I was onto Mr. Mwila. He thought because Danny the K and I sat in detention, that we’d talk to each other like the grade-six upperclassmen he told us we were.
Danny’s “you make me sick” faces met my “too cool to care” blank stares. The only thing I cared about at the moment was if Mr. Mwila saw this as an “opportunity” to call my house. The more I thought about Big Ma getting that phone call, the more I regretted being in detention with Danny the K. I missed being in class where everything was happening. Plus I had to save our group from Rukia Marshall and women running for president. If New York City had never had a woman as our mayor, how would the country elect a woman to be president?
The detention aide got up from her desk and sternly warned us, “Mr. McClaren and Miss Gaither,” to be on our best behavior while she left the room for a few minutes.
I glanced up at the big clock, whose minute hand never seemed to move in spite of the second hand winding around and around. I looked down at my Timex. Four more minutes before I could join my class. And what if Pa decided I couldn’t go to the Jackson Five concert because I was shouting “Your pie-baking mama!” in social studies, like a dice-throwing hoodlum?
I thought of how I wanted the one thing that seemed hardest to get. I wanted Mr. Mwila to think better of me.
Danny the K pursed his lips. I thought to make kissy smacks, but he would be the last person on this earth to blow kisses at me. At first I only heard pitchy whispers stabbing the air around me. Then I saw Danny’s spit shooting through his puckered lips. The whispers grew louder. Clearer. Until there was a tune. A tune I knew.
With his eyes sparkling like beady marble shooters, Danny the K whistled that stupid TV dolphin song, and he dared me to do something about it.
I crossed my arms and looked away.
Danny whistled louder.
I stared up at the big clock. My “too cool to care” face wasn’t holding up. I pinched a chunk of my arm and gritted my teeth. My ears were getting hot as he leaned forward.
The detention aide had not yet returned. Danny the K got up from the bench and danced to the tune of the Flipper song. Danced and whistled. He came closer, probably hoping I’d push him away so he could push back. He wanted me to start it.
I kept looking up at the clock, praying the minute hand would strike 1:40 and the bell would ring. I let out a sigh to pretend I didn’t care, but he whistled even louder. Until he got me with his stupid spit, right below my eye.
I wiped my face and turned away. Turned away when my fists were ready. So ready.
Danny knew it. His whistling got louder and he leapt like a ballerina.
Then Principal Myers walked in.
Mr. Mwila had not called our house yet. Big Ma would have given me an earful the second I came into the living room, where she sat in her chair, resewing Pa’s shirt buttons. I didn’t want to stew over the detention note that she or Pa had to sign. I got it over with and took the mimeographed letter out of my book bag. The smell of purple ink swirled up my nose when I unfolded the bright white paper. The writing on the paper was blurry after too much recopying but Big Ma would be able to read it. This was the second detention letter I had brought home. The first was from punching Ellis in the jaw last year.
I braced myself for either the scolding or the sting of Big Ma’s right hand. I expected to get one thing or the other. Or both.
“What did you do now, Delphine?” At least this time she asked what it was all about first. My sisters and I weren’t supposed to bring trouble in the front door. Especially not from school.
I spoke plain and clear. “I got into an argument in class with Danny McClaren.”
“You’re in class to learn from the teacher,” Big Ma said. “Not to be arguing with some know-nothing boy.”
I heard myself while I retold the whole thing. It sounded silly.
Big Ma never looked up once from her sewing. When I finished telling, she said, “Women are too busy to be running for president of the United States. What are they teaching at that school? Woman president. Hmp.”
“My teacher might call.” Might as well let the other shoe drop.
“Let him call. I’ll straighten him out.”
Big Ma was funny, as in hard to figure out. She had loved President John F. Kennedy but hadn’t wanted a Catholic president. She loved keeping up with the Kennedys in the supermarket gossip papers but also loved wagging her finger at them.
I remember the president’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy, came to Bed-Stuy a lot—before the riots and after. His visits were always in the newspapers. Back in spring, when I was in the fifth grade, just months before he, like his brother, was assassinated, Big Ma put on a church outfit to hear the senator speak. Vonetta, Fern, and I asked if we could go with her but she said it wasn’t a meeting for kids. I learned later that plenty of kids had gone, and Rukia Marshall had posed for a picture with Senator Kennedy. That color photograph became her show-and-tell.
Well, Big Ma had gone down to Friendship Baptist Church to hear Senator Kennedy tell the black people they were American citizens who deserved decent homes, decent education for their children, safe neighborhoods, and opportunities. But Big Ma talked more about taking off her glove to shake a Kennedy’s hand than she talked about his speech. You’d have thought Big Ma would’ve been baking cookies for the “Vote for Bobby” office on Fulton Street, the way she talked and talked about Senator Kennedy. But she said she wouldn’t vote for him because his hair was too long and he let people call him Bobby and not Robert. He was too young, talking about changing things in Bedford-Stuyvesant and in every other ghetto. She said that while that sounded good, and the people hollered and clapped for him, he was still a rich, young Catholic boy whose daddy made millions selling liquor.
Instead, she planned to vote Republican for Richard M. Nixon who, to Big Ma, was more suited to be president of the United States than a Catholic boy with hippie hair—or any Democrat, for that matter. She and Pa talked back and forth about that. After the assassination, Big Ma told Pa not to waste his vote on the Democrats. Instead of fixing things for the Negro race, Richard Nixon would win the war in Vietnam, clean up the country of its long-haired, drug-smoking hippies, and get those black militants and bean-pie-selling “Mooslims” in line. He would make America great.
Pa would say that Richard M. Nixon wasn’t good for black America, but Big Ma would say, “Life for colored folks is how it’s been. If Reverend King couldn’t fix it, it can’t be fixed. Only Jesus can give colored folks their rightful place, although Reverend King came close.”
That’s what made Big Ma both funny and hard to figure. When she looked at Richard M. Nixon, she saw what a president should look like. But I bet you wouldn’t have caught Richard M. Nixon at Friendship Baptist Church on Herkimer Street.
Big Ma put down her sewing needle and signed the note.
“Don’t get caught up in foolishness, Delphine. You just study your lesson. Gradurate”—she said it with an r—“and maybe you can go to college. Be a schoolteacher. Something nice like that.”
Then I said the thing I’d never have said to my revolutionary poet mother. Still, I knew it was the right thing to say to Big Ma. I took the signed detention slip and said, “Yes, ma’am.”