No Place Safe (7 page)

Playing basketball was one of the few occasions I wasn’t nervous around boys. I loved their awe when I hit two points from the outside while being defended by a boy six inches taller. The moment my feet left the ground in the jump shot, when I felt the ball leave my fingertips, watched it arc through the air and fall into the basket, heard the whisper of leather moving through net without touching rim or backboard, I was all confidence. By the time a boy from the other team had grabbed the ball and run up the driveway to take it out again, my shot was forgotten. But in the seconds between the shot and the next play, hearing a player from my team say “nothing but net,” or taunting the boy who’d been playing me with “in your face” or “you let a girl play you like that?” was the sweetest thing. Cassandra would never know that feeling (and probably wouldn’t care, anyway) because she always sat on the porch steps watching the game, along with the second daughter from the Beautiful Family, who was another prissy girl.

We had just finished a game of Twenty-One, my side victorious, and were resting up so we could start another. I sat on the porch steps and could smell the pine needles someone had raked from the lawn and spread under the holly bushes that grew in front of the porch. It was barely a smell, the pine oil long since faded, just enough to remind me of something warm and pleasant.

“We play Fulton High tonight. Who’s going to the game?” asked one Beautiful boy, who was the oldest of us and in the eleventh grade. Along with his brother and Marie, he went to George High like everyone else in our neighborhood. He tried to spin the ball on his middle finger like Meadowlark Lemon, but managed no more than a few rotations before the ball fell and he had to try again.

No one outside the Beautiful Family planned to go to the game.

“Why not Cassandra? You go to George, show some school spirit,” Marie said.

“I don’t like sports.”

“No one goes for the sports. People go for the cheering and socializing, and to hear the band and watch the steppers at halftime.”

I didn’t say anything, only thought how different it was at my school, where the football game was everything, where the team ran the show because they had a tradition of going to the state finals every year since dirt was created. The band had no soul and I was certain no one at the school had ever seen a step show, much less knew what one was. In my head, I kept hearing,
Who brought disco?

Everyone was quiet for a while, and then Cassandra asked, “What about these kids turning up missing?” It was an attempt to keep the conversation from returning to her not going to the game. Or she may have asked because she was like an old person that way, bringing up the news or talking about the weather the way old people do when there’s nothing else to say.

“Not just missing. Dead. Two dead and one missing,” Marie said. “You think it’s just a coincidence?” She said it in a way to make the
you
addressed to anyone, but we all knew she was directing it to me. I was the one most likely to know.

“We don’t think so, but it’s too soon to tell.” I was good at giving just enough information to titillate, but not enough to get into any trouble. It was a politician’s skill I’d learned listening to Ma answer similar questions. I liked the way I could let
we
slide off my tongue as though I had anything to do with it, and the way none of the kids ever questioned my knowledge. “Just too soon to tell.”

One of the boys who lived in the house went inside for a few minutes and returned with a stack of Dixie cups and a plastic pitcher of Kool-Aid full of ice. The drink was so sweet, we knew he’d made it, not his mother, and we were glad. The cups were tiny, with riddles and cartoons on them, made for preschoolers instead of sun-weary, half-grown kids, so we drank the first cup greedily, then settled into a resting spot to savor the second cup. We all had red mustaches as Kool-Aid dried on our upper lips in a breeze that briefly hinted at fall.

Someone had brought a boom box, and now Sugarhill Gang’s new song was playing, “Rapper’s Delight.”

“
That’s my song,” I said.

“That’s
my
song,” said a Beautiful brother, and the challenge was on.

After the music intro, I started singing along with Wonder Mike, hitting every word on beat, as if I’d written the lyrics. When Wonder Mike passed it over to Hank, the Beautiful brother picked up the lyrics, and everyone waited to see if he’d stumble on a word, making me winner of the battle. We sat on porch steps, lawn chairs, and grass, and took turns singing the parts we knew, laughing when somebody didn’t the know the rhyme and tried to make up words. We weren’t thinking of dead kids anymore. I wasn’t thinking of mean white girls who couldn’t see the beauty in a dance beat so tight you couldn’t resist moving to it.

*

After I finished my homework, Bridgette and I were watching the news and heard that another boy
was missing. They still hadn’t found Milton Harvey, the boy who was last seen at the bank, but it had been over six weeks and I’d already stopped making up reasons why he went missing. I didn’t bother to imagine what this fourth boy was doing, where he might be. I knew he was dead, just like lots of people in Atlanta knew, just like his mother must have known while she cried in the film that the news people were running, praying publicly for his return. I turned to Channel 17, which had no news hour or crying mothers, and played a constant loop of sixties sitcoms and Braves games during baseball season.

Ma walked into the den and told me to turn the TV back to the news. She wanted to hear it. This I didn’t understand because whatever information she had must have been better than the story they told on the news. But Ma was a news junkie. No matter what was on, boring human-interest stories or the most terrible murder, she had to see it. Even after the crazy stuff she saw all day, she could come home and watch more.

This time the boy, Yusef Bell, was only nine years old.

“That’s the same age I am,” Bridgette said.

I asked Ma to tell me what she knew about him, because even to a thirteen-year-old, nine seemed too young.

“Why do you want to know?”

“So I can be safer,” I lied. I guess that could be true, but now I just wanted to know. Was this boy more like me than not? Did our paths ever cross?

“Don’t go sharing this with your friends.”

“Do I ever?”

I never did, even when I was younger and first understood that Ma being a cop gave me the kind of attention I’d never attract under other circumstances. She helped me earn my grade school friends’ respect when she’d turn on the blue lights of her patrol car, and my high school friends’ envy when I hinted that I could have a traffic ticket fixed if I ever got one, but I never betrayed her trust.

“He was last seen in Southwest, but closer to us, only six miles away.”

“Anyone see anything?”

 “Nothing. His mother had sent him to the corner store to pick up something for her neighbor friend, and he just didn’t come back.”

 Like the boy from the skating rink, I wondered what this boy was thinking, what he was doing, before he was taken. He’d probably run the same errand so many other times before. Was he hoping he’d have enough change left over to buy some Pop Rocks? Did he plan to stop off at a friend’s house before returning home to pick up the football he’d loaned him? I wondered what his last thoughts were, what his last happy act was, and hoped it gave him something sweet to hold on to.

Ma threatened to keep me from going downtown on the weekend with Cassandra and some other kids to watch a kung-fu movie at the Rialto. The Rialto was one of those old-time theaters that had been around forever and couldn’t compete with the wider screens and armrest drink holders of the newer shopping mall theaters. Downtown Atlanta didn’t make it the most attractive location either, since people with the most discretionary income spent time downtown only Monday through Friday, nine to five. After their weekday, they beat it out of there, packing cars onto I-75 or I-20, heading for the suburbs in every direction.

The Rialto understood its weekend audience—young black folks who needed a theater on an easily accessible bus route—and ran the movies we wanted to see, sometimes a picture with black actors in it, but usually an old Bruce Lee movie, or some kung-fu flick that tried but never matched the style of the old Bruce Lee movies. It was where all my friends went, and I always took the bus down there with no flack from Ma, but when children started dying and disappearing, she was all of a sudden worried.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, Ma standing behind me while she applied permanent relaxer to my hair and cancelled my weekend plans. I wondered how far I should push the matter. Ma didn’t much like being questioned, and at that moment, she was applying lye to my head. Putting up a fight just then would be foolish, not because Ma would do anything to hurt me, but once I set her off on a lecture, she might have forgotten how long the chemicals had been burning into my scalp. But I did it anyway.

“Those boys were found in Southwest—I won’t be anywhere around there. I’ll be downtown.”

“One of the missing boys, the one that might be the unidentified body laying in the morgue right now, was on his way downtown to the movies the last time anyone saw him alive.”

“There’s more than one theater downtown. He was going to the Coronet, not the Rialto.”

Ma didn’t hear me, and only said, “The other boy was last seen leaving the same skating rink you go to sometimes.”

“What’s that got to do with the Rialto downtown? I don’t want to go to the skating rink.”

“Watch your tone, girl. You can’t go because it’s too close, and because I said so.” As usual, the reasonable logic she applied to her cases, the weighing of facts, had no place in our house. In our house, everything came down to
because I said so.

I tried again because her tone hadn’t yet changed from
I’m mildly peeved
to y
ou’ve gone too far
. “The skating rink and the Rialto are miles apart.”

“I don’t mean too close in proximity. I mean too close to
you
. The same skating rink? You might’ve skated right past that boy once. You could have been there that night and they picked you instead.”

I knew then it was useless to fight. When something happened to a child, that child became any child, all children, to Ma. In her mind, she could easily substitute me or my sister with the kid who had been kidnapped, or raped, or beaten up in whatever case she was working. No more logic in the discussion. I shut up about it and hoped that by Saturday, either the case would be solved and have nothing to do with my world, or the dead boys would have been pushed out of her mind by some other terrible thing. In a city considered the murder capital of America, this last option was not at all impossible.

*

They say bad things come in threes, but in this case, there was one extra. In November, Milton’s and Yusef’s bodies were found, bringing the number dead to four. The mother who’d sent her boy on an errand for her neighbor was angry and made herself heard; we saw her on the news, read about her in the paper. People began paying attention to what she was saying, instead of comforting themselves with the idea that it was all just a coincidence. She said in the news what Ma had been thinking, what other cops had been thinking but what the city denied—that the boys’ murders were related. People started to talk about it wherever you went. There were even rumors that the Klan was behind it, and how we might see race riots like they did up north and in Los Angeles in ’66 and ’67. When I asked Ma what she thought about the Klan theory, at first, she waved her hand to dismiss it, but then she said, “You never know.”

At the time, the only thing I knew of the Klan was what I’d seen on TV, or the stories told to me by my grandparents and my great-grandfather. They grew up in a time when black folks knew more about the Klan than they’d ever wanted to, mostly about how to stay out of the Klan’s way. I’d yet to have rocks thrown at me by men in hooded robes, or hear my white friends called nigger-lovers by the same men (and women and children)—something I experienced seven years later during a march in Forsyth County, Georgia, where black people were outlawed from owning property simply because they were black.

But in 1979, Klan involvement wasn’t impossible. The Klan was still burning crosses with regularity on Stone Mountain, in a suburb of Atlanta and official home of the Ku Klux Klan’s national organization. Stone Mountain is Georgia’s answer to Mount Rushmore, with its carving of Confederate leaders. The fact that the carving was officially completed only seven years earlier, and that the Klan used it as its base of operations well into the 1980s, should disabuse anyone of the thought that the Old South and its slave heritage was hundred-year-old history. Its roots wound deeply through Georgia clay. The weekend before the last two boys were found, the Klan had killed five Klan protestors in North Carolina. It wasn’t at all unlikely that they could have something to do with the boys.

As a child uninitiated in the ways of the Klan, I tried to imagine a Klansman in his white hood, driving down Campbellton Road in Southwest, past Wingo’s Restaurant with its loud rainbow-colored sign and the best chicken in the world, looking for a fourteen-year-old black boy to steal. He would sit behind the wheel, moving slowly down the street populated by black folks going about their day while he tried to figure out which life was most valuable, would be held more dear, once the people on the street got word that it had been taken away. Taking which life would cause the most fear, the most panic?

It could never happen if he was wearing a hood. So I imagined him without the hood, looking like any other white man in Atlanta, and I still couldn’t see it happening. Most black folks, at least in the 1970s south, came out of the womb mistrusting white folks, and one as racist as a Klansman? Any black person could probably tell you—no hood is needed to see the truth in people who hate a race for simply being. The danger just rises from them like steam from just-rained-on asphalt in summer. I just couldn’t see those boys getting into the car of one. But maybe they were too young, especially the nine-year-old, to know any better. At nine, you still trust everyone.