The Cruisers (6 page)

I
n the lunchroom. The service counter had peas, green beans, some nasty-looking spinach, rice, something that looked yellow and round, spaghetti, chicken tenders, fish sticks, chilled pears, and cookies. I settled on the fish sticks and spaghetti. I looked around and saw LaShonda and Bobbi sitting together and went over.

“Yo, what you doing?” I asked LaShonda.

“She’s painting the first ten prime numbers on my fingernails,” Bobbi said. “I would have her paint the next ten on my toenails but they’re too small.”

“You don’t have any toenails,” LaShonda said, holding up her nail polish. “You have toenails on your big toes but your other nails are too small to be called real nails. They’re just like tiny spots on top of your feet.”

“That is seriously stupid,” I said.

“What are you eating?” Bobbi pointed to my plate.

“Fish sticks and spaghetti,” I answered.

“That doesn’t look like a fish to me,” Bobbi said. “It doesn’t have a tail, it doesn’t have eyes, and it’s rectangular. If you threw it in the water, it wouldn’t swim, and if you walked down the street it wouldn’t follow you home. And I’ve never heard of a fish called ‘stick.’ And now you’re going to put it in your mouth and eat it. Now
that’s
weird, Zander.”

“It looked better than the chicken tenders,” I said.

BLAM! BLAM!

I was trying to think of something else to say when we heard the noise coming from the other side of the lunchroom. Everything got quiet for a second and then it came again.

BLAM!

I looked over the table and saw kids clearing out from near the window.

“Come on, punk!” It was Alvin McCraney pulling off his shirt. “Bring it! Bring it!”

He was facing off with Kambui about four feet from the far wall.

I started across the floor as fast as I could. I didn’t want Kambui getting into any fights in the lunchroom. I was almost to them when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. It was a body coming toward me.

I couldn’t tell who it was but then I saw another blur as two guys clashed, knocking a girl down as their bodies crashed onto a table. I could see the second body. It was Cody.

I turned back to where Alvin was still standing, his shirt half off and his face pale and twisted with anger. His mouth fell open as he saw Cody and Billy tangling big-time.

I got between Kambui and Alvin and held my hands up. From the corner of my eye I saw some of Alvin’s friends move behind him. It looked like the war was about to begin.

“What’s going on here?” A man’s voice. Then again, slower. “What is going on here?”

“Nothing.” Alvin McCraney was putting his shirt back on.

“Cody?!” Mr. Culpepper watched as Cody and Billy untangled themselves.

“Nothing, sir,” Cody said.

“Your father would not appreciate your fighting in the lunchroom, Cody,” Mr. Culpepper said. He was puffed up so that his neck looked bigger than his head.

“No fight, sir,” Cody said.

“Okay, then,” Mr. Culpepper said. “Let’s see if you gentlemen can live up to the title.”

He looked around again and then walked away. I knew if it had been anyone except Cody there would have been a lot more screaming and taking down of names. Cody’s father worked in the school and Mr. Culpepper didn’t want to make trouble for him. I watched as Alvin and some of his guys got together and shot some dirty looks our way before leaving the lunchroom together.

“I don’t know if they make jerks in grades,” Cody said, standing near me, “but if they do, then Billy Stroud is class A all the way. He was coming at you like a freight train.”

“Thanks, man,” I said.

“No problemo,” Cody said.

I went over to Kambui and saw that he was steaming mad.

A girl named Zhade Hopkins, Shantese’s sister, was with him and I asked her to tell LaShonda and Bobbi to
meet us in the media center. Kambui had a thing for Zhade. He’d been trying to get a date with her for over a year.

“If you guys get into it don’t use any guns,” Zhade said. “It ain’t worth it.”

The word was on the street.

“We need to get some brothers together and just get busy with the Sons of the Confederacy and anybody else who needs to get his head whipped,” Kambui said, looking me down. We were meeting in the media center and Kambui had brought the Jackson brothers and Phat Tony from the Genius Gangstas to the meeting. “I’m dealing on my own because you’re acting like you’re scared of them.”

“I’m not scared of anybody,” I said. “But if we’re going to war you need to show me the win you found. If there’s going to be a fight there’s got to be a win in it somewhere. Show me what you got.”

“One of Alvin’s dudes came up to me in Social Studies and said if I picked enough cotton he would let me sit on the front porch with him in the evening,” LaShonda said. “I told him if he needed any cotton picked he’d better tell his mama to pick it. Making him keep his mouth shut is a win for me.”

“And Alvin was up in my face in the lunchroom,” Kambui said. “He’s moved the set from his little jokes to jumping bad because he knows you’re too scared to fight.”

“The civil rights movement wasn’t about fighting,” I said. “Martin Luther King, Jr., wasn’t about fighting.”

“No, but he had some righteous brothers in the streets who were ready to get down if they had to,” Kambui said. “And Frederick Douglass was down for peace but he still told Abraham Lincoln that the Union needed to get some black soldiers involved in the Civil War. Yo, man, if it was good enough for Frederick Douglass, it’s good enough for me.”

“I think Zander is running shy,” LaShonda said. “He definitely doesn’t look like he’s ready for no serious throw down.”

“I think we should remain true to our role as peacekeepers,” Bobbi said. “And that’s not about fighting.”

“Bobbi McCall, how are you going to fix your mouth to say that when you’re not black?” LaShonda asked. “It doesn’t affect you the way it does us.”

“LaShonda, I may not be as dark as you”—Bobbi got both hands up on her hips—“but I’m every bit as human
as you are. If you’re putting down human beings, then you’re putting me down, too.”

“Anybody that paints their nails with the prime numbers is not as human as I am,” LaShonda said. “You may be smart but you are freaky.”

“Yeah, well, that, too, LaShonda,” Bobbi said, checking out her nails. “But that doesn’t move me away from what I’m feeling about this.”

“Alvin’s walking around with bodyguards now,” Kambui said. “He’s been hanging out with some of the big guys in the school. I think they’re just looking for a fight.”

“Yeah, but isn’t that the way all wars get started?” I asked. “The textbook said that most of the people in the South didn’t have slaves but got caught up in the idea they were fighting for their states or for their homes. I think they forgot about why they were fighting and just got on with it.”

“Whatever!” Kambui was on his feet. “The bottom line is that he’s walking around with his ha-ha on and it’s us that he’s goofing on. It might not bother you because you’re not rolling with the people, but it bothers me.”

“And having these dudes up in my face is messing with my mind,” LaShonda said. “They’re fingerpicking on my
last
nerve and making me feel four kinds of stupid because I ain’t got no comeback!”

“Okay, if I can get Alvin and his crew to the table and make them own what they’re running, will you hang with me?” I asked.

“How are you going to do that?” Kambui rolled his eyes toward me.

“They don’t want to take credit for what they’re saying,” I said. “They want to make it light stuff and, like you’re saying, they’re blowing themselves up and thinking they can push up on us. Okay, suppose we give them credit and give them exactly what they want. Suppose we start agreeing with what they’re saying but put it up front so they can’t get around it?”

“Zander, are your mouth and brain on the same page? What are you talking about?” LaShonda’s voice went up about four notes.

“He’s punking out,” Kambui said.

“I’m not punking out,” I said. “I just think if we make the Sons of the Confederacy responsible for what they’re saying and doing we’ll have something going on that we can deal with.”

“So what’s your plan?” Bobbi asked.

It wasn’t a whole plan but I didn’t want to say that. It was like a little bit of
Gone with the Wind,
a little bit of real history and some of that luck Mr. Culpepper said we were going to need.

“Look, in the movie
Gone with the Wind
they had a bunch of black people on their plantation but they didn’t call them slaves. They called them servants like they were just working there part-time or something,” I said. “If they had signs around their necks that read ‘Slave,’ then the movie would have been different. Slavery was the name of the thing going on then, and we got to bring the name to this set. If LaShonda can work her Facebook connections and her IM circuits to let everybody know what we’re doing, we might pull something off.”

“Which is what?” LaShonda asked.

“We get all the blacks in the eighth grade to start acting like they’re slaves and bowing and crossing the hall when they meet the white students.”

“I’m not doing that,” Kambui said. “No way. It’s stupid, man. I’d rather go down swinging than lame my way through this crap.”

“I don’t think it’s stupid, Kambui,” Bobbi said. “I see where Zander’s going. Say the teacher comes into the
room and asks who took a book off the desk and everybody turns and looks at LaShonda—”

“Why does it have to be me?” LaShonda asked. “I don’t take people’s books.”

“Right,” I said. “But you’d have to answer the questions about it if we all acted as if you did.”

“And we’re supposed to be acting like slaves so that Alvin has to answer the questions about his attitude?” Kambui had his arms crossed.

“Not only Alvin,” I answered. “But everybody who is saying it’s just a freedom of speech thing and it’s just a play thing and it’s everything except what it really is, a lot of joking around that’s making people feel bad.”

“And suppose it doesn’t work and they just keep on with their ha-ha attitude?” Kambui asked.

I looked over at him and took a deep breath. “This is Tuesday. We’ll get it together for Thursday morning. I’ll run off a broadside edition of
The Cruiser
tonight and we’ll give that out tomorrow. Then, if the joint doesn’t run by Friday afternoon I’ll punch Alvin out at three o’clock,” I said.

“I don’t think you can beat Alvin,” Kambui said. “But I’ll run with it until Friday.”

“If it don’t work out I’ll see what happens Friday,” I said. “All I’m asking is that you work for me until then.”

“Wait a minute, I just thought of something,” Bobbi said. “You might have noticed something about me, folks. Like, I’m cute and white. What am I supposed to be doing when you’re walking around acting like slaves?”

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

“She can hold the guns,” Phat Tony said. “We can contact the Bloods, the Crips, and the Mexican Mafia and get them on our side of the ave.”

“I just want to get with the program,” Bobbi said. “Not get pushed to the side.”

“Instead of us all acting, let’s run with a visual,” Kambui said. “We can have signs around our necks. Remember reading about the civil rights movement and the brothers carrying signs that read ‘I Am a Man’? That’s what I need to feel like, right now. A man.”

Kambui’s idea was good and I went with it. “Okay, how about us wearing signs that just say ‘I Have Been Degraded’?” I said.

“Then I can be on board,” Bobbi said. “It sounds like a plan to me.”

I told everybody that I would make the signs up and
have them ready to wear. I knew I could run them off on our printer and then glue them down on some heavy oak tag.

The Jackson brothers, Kambui, and LaShonda left together and I knew they would be talking about me.

“You sure about this?” Bobbi asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s going to work?”

“If I were you I’d bring some bandages to school Friday morning,” she said.

The thing was that if it didn’t work and I did fight Alvin it would be just enough to get me kicked out of Da Vinci. Maybe even all the way to Seattle.

CRUISERS DECIDE THAT
SLAVERY DIDN’T MATTER!

The Da Vinci Cruisers, who were trying to make peace between the North and South factions and prevent the Civil War, have come to an agreement with the Sons of the Confederacy that slavery was not an issue because the feelings of black people don’t matter. “You can say anything you want about black people,” said Zander Scott. “We don’t matter because, as Alvin McCraney has pointed out, we aren’t civilized. So our feelings don’t count.” We therefore encourage all Da Vinci students and teachers to disrespect everything dealing with African Americans for the rest of the school year. We also offer the following resolution for the approval of all Da Vinci students: It does not matter that the Africans
brought to America from 1619 to 1807 were degraded into a state of slavery and that they, and their descendants, can still be degraded today within the halls of Da Vinci Academy.

—The Cruisers