“The face of Seasons Ustis law firm, huh?” Mama adjusted her kente cloth chef’s hat. “You better hope you don’t get punched in the face.”
We were in the Chicken Coop, the fried chicken restaurant slash community center slash sometime boardinghouse Mama had taken over and put me to work in when I was a teenager. A place I avoided as much as possible as an adult. It was bad enough to participate in a cliché. How much worse to propagate one? A black family selling fried chicken to black people in the ghetto? Even a racially insensitive hack screenwriter would avoid that setup. Yet to be honest, my difficulty with flaky fried fowl fingers had a more personal dimension.
In high school, in the second half of my sophomore year, I dated a girl for about two weeks. Or rather I should say she, Sharane, dated me. She became an eventual Rhodes scholar and CEO of an entertainment company out west. However, when I knew her she was a cherrywood-skinned goddess—the cheerleading captain!—with all the physical bells and whistles necessary to send the hormones of an apelike teenager such as myself rocketing into the magnetosphere. Any neutral observer could have taken one look at me—the thick glasses I wore over my uncorrected eyes, the hair parted straight down the middle—and seen that I was outclassed. I questioned whether her interest was an elaborate setup to shame me at some upperclassman’s upcoming drinking party. But it turned out that she just really liked Mama’s chicken. She would show up to the restaurant shortly after I wrapped an apron around my waist and wait for Mama to step into the pantry. Then with the stealthiness of an American spy tiptoeing through the lowest subbasement of the Kremlin, I would smuggle a few extra-crispy thighs over the counter. Not that I fooled Mama.
Our liaison reached its sell-by date pretty fast. As soon as Mama announced that I could no longer just give Sharane half our stock, the girl’s presence became scarce. For my part, I lost my taste for eating fried chicken around then. And for years afterward, I suffered nocturnal indigestion every July 6, National Fried Chicken Day.
Mama went behind the counter, slipped on a pair of plastic gloves, and mixed flour and seasonings in a bowl. “My son a figurehead,” she said. “You’ve always been different, but I thought you had better sense.”
I glanced at Penny, seated next to me. “I thought we weren’t going to bring up my work stuff.” When I had told Penny about the situation, her face turned red, and she sliced an eggplant right down the middle. She saw it not as an opportunity but as an exploitation. If the firm really wanted to show their appreciation for me, they should have given me a raise or made me lead on one of our major client cases.
“It just slipped out.”
Penny rolled her eyes upward. The restaurant air conditioner clunked to life. “But see? Your mother thinks it’s a horrible idea, too.” Mama thought the firm wanted to use me as blackface. A way to make the organization more palatable to the clientele. She was right, of course. But it would put me in position to help Nigel. I couldn’t tell her that. I knew my mother well enough to understand that she would object to my plans for Nigel even more vehemently than Penny did. Best to avoid the topic and enjoy time with my family.
“Forget that they’re not paying you extra for doing it.” Mama cracked several eggs into another bowl. “Why can’t one of them do it? And what in the world qualifies you to be the face anyway? Lord knows you don’t look like most of them.”
“It’s the chance of a lifetime,” I said. “A chance to break new ground.”
Mama opened a beer and poured some into the wet ingredients. “Boy, Uncle Tomming existed way before Harriet Beecher Whatsherface wrote that novel. You ain’t doing nothing new.” She poured more beer, then stopped. Her banana earrings swayed as she gulped the remaining contents of the beer can. “Don’t mind me none.” Leaning toward Penny for effect. “He always been stubborn.”
Penny stepped to the register. “I have a dream that one day he’ll come to his senses, and we’ll live happily ever after in a little cabin in the woods.”
“Don’t hold your breath, sister,” Mama said. “He’s just like Sir.”
I grunted.
Mama placed the battered chicken into a basket and lowered the basket into the deep fryer. It was hard to believe that when Mama and Penny first met, they both confided in me their reservations about each other. Penny found Mama overbearing and self-concerned. Mama thought Penny was clueless white trash. The tats and black eye makeup didn’t help.
Nigel entered through the double doors that led to the community center’s day room. “Where is everyone?” He washed his hands.
“Honey, they at that protest.”
“The kids, too?” Nigel dipped his finger into the dry ingredients. He tested it on his tongue and pointed at the pepper mill. Mama smiled and nodded. Nigel ground three heartbeats’ worth of pepper into the mix. “Shouldn’t we be there, too? I mean, maybe they could use our help.” He tasted the mix and gave Mama the thumbs-up.
“Protest?” I said. “No son of mine is going to stand shoulder to shoulder with a clot of troublemakers. You could be arrested or shot. And besides, they probably don’t even know what they’re protesting for. Is it higher wages? Is it banking reform? They probably think it’s for longer kennel hours.”
“You don’t even know about the protest, do you?” Mama put her hands on her hips. “Look at him.”
“Well, I— That’s not the point.”
“Hello?” Penny said. “We talk about it almost every morning.” She reminded me that the protest was at PHH—not the main building where she worked, but at the plastic surgery clinic. For the past few weeks, she had to drive through angry people at the employee entrance. “Not that I’m mad at them. Their hearts are in the right place. Even if they shake the van sometimes. Someone graffiti-bombed the clinic building with these big, weird letters….”
Although it beat discussing my work obligations, I wasn’t really interested in talking about protesters. An envelope lay faceup between the register and the condiments caddy.
“Oh!” Mama said. “It’s for you. A letter from Sir.”
I held my hands up. “I don’t want that.”
“I’ll take it.” Nigel grabbed the envelope.
I took it from Nigel and ripped it in half. “We don’t associate with criminals.”
“Your father is no criminal.”
“That’s not what the court said.”
“Well, if he is one, that criminal put food on our table,” she said. “That criminal paid for your frou frou edumacation. That criminal is your father.” Yes, Sir was my father. “Sir” was the nickname Mama gave him for what she sometimes described as his “particular bearing.” I now found the usage of the nickname creepy and disturbing, like those parents who referred to each other as “Mother” and “Father.” Also, it was hard to fathom that my father and I had once been so close that people took to calling us Big Sir and Little Sir, an appellation that I now strictly forbade even Mama to use.
“What did I do to deserve such a siddity son?” Mama turned her nose up. “You need to come around here more and stop acting like you weren’t raised right. It’s not healthy to spend all your time up in that white tower.”
My field of vision went dark. Someone had placed their hands over my eyes.
“What’s up, Frank Sinatra?” Only one person ever called me that. It was a reference to my fedora, which lay upside down next to me.
“What you selling today, money?” I asked in light Ebonics. Supercargo released me, mussed my hair, which I hated, and stepped into view. He had taken my fedora and put it on. Supercargo was my cousin. He had lived with me, Mama, and Sir for years. We’d been close as kids—I taught him how to tie his shoes—but I’d kept my distance from him after he dropped out of high school and got himself locked up in City Prison. He said it was all a setup. That white people had more use for him as a felon not in direct competition with their sons and daughters. Supercargo was a little nutty. Choose your company wisely, I always told Nigel.
“I see you still conking your fro, brotherman.” My fedora sat atop his wild dreadlocks like a bird on a hippo’s back.
“I see you’re still annoying as ever.” I turned to Mama. “I told you about harboring all these agitators in the restaurant. The City will be after you.”
Mama raised her pinky. “Shut up, boy,” she said, and laughed.
“What’s up, girlfriend?” Supercargo kissed Penny’s cheek.
Nigel came around the counter and tried to hug him, but Supercargo held his hand out to give Nigel a pound. “I’m too ripe for a hug,” Supercargo said. Nigel hugged him anyway.
Supercargo said the riot squad moved the barricades back one hundred more feet from the hospital. Now they were confined to a small patch of grass near a drainage canal.
Mama asked him about the two bundles he dropped by the door. Balled-up banners in one.
“And those tablecloths you asked me to pick up from the Kendrick’s cleaners,” Supercargo said. Mama thanked him. “There were a couple of guys in robes and hoods.”
“That’s rich,” Penny said. “They must think it’s 1968.”
Mama placed a hand on her collarbone. “Did they cause trouble like before?”
“Nah. We run them off.”
“Now, that’s how you handle an issue,” Mama said. “Why don’t you handle your problem like him?” Sometimes I could swear Mama liked my cousin better than me. He wasn’t even my real cousin, just a crumb-stealing stray whom I loved like a brother.
“What problem?” Supercargo asked. I explained. “So, basically, your job want you to be more black so they can look like they care about black people.”
“In a nutshell,” Penny said.
“Sounds like he’s doing what he gotta,” Supercargo said.
Penny and Mama looked surprised.
Nigel tapped Supercargo’s arm. “I’m going to be main guy in the school musical.”
“Main guy?” I asked. “Musical. What foolishness are we speaking of now?”
“Not quite the lead yet.” Penny pulled Nigel to her body and curled an arm around him. “He still has to win the role.”
“Oh,” I said. “That.” My jealousy mounted. There was something about Nigel’s ability to create words that my presence warped. Around me he sometimes seemed like Charlie Chaplin or Fancy Fox, able to act but not speak for himself. But in my absence, Nigel apparently reached Proustian heights of discourse, detailing the colors and smells of his life with startling clarity. He had known about his audition for the School Without Walls’ production of The Musical Life of Cletus Prufrock Morris, the blind black organist and, later, blind black vice president, for days before I overheard Penny and him talking about it. Supercargo walks in and Nigel tells all in under sixty seconds. I took my fedora back. I didn’t want it sullied.
“You know how to play the keys?” Supercargo asked.
“A little.” Nigel hung his head slightly.
“That’s nonsense. Nigel is a veritable virtuoso.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Nigel said.
“The new teacher at school, Mr. Riley, has been showing me. He’s really good.”
“Riley?” I asked.
“He said he used to work with you,” Nigel said. So that was where Riley wound up after the firm dumped him on Elevation Night.
“Mr. Riley said if I stuck with it, I could get really good.” We had brought in a tutor and paid him handsomely for weeks before Nigel admitted he didn’t like the man. Following those sessions, Nigel could play “Yankee Doodle” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” but little else. He couldn’t be a natural at everything, apparently.
“You just need to practice more, baby,” Penny said.
Supercargo gestured for Nigel to follow him into the community center, and I received a jig of haptic feedback from my amygdala. My cousin was mostly a good guy. Maybe the countless times he had been stopped by the police and occasionally been taken into custody and sometimes even charged and now and again incarcerated—for vagrancy or carrying a joint—weren’t his fault. But fault wasn’t the question.
I couldn’t help but feel that every time he left my sight, the next thing I would hear about him was that he was profiled, chased, arrested, shot, killed, or any combination of the above. Still, I put a lot of the trouble on his appearance. He often dressed well, if a bit too garishly, during his leisure. But his various work uniforms, frumpy and bland, put him in the same visual class as the brothers begging for change at the soup kitchen. And his hair, his magnificent, unstructured, unprofessional hair—the huge locks branched off in five or six directions, a photo negative of the final fireworks of New Year’s Eve—made him a target. I had been trying to convince him to cut the growth or at least tame it for years.
A slightly out-of-tune piano interlude to an R&B song emanated from the other room. The syncopated interlude played a couple of times before stopping midnote. It restarted shakily, like a fawn using its legs for the first time.
“Is that Nigel?” Penny’s face lit up.
“Sounds like it,” Mama said. Penny went to see. I was going to follow, but Mama said that she bet I had forgotten how to prep an order. I bet her she was wrong. As I mixed wet and dry ingredients into a steel bowl, I realized Mama was watching my every move, studying my face.
“It’s just the kind of opportunity I’ve been waiting for. I slaved for this.”
“Don’t con me,” Mama said. “I won’t take it. You still trying to bring that boy in for that procedure. I know you.”
It’s impossible to outmaneuver the person who taught you how to walk, talk, and lie. “We don’t have to talk about this now.”
“But we do. You losing yourself. Your heart. Your roots. Like another man I know.” She grabbed her own forearm and wrenched her fingers around it as if trying to take herself apart.
I looked away and grabbed the pepper Nigel left behind. “I’m not about to wind up in prison.”
“They transferred him to City Prison, you know,” Mama said. Sir had been at Buckles Correctional for the length of his term. The idea of him being in the City—barely a mile away—startled me. I struggled to suppress my surprise. “I’m going to visit him during open hours next week.”
“Great,” I said.
“Don’t sass me.” Mama raised her pinky. “I know you ain’t well. It’ll break me if you let whatever is chewing on you hurt that boy.”
“We’re fine, Mama. I promise.”
“Stop,” she said.
“But we really are.”
“The mix.” She grabbed my hand. Without noticing it, I had emptied the pepper mill. The mix was pitch black.