Jeffery Allen - Holding Pattern - Stories

In a burst of thunder (God’s fart), the sky closed.

The once hollow-cheeked were now frog-jawed with pennies. Green eyes were greener. Coons cradled coins in arms like children. (One bitch coon rocked her bundle back and forth.) The dark streets glowed copper paths. And under the streetlights, yellow blue red things, twitching or still. Some dressed, some naked. Some with calm faces, others with wide looks of terror.

Maybe the next time it will rain nickels, dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and round dollars. Maybe the sky will pave streets in silver. Level steel skyscrapers and mold them into tracks. Forge the entire city into a massive silver railroad. Guess who gon be the conductor? Choo choo! Whistling and weaving.

No sooner had he thought this, when it began to rain again.

He knew all the names for his people and recited them. Chocolate drops, coons, niggers, niggas, nigras, jungle bunnies, moolies, tar babies, sambos, spooks, spades, spear chuckers, darkies, geechies, coloreds, negroes, Negroes, blacks, Blacks, Afro-Americans, African Americans. Falling like bad dancers. Flopping like fish.

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell, 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell, 1999); the widely celebrated novels Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) and Song of the Shank (Graywolf Press, 2014). His awards include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a support grant from Creative Capital, and the Charles Angoff Award for fiction from the Literary Review . He has been a fellow at the Dorothy L. and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library

His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including the Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, BOMB, Hambone, StoryQuarterly, Callaloo, Other Voices, Black Renaissance Noire, 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11, and Homeground: A Guide to the American Landscape.

Allen was born in Chicago. He holds a PhD in English (creative writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is currently professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, an instructor in the graduate writing program at the New School, and an instructor in the low-residency MFA writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He has also taught for Cave Canem; in the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nairobi, Kenya; for the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop in Lagos, Nigeria; for the VONA/Voices Workshop; and in the writing program at Columbia University. He is the fiction director for the Norman Mailer Center’s Writers Colony, and is also the founder and director of the Pan African Literary Forum, a nonprofit organization that supports and aids writers on the African continent. Allen lives in the Bronx, New York.

The text of Holding Pattern has been set in Adobe Jenson Pro, a typeface drawn by Robert Slimbach and based on late-fifteenth-century types by the printer Nicolas Jenson. Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by BookMobile Design and Publishing Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free paper.