Insurrections

by Rion Amilcar Scott

God, Rashid, that’s quite something, he said. I’m not sure—You young people. There are going to be rocks in your way and rocks on your backs. You’re a man, you can’t approach this like a baby would. It won’t get any easier, Rashid. Not a lick easier. It’s gonna be like this forever. Shit, it’s going to get harder. Forever, huh? I was going to name Luce forever, or rather, Samad, one of the ninety-nine names of Allah—Al-Samad, the eternal. But then I started to think about eternity, what a curse if you’re not God, right? My man God doesn’t have holy rent and holy bills to pay. Eternity means someone always digging into your pocket, forever being distracted from your deepest desires, spending all your time doing something you don’t want to do in order to pay a petty light bill. So in that hospital room while Ricca was screaming and pushing Luce out, I changed my mind about wanting my son to be eternal. His little head looked sort of like a beam of light so I dropped my college Arabic for my high school Spanish. La Luz, the light. But light, it’s beautiful and all, but it generates heat: heat burns. That’s what this family shit does, it burns you. Sets you on fire. Burns you to a fucking crisp. All my sense is burned from me. Everything. I’m gutted like a burnt-out building. I’m burned. I can’t stand. One day I’m gonna topple over, a pile of fucking burnt ash that’ll burn forever. And that, Rashid, is the good news. The sun burns and burns and burns and one day it’ll burn out...

They both wore flat, creased faces that looked like abused rubbery masks.

Have you even fucked her yet? Been with her how long and you ain’t even hit that? You must be gay, man. You the only one that ain’t hit it. He a virgin, that’s why he be throwing rocks at people. Man, that don’t even make no sense, Casey said. It’s from the Bible, Kwayku replied. He who is without sin can cast the first stone.

Peacefulness, she realized, was synonymous with vulnerability.

Now hold on, little girl, my father said. Chess is like real life. The white pieces go first so they got an advantage over the black pieces.

He jumped and shuffled across the floor like the Holy Ghost had slithered up his pant leg.

I’ve never even smoked a joint before. Not even in college? Nope. What the hell have you been doing with your life, cousin?

Each week, I volunteered at K.I.D.S. Community Center in the McCoy neighborhood on the Southside. I forget what the letters stood for, but it could have been Khaotic, Ineffective, and Detrimental Supervision.

Some shit I got to say to you, I won’t even try to say ’cause there ain’t no words for it.

I put it in my basement in a briefcase where I kept things I wanted no one to find. After a while I forgot the code and couldn’t even get back into the briefcase if I wanted to.

We called him Mr. Cold. A name, I think, Zeke made up. Anyway, Zeke was the first one I heard say it during third-period art one day, and my laughter turned from tittering to inconsolable, if laughter can be called inconsolable. Mr. Coles had a young, elfin face with tidily groomed hair on his cheeks and chin, none on his upper lip. He was handsome. Impossibly, even freakishly, handsome—strong cheekbones and a smooth dark complexion—a fact I had to reluctantly admit and one that most of the girls never let anyone forget. Hair all black while most of his peers sported grays and bad dye jobs. And Mr. Coles always smiled, even when angry and trying to be stern, especially when angry and trying to be stern. All of this is why we treated him poorly and why he overcompensated, first attempting to come across as a pal, a trustworthy big brother, and when that failed turning into a hard-ass for a time, though he was a phony hard-ass, one we could see clear through. Rarely, if ever, did we tremble in fear at his silly yelling and stiff pointing finger. Marshall, Mr. Coles called to me as I choked on laughter after he grew upset from Zeke’s taunting. Marshall, it’s funny, but that’s enough. This just caused us to laugh more. The warmest man in the school, Mr. Cold, then sent Ezekiel into the hallway as his mentor, Mr. Drayton, probably advised him to do. Damn, that’s cold-blooded, Mr. Cold, a proud and smiling Zeke said on his way out to another rise in laughter. The next time we sa...

I wondered why Jesus would care if we sang songs in his honor. Why it mattered that we dropped to our knees like the naked women in the Cinemax movies I stayed up on weekends to watch.

I tried to imagine what Jesus had said to woo that young slut, the first nun.

White Jesus’s arms were long, his muscles defined. He looked sad, though. He had never had sex, like me. Never masturbated to relieve the tension, because that was a sin and he was sinless. Never watched naked women writhe about on Cinemax or whatever the ancient equivalent of that was. Just what did he discuss with those whores? With the one he loved but never fucked? What did he do with all that yearning?

The Hottentot Venus was well known in her time and even after. In the 1939 cinematic version of The Wizard of Oz, Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion asks in song, “What makes the Hottentot so hot?” He answers his own question with the word courage. The correct answer, though it is not said in the film, would most logically be: her derrière. Or perhaps Wizard of Oz songwriters Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen meant that it took a certain measure of courage to live through such degradation.

When I started at Freedman’s, during orientation, a speaker who was an alumna and board member talked of sitting in economics class next to a shy young man with a thick West African accent. They struck up a friendship, she said, pausing to wink and nod, which I took as an insinuation of a more intimate relationship. The woman ended the story with his name, and I recognized it as the name of the warlord-turned-dictator-for-life of a small African republic. We were supposed to be impressed by the prominence of our alums, and at the same time we were encouraged to wonder what sort of world-shaker sat beside us. One day the dictator will be overthrown and executed or tried in The Hague for crimes against humanity.

If vanity were a religion, he’d be a fundamentalist.

The Riverbabies—the Cross Riverians—they have an insurrection. And there is one to come and it’s mentioned with the ones that happen like it’s a piece of threaded gold passing through the garment.