ONE
“My aunt doesn’t pay me any mind,” Yolanda says, then gets quiet, so I stop the questions. “She’s mostly on the road anyway.”
“On the road where?”
“Wherever there’s a march.” Yolanda sticks her chin out at me, as if daring me with this news, but I don’t know what she’s talking about.
“A march?”
She can see I don’t get it. “Don’t you watch TV? Montgomery? Birmingham?”
“You mean a civil rights march?” I can hardly believe it. I can’t make sense of it. My parents are always saying it’s Communists who go on those marches. But Yolanda’s just an ordinary person. Her aunt can’t be a Communist.
“She got beaten up at the last one,” Yolanda says.
“Beat up?” I look at Yolanda more closely, to see if there’s something about her I may have missed before. But I don’t even know what to look for. I don’t even know what Communists look like.
“People get beat up a lot more than they show on TV,” she says.
“Why?”
“You playin’ with me, girl?” she sounds annoyed.
“No.”
She looks down, and I don’t understand what’s wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t ask her any more questions. Maybe she’s touchy about being colored. She looks up again, and her face is different. Her eyebrows are scrunched together and her mouth is in a pout. She looks mad at me. “White folks have been beating on niggers for a long time.”
I stare at her, confused.
“That’s what Cheryl says.”
“Cheryl?”
“My aunt.”
I don’t know what to say. I’ve never beaten anyone up. Of any color. And I’m pretty sure my father doesn’t beat up anyone else but us.
“She shows me newspaper stories about it,” Yolanda says. “The stories don’t tell it all, though, not what really happens.”
“Has she ever gotten really hurt?”
“Some bleeding. That’s all. Her friend got hurt bad last time, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Died.”
“God.”
“God doesn’t seem too bothered about it,” she says, sounding a little angry. I think that myself sometimes, that God isn’t exactly losing sleep over us, the way the nuns in catechism class after school make it sound.
“What did she do?” I say.
“Who?”
“Your aunt’s friend? What was she doing that they beat her up like that?”
“It wasn’t a she; it was a he. And he was eating his lunch at a counter in a store. Except it was a counter for white folks.” Her voice does something with the word “white” that makes me uncomfortable. “Anyway what makes you think you have to be doing something wrong to get killed? You just have to be black enough, that’s all.” And there’s that look in her eyes, the one that makes everyone so careful around Yolanda, so scared, the one I saw across the net in our first game, the one that made me want to be like her.
On TV the police in Birmingham opened up fire hoses on the colored people, set dogs on them. They were young like me, like Liam; the water blew them off their feet like they were paper dolls. But watching people get hurt on TV doesn’t feel the same as watching it in real life. When it’s on TV, a part of me doesn’t really believe it, even while I’m seeing it happen; when I see someone get hurt for real, I know it’s happening because it takes over everything else. I can’t see anything or hear anything else but the hurt. I don’t stop believing it till later, after it’s over.
The last time Daddy beat up Mama was just before we left him; she can’t hear in her left ear so good now. That makes it harder for me to forget it happened. Every time she says, “What?” or “Speak up,” I see his hand in the air again, the huge paw like a baseball mitt, sudden yet you knew it was coming, then the snap of her head back, the look on her face as if she can’t believe he’s hit her. And that awful feeling takes over, the one I always have when she gets hit, like I can feel the blows. Or maybe it’s that I want to feel them. Anything to keep her from getting hurt anymore. But I’m not the one. I’m not the one he goes after. I’m the witness, the one who does nothing, the one without the courage.
