Leaving: A Novel Read online

  Her shoes sat by the front door. She had come to putting them there so she didn’t have to make any more noise upstairs, but she told Ruby it was out of respect for the wooden floors. Ruby liked the idea so much that she insisted everyone do it. But if Lida saw Easton’s hard, scuffed black loafers touching her shoes, she picked hers up and moved them to the other side of the entrance.

  It was not yet six-thirty in the morning when she stepped outside. Cranston Avenue was still silent and dark. She walked with her head down, careful to step over the cracks in the sidewalk. Other children came out of their houses now. So loud—slamming their doors, running across the street, calling to each other. The recklessness of it made her heart freeze. She didn’t talk to anyone, and no one talked to her. Except for Marcus LeRoy.

  She recognized Marcus from behind by the sky-blue pick in his hair. In elementary school they used to play kickball together on the street. Then he started to come over after school, and sometimes they danced to Easton’s James Brown records in the living room if nobody was home. But over the last summer, Marcus’s father had made him help out at the health food store, so she hadn’t hardly seen him at all.

  Marcus sat on the bus bench at San Pablo and turned around to wave to her as she approached. He smiled. He looked different. His shoulders were just starting to fill out and he seemed taller. She hugged her purple notebook to her chest, held the sides of her bare arms, and whispered without moving her lips, “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.”

  CHAPTER 1C

  FEBRUARY 1993

  “FUCK YOUR MAMA!”

  Love, Lida’s eldest child, clenched his long fingers into fists; his bony knuckles sharpened, and his manicured nails cut into the palms of his hands. His arms stiffened at the sides of his thin body, and he glared at the White attendant, his eyes squinting and venomous.

  The attendant didn’t challenge Love by looking directly back at him, which he feared would just escalate the child’s behavior. Instead, he looked away, at the floor, at the ceiling, out toward the courtyard of the school. But Love had an acute sense of fear; on the streets, fear in others was not only a sign of their inability to defend themselves, it was a sign that they could not control a situation, could not keep you safe. It was the same with the attendants here, on the inside, at Los Aspirantes. The fearful attendants were the ones who didn’t keep the other kids from kicking you under the table, from punching you in line, from sneaking into your room with a nail.

  Los Aspirantes School for Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children had two blocks of classrooms. The lower block served day-treatment children, those who still lived with their parents, grandparents, aunts, or in foster care but had been kicked out of the public schools, or assessed under AB 3632 as needing more intensive mental health provisions. The upper block schooled kids from the residential program, the group homes, each of which housed six children, staffed 24-7 in three shifts. Some of these kids had been removed from their homes under the Child Welfare Protection Act, then failed in their foster placement due to violent or destructive behavior. Others had been released to Los Aspirantes after serving time in Juvi and had become 601s, criminal wards of the court. In cases like Love’s, they were released from Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital after a 5150, a forty-eight-hour hold for being a danger to self or others, then placed in the group home with the agreement of their legal guardians. For Love, this was his grandmother, Ruby.

  “Take your time-out in the quiet-room to refocus, Love.” The attendant pointed out the back door to a small carpeted room, a padded cell with a rope attached to the outside door handle. Each upper-block classroom had a quiet-room outside to contain the children when they blew up.

  “Fuck you, dog! You better stand back!” Love walked into the courtyard and the attendant followed closely. At thirteen, Love was tall enough to reach up and smack the top of the door frame. He kicked the plastic chair in front of the guinea-pig cage, stopped, and turned back.

  “Take your time-out in the quiet-room, Love.” They stood facing each other, the boy rigid, his jaw clenched and bulging below his high, sculptured cheekbones. The attendant continued to look away; he pointed to the corner of the darkened cell where he expected Love to walk.

  Love swung, twisting his body from his hips. His fist struck the left lens of the man’s glasses, cutting his cheek in a semicircle and breaking the bridge of his nose. The glasses skidded across the courtyard, and the attendant covered his face with both hands.

  Love ran back into the classroom. Tom, a tall Irish man with a shaved head, grabbed him in the doorway. Love hit him in the forehead, but Tom looked straight at Love and caught the boy’s flailing arms. He held his wrist and reeled him in, turned him around, and bear-hugged him from behind. He wrapped Love’s arms across his chest, locking one elbow under the other like a straitjacket, then turned to his side and pushed the boy into the quiet-room with his hip and held him face forward in the corner.

  When Tom was sure that Love was completely immobilized, his arms trapped between his own body and the wall, he let go of the boy’s wrists and pushed with one hand on the center of his back. With the other hand, Tom reached down and picked up the tail end of the rope to the door, then ran out of the room, pulling the door behind him. Love had only enough time to turn and yell before the door shut flush with the inside wall.

  “White-Ass Nigger Mother Fucker!” He kicked the handleless door. “Bitch, Mother Fucker, Faggot-Ass Bitch. I’ll cap your fucking punk ass.” He kicked the door again. He couldn’t do damage from inside the quiet-room, yet he struck out even more recklessly, hitting all the walls in a helicopter-like torrent. “Fuck your mother, dog! I’ll bust her face and stuff her in a garbage can.” He punched the small, square, reinforced-plastic window in the upper center of the door. “Your mama sucks dick for a baggy. Your mama’s a crack-ho fiend!”

  He walked to the back wall and kicked it with his red Air Jordan sneakers, a Christmas present from the residential house manager. He hit the wall again, listlessly this time, his fingers in a loose fist, half grazing the carpet. He then walked to the far corner where he had been instructed to stand.

  “I’m taking my t-i-m-e-o-u-t.” He spelled “time-out,” as if he couldn’t bring himself to say the word. He stood unmoving, arms at his sides, his face five inches from the wall. There was no response from Tom, and he didn’t expect any. Love stayed that way, frozen, for three minutes.

  As he waited, he watched a line of ants crawl up to the ceiling. He chose one black ant and blew on it with a quick, solid burst. The ant changed direction and ran back toward the bottom of the wall, antennae flapping in panic. He blew at it again and let it run for a while. With each blow, the ant changed direction, frantically running from the invisible force attacking him.

  There was no real time inside the quiet-room, only one long extended series of moments. A minute never ended or began until the attendant on the outside said that it did, so there was no way to measure how close or far you were from getting out, and this complete lack of control and the sense that you’d been forgotten was what tested you the most, more than being trapped inside. He’d swear it had been an hour, that the veins in his neck were about to burst from frustration, that he couldn’t stop himself from yelling even if it meant getting more time in the room; only the ants moving in their determined trails kept him distracted enough to stay calm.

  At the end of the three minutes, the door to the quiet room slowly cracked open.

  “Have a seat, Love. Your sit-time will start now.” Love sat in the corner with his knees up to his chest. Dark tracks of dried tears streaked his face. He could not see Tom through the open door, only the rope held taut across the space and a leg of the plastic chair.

  Love sat silently for twenty minutes. His breathing slowed. He knew the inside of the quiet-room intimately but examined it again, every scratch mark on the walls, every stain in the carpet from some kid urinating or defecating. There was a Plexiglas ceiling over the lightbulb and a ve
nt for letting in air. Behind the vent, a fan turned with a slight hum and ticking, light cutting through it as it spun. He counted the ticks, trying to beat his own personal best, but repeatedly lost count before three hundred. He heard Tom turn the page of a magazine and tap his foot.

  “Did I b-l-i-n-d him?” Love spelled softly. The rope went slack and Tom nudged the door open wider. Tom had worked with Love since the boy had arrived at Los Aspirantes four years earlier They could see each other completely now. Tom had a red splotch on his forehead.

  “Are ya worried ya mighta hurt Rick?” Tom asked.

  Love shrugged his pointy shoulders.

  “So ya think ya blinded him?”

  “I cut his eye.”

  “How does that make ya feel?”

  Love shrugged again. They both watched a spider walk across the wooden strip in the doorway.

  “Can ya tell me how ya feel about cuttin his eye?”

  “T-r-e-m-e-n-d-o-u-s,” Love spelled.

  “Ya don’t look tremendous.”

  “You can’t tell me how I feel, dog!”

  “I didn’t tell ya how ya feel; I told ya how ya look. Don’t ya think your anger has anything ta do with ya havin ta leave?”

  Love puckered his lips and sucked in through his nose. Tom yanked the rope taut, but before the door slammed shut, Love spat a wad of saliva that hit Tom in the knee.

  “No, Bitch!”

  SANTA RITA JAIL

  HE CAME TO the front of the recreation room, stood on the table, and spoke to the men:

  We were not the first people to be slaves, and we won’t be the last. But all the knowledge about slavery—about how to break a man down, how to keep us in check, how to make us forget we ever had the power or right to be free—all the experience with slave-making, from the time the Jews were slaves in Egypt and before that, went into our enslavement. If you want to know how to make a slave the right way, you can learn from the past. And if you want to learn how to be a free man, you’ve got to learn from the past too. The most dangerous part of having been a slave is not knowing what it means to be free. You’ve got to know how you were robbed, know what was taken, before you can get it back.

  What’s slavery got to do with me? you ask. That foolishness ended a hundred and fifty years ago; what’s that got to do with me sitting in jail right now, over a decade into the new millennium? Didn’t we leave all that behind us?

  I know what you’re thinking: what’s that got to do with me lightin up, or bustin a cap into some punk’s head, or my father taking a switch to my ass? You say, not all Black men are in jail, in fact most are not, so it must be my own damn fault that I’m here and not CEO of Ford Motor Company, or a congressman, or a lawyer, or a teacher, or a busboy.

  And it is.

  You heard me: it is.

  And it ain’t.

  It is and it ain’t.

  You are an individual, but you are on a raft. The limits of that raft are the limits of who you think you are and how you think you have to be. That’s true if you’re Black, White, Red, Brown, or Yellow. Right now you don’t even see that you’re on a raft. You don’t know that your raft is floating down a river, the River of History, and that the events of the past have surrounded you and brought you to this place, and that unless you get off of this raft, you are going to stay in the course the River has been pushing you. But first you’ve got to recognize that you’re on a raft, and to see how the River has surrounded you to make you believe in your limitations. You must know rivers.

  I’m calling you from the shore.

  I’m telling you to dive into your history. It’s your job to learn about that River, how wide it is, how strong the current is. Without the knowledge of the past, you’re likely to drown in it by making the same mistakes as those who came before you, or jump right back onto that raft, and worse yet, pace back and forth on that raft forever, like a beast in this jail-cage, until it takes you right over the edge.

  CHAPTER 2A

  1959 • CORBET 49, RUBY 21, LOVE E 13

  TO RUBY, THE inside of GI Bill on Cranston Avenue was like a church. Not a church she had been in, but the way she believed a church should be, beautiful and frightening, with polished wood floors and high ceilings. The front windows arched across most of the living room wall facing the street, and the burgundy lace curtains blossomed in an intricate pattern of roses and thorny stems.

  “I told your mother she should come on out with you,” Corbet said, as he took them on a tour of their new home. “If you were in so much danger, why was she so safe? I asked her. But she said she wouldn’t be herself if she left the South. I said, ‘Elise, I don’t think that would be such a bad thing,’ but she didn’t take to that.” Behind the living room was a large kitchen with wooden cabinets and a fancy refrigerator that made its own ice cubes.

  “I sure hope your mother taught you to cook,” he said to Ruby. “I miss pork chops with mustard and onions, and fried chitlins. All Saul knows how to fix is spaghetti and soup.” He stood up straight and looked directly at her. “Besides, there are a lot of people who’ll hire a woman who can cook and clean.”

  “She’s not a maid,” Easton spat out. “She’s a seamstress.”

  “Hush,” Ruby whispered. “I do all the cookin an cleanin you want. An I serve up some fancy corn fritters when I put my mine to it.”

  “Très bien, car je suis affamé.”

  Easton raised his eyebrows and laughed, not a sincere laugh but forced, like he was trying to insult Corbet and make something happen. He covered his mouth and waited. Ruby watched Corbet to see what he would do. There was no question what Papa Samuel would have done if Easton had laughed at him: he would have picked up the iron that sat on the counter and thrashed him across the face with the cord.

  Corbet walked to Easton slowly. He raised his hand in the air and Easton closed his eyes.

  “Est-ce que j’ai l’air stupide?”

  Easton opened his eyes.

  “Repeat after me,” Corbet said. “Raise your hand and repeat.”

  Easton raised his hand.

  “Je suis un nègre et j’en suis fier.”

  Easton laughed again, then tried it.

  “Well, listen to you, a regular man of the underground. A man of the Resistance.”

  * * *

  THE UPSTAIRS HAD three bedrooms. Corbet told them to drop their trunk in the front room to the left and said that Easton could have the room across the hall. They were not to go into the back room because that was Saul’s. But he knew better than to tempt curiosity, so he opened the door and showed them. In the corner was a rolltop desk next to a bookcase and, on the far side, a dresser with black slacks folded on it. The room had all the fixings of a bedroom, without a bed.

  “Where’s he sleep?” Easton asked.

  “He stays with me when he’s here.” Corbet closed the door firmly and didn’t offer any more explanation. He took them back to Ruby’s new room to get them set up.

  Within a week of their arrival, Ruby had her sewing machine running all day while Corbet went to his job at the docks. They’d enrolled Easton at McClymonds. The school was integrated, which he had never experienced, but still there were very few White children. Out of thirty-five students in his class, five were White, two were Chinese, and one Japanese.

  He quickly found his favorite class. His math teacher, Miss Claudia Grossbalm, was young and serious. She paced across the front of the room with her head down, her dress pressed against her body by the force of her movement, deep into her explanation of an algebraic equation as though she were rediscovering her own religious conviction; at times she would even raise the math book in the air like a Bible, revealing small stains of sweat under her arms. She was strict with the boys in the back and didn’t take any of their lip, strong and curt, the way Easton had never seen a White woman act before.

  “Quiet, Mr. Waters,” she chastised a boy whom most teachers ignored out of fear. But she continued with her lesson, and he had no ope
ning to respond, for she was not confronting him, simply pushing aside an obstacle in the way of her mathematical quest.

  “Now!” She turned to the class suddenly, breathing hard through her nose and looking out over the faces with passionate and hopeful eyes. “Who can tell me how to find twenty-five percent of XY when X equals five and Y equals one-half X?” There was a silence so strong it sucked at the marrow of every student. Easton could not bear to see the slow transformation from rapture to despair on Miss Grossbalm’s face. He could not help but raise his hand.

  “Yes, Mr. Childers.” He stood, as he had been taught to do in Norma, and a few kids chuckled. He felt the eyes from the back row upon him, yet the smile of anticipation on Miss Grossbalm’s lips drew him on.

  “Point two five times five times two point five.”

  “Yes, and then?” She practically ran to the board to write out his equation.

  “Uppity nigger,” he heard from the back of the room. “Whitey.” He was lighter-skinned than most of his family, but he’d always seen that as a source of pride.

  Miss Grossbalm turned. “Mr. Waters, stand up.”

  “But it wasn’t me,” Charles Waters said without conviction. She never involved herself in a tug-of-war. If it wasn’t him, it was one of his lackeys.

  “Stand up and come here to the board to finish this equation.”

  At this challenge, Charles stood, pulled his shirt out of his pants, and swaggered up the aisle toward the front of the room where Miss Grossbalm held out the chalk. It took him a long time to make it to the front row. He forced a confident smile, but everyone knew he could not possibly solve the equation. As he passed Easton, he covered his mouth and coughed into his hand: “Daddy’s a homo.” The rest of the class laughed. Charles sneezed, “Up the ass.”