16

Every Saturday morning at Rutgers, Cedric went fishing. His cousin had started taking him when he was six years old, plucking him out of East Orange and the cement, and Cedric remembered catching that first slapping mackerel like it was yesterday. “Goddamn that was a beautiful fish. I kept it in the refrigerator in a plastic bag for weeks but it started to stink and my mom tossed it out one day when I was at school,” he once told me. Every Saturday he was out of our room by 4 AM catching a bus south to the Jersey shore. Most days he’d come back with striped bass that he’d prepare for his dinner. Cedric cleaned the fish right in our sink, slit open the bellies and let the guts run onto some newspapers he put down. Then ran his finger along the inside, rinsed out the last blood, and threw it on a Hibachi he took out of the closet, the little eyes shrinking in the heat. I never touched the stuff. It smelled like oil burning in a car engine.

When I complained, Cedric said, “You’ve lost touch with the hunter in you. You’ve lost touch with hardship.”

“I never had hardship. That’s you, man,” I answered.

Freshman year, Cedric built curves into the corners of our room.

“Africans don’t live in square rooms,” he said.

“You’re from East Orange, not Mali,” I told him.

Cedric had grown up on the city pavement and never really got used to the quiet of the woods around the school, the electric buzz of the streetlight just outside the window of the house we rented senior year, the cricket quiet of the neighborhood interrupted by silverware crashing and our next door neighbor’s maniacal laugh. The man collected antlers and we could see them through his side window.

For one year we shared that big old house with the automatic broom the owners left behind and the ceiling fan in the living room. Cedric had a banner on the wall above his bed that read: Work Is For People Who Don’t Fish. His room was filled with his fishing stuff—poles and reels and lines and hooks.

I always thought it was strange that despite all his fishing, Cedric had these smooth, soft hands. They were almost feminine with perfect round nails. Before Cedric, I had this picture of serious fishermen having ripped-up fingers.

Cedric was the only one who took as much interest in the lynching as I did. We talked about it every day, even when the news about the hanging man wasn’t news anymore. He was hanged from a tree out in the woods behind the sixteenth green of the public golf course on the north edge of town; he was hanged by his own belt and had been dead about eight hours when he was found, purple-faced and limp.

When Cedric first saw the picture of the lynched man he said, “Badness. The dude had his moment of truth.”

“No pity?” I asked.

“I’m not the judge or the executioner,” Cedric answered.

Bob Esah, who’d been listening, said to Cedric, “You don’t take any shit, do you.”

“Not from Cage,” he said. “You? Yeah I’d take shit from you.”