Trell

Even if Big Vinnie’s Vinnie-isms are hard to take, one thing’s for sure: I’m a lot more at home in his beat-up excuse for a bus than I am riding in the gleaming silver Mercedes-Benz minibus that my school owns. This year I started going to the Weld School, a fancy-Nancy private school I got myself into (and now maybe wish I hadn’t). Ma and everybody else were so proud of me for getting myself out of Boston Public and setting my sights higher, for figuring out the Weld had a program for kids from Boston’s poor neighborhoods, for getting an application together and submitting it by the school’s deadline and then — surprise, surprise — for actually getting accepted, so long as I repeated the seventh grade.

It was my daddy who actually gave me the idea. I don’t mean he knew about the Weld. But he got bussed to a public school in a Boston suburb when he was a kid — before he started getting into trouble, that is. I decided I wanted to try to do something like that, too, and I felt pretty good about getting myself accepted. Except I’m not really feeling accepted. I’m lonely most of the time I’m there, and the bus ride is endless. It’s summer break now, and I’m not sure I want to go back for eighth grade. This is one of the big things I need to figure out this summer — and soon.

I actually wanted to quit after the first week. I hated the bus ride, for one thing. I had to get up in the dark to catch the minibus the school sent around Roxbury and Mattapan to scoop up day students from the city. It was like an hour ride, and at first I thought I might sleep along the way. I sure was wrong. The ride was so bumpy, it made me think of Mattie Ross, the girl in my favorite book, True Grit. There are times where she’s riding on horseback along the backcountry roads of Arkansas and Oklahoma, and it’s just a whole lot of bumps, deep ruts, and constant starting and stopping. I certainly never got to school any more rested, and sometimes I had a headache or sore neck, too.

The bus wasn’t the only bad thing. Or even the worst thing. It was the teachers trying too hard to seem so nice and supportive, but actually being totally creepy. My adviser, especially. The way the Weld works is new seventh-graders are supposed to meet with their adviser two mornings a week before classes. But because of my ridiculous commute, I usually got to school late, so I missed a lot of the meetings. Then one morning in early October, I got off the bus and my head and nose were all stuffed up. My eyes were swollen, maybe from allergies but probably just a cold, and Mr. Rowe, my adviser, caught up with me in the hallway of the middle-school building. I had missed our meeting earlier that week, and Mr. Rowe pulled me aside into an empty classroom. I was standing there rubbing my eyes, and I sneezed hard. Mr. Rowe studied me. He waited a second and then said that he had a question to ask.

“TV, video games, music — whatever,” he said. “You’re exhausted.” Mr. Rowe fidgeted with his bow tie. He nodded. “I get it, Van Trell. I do. No one’s home. Just you. No supervision. You’re up all hours.”

Mr. Rowe saw me making a face. Ma might work a lot and get home after dark, but she makes me turn out the lights at nine thirty. On the dot.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Maybe someone is home. But it’s noisy, loud music. Party time. Alcohol, drugs — am I right? Is that why your eyes are puffy, Van Trell? You know, like secondhand smoke, from the marijuana?”

I was thinking, Really? Here for me? You don’t know anything, Mr. “I’m so hip” Rowe. But I didn’t say a word. Just as I’d hardly said a word to anybody during the first weeks of school. I think Mr. Rowe took my silence as a yes, because next he said, “We might want to explore how to go about making some changes on the home front.” The meeting ended, and I hurried into class.

Besides making me mad, I was left feeling stranger than ever — and I was already feeling pretty strange, surrounded mostly by white kids. It wasn’t the fact they were white that made it so weird. My neighborhood schools have plenty of white kids. The strange part was how rich they were. I’d never seen so many rich kids — coming to school in big black SUVs and Lincoln Navigators, sometimes with a driver. Living in gigantic mansions. We’d pass a bunch of them as we got to school in the morning. Houses with twenty rooms, thirty rooms, swimming pools, tennis courts. I didn’t know how to talk to these kids, and I began feeling real self-conscious about where I was from. I mean, I couldn’t imagine a kid from one of my classes seeing the two-family on Hutchings Street where Ma and I lived, and I didn’t like that feeling. Then came times kids talked about colleges, and how their dads and moms went to Yale or Harvard or Stanford, places like that. I sure dodged those conversations, heading in the opposite direction before anyone could ask me about my daddy.

I basically went mute, and that’s not me, not even close — usually you can’t shut me up, and so I let Ma know how much I was hating the Weld. In November they held a special “Diversity Day,” and when I got home, I told Ma it was pathetic. Because besides me, there were only a few other black and Asian kids at the school, and so I was like, Really? Diversity Day? They brought in a couple of speakers, but the talks were in the afternoon during sports, so it was like five people were in the room. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? And that’s when Ma stopped me. She was standing in the kitchen, hands on her slim hips and wearing that serious look I knew all too well. She made clear I had to finish what I started — and she meant a full school year. And I knew she was right, really.

Eventually there even came a moment when I began to make some sense of it, and it happened in my English class when we were reading this poem by Langston Hughes I ended up memorizing. It’s called “To Certain Intellectuals,” and it goes like this:

You are no friend of mine

For I am poor,

Black,

Ignorant and slow, —

Not your kind.

You yourself

Have told me so, —

No friend of mine.

Maybe it’s a little harsh, but except for my English teacher, that’s how I felt about Mr. Rowe and the other smarty-pants teachers who smiled down at me and gave me these earnest looks but never really wanted to know me. You’re up all hours, aren’t you, living in the craziness of the inner city where everyone, young and old, runs wild? Anyway, the poem helped me feel not so alone, and I tried my best to do my schoolwork while keeping to myself.

Big Vinnie slowed the bus as he approached Walpole, where a guard stationed in the entrance booth came into view. He was dressed in a green uniform, wore a gun on his belt, and waved Vinnie through. Vinnie drove the bus around the big circular driveway, passing the big main office building, made of stone and stained a dark gray after the more than hundred years since the granite blocks were first stacked into place. Next came the outdoor space, extending for acres. It was closed in by not one but two rows of fencing topped with thick coils of barbed wire. Inside was a blacktop area where the men spent outside time. Some shot baskets, others lifted weights, and others just stood around. Farther back was the garden, where I could see some of the inmates working, and where Daddy liked to spend his outside time.

The sun was gone now, replaced by solid gray clouds that matched the color of the prison. Big Vinnie pulled up in front of the next building we came to. It was a three-story building called Cellblock C. It had prison cells in the rear, but in front was the prison hospital and the visitors’ section. The way we had circled in was kind of like a slide show, with one part of the prison followed by the slide of another — the buildings in their dull grayness, the miles and miles of barbed wire, and the guards in green bearing arms. The images were stuck in my mind after all these years of weekly visits, always there even when I wasn’t in Vinnie’s bus pulling up on Saturdays, always there even when I didn’t want to be thinking about it — and always leaving me a pit in my stomach.

The prison entry was burned into my memory the same way Daddy’s official prison sheet was from the first time I saw it in Nora’s files. Nora is my daddy’s attorney; she’s been fighting for him in court for a year now, and last year, when I was still thirteen, I happened to come across the single-page sheet in one of Nora’s big manila legal folders. I was helping Nora at her law office. There wasn’t much I could do at first, but I was able to organize files into alphabetical order, and it was while doing that that I came across a folder containing the form.

The official document had been filled out the day Daddy was taken away for good. (I was only a baby then, 1989 — one year old, to be exact.) The thing that caught my eye was Daddy’s mug shot pasted on top of the page. It stopped me cold. Daddy was so young looking. He was only twenty-two, so of course he looked young. But it wasn’t that. It was that I’d never seen him like thi s — two face shots, one looking straight ahead and the other in profile, and both photographs were grainy-looking, in black and white. In the one where he was looking straight into the camera, a tiny sign was pinned to his dark sweatshirt. In white block letters the sign read BOSTON POLICE. Underneath was a six-digit number — 195354. I recognized the number immediately as being Daddy’s, the number that was always on the visitors list at the state prison and that was also stamped on all of the legal papers contained in Nora’s files about his case. It was like Daddy no longer had a name, just a six-digit number. Then underneath the number was this date — 11-11-89 — which I also recognized. That was the day in 1989 — November 11 — when the jury unanimously decided Daddy had shot and killed the girl, and the judge sent him away to prison for life.

I could feel my heart beating faster as I gripped the sheet, studying it. Printed in bold on it were things like, Name, Alias, Birthplace. I read that Daddy was five foot six inches tall and that he weighed only 139 pounds. I knew that from lifting weights in prison and exercising he now weighed at least twenty-five more pounds than that. I read his parents’ names (my grandparents): Joseph and Wanda. I read his alias was “Smut.” I had never heard that before. Later when I got home I looked the word up in Webster’s. Smut was a word meaning “a particle of dirt, a smudge.” I walked into the kitchen holding the dictionary and asked Ma why Daddy would have a nickname like that. She laughed out loud. “I haven’t heard your daddy called that in a long, long time.” She said Daddy was called Smut when he was a little boy. Said his aunt had come up with it, because when Daddy was little he was always into everything, turning their apartment upside down and making a mess, and one time his momma and aunt came home to find Daddy in the kitchen, and the counter was covered in flour and sugar and broken eggshells. Daddy announced he was baking them a cake, and the two couldn’t help but laugh, and his aunt started singing, “Oh, Romero, my little boy, you are always making smut, always making smut,” and soon enough she was calling him Smut. Ma said it was a term of endearment, even if the word didn’t seem so.

But as I read this information, I kept going back to Daddy’s photo. His hair was cut in tight curls, and he wore a thin mustache that was kind of lame and looked like a teenager trying to grow facial hair. The form said his eyes were “maroon,” which was odd, because they’re as brown as hazelnuts. But it wasn’t any of this that froze me in place. It was the look on Daddy’s face. His eyes were hollow, and his mouth was slack. He was skinny then but looked heavy, slumping under the weight of something, some kind of invisible burden. In my whole life I’d never seen Daddy look so sad and lost, and it left me feeling like I might be sick.

Ma and I got off the bus, and in a single file behind Marlon Williams’s mother, Terrance Jones’s grandmother, and the rest who’d come this day, we slowly walked into the waiting area. The guards called it the Visitors Center, as if we were entering some kind of theme park, museum, or even a zoo. It always struck me as funny how people, especially the official-talking ones, play around with words, trying to fool us into maybe, just maybe, thinking something is not really what it is: harsh.

“Shey Taylor,” a uniformed woman yelled from her chair behind a desk that was on a platform. “Van Trell Taylor.” The woman had recognized us, and she signaled to another guard, who led us to the security checkpoint. Ma and I began the drill we knew by heart like we were the walking dead: take off shoes and place into bin with Ma’s purse; step through a metal detector with its stop-and-go, red-and-green lights; and wait for the bin to emerge from an X-ray machine. Once we were cleared, the guard pointed across the room to a round table assigned to us.

The room was like a small school cafeteria, with its beige linoleum floor, sick-green tile on the lower part of the walls, and off-white paint on the upper half. The room was run-down — the linoleum was shredding, wall tiles were cracked and missing, and the paint was peeling off in long strips. The round tables and stools were made of stainless steel. The only good thing was the bank of windows along the far wall, so at least the outside light could shine in, except that today the sky just kept getting grayer and grayer.

Ma and I had a table by the window, and we sat down on the stools and waited. I thought about the mug shot in Daddy’s folder. He certainly didn’t look like that anymore. For one thing he was thirteen years older, and he was no longer trying to grow a mustache. He no longer had any hair either, because in prison he shaved his head. Daddy had quit high school his junior year, but in prison he’d earned his GED, and was now taking college courses through a program with Bunker Hill Community College. Daddy would get excited sometimes talking about what he was reading, whether it was the sociology course on urban justice or the course he took in American history. In fact, Daddy gave me some ideas on what I should read when I had to do a paper about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for history class at the Weld. It was like we were working on the paper together, and that felt good. That’s how Daddy was — not like in the mug shot but always seeming so upbeat, so happy to see us each and every week. I don’t know how he did it.

Pretty soon the door on the far side opened. The duty guard entered, and behind him was Daddy. Right away I could see something was different. Daddy usually strode into the room, head high, smiling my way. But this time he was looking down, and he seemed to be shuffling, almost limping, across the floor.

Daddy’s lower lip was three times its normal size, all puffy and discolored. His left eye was practically swollen shut, all black-and-blue, and his left cheekbone was scratched, bruised, and also swollen. “I know,” he said again. “I know.”

Daddy rubbed his chin. He didn’t want to talk about it, but he also knew Ma wouldn’t let them talk about anything else until he explained. “There was a new guy,” he said, “young kid, busted selling weed. Nothing serious, really. He shouldn’t even be put in a place like this.”

Daddy took a deep breath. “The other guy, Lug — he’s this dude from Brockton, sorriest guy I ever seen, unhappiest guy in the world, and meanest, too, a guy you keep a distance from. He starts giving the new kid a hard time, and I saw no reason for that.”

It was a few minutes before anyone said anything. Now it was Ma’s turn to take a deep breath. We all sat there, and then Ma spoke. “Nora says Trell is being a big help in the office, getting ready for next week.”

Daddy looked up, happy the subject had changed, and he smiled, a crooked smile on account of his lower lip. Looking at Daddy’s wounded head, it was like my head began to hurt, too. My parents started talking about the ruling from the court we were expecting on the big appeal Nora had filed during the winter in the state appeals court. In it Nora was trying to convince the court to reopen Daddy’s case because the lawyer at his trial had been so incompetent. Daddy hadn’t been able to pay for his own lawyer, so he was appointed a lawyer by the state, called a public defender. Nora says some public defenders are real good, but Daddy unfortunately didn’t get one of them. Nora had discovered Daddy’s trial lawyer was a drunk, which is kind of sad, really, if not for the fact he had Daddy’s fate in his hands and was supposed to show the jury that no way was Daddy the one who shot the girl. Turns out the lawyer was drunk most of the time, and didn’t ever do the basic things any defense lawyer would do, like talk to Daddy’s friends who were with him when the girl was shot. Because you can’t be two places at once. But the lawyer never told the jury about it. Unbelievable. Truly crazy. There was other legal stuff in Nora’s motion, but this was the main one, something Nora called “ineffective assistance of counsel,” which means his lawyer at the trial was so incompetent that it violated Daddy’s right to a fair trial under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Daddy asked me a little about my summer, and that’s when I noticed the duty guard heading toward us. This was the signal our hour was up, and I was shocked, because it didn’t seem like an hour had gone by. I think it was because Daddy was so smashed up, and he seemed so down, which was unlike Daddy and strange to me. I must have spaced out. I looked over at the guard and saw it was my least favorite, a big beefy-looking guy who was never very nice. His name was Officer White.

Officer White chuckled. “Sure,” he said. Then he addressed Ma. “Whaddya think, Shey, about Romeo here? Lookin’ good, you think?”

Daddy grimaced from his wounds as he stood up to go. I moved close to Ma. We ignored Officer White, but the guard was not finished with us. Now he was looking at me. “Trell?” he said. “How old are you now?”

Officer White nodded. He raised one of his meaty hands and began scratching his head. “That’s what I was thinking. Exactly what I was thinking. You see, I was standing over there watching you today, thinking, ain’t that sweet, the three of you together. And it dawned on me Trell was probably fourteen years old now. So, I just had to ask and, what do ya know, I was right. Trell Taylor’s fourteen years old. Damn, how time flies.”

Officer White paused before continuing. “I gotta say, Trell, you growin’ up to look an awful lot like your momma, thin-like, and those pearly white teeth like hers that can light up a room with a smile takes up your whole face, and your skin, dark just like your daddy’s, and your eyes like his, too, deep brown, big, and round.”

Officer White looked at my parents. “You two — I can imagine — must be real proud.” He was nodding slowly, like he was deep in thought.

“Romeo, you ever think about that?” Officer White’s voice dropped down. “Your daughter and the little girl you killed — being so close in age?”

I was gonna explode — that’s how I felt. Start screaming at Officer White he was mean and to stop. Maybe even hit him. But before I moved an inch, Daddy stepped sideways in between the man and me. He knew how furious I was even before I knew it, and, with his back to Officer White, he gave me a hard look.

Officer White kept going. “Real tragedy, don’t you think? Poor Ruby’s parents never got to see their little girl on her fourteenth birthday.”

Daddy didn’t take his eyes off me. “Don’t you dare, Trell,” he whispered. “Don’t you dare.”

I looked over my shoulder. My frown softened into a smile. It’s what Daddy always said at the end of our visits. I don’t remember when he started, but he’s been saying it for as long as I can remember. Trolls, bells, and candy canes — silly stuff, really, but between him and me it was special, and it meant this: I love you.