Paul Beatty - Tuff

“Can we return to discussing Winston’s welfare?”

Clifford drummed his fingers on the table. “I just don’t want my son’s integrity as a strong black man compromised. We must ensure the boy develops himself as a black man, a descendant of African aristocracy, the southern working class, and some hellified Brooklyn niggers who took no shorts.”

Waving a mindful finger, Spencer interrupted him. “I think we shouldn’t take this black-man’s-right-to-self-determination thing too far with Winston. It’s like calculating pi to the five-billionth place — so what?”

“Wait a goddamn minute!”

Like channelers at a séance, everyone looked around to see where the disembodied yell was coming from. “Hey, anybody out there?”

“Oh shit, it’s Moms on the speaker phone. Everybody shut up! Go ’head, Mama.”

“Listen up. It’s Winston’s life. Let Winston decide what he wants to do with it. I’ve got to go — bye, son. I’ll call back in a few minutes.”

“Love you, Mama.”

After Mrs. Foshay’s reproach the gathering sat upright in their chairs, waiting for Winston to take command of the meeting and his life. Winston, oblivious to the restlessness surrounding him, rummaged through his backpack and removed a box of food. He set a tin of pernil, habichuelas, and arroz amarillo topped with gandules aside. He unwrapped a thin, flimsy burrito and bit into it. After just one bite he spit out the mouthful of food. “Taco Bell will definitely fuck up your order. I told them no onions.” Winston took his time rewrapping the rest of the burrito. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and said, “First, these niggers gots to go.”

“Who, us?” asked Gusto, Dawoud, Sugarshack, and Duke, flabbergasted, their index fingers pressed to their breastbones. “How you going to act?”

“You four draft-dodging dashiki-wearing brown-car-driving leather-trenchcoat-in-the-summer-sportin’ stuck-on-stupid-played-out-1970s reject motherfuckers need to raise. You all ain’t none of my social support network.”

Clifford defended his friends. “Winston, you’ve known these brothers all your life. Who looked out for you when I was gone? They did. Who turned you on to Miles and Monk? They did.”

“Them niggers didn’t turn me on to shit. They only came over to the house to crash, smoke weed, and flirt with Moms. And when the electricity was turned off, they’d steal my boom box since it ran on batteries and force me to listen to all that fucked-up plink-plink-bong music.”

Clifford covered Winston’s hand with his own and squeezed. “Winston, these are four brothers who’ve been around the block. Proud black men who’ve sacrificed their youth so young people like yourself wouldn’t have to go through what they did. Do you remember?”

Winston’s resolve began to weaken as he recalled how comforting it was having the four men requisition the tiny apartment like Allied liberators. Their cocky banter made him and his mother laugh. Their menthol cigarettes dangled from ashtrays he’d made in school like smoking cannon from castle ramparts. Winston felt protected. And though he was too young to know the war had been over for more than a decade, he longed to be old enough to fight on the Revolution’s frontlines. After dinner the men would sit on the couch and clean their weapons. Carefully, they’d place dabs of brown oil on the guns’ mechanisms, smearing the droplets with their fingertips.

“I remember when Gusto shot me, cleaning his fucking rifle. That’s what I fucking remember.”

“You know that was an accident.”

“Dead in my fucking thigh.”

“Shit was an accident.”

Clifford shook Winston’s shoulder, and Winston blinked away the memory of his leg pulsing blood. Brenda tying a bathrobe-belt terry-cloth tourniquet around his leg.

“Winston.”

“What?”

“We’re all black men here, and men, especially black men, make mistakes. We need to forgive each other and work together. You’re a smart enough young man, not so different from Malcolm, Huey, and Eldridge when they were your age. Many a great black man has been in the same position you’re in now. Jesus, Hannibal, Pushkin, Babe Ruth, and Beethoven all listened to their elders, and you must do the same.”

Winston looked at the man he had designated to be his elder. Spencer was wearing a stonewashed blue oxford shirt. He looked under the table: his new mentor’s sockless feet were shod in pewter Sperry Top-Siders. Sugarshack, noticing the look of chagrin on Winston’s face, reached across the table and fingered Spencer’s collar. “Nigger look like CIA, don’t he? This the type nigger you want on your team?”

Winston popped off the plastic lid to his Spanish food and placed his face in the rising steam. Wrestling the slabs of fatty meat with his plastic utensils, he spoke without looking up. “Look, maybe y’all was throwing grenades, toting shotguns, feeding kids and shit back in the good ol’ days, but now you ain’t doing a damn thing but playing off-beat bongos and a dented-up saxophone behind my father’s wack-ass poetry, so even if Spencer is a CIA agent, you ain’t got nothing to worry about, because the statute of limitations has long expired on whatever revolutionary shit you’ve done.”

Clifford shook his head. “Son, you’re missing the point. I know you think we’re old-fashioned, paranoid, and who knows what else—”

“No, I know what else. Yolanda, what’s that word you always using for people who can’t function without certain other motherfuckers in they lives?”

“ ‘Codependent,’ ” she shot back.

“Right.” Winston turned to face Clifford and his rat pack. “Y’all codependent.… Yolanda, what’s that word you always use to describe me, Smush, Whitey, and Armello?”

“ ‘Homoerotic’?” she said, a little unsure of her answer.

“Yup, that’s it. Daddy, you, Sugarshack, and them are all old-fashioned, paranoid, codependent homoerotics.” Winston started flicking green snow peas from atop the mound of yellow rice at his father’s friends. “Now bounce! Before you motherfuckers start talking about John Coltrane.”

“That’s wrong, Winston.”

“Pops, you go too if you want.”

Clifford remained seated while Gusto, Dawoud, Sugarshack, and Duke got to up leave, pulling their collars up around their necks, tugging on the sleeves of their jackets, and patting down their Afros, trying to maintain their expired seventies insouciant chic. “No need to bring Coltrane into this,” said Gusto, licking his fingers, then matting down his eyebrows. Winston beat a rhythm on the tabletop, mocking their poetry as they skulked into the hallway.

Coltrane be superbad .

Coltrane be black love .

Coltrane be a love supreme. A love supreme .

Coltrane be a burrito supreme. A burrito supreme .

“You call that poetry? I admit, when y’all used to bogart my tape deck, I liked that nigger’s music. That fucking horn would calm you down like a back rub. But after listening to you clowns write about his shit, I can’t stand his music. Whenever I hear one of his tunes I think about your bullshit poetry. Y’all must be killing the nigger’s record sales.”

Extremely satisfied with himself, Winston returned to shoveling food into his mouth. “Man, that felt good, yo.” Everyone was staring at him with varying degrees of incredulity. “What y’all looking at?” he demanded, speaking with his mouth full.

Spencer waited for Winston to swallow, looked him in the eye, and asked the question that forever has hounded any miscreant who’s ever tried to set his or her life straight. “Winston, what do you want to do?”

A grim look of concern crossed Winston’s face. This question had been asked of him countless times, and for the first time in his life he didn’t respond with his stock answer: “I don’t have to do nothing but stay black and die.” He couldn’t verbalize it, but Winston was feeling the onset of the freedom his father and Inez were always saying his ancestors died for. “What do I want to do? I don’t know, but I want to do something.”