2

By the Time I Get to Arizona

Uzi tells me they tried to throw the book at him.

“You’re lucky you’re still a minor,” my pops tells him. “If you were eighteen, you’d be in the penitentiary.” He fills the doorway to Uzi’s room like a prison guard. I’m sitting on the bed, long-faced, watching Uzi pack for a one-way trip to Arizona.

My dad’s Afro is thick and flat at the back like how Muhammad Ali’s jawn was back in the day. He’s wearing a black and gold dashiki. He’s got a dashiki for every day of the year.

“I’m African,” he told Uzi and Ted the other day on the porch. Ted calls Pops “Dr. Africa.” “That’s why I wear African clothes.”

“But you’re from Georgia,” Uzi said.

“Being born in Georgia doesn’t make me an American any more than being born in an oven makes a cat a biscuit.”

“Huh?”

“There’s an African proverb that says, ‘No matter how long a log sits in a river, it will never become a crocodile.’ That means that even in a foreign habitat, a snail never loses its shell. Even in America, I’m still African.”

“Here he goes.” Uzi shook his head. “Always in his Afrocentric bag.”

The newspapers call our father “the father of Afrocentricity” because he created it.

                    My third eye is my rail, on this L of thought
                   With Afrocentric stamps I’m mailin thoughts

Pops is always preaching Afrocentricity. He was a Church of Christ minister way back when, one of those child preachers, and he still sounds like he’s in the pulpit when he talks about black people, white people, and the struggle. I remember this debate he took me to at East Stroudsburg University a few years back: him vs. Cornel West vs. Arthur Schlesinger. It was packed, standing room only. I remember how West, this cool black dude with a big Afro and a tight three-piece suit, talked with his hands fl ying fast like he was conducting an orchestra. And how Schlesinger, this old white guy with hair the color of milk and a red bow tie, sounded like a statue. I remember the cheers, the boos, the ad-libs. Most of all, though, I remember how dope my pops was: his passion, energy, confi dence, intelligence. Half the time I didn’t even know what he was talking about—hegemony . . . pedagogy. . . subverting the dominant paradigm—but I was proud.

                                                    ____
Back then I didn’t get it, but now I think I do. Afrocentricity basically means that black people should view the world through our own black eyes. It’s like the poster my dad has framed in the hallway that says, “A people without knowledge of their past is like a tree with no roots.”

                            Hit the Earth like a comet, invasion.
               Nas is like the Afrocentric Asian, half-man, half-amazin

Our crib is mad Afrocentric: naked African statues standing everywhere, ritual masks ice-grilling down from the walls, portraits of Martin, Malcolm, Harriet. From the wallpaper to the plates, everything is stamped with Africa.

Even my favorite porn series, My Baby Got Back, is made by a company called Afro-Centrix Productions. “Beauties that give up the booty,” the box under my bed says. Mr. Marcus, Lexington Steele, and loudmouthed Wesley Pipes nailing Nubian queens like Janet Jacme, Obsession, Midori, Monique, and Lacey Duvalle in doggy style, reverse cowgirl, and missionary.

I tell Pops about the other Afro-Centrix and he’s disgusted. Say what? But he’s the one who’s always talking about how black people should have their own stores, own banks, own schools—shouldn’t we have our own porn studios too? What’s more Afrocentric than black pussy?

                                                    ____

Uzi doesn’t really get down with Afrocentricity. I think he’s still mad about the whole Star Wars thing from when we were little. Uzi used to love Star Wars and he kept begging my parents for a Luke Skywalker action figure. Finally my dad took him to Toys R Us. They came back—Uzi was heated.

“He got me Lando Calrissian!” Uzi said.

“Who?”

“Exactly! Nobody knows who he is. Lando Calrissian!”

“Who that?”

“Fucking Billy Dee Williams! The corny black dude. He has no gun, no weapon, no special powers, and he talks like he’s in a goddamn Colt 45 commercial, like”—he lowered his voice—“ ‘the power of Colt 45 . . . works every time.’ ”

“They didn’t have Luke?”
“They had everybody—Luke, Obi-Wan, Han Solo—but Dad wouldn’t get them because they’re white.”



So now Uzi’s in his closet deciding what to take with him to Arizona.

“Make sure you leave this room better than you found it,” my dad says, scoping the mess.

“Whateva,” Uzi sighs, and tosses a shirt into his duffle.

“What’d you say?” My dad moves closer. I see his face clenching, like he wants to slap the shit out of Uzi. He won’t, though, because Uzi’s his stepson. Now if it were me, I’d be ducking haymakers. Uzi steps out of the closet. They’re a swing away from each other. My brother, at 6'6", Michael Jordan’s height, towers over my pops, who might be 5'7"—Spud Webb. Pops ain’t no slouch, though. He’s southern stocky, used to chase chickens and wrestle swamp thangs and chop firewood back in the day.

“What”—Uzi tilts his head like one side weighs more—“eva.”

Pops swallows hard. They eye each other down like the cowboys in the black-and-white Westerns my uncle John loves watching—toothpicks plugged into stone faces, beat-up brims, ashy steel toes.

I love a good fight, but I don’t want to see this. One day when Uzi was real mad at my dad, he told me if it ever came down to it, he’d fight my pops like “a ngh on the street.” I don’t want to see that, and I know deep down Uzi doesn’t want that either, but he’s a cannon. He’s got a Rasheed Wallace temper, so hot you can fry bacon on it.

“Finish packing. Be downstairs ready to go in thirty. You’re not welcome in this house anymore.”

“Man, I don’t give a fuck!”

“Don’t you use that language with me, boy,” Pops says, pointing at Uzi, eyes on fire.

“You Malo dad, not mine.” Uzi moves in closer. “Don’t get it twisted.” I can see the veins in Uzi’s neck pulse like little lightning bolts, striking on every word.


“Pack. Your. Bags,” my dad blows out. He turns to me.

“Downstairs!”

“Why?”

“Because I—”

“Damn, I can’t chill with my lil’ brother before y’all kick me out?” Uzi jumps in. “You said I ain’t coming back, right? Well, at least let me say bye to my lil’ brother.”

“Yea, c’mon,” I add.

“Thirty minutes!” He storms out. Uzi kicks the door shut.

“Can’t stand him,” Uzi says, scrunching up his face. “Wish I lived with my real dad. That ngh right there, my real pops”—shakes his head into his fi st in awe—“is cool as shit. Lets me do whatever the fuck I want.”

Whenever Uzi gets into it with my dad, he starts talking about Bob, his dad.
“Bob is the truth,” he says.

No he ain’t, I think.

I’ve heard all this before, but I listen like it’s new music. In my mind, though, this song is played out. He sings about how Bob runs shit in Harlem, from One-two fifth to the Heights; how everybody calls him “the mayor of the ghetto”; how he’s always rocking the fl y shit before everyone else—fi tteds, jerseys, fedoras; how he curses up a storm, all types of fucks and shits and bitches—hurricane slang.

But the other night, while Uzi was locked up, I heard the unofficial lyrics to the song. The ones hidden in Uzi’s stomach, I guess. They said that Bob is a junky, all strung out on heroin; that he beat the everything out of my mom every day they were together, like Ike Turner did Tina; and that my mom’s neighbor, a priest, put a gun in Bob’s mouth and told him if he ever touched my mom again he’d be “summoned to appear before his maker.” My mom told me this secret music from her chair, Egyptian pillow resting on her stomach. I was kneeling next to her, holding her soft hands, soaking up these blues.

“He would beat me and beat me until my eyes were purple and swollen shut.” She cried as she told me. I hugged her with all I had: arms, heart, body, and soul. I want to protect her from everything, from all the evil in this cold world. I think about the man who beat her and bite my bottom lip so hard it bleeds. I think about using my dad’s double-barreled shotgun on Bob—about taking it from his closet, loading it with buckshots just like Pops taught me last summer after our crib got robbed, and squeezing. Uzi doesn’t know that I know this.

“Bob is that ngh,” Uzi says.

Fuck Bob! is what I really want to say, but this is Uzi’s last day in Philly and I don’t want him to bounce on a bad note—so I press mute.



My parents are in the kitchen waiting to take Uzi to the airport. They’re mad because Uzi keeps getting in trouble. They get him out, but he gets right back in. They keep saying he’s playing with fire.



He gets expelled from all the schools: Ivy Leaf for telling some girl “Suck my dick, bitch” in the middle of math class; Piney Woods, this black military school in Mississippi, for breaking some kid’s nose; and a bunch of other places. He even gets booted from the last-chance schools—the ones with names like Second Chance and Fresh Start—so now my parents don’t know what the fuck to do.

The day after Uzi got locked up they called a family meeting. They sat us down and talked about the struggle, about the sacrifices our ancestors made, and about how they came up. They asked us all these questions about their upbringing, then answered before we could respond.



                             Do you know where we came from?

DAD: A one-room shack in Valdosta, Georgia. I was the oldest boy of sixteen children. Sixteen of us in a shack the size of a pigeon coop, on the banks of the Okefenokee Swamp and Withlacoochee River.

MOM: The projects in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. I was the oldest girl of three. We all slept in the same bed. Single mom.



                     Do you know what it was like back then for us?

DAD: I started working on the plantation when I was six. Picking cotton for white folks. I picked more than I weighed, working under the hot Georgia sun from can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night. The thorns around the bolls would leave my hands cracked and bloody. We were sharecroppers who never got a share. Separate restaurants, separate water fountains, separate toilets, separate schools, churches, neighborhoods. The only thing that blacks and whites shared in Valdosta were mosquitoes.

MOM: I started working when I was eight: scrubbing floors and toilets for white families in Long Island. It showed me just how poor we were. Dirt.

                                 Do you know how hard it was?

DAD: I was eleven when I got my first job as a shoeshine boy at a white barbershop. I just took my wooden shoe box and went inside the shop and asked the owner if I could set up and shine shoes. He said, “Yeah, boy, just give me fifteen cents on every quarter you make.” Shining white people’s shoes was a guaranteed position; after all, it was nonthreatening and subservient. So I was not surprised that I got the job; other than working in the fields, it was probably the only job that I could have gotten at the time. My first customer, a young white man in his twenties with black shoes, sat in the chair near the window, and I took out my polish, my rag, and toothbrush. When I finished, instead of paying me, he spat in my face.

MOM: I saw my mother raped. We lived on the third floor of a rooming house on Vanderbilt Avenue. “Yell for help, yell for help,” my mother told me as the man broke down the door to our room. I ran to the window and looked down on the dark street where nothing seemed like it was moving. I opened my mouth wide but nothing came out. No voice, no cry, no nothing.

The refrain: If we made it from all that—from projects and plantations—what’s your problem? It’s not just Uzi either. My cousin Kadir from the Bronx got knocked a week after Uzi did for robbing the subway platform.

“The subway platform?” I asked my aunt on the phone.

“Yes, he robbed everyone who was waiting for the A train at ten-thirty in the morning. I’m convinced he’s lost his goddamn mind.”



They’re sending Uzi to Arizona to live with my uncle Jabbar. Bar’s cool. He’s a former Golden Gloves champ who sparred with Muhammad Ali back in the day. He always rocks a gold chain, pinky nugget ring, and a hustla’s grin. Cadillac slick, he looks just like Tubbs from Miami Vice.



Last time I saw him, on Thanksgiving, he pulled me to the side.

“You getting any ass yet?” he asked, submarine voice. I just laughed. His thick hands pulled me close.

“Huh?” He studied me, tightening his grip. I nodded a lil’ nod. “My boy!” He scrubbed the top of my head like a lotto scratch-off . “Life is all about ass . . . You’re either covering it, laughing it off , kicking it, kissing it, busting it for some white man at the job, or getting some!” I cracked up.

“Just remember,” he said. “Sex is like riding a bike: you gotta keep pumping if you want to go anywhere . . . Lemme ask you something else?”

“What’s up, Unc?”

“You eating pussy yet?” He grabbed me.

“Come on, Unc,” squiggling out of his grip.

“Let me smell your breath.” He chased as I jetted out of the room.

He found me in my room.

“Put your shit up,” he said, putting his hands, like boulders, in front of his grill. He threw a jab at me. “Fuck you gon’ do, nephew?” Sizing me up like a fi tted hat. I jumped out of my seat.

“Gotta be ready for anything.” Touched my chin with another jab. “C’mon now, put your shit up.” I threw my hands up. He caught me again—bang. “Keep ’em up, young buck. Up! Protect them pussy-eating lips.”

I moved them up. His fi st on my ribs. My hands fell like they were asleep. His fi st on my chin. He picked me apart, then showed me how to hold my hands.

“Stand strong, feet shoulder width apart, like this.” Planted his feet, fixed my stance. “And if you ever want to kiss a ngh good night,” staring into his right fist, “swing it like this. Land it right there,” landing it slo-mo on my face.

I pulled back and tried to throw the same punch. “Like that?”

“Yup, just like that,” catching my punch. “That punch right there will make a ngh swallow and spit at the same damn time.”



Unc can fight anybody, whoop anybody’s ass . . . except for dynamite. Dynamite is crack and heroin mixed up—it’s undefeated.



“You clean?” my mom asked him on the phone the other day. I was eavesdropping on the other phone.

“Seven months. Think about using every day, but I’m clean. Intend on staying that way too.” Before they hung up, he said, “Send the boy. I’ll get him in line.”



Uzi’s going through his dresser. It’s got so much graffiti on it I can’t tell the original color. It’s bombed out like one of the subway cars in the train yard near my grandma’s house on Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

Top drawer—

“Want these?” he asks, tossing nunchucks at me.

“Yeah!” I catch, swing. They’re really just two wooden paper towel holders chained together.

“Take these too.” He throws brass knuckles at me. I slide my fingers into the four holes that look like the Audi rings. Make a fist.

“And yo—don’t get caught with none of this shit either,” Uzi tells me. I nod like a bobblehead and throw a brass jab at the air. “I’m not tryna hear Mom’s mouth.”



Middle drawer—

Black and silver Krylon spray paint and a couple of fat cap nozzles.



Bottom drawer—

A Phillies Blunt box full of sticky photos. He hands me this pic of a naked jawn. “What you know about that, Malo?”

“Damn,” I say. “Her titties look like two bald heads.” Uzi laughs and hands me another photo.

“’Member this?” It’s a hazy pic of me and Uzi.

“Nah,” I say. “When was this?”

“That’s from when we moved here. Our first day in Philly. Mom took this,” he says. I keep staring at the photo.

“I look shook.”

“You were! You don’t remember that day? You don’t remember what you asked me when we were watching the fire?”

I shake my head nah. “What fire?”

“That was the day they bombed MOVE.”

“Who bombed who?”

“Mayor Goode had the police drop a bomb on this group called MOVE, right there on Osage Avenue. We could see the blaze from our building.”

“Oh yeah,” I say slow, remembering, seeing the smoke curl behind my eyes. “That was a bomb?”

“Yeah, they dropped C-4 with Tovex on the whole block. That’s the shit NASA uses to blow up asteroids and whatnot. Mad people died—women, kids. Shit was crazy. Mom is friends with one of the survivors—Ramona Africa.”

“So what did I ask?”

“We were watching it go down—the smoke, the helicopters, sirens—you asked me if it was the end of the world.” We both laugh. “It was, though, in a way. It was the end of the world we knew. We moved into a burning city.”

He pulls one last thing out of his dresser: a deck of cards. He shuffles them, then they disappear, and reappear in my pocket. I’m like, “What the . . . ?” and he’s just flashing this crazy grin.

“See, Malo, every ngh knows magic—look how we disappear when five-o rolls up.” I laugh, thinking, And reappear in jail? “For real, though, magic is all about misdirection. Large movements to cover small movements. And every magician needs a signature trick.”

I wish I knew magic. My signature trick would be to make the cops—the ones that stormed through our door that day, then into my dreams most nights like a horrible movie playing over and over in my head—disappear. Poof. Be gone.



I hug Uzi tight and try not to let go. I feel like if I let him go, he’ll be gone forever. I can’t fight back the tears. If he comes back tomorrow, it’ll be too long.