Paul Beatty - Tuff

“My welfare sounds like the same thing Ms. Nomura talking about. And it’s more money in the long run.”

“Funny.”

Nadine, pleased with her joke, worked Jordy’s arms up and down like water pumps, producing a foamy saliva that bubbled from the baby’s mouth. “Tuffy, you sure this kid ain’t got rabies?”

The afternoon wore on, the shadows lengthened, and the tension died down. The neighborhood kids resumed playing stickball. The adults chattered like patrons in a theater lobby waiting for the bell to signal the next act. As veterans, they knew the edges on a rough East Harlem weekend were never smooth. “Tuff, what your commercial idea for a movie?”

“That’s right, Boo, you never said.”

A smile lit up Winston’s face like a camera flash. He pretended to close one eye around an Otto Preminger monocle. “Okay, picture this: Cap’n Crunch — the Movie .”

“What? The cereal, yo? You buggin’,” Nadine said, tapping her index finger on her temple.

“Hollywood’s remade all the cartoons— The Flintstones, Popeye, Batman —but nobody has done a cereal. The commercials are just as popular as the cartoons. Captain Crunch sailing on an ocean of milk, having adventures and shit. Shit would be slamming.”

The gang started to giggle, seeing the appeal of the idea and unable to fight off Winston’s infectious enthusiasm. “You got the Carlisle and the little white kid sailor motherfuckers for that matinee PG feel.” The group closed in around Tuffy, peppering him with questions. “Who gonna play Cap’n Crunch?”

“Danny DeVito.”

“What was the thing that steered the boat?”

“Sea Dog, fool. And I’m going to have Smedley the stupid elephant rampaging to get to the Peanut Butter Crunch. The fucking Crunchberry Beast, all yellow with strawberry polka dots and shit. You know who going to be the costar?”

“Who?”

“The invisible motherfucking Goo-Goo!”

The group convulsed with laughter, giddy with the reminiscence of how important breakfast cereal was to a kid’s sanity.

Inez folded her arms and looked at Winston and his friends high-stepping around her. Their glee was contagious, and she wanted to join them, but age and psychological distance immobilized her. She felt as if she were tied to the stake while the natives whooped and pranced. Tuffy wiped the tears from his eyes with his wrist. “Don’t give me that look out of the corner of your eye, Ms. Nomura. You about to start that ‘If you’d only channel your energy, harness your intelligence, you could be the next Malcolm X’ bullshit. Remember how you sent me the Koran when I was in jail? Well, I never told you this, but I traded it for some astronomy magazines stolen from the library. So you can forget about that by-any-means-necessary bullshit.”

Almost four decades ago Inez was in her early twenties, a University of Washington dropout, and procrastinating in New York before returning to the drudgery of her parents’ chicken farm just outside of Olympia. There was no better place to put off poultry raising than Manhattan in the early sixties.

Every morning she would go to the observation deck of the Empire State Building and place pennies into the power telescopes, bringing into focus the beatnik far-out, bebop outta-sight — and New Jersey. A week before the spring molt, she received a letter from her mother. It was in English — the language her mother often bragged was taught to her by her personal tutor, Lionel Barrymore, who held class in Seattle’s Rialto Theater. The letter’s curt B-movie telegram prose was all too clear. There was no salutation.

Return home. This is final plea to only daughter. Born March 19th, 1943, in Tule Lake, California. Named after half-Japanese, half-Peruvian midwife, and not after the months (April, May, June) or flowers (Rose, Daisy, Iris, Violet) like the rest of the Japanese girls your age. Too young to remember barbed-wire fences, redheaded sentry who manned the machine gun in guard tower making sounds like he is strafing Japanese. We know you are rebellious, it’s in your blood. Descendant of Choshu clan, whose children slept with smelly feet pointed toward the Tokugawa’s Tokyo for two hundred and fifty years. During war Father and I were repatriated from Heart Mountain, Wyoming, to Tule Lake with other “no-noes,” though he insists he was not a “no-no,” he was a “hell no, fuck no.” The War Relocation Authority give us questionnaire: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered? “Hell no!” Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any foreign government, power, or organization? “Fuck no!” You are born rebel, but our daughter nonetheless, one does not “forswear” allegiance to family. The kindness of gods is only reason Father got the land back. We have just placed this season’s pullets in the pen. You are smart. You can help with courts and Mexicans, who are on strike with the Filipinos. They want one dollar forty cents an hour. Father, chicken-king of Olympia, Washington, orders you home. We thinking of adding turkeys.

Mother loves you.

Enclosed with the letter were two Rhode Island Red feathers.

Ma never talks about the camps .

From the top of the Empire State Building Inez gazed past the Central Park greenery and into the clay-brown Harlem horizon. She envisioned herself driving the family acreage in the sky-blue convertible Oldsmobile, ordering the migrants about in her clipped Spanish, hoping the silk scarf would keep the mosquitoes off her face and the guano dust out of her lungs.

I’ve been everywhere in New York but Harlem .

She walked up Central Park West looking for street signs directing her to Harlem. Crossing 110th Street, she stumbled over a fissure in the blacktop and fell into a pothole the size of an army soup kettle. A group of girls in gingham dresses stopped jump-roping to giggle at her, laughing shyly into their palms. Welcome to Harlem.

After dusting herself off, Inez inhaled deeply; the air was thick and heavy and smelled of gasoline. She traipsed the brownstone-lined streets, tarred, narrow tributaries that all flowed into the big river, 125th Street, black America’s Nile. At the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, a faded banner hung limply from two lampposts: BLACK UNITY RALLY. A gathering of about forty people was huddled around a wooden tribune. The speaker, a clean-shaven, bespectacled man, was dressed in a clean but well-worn gray suit and trench coat. He was the color of the Rhode Island Red feathers in her pocket and seemed to have butane for blood, gas fumes for breath, and a flint for a tongue. As he spoke his words burst into flaming invective, burning the ears of anyone brave enough to listen. The man paused, wiped his sweaty brow, then narrowed his eyes as if he’d spotted an approaching enemy hidden in the brush. A woman moved away from the throng, downcast and shaking her head. “That man crazy. He going to get us all killed.”

Inez filled the void. Malcolm X smiled, showing off an equine set of teeth. “I’m a field Negro,” he said. “The masses are the field Negroes.… Imagine a Negro saying, ‘Our government.’ I even heard one say, ‘Our astronauts.’ They won’t even let him near the plant. ‘Our astronauts.’ ” After two weekends Inez was in the front row of the weekly rally, mouthing “I’m a field Negro” to herself. She soon moved into the Theresa Hotel on 125th Street and began working part-time for Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-African Unity. Her duties were mostly editing press releases, inserting a semblance of Anglo cogency into the rambling colored rhetoric. Exasperated, Inez often confronted Malcolm, clutching heavily revised speeches and essays. “Malcolm, you can’t just jump from theme to theme, you need a transition.” Malcolm would chide her, saying, “Now, Inez, you’ve been here long enough to know niggers can’t never stay on the topic.”