Mitchell Jackson - The Residue Years

I am loved .

I am strong .

I am patient .

No one answers. Not the first time I buzz. Not the second. It’s a long time before I hear a voice and the light clop of feet, longer before someone comes to the door. It’s Helen. Are my boys here? I say.

She smirks and slaps a hand on her hip and huffs a lift in her bangs. I sit my bags beside me and cross my arms. I see we still rude as ever, I say.

Did Kenneth know you were coming? she says. She looks past me, and it’s no telling what she sees.

Kenneth, I say. Who’s Kenneth?

Wait, she says, and slams the door shut.

But I won’t let her do it; won’t let her wreck my day. I take out my cigarettes and count what’s left in the pack.

Kenny comes to the door dressed in a starched white shirt and creased khakis as if he just might be other than who and what he is. Well, well, well, he says. Look who finally dropped in.

Needed time, I say. Don’t start.

Don’t we all, he says. How’d you get here?

A spaceship, I say. A hot air balloon.

Still got jokes, huh, I see. But check this out, all jokes aside, call ahead next time, he says. Helen ain’t too fond of surprise guests.

You got my boys a few days and now all of a sudden you calling shots, I say. Trying to tell me when and where?

They’re our boys, he says. Canaan and Kenneth Jr. And how all this time add up to a few days? C’mon, now, Grace. We’re too old for new math.

You wouldn’t put it past this man to have been feeding my boys a bad script about me, but my boys are bright; they’ll see for themselves.

My youngest comes up, calling Kenny. He spots me and yells and almost falls over himself trying to make it outside. He pulls me tight, shoots something out of me, shoots something into me. I missed you, I missed you, I say, and stand back to have a look at him. His father, if that’s what he is, struts off. My baby leads me inside and asks if I want to see the rest of the house, and I don’t have the heart to say no. He shows me a crystal chandelier in the front room, a kitchen fixed with granite counters and oak cabinets, bedrooms posterized with basketball gods. He tugs me into the basement where my middle boy is sitting in the semidark, eyes locked on the giant screen, thumbs drumming a game controller.

Ta-da! I say.

He looks at me, a glimpse, says, Hey mom, and goes right back to his game.

Wait a sec, that’s it? I say. That’s all you got for your mama after all this time, after I hiked across the world for you?

He pauses his game and slogs over and presses his head to my chest for a thump, that’s it.

You would think it was this middle boy and not my baby that marks time but it isn’t. It’s Canaan I was pregnant with the night I caught Kenny, the night he called one time too many and said he wouldn’t be home. It was my youngest kicking in my belly the late night I broke a phone, threw on clothes, and blew red lights all the way to her apartment. By then I’d steamed outside her place many a night, had busted car windows, knifed tires, had keyed curses onto the hood of her car, but of all the times that was the first time I’d ever had the gall to knock on her door. She answered in a robe that was a match of one he’d bought for me, and it must’ve been a reflex how fast she tried to shut me outside. So quick, but I jammed the door, pushed through, and stalked her into the bedroom where I caught Kenny — he seemed the gift of my life to that point — lying butt naked in bunched sheets. He didn’t say a word, didn’t stir when I turned and fled.

That night, I drove home and butchered his suits and dumped them in a tub of bleach. The truth is, though, it was as if I’d done nothing — nothing at all to heal.

He and she bicker above us and it’s a boon for me.

The boys open their gifts and precious hours go on.

They are priceless, my sons; they’re all I need, or else they’re not enough and I hope to never know.

There’s a bucket up ahead spitting a big-ass plume of dirty white clouds. Cars ahead, cars behind, car across. Shit, you could start a squad — hoop, football, soccer (though we don’t play no soccer in these parts) — with the fools waiting for the shop clerk to flip the sign, and let us in, and scrawl our names on a list nobody but nobody but her can touch. Niggers ready to Olympic-joust for first in the chair. When the clippers are cold, sharp, precise, before a showing late can mean a whole afternoon on ice. Believe me when I tell you, fresh cuts are serious business, especially at The Cut Above, which is damn near an institution. Soon as the sign flips we (the we being me, KJ, and Canaan) surge across the street with the rest. The barbers in prep mode, zipping their smocks, oiling their clippers, tooling their stations. The clerk puts us down on the list and sends my bros searching for seats.

The shop meanwhile fills.

See you got your nappy-headed brothers with you, one barber says, the resident shop funnyman.

Damn, homie, I say. Hatetrocity at the crack of dawn? Let us live.

You know me, he says.

Yep, I say. Your hate runneth over.

My bad, he says, twisting the top off a bottled juice. But I wouldn’t have to say it if you brought them in here more often. Your bros be lookin like Nigerians by the head by the time you think they need a cut.

Gimme me six feet, I say, and ask Famous, the shop’s manager, to get a handle on his workers. Famous, by the way, is this type of guy: a being-caught-without-a-fresh-fade-is-a-crime type of guy. A man after my grooming heart.

Mr. Funnyman asks about his first client and the clerk says it’s baby bro.

C’mon, young Kunta. Hope you don’t break no teeth on my clippers.

The clerk unmutes the TV in the lounge and teases the shop with a commercial of kids singing. The rest of the lounge, a couple dudes haranguing who’s the best high school hooper in the state. Near them this tight-jawed quasi-mute, a dude they say got a bad habit of taking stuff that ain’t his. A handful of unmentionables. And it’s one of them (thought I was the only one who caught it) glimpses a white girl jogging past the shop. Look at that shit, he says. Got pork Prefontaine-ing in the hood now.

Big deal, someone says.

Damn right, dig deal, someone says. It’ll be marathons next. Million-man dog walk after that.

Why ya’ll mad? someone says. Make it easier to knock the pork.

Pork, what’s pork?

White meat, fool.

Who wants that?

All the smart niggers, that’s who. Trust the porkologist. You ain’t lived till you had a taste.

Man, you silly.

Sheeit. Knocking a white broad is a black man’s civil right. Even Malcolm approved.

Malcolm approved, my ass.

Real talk, boss. Check the history books.

The clerk stomps into the lounge. She’s the girth of an NFL lineman (a few pounds off, no more). She don’t need to do more than wrench her lips for fools to quiet right the fuck down.

It don’t matter why they’re here, they’re here, Famous says. You see them coffee shops and boutiques and bookstores down the block. Who you think they built them for?

Famous got his nickname cause someone said he lived life like a movie. Most people would say that’s extra, but I say, a life with no stories, what’s the point?

KJ’s ambivalent about his cut. Looks to me, with his shoulders hiked. My bro is always demurring, always deferring. But since it’s a 0.00 percent of reclaiming a vacated seat, it won’t be no assurance from intimate distance today. Give him a low one-lengther, I say from my perch. Dude’s averse to cuts, I say.