Daddy’s Buick is dirt brown and has dents, scratches, and duct tape all over it.
“Did you build this car yourself, Daddy? Did you make any special modifications?” I ask.
“No, Broomstick, it’s just a little beat up, that’s all,” he says, as he slips the last suitcase into the back seat. He has to push the front seat forward ’cause there are only two doors on his car—unlike Granddaddy’s new Cadillac with its four doors and leather seats.
I ask Daddy if I can sit in the back seat to stretch out my legs. I lie down on the rough and torn seats, rest my feet on my suitcase, take off my glasses, cross my hands over my belly, tilt my head back, and look out of the car window. After a few minutes of seeing only wide, blue, open sky, the tall buildings in No Joke City appear from out of nowhere. I sit up in my seat as we cross a bridge over a green-brown river. In the distance, I see short-and-wide buildings and tall-and-skinny buildings. The whole city looks like it was built by robots and machines.
“Welcome back to Manhattan, baby girl. The Big Apple. New York City! And soon, we’ll be in Harlem—the heart of it all—where the beat is, the bass, the drum. Ain’t that right, baby girl?” Daddy says from the driver’s seat.
“It’s No Joke City, Daddy,” I say, easing toward a window. “’Cause this place is serious with them tall buildings.”
“You got that right,” is all my daddy says.
We drive down a winding highway that runs along the green-brown river and on the other side is a sea of shorter-and-wider buildings that Daddy says is Brooklyn. Soon, we turn down Park Avenue where above us a long and wide bridge seems to extend just as far as the whole city. I roll down the window and stick out my head to look up at the giant structure. I remember what it’s up there for from the last time I visited Harlem. It’s an aboveground train track.
“Daddy, ain’t that the Soul Train?” I ask.
He laughs a little. “Could call it that. It is the Harlem Line, after all. The Metro-North. Goes up to somewhere fancy called Connecticut.”
“Can we get on the Soul Train to meet Don Cornelius?” I ask him. Momma never lets me watch Soul Train, and Granddaddy says it’s changed so much from when it first started with all that glitter and dirty dancing.
Daddy laughs even harder. “I don’t see why not. But you gotta dance up there on the Soul Train, baby girl. Whatcha gonna dance to?”
“No, sir. I’m not dancing. Ain’t gonna laugh either. ’Cause ain’t nothing funny about No Joke City!”
“I see you’re not gonna let that one go,” Daddy says. “Don’t worry. Harlem’ll set you straight.”
I shake my head to disagree with Daddy, but he can’t see me from the driver’s seat. Soon, we’re making a left onto 126th Street, Daddy’s block.
This street is full of fast-walking people packed onto the sidewalk like Granddaddy’s sardines, sitting around on stoops, and everything in between. I know better than to trust any of them. The white-teeth smiles or the slap-knee laughter in Daddy’s Harlem—they’re just traps and they don’t fool me. The world here is square and rectangular with its high walls and sharp corners made to keep everything round and bubbly and soft—everything happy—in a cold, hard box.
Except it looks like the box has sprung a leak. Water sprays out of the mouth of a small robot at the edge of a wide sidewalk and it’s free like air, like starlight, like rockets.
“I gotta roll up the windows, Broomstick,” Daddy says. The window squeaks as it slides up and there are tiny cracks in the middle of the glass.
“What’s happening?” I ask, sitting up to watch big-headed and knobby-kneed Harlem kids run through the spray. An iridescent rainbow forms on the ground and no one seems to care because they run all over it with their bare feet.
“Just the neighborhood kids having a good time. But it ain’t hot enough out here for all this mess,” Daddy says. “School ain’t even let out yet for the summer. But what the heck . . . Could use a good car wash!”
Daddy slowly drives the car through the water as the kids make way for him. A boy with a pigeon chest wearing only a pair of red shorts goes over to the small robot and puts his hand in front of the water as it flies even higher. I press my face against the window and the water pounds Daddy’s Buick as if it were the torrential rains of the Second Coming, as Momma would say.
“Wow!” I whisper.
“Could come out here later, if you want,” Daddy says.
The water splashes my window, I squeeze my eyes shut and press my forehead against the coolness. Soon, we’re out of the spray and the kids run back in. I watch everything from the rear window, through the sliding droplets that make everything look bigger and stranger, like a house of mirrors at a carnival.
Still, I don’t trust all that laughing and fun because ain’t nothing funny about No Joke City! “It’s a trap,” I whisper to myself.
“Broomstick!” Daddy says. I jump in my seat. “As long as you change out of those nice clothes, you could run back out there before they turn off the fire hydrant.”
“Fire hydrant?” I ask, wishing that the little robot had more of a funky name.
Fire Crusher pops up in my imagination location. Fire . . . Destroyer!
Before I can think of what a Fire Destroyer might do, I’m out of the car and setting foot on the surface of Planet No Joke City. “Welcome home,” King Sirius Julius says as he pulls my bags out of the back seat. I run to him to help. But a short man wearing a long, dirty coat beats me to it.
“This here your daughter, Julius?” he asks with a scraggly voice. “Looks just like you. You spit that baby girl out!” He tries to grab one of my bags, but Daddy shoos him away. “Lemme help you with those, man.”
“Get back, Lester. I don’t need any help,” he says.
I try to take one of my bags from Daddy again, but before I can even open my mouth to tell him I can carry my own bags he looks down at me with needle eyes. “Broomstick, you go on over there and stand by the steps until I open the door. You hear?” His voice is harder than before—more like the King Sirius Julius he’s supposed to be.
I do as he says and watch as my daddy and this Lester fight over my bags. Lester doesn’t budge. He tries to grab my green backpack, my brown satchel that used to belong to Nana, and Momma’s old makeup case. She had filled that case with all the dolls I never played with. But before we left for the airport, I took out those ugly dolls and replaced them with things more useful and more fun.
“Lester, I’ma have something for you to do in just a minute, if you just let go of these bags and let me take care of my baby girl,” Daddy says, softer now.
Lester steps back and bows as if Daddy really were the king of this place. I get a glimpse of Lester’s sneakers—no laces and one of his big toes sticks out of a hole. He scratches his head and neck and keeps his eyes on my bags as if there were nothing more he wanted to do in the world than to carry one of them up the steps to Daddy’s brownstone.
I’m so focused on Lester and his scratching that I don’t notice the small crowd of kids walking up toward us—even the skinny boy with the pigeon chest and red shorts. I turn the other way. More kids. They’re coming from every corner of this block.
There’s nowhere else to look but down at the brown and gray concrete. Blades of grass stick through the cracks as if there were a secret tiny forest underneath the sidewalk, with teeny-tiny aliens who do nothing but laugh all day. This itsy-bitsy forest beneath the concrete is their prison and punishment for being so happy.
“That’s your daughter, Mr. J?” someone asks. It’s a boy’s voice and I refuse to look up. I imagine one of those tiny laughing aliens climbing over my shiny black Mary Jane shoes, swinging across the lace trimmings of my socks, and scurrying its way up my skinny, Vaseline-covered legs. I let out a snort and quickly cover my mouth before a forbidden laugh bursts out.
I look up to see all the kids’ eyes on me. Then, Daddy yells out my name: “Ebony-Grace! Don’t be rude.”
Get ahold of yourself, E-Grace. Not one snort. Not one giggle. Wipe that smile off your face! I tell myself. I furrow my brows and purse my lips so tight they almost go numb.
“What’s wrong with her, Mr. J?” Pigeon-Chest Boy asks.
There are almost a dozen of them—all different shapes and sizes. They talk at the same time—No Joke City gibberish. But luckily, my super-duper bionic ears can decipher it all. The words and questions spill out of their mouths as fast as shooting stars.
“Why her face like that?”
“Why she just standing there?”
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Can you see through walls with them Coke-bottle glasses?”
“She looks like she been sitting out in the sun her whole life!”
“You know my people down in ’Bama?”
“Is that a perm or a press ’n’ curl?”
“Subspace frequencies jammed, sir. Wormhole effect!” I say and cover my ears and shut my eyes because it’s sensory overload. I need my helmet. I need to go back home. “Beam me up, Granddaddy!”
But still, they poke and prod and ask more questions. They move in closer and they smell like hot sun, salty sweat, city streets, and car exhaust. I brace myself to be beamed back up onto the Uhura. I wait for the atmospheric pressure to squeeze my whole body into a teeny-tiny wormhole in the universe, and I’d zoom up through an invisible portal, catapult into space, and stumble onto the cold, logical metal floors of the Starship Uhura.
“Beam me up, Captain Fleet!” I yell out loud. “Beam me up, please!”