I woke up to one of those summer days where you start sweating in the shower and it’s impossible to stop. Towel around my waist, I put the needle down on my favorite James Brown song, “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing.”
As the groove kicked in, I picked up the album cover, then dropped it in surprise. Usually, the cover’s got a portrait of James in a dark denim bell-bottom suit, sitting on a filthy concrete bench, with his name and In the Jungle Groove scrawled on the wall behind him.
I picked it up from the living room floor and carried it into my room. Today, James had company. Across from him, ’fro blocking half the record title, stood a guy who looked just like Lucius. He was wearing a 1970s basketball referee uniform—black pants and a gray V-neck with black piping—and blowing a whistle at James. Alone, James looked satisfied. With the ref in his face, he looked tired and a little defiant, fixing his mouth to go, “Really, you want more?”
The song blared in the living room, muffled a bit by the wall. I love how the shuffling rhythm pushes and pulls at the same time, all headed in the same direction: forward. I propped the record cover up on my dresser and pulled on a black T-shirt and the dirty jeans I’d dedicated to work that week.
When I looked at the record cover again, James Brown was still frozen in place, but the ref had turned and was pointing out beyond the photographer, like he was surprised by something over my shoulder. I turned around. There was Lucius, standing in my bedroom door in a baggier version of my outfit, with white gym socks glowing on his feet.
“Been a minute,” we both said, having a standoff in my musty little bedroom.
“Taught you well,” he said.
He sure hadn’t been doing much teaching lately, but everything felt like a test. So I said, “Where you been? Coulda pulled that cop off me on Russell’s porch.”
He said, “If I jumped in, things woulda got a lot more serious.”
I pointed at my face. “It got pretty fucking serious, Lucius.” I turned and rifled around in my dresser for some socks of my own. “That’s awful convenient for you. That might be something that’ll lose you your Black Card,” I said.
I turned, holding some socks that were losing their elastic. James Brown grunted and shouted in the empty living room while Lucius stood there making O shapes with his lips like a hungry fish.
Finally, he said, “I never had one, man.”
“What?” I looked up, while bent over to put on a sock.
“Dawg,” he said, and laughed kinda nervously. “I made that thing on a copy machine back in the day. To chill you out.”
“What?” I said again, and stood up straight with one sock on, my bare foot gathering dirt from the splintery floorboards.
“Yup.” He nodded. “You should have heard yourself back then. Asking me a million questions.”
He sat on the foot of my bed and dropped his voice to sound like mine. “‘Why do black people go to church? Why can’t my shoes get dirty? Can you show me the Tootsie Roll dance? What are the projects like, do you know?’”
I rolled my eyes and laughed at the embrrassing memories.
I put on my other sock and he said, “Aye, remember when you couldn’t understand nobody and we had to work backwards? You thought ‘shorty’ was ‘shad.’ ‘Lucius, what’s “shad”?’”
I laughed. “I still don’t get that one. I heard someone call his six-foot-five homie Shorty.”
“Hey,” he said. “Sometimes you’ve just gotta use it your own way. Make it work.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” I said.
James transitioned into the next song, kicking it off with the usual call-and-response with his band.
“I can tell,” he said. “And I’m here to help. Say, you about ready for work?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We put on matching dark shades, and the apartment swam in a deep bottle-green murk.
Outside, I turned from locking the front door and Lucius was bending my Black Card with his thumb and forefinger.
I jumped over to grab it. “Gimme that.”
The card looked janky and faded in the daylight. Standing on the porch, I turned it over and reread the black privileges on the back. Some of them made sense, like maintaining a healthy skepticism of white folks, and use of the n-word. But some of it seemed silly, like the stuff about flip-flops and socks.
I’d got what I’d been trying to get, but it wasn’t what I thought I’d wanted.
“Being black isn’t a club,” I told Lucius. “There are no ins and outs.”
He nodded, divided diagonally by the sun shining under the porch roof. “We’re all in, all the time,” he said. “You don’t really need black lessons from me. The world’s a goddamn black lesson.”
He sent a nod out toward the coffee shop.
This shift was gonna be with Mona, and I knew that if I took my usual route through the alley, I’d think of every stupid, mean thing I’d said to her until I was even more awkward by the time I arrived. I walked past Lucius and onto the tan sidewalk, taking a right toward Carytown.
“So, what do I do now?” I asked. “There’re no Black Cards, so what am I working toward?”
“Being the you that you want to be. So, I say do what you been doing,” he said. “Like when you said your piece to that boy from North Carolina the other day.”
“Thanks,” I said, then winced, remembering JJ’s confusion at my blackness. “You think it changed anything?”
“More than if you ain’t said nothing,” said Lucius. “But . . . for the time you spend converting a single redneck, five more are born.”
I pictured a field with endless rows of low plants, cabbage-size white heads popping up from the ground, with mesh-back hats, mullets, buzz cuts, and teased bangs appearing in little clouds of dry dirt.
We stopped at the corner of Ellwood Avenue. A tree waved overhead while a few cars passed, stirring up a wave of hot air. A silver SUV stopped at the curb in front of us. The window oozed down and I saw a middle-aged white man at the wheel, opening his mouth to say something. I kept my mouth shut because you don’t provoke a stranger in a big vehicle when you’re on foot. After a moment, he squinched his eyes into his sunglasses, then popped his mouth shut and looked forward. The window slid back up and the car rolled off.
“What was that about?” I asked Lucius.
“Oh, you’ll see.”
We crossed the street. The houses looked the same. So did the cars disappearing down the avenue.
“Lucius, I expected it to feel different,” I said.
“What?” he asked
“Being black,” I said. “The sun’s still hot and I still want another cup of coffee.”
“You always been black. Why would that feel different now?” he asked. “White people want you to think it feels different, because they think it would. That’s how they justify treating us worse.”
“Hell no,” I said.
“Mmm-hmm,” he agreed. “You’re you. Only thing that should feel different is that you’re always kinda mad.”
I looked around, at the chocolate shop and the deli. That was why this world always seemed like it hadn’t been created for me.
“Why didn’t you tell me this a few years ago?” I asked. “Coulda saved me some grief.”
“You needed to figure it out for yourself,” Lucius said. “You weren’t there yet. We weren’t talking like this back then.”
We came up on the parking garage behind the movie theater. Lucius’s voice rippled through the concrete structure when he said, “Hey, let me hold your card?”
I hesitated for half a second, then handed it to him, feeling trusting. He stepped to the parking garage entrance and fed my Black Card into the ticket machine. The barricade lifted and Lucius walked in, waving me along over his shoulder as he faded into the darkness.
Inside, the parking garage looked like none I’d ever seen. Instead of cars and parking spaces, a velvet rope ran along the wall, draping lavishly between brass posts. Small spotlights shined up on the framed posters lining the wall. Black faces looked out from each one, smiling, glowering, or holding a pizza box and staring in front of different colored backgrounds, advertising movies I’d seen, and others I made a mental note to check out.
Our footprints were quiet, and I looked down to see that I was walking on wall-to-wall maroon carpet. There was a perfect air-conditioned chill. I caught the toasty, salty, unmistakable popcorn smell and saw a machine in the corner, with nuclear yellow kernels piled up against the greasy glass. Lucius cut a right and I followed him up a ramp with more velvet rope and posters.
Lucius disappeared onto the flat second level while I still climbed. As soon as he was gone from my sight, Blaxploitation conga drums rolled, and some brassy funk with chicken-scratch guitar started to play, piped in through fabric-covered hi-fi speakers mounted along the wall every few posters.
I finished the walk up, Lucius reappearing a foot at a time as I took the last few steps onto level two. He sat facing me in a black beret, legs crossed in a black canvas director’s chair. He pointed to the empty, identical chair next to him with a black megaphone, revealing the green-and-red fist painted on its side. A mechanical rumble quivered through the cement beneath the carpet, and when I sat, I saw that a movie screen had scrolled down behind me, blocking the top of the ramp.
I took off my shades and tucked them onto the neck of my shirt as the light dimmed even more. Film clattered into a projector above our heads, and a familiar 4-3-2-1 countdown flickered on the screen in front of us.
The first thing we saw was from a black-and-white movie. Corny old jazz tooted through the speakers as an older black man in a tux and a toothy grin tap-danced down half a flight of stairs and bowed in front of a little white girl. The grin stayed frozen on his face as he took the girl’s hand in his gloved fingers and they turned to dance together up the stairs, her imitating his every move as they climbed.
The dancing was impressive, but I couldn’t stop thinking how everything hung on that little girl’s whims. She could have pushed the man down the stairs, and he wouldn’t be able to do anything but keep forcing that skeleton grin.
The screen flashed white, then some color footage of a black woman in a big fuchsia 1980s suit with curlicue accents and matching hat appeared on the screen, dangling a small leather purse from a white-gloved hand. The second character with gloves, because we aren’t allowed to touch the white world with our bare hands.
“Our?” Lucius read my thoughts.
“Yup,” I said.
Us.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him smile and nod.
On the screen, the 1980s black woman stepped back gingerly as a white couple began a dramatic kiss. An oldies ballad hit a crescendo. Seeing the climax of a movie without seeing anything else felt pointless. I had to be at work. I turned to Lucius, my chair’s canvas back stretching under my weight.
“Why’re we watching movies?” I asked.
He snapped his fingers and the projection stopped.
“I take it you’ve never heard of a Magical Negro,” he said.
“No . . .” I could use one of those. I could be one of those. “Wait,” I said. “Is this some more nonsense you made up?”
“I ain’t made this up,” Lucius said. “It’s some nonsense, though.”
“So what is it?” I asked, losing my sense of depth as I stared into the hanging silver-white screen.
“It’s in a movie or a TV show,” Lucius said. “Where there’s a black character, and the only reason they’re on is to help the white folks. Maybe they’re a cool old man with some sage advice. Sometimes they actually have some mystical ability and can make white people good at sports or dancing.” He pointed the megaphone at the screen and the tap dancer soft-shoed across it, in sharp relief to the blank background.
“But in movies,” Lucius said, “they disappear when their work is done.”
“Like a god in the machine, where they come out of the blue to change things?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “But I guess they come out of the white.”
We both laughed, then I stirred in my chair and said, “I need to get to work.”
He waved me back into my seat, “Not yet. We’re on Colored People Time in here, the clock’s moving differently.”
“What about out there?” I asked, pointing toward an exit sign with a cardboard cutout of a woman with a leather jacket, ’fro and pistol standing by it.
“We’re on their time out there,” Lucius said. “But a Magical Negro’s work is never done. We don’t disappear.”
“We?” I asked.
“What do you think I am?”
I just kinda stared at him as he shrugged. I’d always known that people couldn’t see Lucius, but we’d never talked about it, because I didn’t want him to go away.
“A’ight.” Lucius stood. “Let’s go. I think you’re gonna see things differently from now on.”
We rounded the corner onto Cary Street, shades back on, and I heard weeping as we passed under the century-old Byrd Theatre’s ornate marquee. A slim brother with short dreadlocks was sitting in the passenger seat of an SUV, hiding his face with his hands, massaging his forehead with his fingertips, and sobbing loudly.
“Damn, Lucius. Should we check on this guy?” I asked.
“Naw, look.” He pointed.
A preppy middle-aged black man in a chino baseball cap and tucked-in polo was climbing out of the driver’s seat, paunch first. He was clutching a brown bag from the local conservative Christian grocery chain and making a sour face. The two men didn’t match.
“What’s going on?” I muttered to Lucius. “They a couple? Or is the older guy his dad?”
“Not quite,” said Lucius. “I think that young brotha’s worn out from a tough job.”
I stopped in front of the vintage store next door and watched the drama. Sobs echoed under the movie marquee, but no one else was looking at the young man crying in the car’s front seat. Lucius sidled up to me. A mannequin in a beaded 1920s flapper dress loomed over him from the store window.
It was the beginning of lunch hour, and the sidewalks were busy with men in rumpled suits and women in wilted blouses, dragging themselves along, holding white paper bags and plastic-topped soda cups. Peppered throughout were black people, often walking in pairs, rarely both in professional dress. A punky white bike courier I sorta knew pedaled by, giving me a nod. I wondered if he’d seen Paper Fire with a different bassist.
The preppy black guy shoved his grocery bag into the back of his SUV then slammed the door, and the crying got quiet. A teenage couple were coming toward us, both black kids, both holding colorful ice cream cones. The girl’s eyes slid my way before she focused her attention back on her bright green ice cream.
“Walk with me,” Lucius said.
We stepped out and I almost bumped into a twenty-something couple who were walking a few feet behind the teenagers, holding their own ice cream.
I said, “’Scuse me” and stepped aside, then looked closer.
The guy was wearing a blue mail-carrier uniform with the hat turned backwards, and the woman with him had long, thick braids under a jazzy applejack hat. They looked just like characters from a black romance movie I’d seen in high school. I watched them until the guy looked my way. I got worried I was gonna get grief for staring, but he nodded. I smiled. Straight up, this was already twice as many black people as I was used to seeing in Carytown. I loved it.
A block later, I looked across the narrow street and saw the dashiki-wearing, gray-dreadlock-having Afrocentric professor guy who comes into the coffee shop for hummus padding down the sidewalk in sandals. He was trailed by a militant-looking brother who was defying summer in a black leather jacket and beret, marching with a rifle on his shoulder.
Once my instinct to duck behind a mailbox passed, I started to think how no black person could get away with carrying a rifle on the street. So what was going on?
Two professional black women in their thirties were smiling as they walked into a Thai restaurant. Two ’80s sitcom-mom-looking black women ducked in behind them, before the door could clip their broad-shouldered teal-and-kente-cloth blazers. I continued through the bright day, feeling more and more like myself as I walked the last block to work in peace, my favorite bass line running through my head.
Three-Piece Tarik lounged in a wrought-iron chair on the coffee shop patio, slowly rolling his tongue across the front of his top teeth as he replaced his mug on the matching wrought-iron table. Across the table from Tarik stretched a brother who was somehow lounging harder, somehow smoother, wearing linen pants that were somehow flowier, and black shades that were somehow darker, setting down a cup that somehow seemed more delicate than Tarik’s.
I didn’t think that anyone could seem cooler than Tarik, and the surprised laugh that bubbled up inside me added a little soul to my nod when we said hello. Without thinking, I led with my chin, not my forehead.
Tarik’s companion’s nod was so slow it looked like he was taking a deep breath of mountain air. Tarik saw me watching and nodded too.
I was in on something.
Lucius clapped my shoulder, said, “I’m there for you, brotha, but I’ll be out here right now,” then tapped his heart with the top of his fist and pulled out a chair to join them.
Who will be with Mona? I wondered, as I tied on an apron in the employee bathroom. Maybe she’s got a super-earthy sista guiding her, or she could wish she was hood. I tried to picture Mona in a parka and big gold earrings.
Then I stepped out, smoothing my apron with my palms, and got my answer. She looked an awful lot like Mona, but a few years older, and dressed in a gray wool skirt suit with her locks pulled back into a bun. She could have been Mona’s yuppie older sister.
Some neo-soul was on the stereo, a slower song with a synthetic-sounding acoustic guitar. Mona’s companion poured steamed milk from a small silver pitcher into a go cup and handed it to regular Mona, who rung up Soy Latte. I smiled at the customer, then said hi to the Monas. The white customer squinted at the espresso machine, trying to figure out why I was talking to it.
Mona said, “Hi.”
We worked through the lunch rush. The Monas stayed up front, plunging the metal scoop into the ice machine for cold drinks and bringing food orders back to my kitchen stronghold. During lulls, I’d bus tables, passing between them like an extra point, the smell of their coconut shampoo wafting around me in stereo. It hit me that just by doing it—cutting a sandwich, scraping dried mustard from a plate—whatever I did was undoubtedly black.
Things quieted down by 1:30. I joined the Mona I knew at the counter, with a mental list of things to sincerely apologize for, from the dumb questions I asked at her house, to getting mad at her about the cops, to something I couldn’t quite put in words, about how I’d come in too hot and assumed too much.
Before I could start, she said, “They found the guy.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Did you have to pick him out of a lineup or something?” I asked. I pictured Mona behind a spotlight, pointing at a row of light-skinned brothers.
“No.” Mona stirred her chai tea until there was a tan whirlpool in the middle. “He was dead.”
I wished I’d been the one to kill him, or that Mona could have. But that would have dug the hole deeper.
“What happened?” I asked. “How’d they know it was him?”
“They had a description for a while,” she said. “And it fit this guy they wanted for other break-ins,” she continued, spitting out that last word. “And they found him in an abandoned house, with a needle near him.”
I should have felt relieved, but having some facts made him realer. Finally, really seeing him in my mind made me aware of a distance that had always existed between Mona and me.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
Dead quiet from her, dark eyes gleaming wet. Then, “Still scared.”
And I sighed.
“I’m glad you asked, though,” she said.
“I should have earlier,” I answered.
We let that hang in the air, alongside Mona’s airy pop music that I’d never admit to liking.
I started pumping a coffee for myself. The new Mona came out of the kitchen and, without looking at me, bopped Mona’s shoulder with her knuckles, sisterly, murmuring, “What else?”
I stood at the airpot, waiting to hear. Mona saw me and I could practically hear her thinking, “You finally figured that out, huh?”
Then Mona said, “I put in my notice. I’m quitting.”
The older Mona beamed, leaning by the espresso machine with her hands in her apron pocket.
“Oh,” I said.
I was not surprised, but I was sad—because I’d miss her and because I couldn’t think of worse circumstances.
“I got an internship up in DC,” she explained as her clone smiled behind her. “I’m gonna take a semester off and just . . . do that,” she said.
“That sounds perfect,” I said.
The less I said, the less chance I’d ruin the calm with my mouth. So we finished our shift quietly, me wondering what came next.
I took the really long way home, and stopped off at the old Vibe Café, where I sat at a dark table by the kitchen and filled out an application, smelling like coffee grounds and all. I didn’t recognize anyone. They wouldn’t know me. I could do something new there.
The kitchen door swung open and I got a glimpse of a black man in an apron, waving steam off the top of a huge pot. Next to him, a brother in a plaid shorts suit lounged in a beach chair and sipped an electric blue cocktail. Even with them around, working at an Italian spot isn’t exactly part of a real-deal brotherman lifestyle. But the tips would be better, and I figured if Mona could want something then go get it, then it might work for me as well.
Plus, each box that I filled in on the application got me thinking that it’d be just about as easy to apply for college, and maybe I should look into that. Not like I had much else to do, or any other idea for how that might change.
It was getting dark and I was walking up Mason’s girlfriend’s block on my way home when I saw Mason in his royal-blue work polo, placing his guitar case in his car’s trunk.
I said, “Aye, Mason.”
He turned around, saw me, and quickly slammed the trunk shut, then leaned against it, risking getting dirt on the butt of his black chinos.
I wish we could have just had a laugh about Hookah Guy, but he had some questions to answer. I stopped on the sidewalk.
“Where are you off to with the guitar? We gonna practice?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“OK.” I nodded. “You gonna practice with someone else?”
“Uh,” he said, and did a nervous laugh. “Russell didn’t tell you?” he asked, standing straight and rocking from foot to foot behind his car.
“No . . . ?” The iced coffee I’d drunk while closing up the shop hit my bladder and I started rocking, too.
“Clay’s gonna be our new bass player,” Mason said.
We stared at each other for a couple of seconds, waiting for a guy in a pro wrestling T-shirt with blue lightning bolts all over it to pass on a rumbling motorcycle. Mason spent the whole time wincing in this condescending way.
“You want me to switch to guitar or something?” I asked, louder than needed, immediately getting embarrassed for sounding so pathetic. I can’t play guitar.
“No.” Mason sighed and his shoulders dropped.
Oh.
“Clay?” I leaned forward and Mason tensed.
“Yeah. I’m sorry, dude. He can play and you just, you haven’t seemed too into it.”
“Clay’s into it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
I thought of the tours we’d talked about going on, the great shows we wanted to have, the classic album we were planning to make.
I sighed. They’d rather do that with Clay than with me.
“I’m sorry, dude.” He started bouncing his keys in his hand, like they were just raring to get in his car’s ignition.
“I got nothing, man,” I said. “I got nothing.”
“So did we when you’d get too drunk to play, or skip the whole show,” Mason said. “What’s that?”
“Me trying not to lose my shit,” I said, and stalked off, as if the funk band I really wanted to be in would be waiting on my porch.
It’s easy to lose it when you’re looking for yourself.
My eyes were starting to tear, so I stared at the sidewalk, which glowed in the dusk. I was too shocked to really be pissed or sad. Mason drove by a minute later and shouted, “I’m sorry, dude,” out his window. I flipped him off and saw a streak of brake lights before he gassed it to the stop sign on the next block.
Those tours and albums? They weren’t gonna happen anyway.
When I got home, the mailbox was stuffed. I grabbed the letters then walked in. Lucius was asleep on the couch with his head lolling over the back. One of my punk records sat on the cushion next to him. I moved the record back to the stereo then spread the envelopes like a hand of cards. I had one from the City of Richmond, which I split open with my thumb. It was a ticket. Dated July 15. For Public Intoxication. The next sheet was a carbon of intake papers, dated that night and signed by Donahue. They crinkled in my hand, 100 percent real.
For the time being, my city was empty and I was free.