese symbol—the yin and yang—I’d seen in martial-arts movies.

  Suddenly I heard Asa’s angry voice hollering, “He’s a racist! Ain’t nobody can tell me different, and I’d slap his ass again for what he said!”

  It was Asa who’d been fighting, and I watched as security led him through the crowd with his hands cuffed behind him.

  But I did a double take when I saw that the other dude in cuffs, the one Asa had been scrapping with, was black, too.

  “He’s a black-on-black racist!” Asa kept on. “That’s worse, because he’s against his own kind! A damn traitor!”

  Then Bonds found me. He said that Asa had fought some dude on the debate team because he’d done a project with a white kid, arguing that by law Charlie Scat and Spenelli should have got bail. Somehow Asa heard about it. So he snaked his way through the lunch line and jumped in that dude’s face, insulting the shit out of him. But when the dude didn’t back down, it was on.

  I listened to that story, and after hearing it, I couldn’t stomach eating a thing.

  APARTMENT 3C—12TH STREET AND DUPONT AVENUE, EAST FRANKLIN

  (It’s 7:05 P.M. A phone inside the apartment is ringing.)

  MOM (Answers a phone on the kitchen wall.): Jackson residence. Who’s calling, please? . . . Yes, I’ll get him. NOAH! TELEPHONE! (Noah comes out of his bedroom, wiping the sleep from his eyes, still wearing his uniform from Mickey D’s.) It’s one of the lawyers for the city.

  NOAH (Takes the phone.): Hello? . . . I thought we finished those meetings? . . . I know the trial’s coming in another week. But I can’t miss any more time from work. They’ll fire me.

  DAD (From the living room.): I knew this was coming. They just tell you it’s over with so they can start you up fresh again, later. This way they don’t burn you out. But they already got everything they needed. I was there.

  NOAH: My father can’t miss more time at work, either. . . . Because he’s not gonna let me come down there without him.

  DAD (Enters the kitchen.): That’s right.

  MOM (Grabs the phone from Noah, and snaps at the lawyer.): You understand we have a life here? One with bills to stress over. Now you all have worked very hard on Noah’s behalf, and we appreciate it. But we understand a good part of this is about your careers, too. That’s why you probably let that Rao boy walk—to stay in good with the police department. And why you let that Spenelli take two lousy years instead of going to trial, so he’d turn on his friend. So don’t pretend with us that this is all about justice for you, because we see it’s not! (Hands the phone back to Noah.)

  NOAH: Listen, I’ll be here every night after work if you need to call and go over things.


  DA D (To his wife.): You were right on the money with that speech. It needed to be said.

  NOAH: I guess she’s coming. I don’t really know.

  Why? . . . You’re not worried about her crying, or making a fuss? . . . Yeah? . . . I’ll see . . . All right. Good-bye. (Hangs up the phone.)

  MOM : What was that last part about?

  (Noah, his mother, and his father are standing in a triangle, facing one another.)

  NOAH: They want to know if my daughter’s coming to the trial, especially on the first day. So the jury can see her and keep a picture in their minds of what it would be like if she didn’t have a daddy—if Scat would have killed me with that bat.

  DAD (In a mocking tone.): She’s a prop to them. A piece of furniture. Just to set the stage.

  MOM (Shakes her head.): Lord, deliver us from our enemies and shield us from these lawyers.