The Cruisers (5 page)

M
e, Bobbi, Cody, and Kambui were in the media center looking up the causes for the Civil War. Miss LoBretto got all excited and started giving us a bunch of resources when all we wanted was a short, easy list. But we did get to the Declarations of Causes of Secession. The first states that broke away from the Union had their reasons and they were all about the differences between their states and the non-slave states and what rights they had under the Constitution. It was confusing and Bobbi loved it.

“It’s like thinking about infinite number possibilities,” she said, wiggling in her seat the way she does when she’s pleased with herself. “Suppose you designed a computer that could multiply the number one by itself an infinite number of times—”

“It would still always be one,” Cody said.

“Right, and it would be the same if you divided one by itself,” Bobbi said. She was delighted with herself. “Isn’t that cool?”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Well, that’s what it’s all about with math,” Bobbi said. “You have to get in there and figure out all the relationships between the numbers and what they mean. It’s a lot clearer than using words.”

I was beginning to see that.

All the reasons given for the causes of the Civil War seemed flaky to me because none of them included any feelings that black people had or even if it was right to have slaves in the first place. In a way Alvin and the Sons were tiptoeing around the same as the people had before the war broke out.

The next day Cody sent me a text message saying he had been grounded for life for supporting the Cruisers. Bobbi sent a message that Alvin had said in his Hip Baller Blog that she was secretly Puerto Rican.

if i wz i wd hook ↑ w/the D man

The D man was Demetrius Brown, whose parents were from Cuba, and I didn’t even know Bobbi had eyes for him but I did know that we were getting next to Alvin.

Me and Kambui took our bikes to school on Monday. It was a short trip but it was fun. Kambui had painted his helmet black and put stars all over it, which made it look stupid, but I didn’t mention it.

I was feeling confident when I got to school because I thought that the Cruisers were deep into the game and working out okay. Then I saw some of Alvin’s boys gathered in the hallway around Mr. Culpepper. One of them pointed me out when I came in and Mr. Culpepper turned and took a look at me.

That’s when my brain flashed a message. Memo to self: Get with the Cruisers and meet Mr. Culpepper at lunchtime.

Culpepper made an exception to his rule about writing a note to get into see him, so by the afternoon, when we got to his office, I was feeling pretty much okay. Ashley was looking worried, while all the time Alvin was acting like the world really belonged to him and we were just renting space or something. Bobbi, Kambui, and LaShonda were looking down at their feet.

“My father said that the Civil War was about a lot of issues,” Alvin said. “He even wrote an article about it for a magazine. He said that slavery was only one issue and even that wasn’t just about race.”

“One of the things we are not going to do from now on,” Mr. Culpepper said in his Sunday morning holier-than-thou voice, “is accuse someone of being racist unless we can absolutely prove it. Is that understood by everyone here?”

“If only black people were slaves,” I asked, “why isn’t that about race?”

“Well, that’s not the point, is it?” Mr. Culpepper said. “You’re talking about events that happened a hundred and fifty years ago. You can’t say that Alvin is a racist because he is merely reenacting those days.”

“And when the Confederate states seceded they didn’t talk about race,” I said. “They were talking about property rights. So if you call slaves property how come it’s not about race?”

“It’s a very complex issue, Mr. Scott,” Mr. Culpepper said. “The states of the Confederacy were quoting the Constitution when they claimed your—the slaves—as property. That might be too complex for eighth-graders.”

Okay, now I was seeing it. Mr. Culpepper was talking about slavery being too complex and too hard for eighth-graders to think about. It didn’t seem that hard to me—it was either right or wrong. I didn’t see why that was complex. Then I thought about what Mr. Albert had said about the teenagers the police had on the ground. Maybe race was more like drugs than people thought. When they could use race it was good, but nobody wanted to own it when they got caught using it.

“So how important is it for me to be in a movie?” Mom, as usual, had the phone on speaker and was combing out her hair as she talked to Marc. “And how important is it to you to get the fifteen percent?”

“Melba, it’s your career, not mine.” Marc’s voice came over the speaker. “I’m just telling you that I think the exposure will be good for you.”

“I’ll think about it,” Mom said.

“That’s what you said last week,” Marc replied.

“And I did,” Mom said. “I really did.”

Marc did some cursing, then hung up.

“How come you don’t want to be in the movie?” I asked.

“Well, it could be a good movie,” Mom said. “But it could really be a bust. Have you ever seen
Gone with the Wind
?”

“Why would I want to see that old flick?”

“Okay, so I guess you haven’t seen it. It was about this white girl on a plantation in Georgia at the beginning of the Civil War. She’s spoiled and bratty and kind of mindless. The first guy she was going to marry dropped her, and then she meets this cool guy played by Clark Gable and she falls for him big-time but he only partway falls for her. Anyway, she’s got this black maid and there are plenty of black people in the movie. Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for best supporting actress.”

“She was black, right?”

“Right. So then they were having the war and all these Southern boys were marching up and down and acting like they were going off to a picnic and looking pretty good in their uniforms. The war went on for most of the movie and ended up with the burning of Atlanta.”

“They talked about race a lot?”

“Nope. They just skipped around it and talked about Southern honor and protecting the South, that kind of thing,” Mom said. She was wearing a bright red blouse
and was trying on a yellow scarf, holding it against the blouse to see how the colors matched. “They didn’t even talk about slaves from what I remember about the movie.”

“So Hattie McDaniel was free?”

“No, they just didn’t talk about her being a slave.” Mom was laying out clothes on the bed. “I guess the producers didn’t want the movie to be controversial.”

“But she was a slave?” I asked again.

“Yes. They want me to play her part in this satirical movie,” Mom said. “Do you know what satirical means?”

“Sure I know what it means,” I said. “It’s when being funny makes a point.”

“Okay, but the problem is that sometimes these movies start out to be satire and then end up just plain silly. I don’t want to be running around with a bandanna around my head looking stupid. Besides, the movie is supposed to show how racist the story was and you can’t show anything about racism if it’s all about joking around.”

“If you have so many bad feelings about the movie why are you thinking about doing it?” I asked.

“Because I also have bad feelings about taking money from your father and sometimes struggling to make a living for us,” she said.

“Complex, huh?”

“I think it is,” Mom said. “Do you think I look good in red?”

“No.”

“I do, too,” she said.

C
ody called. Kelly Bena, who plays cello in the school band, saw Alvin’s new blog post and texted LaShonda, who left a message on Cody’s Facebook page. Alvin had volunteered to hand out sandwiches to homeless people at a shelter near Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem. He said he wanted to get himself involved in the swim of things, whatever that meant.

“He said he had told Ashley but didn’t think she would print it in
The Palette
,” Cody said.

Okay, so Alvin was working Ashley. He knew she would print the story about him feeding homeless people in Harlem.

I needed to talk to somebody. I was going to call Kambui but he was still in his “let’s get tough” mode. LaShonda was leaning his way, too, and so I called Bobbi.

“Yo, Bobbi, how come everybody is playing a game with us but nobody’s standing still long enough for us to get on their case?” I said. “Alvin was running his little Confederacy thing big-time and now he’s about feeding homeless people in Harlem.”

“Zander, people can be about more than one thing,” Bobbi said. “Sometimes when you see the old movies about the South and you see all the people dressed up like ladies and gentlemen it’s really nice. The way they have it in movies, with all the black people taking off their hats and smiling like they didn’t know they were slaves, it’s kind of romantic and pretty. Sort of like a reality show in reverse.”

“That’s exactly what it’s like,” I said. “Those reality shows where everybody is acting like they’re getting mad at each other or working together and all the time you know there’s a bunch of cameras about ten feet away from them.”

“I’d like to be on a reality show,” Bobbi said. “I think it would be fun. Nothing in the woods, though. They should have one called
Survival at the Mall.
What do you think?”

“I think that’s stupid, but if they get one, I’ll put your name in for it,” I said.

When I hung up from Bobbi, I was seeing things clearer. People were doing their little dirt but it was like a reality show they could just back away from. They didn’t have to own anything. Like my father saying it wasn’t about him and his new wife, it was about me. And the kid on the patrol car saying that the dope the police found wasn’t his. But all the cops had to do was to take them downtown and say they saw them with it and that would be it. They owned it.

I finished the last pages of
A Raisin in the Sun,
then looked up the synopsis on the Net to see if they agreed with me. They did but they thought it was a dynamite play and I thought it wasn’t all that hot.

Then I read the Declarations of Causes of Secession of some of the seceding states that Mr. Siegfried had assigned us and read them over again. The states talked about property and the Constitution, but none of them talked about how the slaves felt or holding human beings against their will. Alvin wasn’t talking about it, either, and I needed to change that.