ACT I: Plié or To Bend
Somewhere in the South. December 2, 1983
I watch my brother from the side. Never from the front, and always to side, because the sight of him serves as a sample to set all my standards by. On a night that is too deep into the night for us to be having ourselves up so late. But it’s a Friday. And Mama and Daddy are up, too, which makes it okay. We huddle around the TV set, breaths stolen from our chests, and the light beams into my brother’s eyes, replacing his body’s emptiness. The video vixens him. Taking him, and us as well, but especially Brother, as its whole dang host, telling him when he can breathe again.
Thunderous greys shadow out, splay, and span themselves into every corner that they can catch.
“Man . . . ” Brother says.
It’s his sixth “man” in two minutes. I wonder how many times a boy can say man before he even becomes one yet. Will he wear the word out so much that when he becomes a man, and gets to refer to himself as one, the sound of the word will leave a stankin’ taste on his tongue and make him sick? Wear the word out until it’s old and raggedy and leading to a good swapping out for something new and smooth by then? Wear the word out until he wants to be something other than a man, something different?
Everybody been talking about it at school, and I know everybody gon’ be talking about it even more come Monday. Talking gon’ become worship, worship gon’ set off a congregation, and a congregation will soon go on to making a pop prince more renowned than the pope.
“Man!”
The music video began with a quote: “‘Due to my personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.’ – Michael Jackson.”
I’m tempted to call Michael Jackson out on this lie. He should change his name to something like Magic the way he makes us puppets to his pop and bop beats, infecting us with his rhythm and that rhythm finding its way into our veins. It’s an epidemic—he and his music! Sickened with his sweetened vocals to slip us into comas we’ll never come out of.
“Man, can’t nobody dance like Michael Jackson,” he says to me, grinning at the 3:45 mark. It mirrors a wicked and wild MJ-like smile. Brother’s teeth flash a starlight venom in the alien TV glow.
“Nobody,” I smile back, agreeing. Except, I think, I wanna say—but I know that I can’t say—You, big brother. One day, I think, you’ll be even better than him. It sounds crazy, even to myself, a blasphemy worse than a curse word (‘cause folks don’t play about MJ). And also, it sounds too big to be said out loud. The kind of saying that scares a person when they hear it.
I also know not to say what I wanna say because no one wants to be the first person to dream a big dream like that.
To look up towards an endless, open sky with no hand to pull them up.
All alone.
All up there. With all of those possibilities.
II
After the video ends, we all can’t help but talk about it, and naturally this leads into a storying of our own and how Brother been moving since he was in Mama’s belly.
“Boy, your feet was just tap dancing all up in me!” Mama sang-fuss. “Got to be that I’d have to stay on the commode ‘cause of you pressin' down on my bladder. You know, God gives his gifts in the womb. He takes a look at the baby before they’re no bigger than a bean, and he says, ‘You’ll be a great builder, you’ll be a healer,’ and Brother, he must’ve said you’ll make movements that’ll shake the whole world,” she said. “Brother was so happy to find a world that was bigger than my small-to-him-but-big-to-me belly. A place free for the length of his legs and the width of his feet to do what all he wanted.”
Daddy got to get his in. “I filled the house with the sounds of Stevie Wonder, and Brother would drop down his baby butt—up and down, up and down—clapping his hands in perfect tune to the beat,” Daddy said. “Get it, boy! That’s what I said.”
“And I said, Do that dance, daddy!” Mama gleamed.
—
Mama and Daddy tell that story so many times ‘cause stories like Brother’s are the kind worth telling.
I think that my folks were thankful in seeing all my brother’s happiness come easily. Thankful that ease was part of his being since there wasn’t too much ease for Black folks without some kind of struggle to get it first.
—
I don’t have any gifts. At least none that I can see all too well. Mama and Daddy love me just as much, but when they tell my story, it’s always about how I was a shy child in Mama’s stomach, about how quiet I was and didn’t stir up too much excitement.
Mama don’t leave me out of the telling tonight even though it’s not nearly as exciting as Brother’s. “And thank God for it, too. My bladder ain’t been the same since Brother. You a thinker, Sister! We need thinkers on this Earth. Too many of us don’t know what in the world to do with our own thoughts but to throw them away and make trouble with ‘em.”
But what kind of gift is a thinker? I want to ask Mama. When every breathing being got ‘em?
A gift is supposed to be something you can see, unwrap the tight rhythm as it pounds to be let out with a quiet, ribbon-cloth pull. I want something I can see, or make, or be clapped over for. I wanna move like my big brother.
III
It’s rare that I don’t say I think and instead use a very secure I know. But I know that there ain’t a person alive who don’t love themselves some Michael Jackson. You know, it’s hard to explain, but it’s just a kind of feeling that you have to witness when you put his music on. And when you do, it’s not just the young folks who dance to it, who know all the words to sing along, but the old folks, too. Ah, MJ just got it. And like Mama said, when God gifts a person, he does so in the womb and with plentifulness.
Some gifts need a little time as fertilizer to make a solid laying down before it builds out, and other gifts come to the world already fully built for the person and for their admirers to live in the walls of their talent.
Somehow, MJ is both—a fully built house and an everlasting plot of land for more houses to be constructed for all of his fans to live in, for him to see how much more he can build upon himself. And just when you think there’s no more room on his block—Bam, here comes another mansion!
—
Over the weekend, still high from thrills televised for ours to chase, we practice the “Thriller” choreography in the front room that has the TV. We hadn’t a mind to think with since MJ turned us into one of his lil zombies, so we just gone ahead and joined his cult.
“See, you got to move like this.” Brother shows me for the infinity’eth time. But his movements might as well be like breathing—something you can’t be taught and just do. He does the entire Thriller routine—arms arched like crescent moons, hands curved like a witch stirring her cauldron. When he throws in a moonwalk just for the fun of it, I know that I am doomed, and there’s not enough teaching in the world to get me to where he’s at. He laughs at me when I try to do it and pets my pigtails with his gloved paws. “You up in your mind too much, Sister. You can’t think about the moves. You gotta just be them.”
“But my thinking is my being. Without them, I’m all undid. And I don’t think I can do this.”
“Not with thoughts like that you can’t,” he fusses. “Come on over here, guh.”
Reluctantly, I let him pull me into something even I can do—a slow side-to-side dance. In the background, MJ rhymes eyes with paralyzed.
—
Once we exhaust every tick of the routine, turn ourselves tired, we get to fixing the living room back up before Mama comes home and gets us for leaving it all in such a mess.
“I would have liked for the girl to have been something,” I say, thoughts turning into talks.
“What you talking about?” Brother asks.
“The girl—in the video. I would have liked if she had been made to be something.”
“What do you mean by that, though?”
“Okay, like how MJ turns out to still be some kind of wolfman in the end? That, but swap it for her instead. Let her be the bad guy . . . uh, woman.” Brother frowns in deep interest. I can see him puzzling the idea together, and it encourages me to go further. “‘Cause see, for all of the video, she’s shown as being scared—scared of the movie, scared of MJ—but what if she was one the whole time? Leading MJ into a wolfwoman trap!”
Brother’s eyes spark, picture fully pieced together. “Ah, man, sis. That’s a real neat idea. Now you got me wanting to see it.”
IV
It’s one of the final weeks into school before winter break, and Christmas, and the hoping of snow after the holiday to extend the break even more. Brother walks down the hallway and sports a new possession: a red “leather” jacket, just like the one from “Thriller,” that he bought with the money he makes at his after-school job at McDonald’s. It got the pockets and zippers on it and everything. And ooowee, it’s sharp. Sharp just like Michael’s.
I follow behind my big brother. Me, fifteen and a freshman, him, seventeen and a junior in our medium-sized school, as all the girls his age, and under and over, swoon over him:
Alright now, Brother! You look good.
Dang, where you get that jacket from?
“You look like MJ, but can you dance like him?” Hers is the only comment that captures—a raspberry-brown girl who is also known as the best girl dancer in school, Miss Savannah King.
“Can I?” He makes a show of wooing her with the rhythm of his hips, serenading her with the singing of his arms instead of his vocals.
Then, here come an ole hater boy, the kind of boy who can’t help but feel a little ways ‘cause my brother is the one the girls love and the one teachers adore for his talent.
“Little Michael Jackson Junior! A-heh-heh-heh!” He laughs an old man’s laugh. Teases like an old man teases, which is always meant to come off like it ain’t nothing but being funny-sweet when really it is a mean-salty to salve over the smallest paper cut, making it feel like a butcher’s knife wound.
It’s not hard for me to see where the rest of this will go. How the scene will story on down. First with a few hard words and then with a few hard fists. Suspension. Mama and Daddy being mad. More mess than what it’s all really worth.
Something has to be done before it gets to that, and no one’s looking at me anyway, so I hit the one MJ move that always makes me fall. That whole spin and tip-toe move. When Brother hears my heavy thud, the making of moans against the cinnamon-fletched cream concrete floor, he quickly rushes over to me. For the time being, all is forgotten and quietly kept from trouble, but I know that trouble is a bubbly beast. It’ll be here again to spew its spicy sizzling spit over all of us again, soon.
V
English teachers be doing a lot. I mean their roles and how they have so many of them.
Their plates be packed like Thanksgiving Day meals. Counselor. Field trip supervisor. Program director. The classes. Being mamas and daddies to those with and without.
It got to be because teaching is a kind of child-rearing for outside of the house. Simply to show us children the right way towards something. And I think in Black schools, or schools that mostly got us in them, this is especially true. Who else is gonna look after us in the right way and keep us safe? When we study and learn about histories, and when those histories happen to include us, it’s always something bad being done.
Outside, and in other countries, and just all around, home and school and church can be a safe place, a haven, where the kids ain’t got to worry and can rest at ease while away, and the grown folks don’t have to watch over their shoulders too much. A haven and heaven are two of the same things—places where a person can strip themselves of what is too heavy to carry.
With English teachers, they not only teach the subject, but they are also the expected providers of any kind of ceremonial event we have going on, and for this time of year, that’s the annual Christmas program.
See, MJ got the whole world excited—the newness that has been found. He has ignited a shifted energy from us all, even the English and music teachers. Everybody’s in the spirit to be something great, to make something greater than what’s ever been done before.
I like our English teacher because she lets us talk how we talk in real life, instead of popping our knuckles with pencils for using “ain’t” instead of “isn’t.” On the paper, she expects us to be proper. In the present, she lets us be. She says, The way of our talking at home is like music, noted with French and English influences. That even songs know not to use a “want to”in place of a “wanna.” Ooo, that Mississippi music, I do love to hear in our speeching! Her way of treating us got it so that she can get us to do just about anything.
She begins her tending to by getting everyone in the class to settle on down:
“Tommy Jones, you a star on the field, now make like one on a tree and sit up at the top of the class. Alicia May—this is not the place to be doing hair. Save that for your future beauty shop, Miss Lady. And Miss Mary Clark, I just know that’s not Mr. Purnell’s physics homework that you’re doing in my class. Being a doctor means working the words well too, you know. Focus on my class to save your patients from that God-awful chicken scratch most doctors try to pass off as writing.
“So, in the soon-to-be Christmas,” she announces, “the school is making moves to do something new as part of the annual Christmas program. What we thinking of doing is putting on a very small rendition of The Nutcracker.” Of course, when it comes down to who will do what, I faithfully figure that Brother will be asked if he’d be willing to participate as he’s the best dancer in school. Though, he doesn’t do ballet. Brother’s talent is that he doesn’t have to do much schooling or lesson-having to learn most movements. All he has to do is watch, and he becomes them.
“Bail-lay! My boy?” Daddy questions back to Brother back at home.
“I’on know about this, Junior. Dancing is fine. Beautiful. But this ballot business...”
Mama shakes her head, sweeping the thoughts away.
“It ain’t what you think, Mama. I’ll be up there with a pretty girl. Moving my body! Just in a different way!” he pleads.
I think I know what’s going on and why my folks are worried. They scared Brother gon’ be one of them funny boys. I don’t use the other word because it don’t sound too good. There ain’t no nice words that got that “ag” on the end—sag, and hag, and drag—they all cruel words used to hurt somebody real bad. Brother ain’t a funny boy. Brother just like to learn to move in all sorts of ways. All sorts of ways ‘cause he can’t help himself. And what being passionate about stuff got to do with being funny anyway? I’d love him all the same even if he was funny.
Brother don’t have the words, so I say them for him.
“If ballet is a movement made by a body, made by God, then by that idea alone . . . ballet is a Godly-practice, Mama and Daddy.”
Silence. I leave it at that because once you bring God into it, there’s not no arguing against it or Him.
Mama sighs the heaviest of sighs. “Just like Black folks to try to plan something like this this late in the doggone month,” she says as her way of begrudging approval.
Daddy still feel some type of way, though. But I think he’ll come around, otherwise Mama would’ve stayed quiet.
—
One thing that worries me about Brother, and the business of ballet, is wondering if he’ll be able to bend in the ways needed of him. Not his body—there isn’t a shape or stroke that I don’t think him capable of contorting his body into—no, I mean the most important bending of all, with his mind.
The mind controls us all, don’t it? Making us masters of our misery or our joy. Masters of whatever we set our mind to. And Brother may have said yes to what his body will need to mold to, but what of his mind? Will it take to the idea of the whole thing if it is only used to a certain kind of thinking? Black people don’t like nothing new or strange or scary. It’s a wonder we took to “Thriller” so well with all the devilish stuff we tend to shun. A kind of strange is a kind of territory we are not accustomed to. Strange stuff and the devil are the keepers away of our greatest promise in this life—heaven. So, when Brother gets to bending and folding this way and that way—will his mind shout at him to stop? That it hurts to stretch it so? That it does not and will not be willed to move in such ways?
But I think I know what to do. How to lead Brother’s way, and the others, too.
To show them that new is not so scary at all.
That the devil is just some ghoulish, hot-footed fool with a whole lot of blush on.
ACT II: Assemblé or To Assemble or Put Together
I
I think thoughts that are too much to stay thinking about sometimes. Like a prison, they stay locked up inside of my head, sentenced to days, weeks, or months of a service to which I am to figure out their crime and reasoning. They get a daily serving of pondering as their sustenance, a routine of my wardened interrogation, and when I don’t let them out for their required exercise of fresh air, they escape to find themselves within my dreams. It’s easier to focus on the stories my thoughts create when they’re Brother’s. Less so on mine. Brother has so many words that go with his. Mine has so many blacked-out spots still wanting to be filled in.
—
In the dream, garish ghouls lead me through a cloud-paved road. They sing, Follow the cloudy-bricked road to the melody of The Wizard of Oz’s “Yellow Brick Road.” The song is chirped and cherry despite how everything looks. I know that I’m supposed to be scared, but instead, I am compelled to sing along. They are leading me. Not to the Great Wizard of Oz, but to the him—Michael Jackson.
Here, Michael is not a wolf-clothed beast. Just a Black man unzipped from his burly brown suit.
Where are your claws? Where are your teeth? I ask with a formal accent, not sounding at all like myself.
I don’t have to have them out. Not if I don’t want them to be. I choose my own skin.
You choose your own skin? But what about being safe? You can’t walk the cloudy-brick road in skin so soft.
I am my own keeper, he confirms. I danced. Dancing is but a set of movements to pay off a debt. A debt isn’t always money, sometimes it’s the ideas we carry about ourselves, about what we’re allowed to do.
Behind, the ghouls sing, Follow the cloudy-brick road to drown out what I want to ask next.
But we have been moving for so many years! Have done all kinds of dance! How can a dance be enough to make us the owner of ourselves?
I wake up before the question becomes answered. Confirmed by my frustration with the silly-strange foolishness of the dream to keep it to myself.
—
I take what I can from what has not been given to us. At least not directly, at least not with grace. Black persons got to make brilliance from hand-me-down knowledge once the white folks have felt that they have used it all up as much as they can—squeezed the orange of all its juice to leave flaky half-shell saps out in the sun. When a Black person finds this sap, takes it, dips it in a bubbling hot sugar bath, it candies, and there is still very much flavor to be found.
This is the attitude that I take on when I go to the public library and find and get as many of the ballet books as I’m allowed to check out. When the White lady librarian looks at me, looks at me as a jaguar would a kitten, as if to say, Now what in the heaven’s does a negro girl want with ballet books?
I say, “I can move the same as to any other abled body,” dropping down in a deep plié, and she huffs herself away.
In my home, some thoughts require a kind of study, and I hunt through published words of the practice of ballet. Though it’s not said with directness, I learn from the words and pictures that it is a four-hundred-year-old rich white folks’ thing that has only ever been knowledgably done by one other Black man—Arthur Mitchell. I make a note to show them to Brother, to make more heroes for him so that he may know that is an art he can claim, too.
These studies will be the helping hand to pull him up from above. Not alone in that big open sky after all.
—
I read and I think, and I think and I read, and I know that the best book to follow is the one that promises to keep my Brother from injury, the one that discourages deformities, the one that will keep him safe.
II
Checchetti’s Days of the Week
No kind of ballet lessons around, and no way to pay for them even if there were, I take Brother’s brief ballet practices from at school and spend some time with him outside of that to help him go further. He lets me, knowing that I’m not the one who can show him how to do these moves but that I can express all that he does not understand.
Makeshift smooth flooring with an iron-pressed cardboard box.
Mama’s old dresser to place his hand where he will need to bend.
Music from a local Christmas station to rig up what classical music we don’t have.
“Un, deux, trois...” I sing with a heavy and false French accent.
Monday: Aplomb to Stand in the Vertical
Brother roots his footing, standing firm and as vertical as possible, his posture strict and without waver.
“Man, this is hard,” he tells me.
“Really?” And I’m baffled by this. “It seems so very easy from where I’m at.”
Tuesday: Épaulement, Opposition About the Vertical
“Brother, to own your body, you got to break through it not by a pained push but by the soft chiseled tap to release it from its cast.”
And with this, he takes on the smallest action, to create the biggest possible one.
A pyrotechnic of power.
Wednesday: Turn Out
Brother continues to say how hard it all is, how this is all too new, and how can he do what trained professionals struggle with themselves?
“Not everyone can do certain things. There will always be a limitation to the body, but this is not your limit. Go easy. Give back to your body entirely. You’ll see what fine points it’ll do then.”
Thursday: Transference of Weight
“Brother, this is the part of the story where the hero has the hardest time,”—when we hit an impasse, I get to speeching—“and in need of a kind word or two to get him to be the hero he wants to be. Now, you cheer all the time when you see it on the TV and this time you’re seeing it in real life. Through you! And I am the kind-word giver. So, hand over some of that heaviness to me. Lift yourself up, and you’ll see how close to the top you actually are!”
Friday: The Aerial Plane
Brother makes himself move high in the air. A star sign made of legs and arms. His head the pointed top. He fits to the sky, sticking and staying like he belongs there.
And, he does.
Saturday: Balloon
Brother has found his way into the new uppity rhythm, altered it to himself so that all the moves feel very natural now. He bounces so easily between all the exercises, holds the moves exactly as to the illustrations. He says again, for the last time, how hard it all is. But he says it with a smile, he exclaims the expression with joyous jumps.
Sunday: Rest
We studied what we could, how we could, with very little and just enough—the ballet moves necessary for the show. Sometimes, Savannah would stop by to practice, too.
And my! How the people who’d kept this practice for themselves, and away from us for hundreds and something-something years, would be furious to learn that they learned it expertly and naturally by a body of their own direction. Toes pointed, legs sharpened so high they could whittle their name in the sun.
III
In my free time, when my mind and dreams are outside of prison, when Brother’s not wearing it, I like to slip on his “Thriller” jacket and pretend that I am as good as him at dancing.
I think the jacket makes a difference, like some of his talent has left traces behind in the inner lining. It sticks to my skin and seeps on up inside of me, and suddenly my arms are sharply crescented, and my left leg slides out and back in with a whipped snap.
For a second, I’m just as big of a star as Brother, for only a second, while my thoughts don’t turn themselves against me.
—
In my free time, I think about all the Black boys interested in too funny things that ain’t supposed to fit to them.
And maybe they do fit.
And maybe the world has made Black boys too scared to try them on.
—
In my free time, I believe that we are heired-keepers. Because these thoughts can’t just be coming from me alone, they were sent to me by some distant source. My brother’s moves must have migrated to him from whoever lived before.
Except, we get to choose what to do with them in this freer time, this present now. Do something with that time taken, from that place, that time-traveled way ahead of us. Our now dead folks telling us to go on and take it ‘cause there’d been no way for them to use them.
A secret Santa Christmas. The gift you can’t unwrap just yet and wait on.
IV
If it’s one thing Black folks are good at, it’s pulling off a miracle in the smallest amount of time and with very little stuff to get it done.
Mind you, we only a day or three from Christmas, and many families still got to think about wrapping they leftover presents. And Mama and ‘nem coming down for the holidays. And the siddity cousins from Chicago who too good to stay in the too-small southern homes, and just gon’ get a motel room instead. Church to go to, and jobs to get back to afterwards, and even with all that going on . . . we find a way.
The school gym is transformed by the many givings of families. Old lace dresses to make flakes from, food cooked as refreshments by the best big mamas, coconut cake to make the snow the southern sky cannot, ribbons, and stages by one boy’s builder daddy from scrap wood salvages.
A world crafted by our own makings, by things that most people would throw away, that we kept because we saw all the goodness it would one day bring.
ACT III: Relevé or To Rise or Lift
I
Everybody come. Even Daddy.
On the stage, Brother makes everyone believe in his passion, the purity of it, that to pirouette is to not be perverse, and captures their doubts with his rhythms. I don’t hardly have any doubts left, mine are just about gone, so I watch as the crowd is exorcised of their waverings. A holiness fills the room as the Black ballet dancers become what I can only describe as a kind of Adam and Eve. They are a beginning, and the purpose of a beginning is to be the first to do something worth talking about. Like Michael Jackson, like Arthur Mitchell, we look to Brother and Savannah for divine guidance. Suddenly, nothing seems out of reach or impossible as they show the capabilities of the body and breathe faith into us all.
That faith is the beginning of an understanding that we can be just as good at something. Maybe not dancing, but something. There is a sweetening in the air from this sort of thinking. The kind that leaves wishes on our hearts and slobbering smiles on our pillows when we sleep and dream at night. My faith is much different from theirs. Theirs is a seeing that they did not even know could be seen now saw. The sight, startling and fresh. A newfound taste to their buds. Mine is a seeing that I saw days and days before, fully colored in my mind, sounds as sharp as they are in real-time. My faith was in knowing that what I created in my imagination could be in reality. My brother who I had taught not by my own physical example but instead with my verbal lecturing. Words spoken from my mouth, his body becoming those words. I, me, my dreams, my thoughts were no longer just some make-believe friend that only I would ever see.
When the brief ballet is over, Brother and Savannah have somehow done the impossible and made Black folks praise harder for them in the gym than they ever have for Jesus in a church.
I release my breath as a bow to them.
—
After the program, everybody makes way to Brother to tell him how good of a job he did up there.
They shake his hand.
They hug him.
They pat him on the back. Anything to get their small moment of touch in, their real-life account so that they’ll be able to say that they’d known him before he became who he’ll soon be in the future.
In waves, they pile up like a snowy shore until time makes them melt down, down, down, and away.
Left behind, there’s just us two.
Us two sibling snowflakes.
ACT IV: Pirouette or To Turn on One Foot
I
The after’ing of the holidays makes an unwilling back-to-school student out of us all. See, we done got settled. Spoiled by all that being out of school and free at home has meant. There were days when Mama would let us sleep in until the cold of the house chased itself away by the afternoon’s warmth. Days when leftover Christmas cake held a place on our breakfast plate beside sides of sausage, grits, and eggs. And all them days of being able to laze about with our few gifts coddled at our sides made the upcoming return to school uneventful and bothersome. How could school, where love was usually given in accordance with the quality of our grades and good behavior, ever compare to the kind of generous and easy decadence of the holiday break?
I walk beside my brother, his gait kinglier than a prince. My own walk something new as well. A walk of someone high enough on his court to warrant a worthy title. I felt like I had the respect of not only being his little sister but also his best friend. The whole thing made me feel some kind of way. Special, or what I guess being in love is like—high, and smiley, and certain that all of the world is at rights and that surely everyone feels as good as you do.
But like most gracious goodnesses, there is always someone there without a sliver of something sweet of their own who has no choice but to try to take yours away. The Ole Hater Boy comes back around to Brother—caught up in talks with his now girlfriend, Savannah.
“Funny looking moves you was doing on stage, Brother.” I was sure that the Ole Hater Boy would return, but what I wasn’t sure about was when or how. Brother’s performance had been so much more than I think he even realized. Not only a coming up of his own but for those who’d applauded, a sort of how-to for having their own upping. An insincere belief being cracked open to find that fear is only a placeholder against what is possible. And that kind of recognition is hard to challenge, hard to say something salty about. “Real funny looking.”
Savannah starts, telling him to go on somewhere and that nobody cares what he got to say.
Brother tells her that it’s okay.
I see Brother. See him trying to think of the best way to beat this. If he should turn his body of movement into a body of violence and settle this once and for all. How else was the Ole Hater Boy ever going to stop, if not to take all of him and make him out to be something worse than being a funny boy? But less than a man. A man beaten by a funny boy.
Sometimes, the now-dead family folks send knowings in the future. Not just time but wisdoms to sort a nonsense with a knowing. That’s how I know that it is the humbling of a man that will settle this, just not the kind that comes about from aggression.
In that moment, I don’t think. I be. Loudly.
“Whew! I think this just the saddest thing in the world—boy with so much time on his hands, he got to find ways to use it up. I think it just real sad to be a boy with no talent. No nothing. And no understanding—that a body moving is a body that can make. And my brother gon’ make moves on every stage! All over the world! On down the aisle one day! And get married and make pretty babies with his girlfriend!” And I say something. Something Mama and Daddy would get me real good for if they heard it themselves. “I think, no, no I know that the only thing that’s gonna wanna make with you is your own left hand!”
And the whole school, I mean the whole school, erupts into a thunderous laughter. It shakes the lockers and all. No teachers in the hallway, thank God, but enough people to where it’ll get back to the grown folks soon enough. And imma get in some kind of trouble for it but not too much, I think, I hope.
Slithering away from the sound of students’ snickers, the Ole Hater Boy leaves. I turn around to my brother who is smiling down at me. His eyes saying, I can’t believe you thought to say that.
And mine own—I know.
II
“Your mouth gon’ be the one to get you in trouble. You might have saved your brother from it, but you put yourself at a risk.” She’s the first grown folk to call me out on it, our English teacher. I don’t know whether to be ashamed or not, but I do know to be very grateful as there are worse teachers in the school who could be bringing me to justice right now.
“It’s really my thoughts, not my mouth. I never say stuff like that . . . at least not out loud where people can hear me.”
“What do you usually do with these . . . thoughts of yours?”
“Keep them to myself.”
She shakes her head. “Child, thoughts like that are meant to be shared. Do you understand what you did just now? How your words made some kind of magical shift? Taking a ‘bout-to-be violence and making a peaceful resolution. Shared, yes, even the spicy ones! Humph, maybe a little watered down for the next time because you just can’t go around talking about what people may or may not do with their left hands! At least not at your age.”
To keep from berrying my brown skin, I focus only on her comment that brings me excitement. “An audience? Like . . . performing?”
“Your thoughts, your words, are a gift. The kind that has an influence over people. If you can change two people’s minds about any given thing, that’s an audience’s worth of persuasion. Now, I’m not sure what that gift will lead you to . . . a lawyer maybe or, if you were corrupt, a cult leader, certainly. But . . . ” She pauses, memory swiped. “But I bet you’d make a fine writer one day.”
“A writer?”
She nods. “A book’s a good place to put thoughts, you know. Complicated thoughts. Happy Thoughts. Scandalous thoughts.”
“A book . . . ” I marvel.
Something that can be seen. Bound by a tight leather casing.
Something to be clapped for.
III
I finally figure out what the exciting part of my birthing and baby story is. It was that being a good child inside of Mama’s belly led to me being a good child outside of Mama’s belly. And so, when I would go on to have moments of excitement, I could, kinda, get away with it. My wrongs being reflected by a—Well, she don’t do much, anyway.
Of course, it got out. Of course it did. Mama and Daddy don’t be too hard on me with my nearly spotless reputation, and since I said what I said for Brother’s sake. But I do have to stay home for a few weekends doing extra house chores and stuff which ain’t nothing too new since I did that every weekend anyway. Clean the walls. Beat the rugs. Help mend a torn pair of pants or two. All Cinderella-type chores blessed not by a beautiful ballgown but by my own discovery. My story—that leaves me feeling untouchable yet respectful in my newfound power.
As the day dusks, the chores settle out of the home like dust settling back to its rightful place outside. I let myself think, and my thoughts feel changed. Like I’m not looking for answers ‘cause I know them all already and why.
My mind makes its movements alongside the imagined pages.
Left to right.
Plié, assemblé, relevé, pirouette.
A ballpoint pen’s ballet dance.
IV
I sneak Brother’s Thriller jacket on.
Sneaking, because he still doesn’t know that I do this from time to time.
Still, because it feels nice to look at myself and see something so fine.
Knowledge-having, no matter how deep and wide it goes, can’t take away that kind of wanting. Where when you look in the mirror not looking for something else, or someone else. A wanting where you want to look at yourself. Lights at their brightest. Face held to a reflection at its closest. And you love what you see.
The weekend where I finally love what I see, in true story-form nature, is the weekend when he catches me with it on.
“You think you got the moves with that jacket on now, huh?” I turn around, surprised but not afraid.
“Nope. I know I ain’t got a single step in me.”
“Ohh . . . so you just wanting to be like me still? Why? When you’re made how you are and how you’ve always been meant to be made?”
“Boy, ain’t nobody trying to be like you. Not no more.”
He laughs. “Wow, so I’m no longer good enough? Cool. Cool. So, I guess you don’t want to see what your not-good-enough brother got you as a gift, then?”
I look away from myself in the mirror, and there in Brother’s hand is a gorgeous red leather book. Same color as his Michael Jackson “Thriller” jacket. He opens it, and the pages are blank. No words or numbers or nothing.
“It’s a journal. For you.” He shrugs. “You should be writing some of those thoughts and ideas of yours down. A hand that moves across the page is a kind of dance, too, right?”
I breathe, startled by him having the same idea as me. A likeness between us that did not depend on my ability to move, or his ability to think in my way, and that was purely outside of us being blood.
“Right.” I take the journal, holding it in my hand, its skin winter cool and warming beneath the stoke from my fireplace fingers. “Thank you, Brother.”
“You’re welcome. Now. Can I have my jacket back?”
“Hmm . . . I think,” And I smile, dropping down into my best plié, the only move I can gracefully make, “that I look really good in this jacket. I think I might just take it off of your hands.”
He makes a move to grab me, and I shift quickly.
“Quit playing.” But I’m already running away, and so he chases me, chases me out of the house and around outside.
“Give me my jacket, bighead guh!” he yells, running like he ain’t fast enough to catch me when I know that he is.
“Nah! I think I’m gone hold on to it for a while! I think!”
My brother and me, we run.
Run all around the house and everywhere the unseasonably golden sun touches. In the new year, we resolve to press the printing of our shadows on the amber canvas.
Run into a breathing breathlessness.
Moving our bodies in a joyous, rapid rhythm, made by the thrill of our thoughts.
Encore
I
Somewhere in the South, Spring 1983.
Spring ain’t too much to fuss over because spring is just a season filled with troublesome days. Fussing, baby-like days that don’t know when to be quiet or to sit still and always in need of a good change.
In the morning, we students step off of the bus with our sweaters and long sleeves from the wintertime, reaching out with the last of its whimsical wishes. In the afternoon, when it’s almost time to go home, the sweater turns us into a swelter. The day, baked more deeply into its heat. It’s the summer trying to stretch its rays and its reach into our lives. Like a long-distance cousin—its voice is sweet and familiar, leaving us to wonder just why it is that we don’t talk to each other more, remembering all that we loved about them and how much we missed them.
Summer was away-from-school time, up-the-road adventuring, and backyard BBQs at Grandma’s house just because.
Spring seemed only to be required waiting to sit through.
Our English teacher doesn’t have to do much settling of us. We are young but tired. Not disrespectfully so, just made comfortable by the familiar routines of our days in the classroom. The jitters of the first few days and months are well worn off by now. We sit through our school days in the way we sit through our breaths, with ease and with not so much as a second thought.
Even though she is the grown-up here, I can tell that she is tired, too. ‘Cause teaching is a day-in-day-out performance. She is worn just like us but doesn’t show it. She wears her worn at the bottom of her shoes, scuffed away of their black grip, and smoothed to a tan slide.
“Now that it’s warming up, we can start plans for the spring program. Easter is in April this year. Soon after, it’ll be May, and then summer vacation time. And I know ya’ll ready for that, but what say you to giving me just a little bit more before we start thinking on that break, huh?”
I don’t tune in to too much of the rest because I already know what will follow, what the blank spaces will be filled in with. I know that it’ll be Brother whose name she’ll call. She’ll ask. Brother is always the one to ask.
“Miss Donna Prim, would you consider being the opener of the spring program? Maybe write something for the occasion?”
It is my name being called. Mine.
She asks me to stand up, and not to the side like I always set myself out to do, but to the front. And I have to shake myself from settings I’d begun to map out in my mind at the start, shattering like slapped-away smoke.
Brother stands in the back, somehow in my class, somehow knowing something before me. Something that I didn’t think could ever be mine.
His smile is wide.
His arms already set to make their claps.
His bodily bows made for me.
Bows made to me.