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194 pages, Paperback
First published October 23, 2018
Emmanuel started learning the basics of his Blackness before he knew how to do long division: smiling when angry, whispering when he wanted to yell.Emmanuel is constantly checking his Blackness on a scale of 1-10: put his hood up, the number increases, put on a button up shirt and nice shoes, it decreases. Ours is a world where policies like Stop and Frisk have specifically target Black youth and, in the story, Emmanuel is painfully aware that simply being Black is cause enough for a police officer to throw him up against the wall. The story initially unfolds as what would be a typical day for him yet in the background of everyone’s mind is a court case that has just concluded. A white man has taken a chainsaw and murdered five Black children outside a public library, claiming it to be self-defence and has been acquitted.
She steps to me. I stretch my neck out for her and close my eyes. She puts one hand on one side of my neck. Her hand is warm plus strong. She stabs the injector needle in. My head feels the way an orange tastes. I open my eyes and look at her. She waits. I look at her more. She frowns, then gives me another shot. And then I feel the Good.
An impossible hand punched my earlobe. An unborn fetus, aborted the day before, was standing at my bedside. His name was Jackie Gunner.
"So, I guess you didn't have the balls?" Jackie Gunner said. His voice was a stern squeak. My eyelids rolled open. He was a tiny silhouette on the end of my pillow. Smaller than a field mouse.
"Well, say something, Dad." He said Dad the way some people say cunt. "Do you even feel bad?"
"Yeah," I said. "I feel real bad."
"I feel real bad," Jackie Gunner repeated. "Is real bad a hole big enough to fit our lives in?"
"Our?" I said.
"It's a metaphor, Daddy," said a new voice, this one shy, charming even. A second tiny fetus climbed up my comforter onto my bed. Her name, I knew, was Jamie Lou.
Soon I was staring at a small entryway sign that read RADIOLOGY I. In the hall there was an extremely old man in a wheelchair. He groaned steadily. His white skin looked stretched and spotty. It seemed someone had forgotten him or maybe was using him to prop open the door. There were so many tubes going in and coming out of him that I couldn't imagine where they began or ended. I walked past quickly. Farther down the same hall, a black guy in a wheelchair stared in my direction with eyes so empty I thought they might suck something out of me.
It's very hard at first for some people. But then if you figure that you are infinite, you are supreme and therefore the master of all things, and it's silly to be sad about things like how much your hip is always going to hurt or how you're so old that the flu means a life in bed or how gone forever your mother is.
I don't know much about other grids in our state block, because way before the Flash came, the soldier-police—the state-sponsored war-coordination authorities—took away everyone's cars. Their slogan—"For us to serve and protect, you must conserve and respect"—is emblazoned on posters in the school, on the windows of some people's homes. ... Back before the Flash ever came, a lot of people actually loved the SPs. They thought they were keeping us safe. People believe lies, believe anything when they are afraid. That's another thing. Aren't we lucky that before the Flash all the soldier-police were deployed elsewhere?