Yaccub's Curse (8 page)

The air parted reluctantly as I charged through it. It was so thick with tension that running through it was like swimming through quicksand. All that did was make me even more desperate to get it all over with. I still had not learned fear yet.

I was at the end of the block in seconds looking for the pretender who had come to usurp my crown as king of the block. I turned at Duval Street and didn’t see anyone but a bunch of second graders being walked to school by a woman too young to be any of their mothers. Just as I was about to sigh in relief and talk some trash to the other kids about scaring them off, Tank’s hulking bulk turned the corner from McCallum Street onto Duval followed by a little light-skinned kid who was almost pretty enough to be a girl.

Huey was all of 4’ 8” and no more than 90lbs. His skin was butterscotch and he had big hazel eyes with long lashes, thick bushy eyebrows that rose to sharp peaks, and curly hair that grew in an unruly bush. My grandmother later referred to him as “That high-yaller nigga with the good hair.”

When I saw him come walking down the street led by his behemoth “Little brother”, whom I’d already sent hobbling to the principle’s office the day before sniffing and crying with blood and snot dried and caked beneath his nose. I nearly burst out laughing. There was Tank with his nose all bandaged up, grinning like an idiot, walking alongside his “Big” brother who looked like you could knock him over with a few harsh words. I knew a lot of short kids who were bad as fuck but none of them were as pretty as this kid. He looked like a mark to me. I couldn’t imagine anyone who looked that feminine kicking my ass, but that just showed the limits of my imagination.

He stepped up to me and I puffed out my chest and said “So, you’re Huey, huh?” His eyes met mine and I knew I had made a mistake. I knew that this little yaller nigga was dangerous. He had eyes like Darryl had after returning from ’Nam, eyes like my uncle had when we used to visit him at Gratersford prison before he was shot by a guard, eyes like that white boy who shot that Jamaican yesterday, eyes that have seen the worst the world had to offer, eyes that had seen lots of killing, eyes that have killed. We all look like that now, but back then you didn’t see eleven year-old boys with eyes like hardened cons.

Huey didn’t say a word as he stepped up. He just kicked me right in the jaw with a move every bit as graceful and beautiful as himself. This was no Kung fu Theatre bullshit either. This little brotha new what he was doing. I felt my jaw pop and then a punch landed on the other side of it that felt like it would rip my head in two. Instantly I flew into a rage, throwing myself at the little pretty boy in a rage, but I couldn’t land a single blow.

Huey slipped and ducked and weaved, while firing counter shots in rapid combinations. My blows were wild and flailing whereas his were precise and accurate. As his punches landed again and again my rage started to give way to fear. I couldn’t even see the punches coming and once they began they were like an endless wave of kicks. Knees, elbows, and hooks. He was taking me apart. I felt myself starting to lose consciousness so I did the only thing I could at that point to save myself. I ran. Hearing the kids behind me laughing, hearing Iesha’s pained voice calling my name, hearing my father’s disappointed hiss echoing in my mind more painful and intimate than the rest. I ran home and ransacked Mom’s room looking for Darryl’s gun. If I had found it Huey and I would have never become friends. If I had found it Huey and Tank would have never become anything but dust and stench.

Grandma rushed upstairs when she heard me dismantling Mom’s room. She found me sitting in Mom’s closet with tears streaming down my face and blood and saliva drooling from my mouth, which hung carelessly open. My cheeks were swollen up like two puss-filled blisters about to rupture. She screamed and hugged me, and prayed, and dragged me to the hospital begging and praying to God all the way.

They wired my jaw shut and I adamantly refused to go back to school looking like some freak whose braces had been welded together. I stayed home reading Elijah Muhammed’s book and thinking about what I’d seen that white boy do to that Jamaican dealer. The more I thought about it the more amazing it seemed. I’d never even heard about white boys that hard. Except maybe the mafia but I didn’t think this guy was Italian. He looked too pale. And I’d never heard of anyone from the mafia eating anyone’s brains. It just didn’t add up. It didn’t make sense.

Why would someone eat a niggas brains? Was he trying to claim that Rasta’s spirit or his power like those African tribes or was he just trying to establish some kind of weird-ass rep?

It didn’t add up at all unless of course he really was some kind of demon. I kept thinking about the way his face had looked after he’d peeled that Jamaican’s cap back and scooped out Jah Warrior’s brains, all covered in blood with flesh and brain matter coating his gold teeth. His eyes had filled with something like ecstasy. There was definitely something not right about that white boy. He looked like he was possessed or something. But Elijah Muhhamed had said that all white people were demons. Did all of them do shit like that? I wasn’t sure. I just didn’t know enough about them.

I started making it a point to question every Muslim I saw about white people and that whole devil thing.

“No, brother. You got it all wrong. There ain’t no one white man walking around who’s the devil like they portray him in the white man’s bible. He ain’t got horns and tail or nothing like that.
All
white men are the devil. Every last one of them collectively make up that fork-tongued cloven-hoofed fiend. He is an amalgamation of evil and the white man is that evil.”

His name was Jihad Ali and he was selling bean pies by the side of the road, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and red bow-tie. His head was clean-shaven and his face was serious but friendly. He’d been only too eager to talk to me when I walked up to him with my mouth still full of wires and started asking him about white people.

“See, the white man is the original trickster, the deceiver. He was created by an evil scientist named Dr. Yaccub in order to bring down the Black man from his throne of power and enslave him. That’s why we have to separate ourselves from these devils in order for our people to rise again. As long as we are living among them we are corrupted by their evil.”

“Do they all eat niggas brains?”

“No, they don’t eat your brain literally. They are parasites that eat your soul. They eat away at you every day by making you feel like less of a human being. They keep us poor and pump our neighborhoods full of drugs and alcohol and fried foods and pork to eat away at our spirits.”

Jihad’s eyes sparkled when he talked, the way my grandma’s did when she talked about Jesus.

“Then what about what I saw?”

“Maybe it was a hallucination or maybe you had a psychic premonition or something. Maybe you had a vision of what all white people are really like underneath.”

But it wasn’t all white people. That drug dealer wasn’t the first white person I’d ever seen but he was the first one I’d ever seen who killed niggas like that and ate their brains. I’d heard about the KKK and the Nazis and those White folks who’d brought my ancestors over from Africa in slave ships. They could have all been devils. But none of them ate black folk’s brains, at least not from what I had heard. That white boy was the first white person who’d ever scared the shit out of me.

I started having nightmares about getting my head blown off and being eaten alive. I soon found myself looking suspiciously at every white person I passed. Then, when I heard about Jeffrey Dahmer getting arrested and thrown in prison for eating a bunch of Black and Hispanic kids, I started to think that maybe Jihad had been right and they were all devils. Still, it didn’t make sense to me. If they were all out there killin’ niggas and eatin’ their brains there wouldn’t be no niggas left in the world, definitely not in America. Maybe that’s why we were still the minorities despite all the fucking that went on in the ghetto? Maybe white people were killing us off and gobbling us up as fast as we could make new babies? I thought about my teachers at school and I just couldn’t imagine it. They all seemed so nice. No, there was definitely something different about that White boy.

I missed a month of school following my run in with Huey but I got that nigga back.

Even though I was staying home from school I couldn’t let the other kids think it was because I was afraid. So, the next day, I left my house early and hid in an alley on Duval street between Ambrose and Burbridge streets. I picked up half a cinder block and a big piece of lumber. I waited, watching all the kids walk by on their way to school. I listened to many of them discuss how Huey had beaten me. My rage seethed within me like something alive and dangerous. Something hungry and violent. I waited until finally I saw Huey walk by. I expected to see just him and Tank and was floored with shock and grief when I saw Iesha strolling along right beside Huey, holding hands. I raised the chunk of cinder block above my head just as he passed then I stepped out of the alley behind him and brought it down on his skull with a crack that sprayed blood into the air like a geyser.

Iesha screamed and looked at me like I was some kind of monster. I wanted to punch her right in the mouth for betraying me like that, but I hadn’t been raised to hit girls. Still, when she charged me looking like she wanted to scratch my eyes from my face, I had no choice but to push her down, though I did so as gently as I could. Tank came roaring up behind me next. I turned in time to crack him upside the head with the stick I still held. He fell and clutched his head, more to ward off further blows than to ease the pain of the first strike, but I was done. I stared at Iesha who glared back at me murderously then I dropped the stick and walked back through the alley to my house. I was upset that Iesha had chosen Huey over me and that sapped all of my rage leaving only a hollow emptiness. I had gotten a little revenge on Huey and Tank, but apparently they had still won because they had the girl I loved.

My reputation was saved. I got phone calls all day from kids congratulating me on smashing up the two brothers. Huey and Tank would have to wait a while if they wanted to retaliate now because I was still not scheduled to go back to school for a month. But there would be no retaliation. Huey and Tank’s Mom came to my house that night to speak to my Mom about her son’s busted head.

“Excuse me, Miss Black, but you have a son named Malik don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. Why do you want to know?” my mother asked, looking over the woman’s shoulder at the bandage on Huey’s head and the big welt in the center of Tank’s forehead and already guessing what had happened.

Mom towered over Huey’s mom, who was only 5’4” and gunmetal black like Tank. I wondered how such a dark complexioned woman could have a kid as light as Huey. Even though my Mom was taller, their mother had muscles like a man and even wore her hair shaved close to the scalp like a man. She looked as formidable as her off-spring and when she spoke it was low and raspy like that dry heat that wheezed out through the vents from those dusty old heating systems we all had. She was pit-bull ugly though and her eyes were mean. Looking at her I thought of what Huey had done to me and wondered if this little woman could do the same thing to my mom. I wasn’t really worried though. I knew that dad’s gun was still somewhere in the house and that Mom knew how to use it. He had shown her how.

“Your son hit my kid upside the head with a brick and he had to get thirteen stitches to sew it back up!”

“Whoa, before you start accusing my boy of anything you should know that that little heathen of yours broke my boy’s jaw and now he can’t even go to school because his mouth is wired shut and he can’t speak!”

“Who the hell are you calling a heathen?”

I sat in the living room listening to all of this and praying that the two women didn’t wind up fighting because of me.

Huey and Tank’s Mom may have been ugly but she had the body of a porn star. I’d never seen breasts so large on a woman so small. Despite the absence of a bra, they seemed to defy gravity. The nipples jabbed at the fabric of her shirt like little brown darts and half of her breasts swelled out from the sides of her tank-top. Her thin waist tapered down to wide full hips and an ass that was like a basketball that had been split into two equal parts and suspended high on her strong back. Her legs were as powerfully muscled as her arms and shoulders. She was built like an Olympic sprinter. Her deep chocolate skin glistened like it had been dipped in oil making her body look even more delicious. My young manhood strained against my jeans as I took her all in. Even with that mulish face she was beautiful. I wondered again how a woman with a face like that could have born a kid as comely as Huey.

As our mothers talked, Tank came walking up with a chocolate ice-cream bar that was dripping down his hand. He bit chunks out of it and chewed them up like a regular meal. In seconds the ice-cream was gone and Tank was licking the remaining chocolate from his pudgy fingers. It struck me then how much he looked like any other fat kid and not the fearsome bully who was terrorizing the whole school. Huey didn’t look like a kid at all though. He looked like the leading man in a romantic movie, but miniaturized.

It was weird, but, watching the two of them standing there huddled around their mother, I found myself wanting to know more about them. I wanted to be their friend. I saw how they stared at my Mom, who I knew was a stunning beauty, and I knew how I could keep our moms from fighting and maybe even establish a friendship with the two thugs. I ran outside to stand by my mother’s side.

“…I don’t care what you say my kid did. It was your kid who—”

“It was my fault.” I mumbled through my locked jaws, interrupting the two women whose tempers were just beginning to rise.

“What did you say?” my mom asked, as if unable to believe what she was hearing. It was hard for me to speak with my jaws wired shut and she was obviously hoping that she had misinterpreted my muffled mumbling.