Rion Scott - Insurrections

I don’t think of my father. I don’t hesitate. I do as she say, as the crowd say. I come right on. You should have seen these people throwing things off the shelves. People with arms full of cheese, socks, heads of lettuce. Anything they can take with two hands.

A man run past me; he bump me with he shoulder. One set of bread go flying all over the place. I apologize and we both on the floor collecting the bread. His ill-gotten bread. He tell me, he say, It’s nothing, brother. It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. Hurry up and get you something before the pigs come. Don’t worry about me. Go on, man. Go on.

So I go on.

I see they got turkeys, but people and them tell me that’s what you eat here in November. I ain’t know if it’s strange to be eating turkey in April. I get to the dairy part. But I don’t need no milk, no cheese, no eggs. I turn and see the bread. Got enough bread at home. I just come to this place a few days before white people decide to blow up the world. Not much I need, yes. I had to stop and laugh. I never shop so carefully. Neville, I say, what the devil you doing in here anyhow?

I ain’t imagine riots this way. All the upheavals I read about, heard about, and now I was in the middle of one, like the rebellious slaves in the book. Like me when I experience the book. That’s what the devil I was up to.

I wander around. Floating. Dislocated. Remembering that I lived through the Haitian Revolution and the Great Insurrection, both. The book make it so. Don’t look at me crazy, Kin. I know how it sound.

I stumble to the tobacco aisle. Still empty-handed, but here is the pipe lying on the floor. Finally, the pipe. Someone knock it from the shelf. The wood on the thing look smooth and shiny. Plastic tip on the end. I take it out the bag and rest it at the corner of my mouth.

Lottie, I mumble to myself. Lottie! Lottie! I take on the voice of my blind, senile old grandfather. Living all alone on all that land on Eastern Main Road, and when your grandmother come to visit, me and one or a couple of your uncles or aunts in tow, he always know it she. The old man ain’t know much of anything else, not anything about his grandchildren or anything it have going on in the world.

Your grandmother warn over and over before we go inside, Don’t get too close. Your grandfather don’t have all he wits.

Once on a good day, I could touch my grandfather, but that was early on in my life. By the time I was seven or so, only Mom could touch him or they say he was bound to fly into fits. That was something I ain’t want to test. Mom always bring tobacco and dinner mints to calm him, and when she walk in she call, Poopa! Though that magic sense he have already tell him it she. Later when Grandpa get older and more agitated and excitable, he hold a cutlass tight in he hand when we walk through the door and he only relax he grip when he sure it your grandmother and not bandits come to raid the house.

This day I watch the madman and his smoky black eyes. This man who know nothing but his daughter and his short corncob pipe. That pipe. That pipe. It look nothing like the one I hold in my hand in Safeway, but it everything like it if you ask me in that moment I’m standing in the aisle pretending. Granddad’s house burn of urine and hot air hanging heavy. He call her name and his voice take on an edge until she respond or sometimes she just put a hand on he back.

Then he sit in his creaky chair and settle himself before reaching into the coal pot at his side to flip a piece of coal into his pipe. A couple puffs at that thing and he’d be content, peaceful. Granddaddy was always so precise, not just for a blind man but for any man, that burning ember flipping through the dark. It never burn him. Never spark on the ground. Always flip into the mouth of that pipe.

This time it’s me and Raoul and Mom. She wander about straightening up, and then she go off to the kitchen to cook Granddaddy’s food. I think is whisper I whisper when I turn to Raoul and say, Granddaddy’s gonna burn this place one day.

Neville, you hush your mouth, your granny call from the next room.

Neville, you better hush your mouth, I mumble to myself in that Safeway tobacco aisle, and I’m back there smelling the smoke coming from the street. Raoul disappear and then my mother disappear and then my grandfather once again he dead and gone, always like a spirit in a cloud of smoke. Sirens start screaming in the distance. There’s a riot. A dead king somewhere shaking he head at all that burn in he name. There’s the book and another insurrection somewhere, sometime. Police out there, maybe coming to save the Safeway, and they don’t mean no good for no one.

I stuff the pipe in my pocket and run from the store back into the smoky streets and I ain’t stop running till I at my door. All the while, my heart is beating fast, fast, fast in my ears like history shouting loud enough to deafen me.

Not a day that go by after that I don’t think about Cross River. That pipe, every time I look at it, it remind me that the book exist somewhere and another insurrection go be happening sometime. Thinking about Cross River make me late to my wedding. Laugh, Kin, but you almost wasn’t made because of Cross River. We flirt with moving back to Trinidad, moving to upstate New York, but the only thing we take serious is moving to this town. I go to law school at Howard again and get a job and thing, but then when your sister is three or four and your brother is five or six, we pack up all our things, no job, no nothing. People tell me it have a big Caribbean community in Cross River, and is true and that nice and thing, but that not why we move here. People ask me why I go Cross River, I say, We come to see the Insurrection.

I don’t know what we think we go find; I don’t know what we did find, but we find it.

I want you to remember this, Kin: You are the only member of this family that is born into Cross River. The rest of we adopt it. Cross River is you. That moment in the aisle is you. Tell you the truth, when your brother, Blair, come a cop, I get disappointed. The son of Neville Samson a police? Naw. I feel like I ain’t give him enough of what was in me in that moment during the riot. And your sister too damn reasonable for her own good. Sometimes, Kin, I think I give you too much of what was in me in that Safeway. You too damn miserable, but you, Akinsanya Abel Samson, you are the Cross Riverian Dream. I know you say that sound corny and thing, but when them people wrench themselves free, is you they think about.

We sit in silence listening to the hospital machines beeping and sighing. I wonder if the thoughts spinning wildly and crazily around my head are from the delirium or from my father’s crazy tale.

He breaks the silence first by drifting off into a snore that startles and wakes him. I think of how much all this recollecting must have cost him.

Now you, he says.

Huh?

Tell me a story.

I don’t have no stories like that.

Don’t play the fool, Kin. You know what I mean. Tell me why you go quite out in the Wildlands.

Is nothing, boy, I say, mimicking my father’s accent, his voice, the shrug of his shoulder and the wave of his hand, the same way my face has always mimicked his own. Playing dead to catch corbeaux alive.

First, I’d like to thank all the readers who opened their minds and their hearts to these words. I wrote them especially for you.

Thank you to the people of Cross River, Maryland, for letting me into your world.

I would like to thank my wonderful editor, Lisa Williams, for choosing my book and then approaching each story with enthusiasm, care, and a sharply critical eye. Whenever I figured I’d done enough, she showed me ways in which the words could do more. Thank you to everyone at the University Press of Kentucky.