The Fugitivities Read online

  Despite their territorial and musicological disputes, Isaac and Octavio got along all right enough, and in certain moments Jonah even felt a spark of mutual understanding between them that he was fundamentally left out of. Sometimes they would suddenly lock in and start trading bars, flipping back and forth, sometimes pulling from tracks that he recognized, or thought he recognized, and sometimes breaking out into a mutual hilarity that Jonah couldn’t parse. On the other hand, now and then Octavio would go out on a fiery tirade, causing people to stare and bartenders to call for the bouncer, and Isaac would always refuse to move, shake his head, directing a look squarely at Jonah like this your man, disowning any association with either of them. For Jonah they read like devastating verdicts on him as a person, throwing into question how he carried himself along and across the color line, a potential laser beam that could appear at any time, snapping subtextual lines of force together with sudden, icy coherence.

  Isaac would switch off sometimes, his whole frame of mind gone to a place where he was only half in the room, following the scene from afar. Jonah could tire of Octavio’s high-strung energy just as easily. But he also felt a special closeness there. They shared a fanatical love of film; besides, Octavio’s eccentricity appealed to him, he interpreted it as an assertion of defiant personal freedom. It did not occur to him that Isaac might resent that very freewheeling quality as something he could not afford himself.

  And this hairline fracture running beneath the surface of things extended to an unnamed reserve between Isaac and Jonah. It was never a resentment exactly, although Isaac hinted once that he might well have gotten his much tougher assignment, in a much rougher part of the city, on account of his dark skin—though of course it would be impossible for him to locate exactly when or by whom this calculation had been made. Isaac would just say stuff like that. “Color just has to be navigated, bro, it’s sad but we got to face that shit.” He told Jonah that it was like a student going to a math exam with formulas programmed into his advanced calculator. Like a cheat code that allowed you to skip certain levels, defeat seemingly impossible bosses. For Isaac it had nothing to do with sincerity, or even character. It was more of a naturally expected thing, like a weather pattern, something he felt he’d been primed his entire life to see and to recognize whenever it came across his path. The light-skinned ones. Always on their way, somehow effortlessly floating upward, buoyed by currents seen and unseen, sliding past the glass doors and showing up on the other side and waving back, always insisting everything was the same, even though everything was different—for them.

  Isaac appeared to brood and consider the general mess of things. He was always the type who took his time while he searched for the right thing to say—so that when he had framed it for himself it ended up coming out blunt, not because he was imprecise, but because his tone always had an intimidating air of Solomonic judgment baked in. Tell it plain. That was his instinct, his way of keeping shit real.

  “So you think I should go?” asked Jonah.

  “I didn’t say that. But I do think you’ve already made up your mind.”

  “And I can’t convince you to come with.”

  “Shit…there you go.”

  “What? You’re always talking about how you hate the city.”

  “Look, J., I’m an American. This is where I belong. I think you’re used to existing between cultures. It’s good for you. Traveling is a natural extension of that. But me, I got to fight on the home front. I know it’s not glamorous, but it’s real. It’s real to me.”

  Isaac took a sip of his coffee. His composure was unwavering.

  “You’re not bored with this place? I mean, the same shit, the same violence, the same stories over and over?”

  “Bored? I’m not bored. It’s the rest of the country that’s bored. They’ve all been shocked into numbness. We live in a blasé culture right now. Straight up. Turn on the TV any time, day or night, and prove me wrong. It’s a way of protecting ourselves against something. I don’t know what it is. But that’s exactly why I need to be here. Someone has to fight back. And the truth is, it doesn’t help anything, you leaving. You run away from your teaching, but also your friends, your people. I mean, call me old-fashioned, but I still believe in the struggle, and not in some bullshit flag-waving sense. I mean in that you build yourself around a community and take responsibility for it, own it, make a good old-fashioned contribution.”

  “I know what you’re saying. And you’re not wrong. But don’t you ever feel suffocated? Like, it’s too big, too vast for anything we do to count? Like the atmosphere is poisoned? It’s not in one thing or one group of people. It’s everywhere you look. And there’s this feeling of ‘Fuck it, man!’ Just get out. See something new, be somewhere else.”

  “I see it another way, J. I mean for me, it’s all right here. You can live a whole life right here in Harlem and never know the half of it. I mean, look at Albert Murray. My man is still living right here in the Lenox Houses. I don’t need to go find the rest of the world, let the rest of the world find themselves…I’m trying to fuck with this music shit, and this is where it’s at here, now, and it’s about us, like it’s always been, and the only place you can find the realness is in these same streets. In our history, J. There’s so much richness we have that no one has even touched yet.”

  “Yeah, there’s richness, and you know what we do with it, we throw that shit away like it don’t mean nothin.” We both know what happened in New Orleans. Gave this country our culture and they let us drown on live television! They Wolf Blitzer you and then it’s so long, folks. Moving like piranhas. Feed on the body and they’re gone. No one cares about our losses, and you can’t make them.

  “Hey man, Kanye said it.” Isaac leaned back with his arms folded. “The president don’t care about black folks. Like we didn’t know already. So yeah. You right, so far as it goes. But who needs they opinion anyways? I don’t need George Bush to care—I don’t need none of these fools one way or the other. The way I see it the culture stands for me and I can stand on that. What you so upset about anyhow? Our shit has survived bigger storms than this. Our shit is official. Always has been. Official down to the bone gristle. Made outta gutbucket bayou back-porch church sweat and grease all up in it. Built hand to hand. Built outta nothing and no way. They tried to lock us up but we did it anyhow. Did for this country. And did for us. I seen niggas bounce back straight outta county and make that shit sound like a cool million. You understand what I’m saying. I ain’t ’bout to start feeling sorry for myself now. Shit, with what ma dukes been through? Her mother, her grandparents? No hope, just run away somewheres? Is that what you gonna tell the kids you teach?”

  Jonah, already defeated, interjected anyway: “I don’t know what I’m teaching them. I don’t know that anything I can teach them would even make a difference.”

  “You lying, bro. You know they watch and listen to every word come out your mouth. You just mad because you don’t really want to be there.”

  Jonah winced and failed to make any reply. Isaac, seeing that he had hit a nerve, shifted away as if to indicate he wouldn’t dwell.

  “Listen, I’m just saying. How you know what’s around the bend? What if the best days for New Orleans is yet to come? What if we only just getting started—only just starting to get the conditions we need to make this place really work out the way it’s supposed to? You talking all this apocalypse. Everywhere I go it’s the same racket. I got these Wall Street Journal dudes on the subway, breathing on me and shit, yakking about how we’re under attack by ‘Islamofascists,’ whatever that means. Every Asian kid in the country is convinced it’s the black kid done jacked his spot in college when we got more brothers in jail than finished the twelfth grade. Meanwhile everybody mad at the war. But only cause the Iraqis not takin’ the ass-whooping and quick drive-by they was supposed to. So I’m not buying none of it. Maybe we’re all just a little screwed-up
right now. Maybe we grew up thinking we were special. Turns out we ain’t. Now the whole world gotta catch hell, and even the Dixie Chicks ain’t safe? Nah, I’m not having it. Say you’re right, and we are the undertakers for this doomed country, and yeah, even this doomed planet. Well, a pallbearer should try to get the damn funeral right. I ain’t running nowhere. And I’m not complaining neither. I got to build from what I know. I love my people, I love our music, the whole thing, man, my everything. Imma stand on that.”

  The coffee shop was filled with light bouncing off simmering coffee pots. The wide steel fan in the corner shuffled sticky air without providing any relief.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jonah said. “You want to go for a walk?”

  “Sure. I don’t mind heading down the West Side, but let’s go up first so we can take that path, you know, the one that goes through the campus.”

  They walked together up Amsterdam Avenue along the outer ramparts of Columbia. The weather was cooling off into evening; fit young students jogged by or stood around laughing in small huddled groups. They cut into the main section of the campus and sat down on the steps facing Butler Library. The sun was going down to Union City. Warm rays bathed the library’s massive frontal colonnade, catching the light like a massive neoclassical grill. They stared across the patchy turf where commencement tent poles had bruised the grass below the pantheon chiseled into the facade: Homer. Sophocles. Plato. Aristotle. White teeth. Washington’s fake smile. Harvested out the mouth of his slaves. Jonah lit a cigarette.

  “You know something?” Isaac said.

  “What’s that?”

  “This is the only place, I mean it’s the only thing, that could ever make me wish I were white. Nothing else. And I’m not saying I do. But I’ve felt it before. Man, when you first lay your eyes on a nice college campus, and you see the girls reading on the steps, and everyone’s got this flair about them, like they belong there, like they’ve always belonged there. I look at it, and I wish, man, I wish I could feel that.”

  Jonah knew inexactly what he meant. He said nothing.

  4

  June was moving closer to July and Jonah still hadn’t given Octavio an answer. It wasn’t like Jonah was doing anything that required him to be in New York, but Isaac wasn’t wrong in questioning why Jonah should spend money he didn’t really have. Surely he could do something. When he wasn’t writing in his journal now he was scribbling out a loony screenplay for a secret-agent spoof movie about black underground radicals with a plan to set up a revolutionary resistance base in Paris that gets foiled when they discover a time machine that would allow them to control the future but that they end up using against each other instead in a series of backstabbing leggy entanglements with white women. He would pitch it as Solaris meets Austin Powers, preferably to be directed by Melvin Van Peebles. He thought about asking Isaac to collaborate. Maybe he could do the soundtrack? But when Isaac did catch him typing away furiously in his room one evening, Jonah lost his nerve and made up a story about a set of school reports and self-assessments.

  Summery days full of hypothetical promise flowed by uneventfully, until one morning Jonah got a call from his father in Paris. In a strained and uncharacteristic voice, he instructed Jonah to pack an overnight bag and meet him the next day at the airport rental lot in Newark. His father’s brother, Vernon H. Winters, had died of a heart attack at his home in Pleasantville, New Jersey. He was flying home for the funeral, his father said. Home was a word he rarely used.

  Jonah didn’t know his uncle Vernon. “Vern,” as his father referred to him, was unmarried and childless (a striking anomaly by family standards), and he and Jonah’s father hadn’t gotten along. But then, his father didn’t seem to get along with anyone. Toward Uncle Vernon, though, Jonah suspected his father of harboring some degree of envy. Vernon was considered the successful sibling in the Winters family. He had worked his way up at a local division of Honeywell, one of the biggest employers in South Jersey. The only time Jonah had met him was also the first and only other time Jonah had been down to Pleasantville. It was for his grandfather’s funeral. His uncle was one of the pallbearers, and he stood out to Jonah because he had never seen old-fashioned conked hair before. He remembered his uncle’s long, thin frame, his severe expression, the sweat dripping down at his temple, and his thin mustache, wet with tears. Jonah was still a boy then, and had been completely overwhelmed by the event, by all the faces of family that he didn’t know, by the rawness of the emotion and the clamor of the church, and also because it was the same week Tupac was killed in Vegas, and the two events had become linked as a period of deep confusion and mourning in his mind. Now it was Vernon’s turn to be put to rest, and it would be Jonah’s father shouldering the box of his estranged older brother. Jonah would take the train out to Newark and then they would drive the rest of the way down to Pleasantville together.

  The next morning, he packed and made his way to Penn Station. In the New Jersey Transit lounge, swirling crowds of commuters struggled against the stale ventilation, dodging and slipping around ragged drifters, counterterrorism units patrolling in military fatigues, and deceptive low-pressure zones where bodies people had given up on lay slumped against the side of a wall or sprawled on the steps under faux mosaics memorializing the old Penn Station, the one modeled on the Baths of Caracalla that they tore down in the sixties. It occurred to Jonah that Vernon, as the older brother, must have walked through those grand archways as a boy, holding his parents’ hands. Madison Square Garden, where Spike Lee watched the Knicks play, now stood in its place.

  Once he was in the frigid railcar, everything was efficient and swift. Only a few minutes from departure, they were rolling under the Hudson in a tunnel built under conditions he could scarcely fathom, but which must have cost untold lives for every yard he now traveled. The train banked up over the meadowlands and refineries and trucking depots around Secaucus, stopped in the brick carcass of downtown Newark, and then proceeded to the gray terminal complexes of the airport.

  His father was waiting in the rental-lot complex. He was calmer than Jonah expected, as if the situation brought a kind of neutrality to their relationship that made it easier for his father to be around him. It helped that his father had logistics to keep him occupied. They got in a midnight-blue Ford Focus, looped through the interlocking airport clovers, and merged onto the Jersey Turnpike.

  After they settled into the road, Jonah’s father told him to reach into his travel bag and pull out a stack of CDs.

  “Which one you want me to put on?”

  “I don’t own no jive records, boy. Just put one in. We gotta have something to make up for this bullshit ride they gave me. Five times I told them over the phone, I want a Lexus and I ain’t payin no goddamn fees. Now Avis tells me all they have left is a Ford Focus. They got me paying for this golf cart when I was supposed to show up pushing a Lexus. Jonah, I’m telling you. Why you think I left this messed-up country in the first place? Why I left? Because a Nee-gro can’t get a fair deal. I mean how—how? And see, they know I gots the mo-nay. They just want to ruin my day a little is all. But I ain’t gonna let em. Boy, you listening to me? Don’t ever let them ruin your day. Give an inch, and they will get you everytime. Not a thing, not a damn thing changed since I left. Rental man tellin me this the best-selling car in America. Like imma take advice from you— the guy grinning in my face cause he clocked in on time at the Liberty Hertz rental desk this morning.”

  “How ’bout this right here?” Jonah ventured.

  A smile, the first he had seen since they had left the lot, beamed back at him.

  “Okay. Now you talking.”

  As they pulled out of a tollbooth in the southbound lanes, the familiar piano chords of one of the Gap Band’s Greatest Hits sent soul-stirring tremors through the little Ford. They nudged along for a while in heavy traffic, canyoned between big rigs, barracuda-grilled SUVs, Hummers fresh off th
e assembly line and ready for Baghdad beyond the Green Zone or a P. Diddy video shoot. You light my fire…The traffic thinned as they passed the gaslights and townships of the Jersey midlands with their names blazoned on the water towers…I feel alive with you, baby…

  His dad was suddenly saying, “Your uncle Vernon could get down, boy, ooohhhweee, Jonah, when he was liquored up, like the time he started dancing at our wedding reception. Lord, I can see it now, like it was yesterday. He had your grandpappy’s funky chicken legs, and he could work them things too. You had to see him out there, puttin’ moves on ’em.” Jonah saw a wet line on his father’s cheek. The Band harmonized, urging someone not to keep running in and out of my life.” Jonah lowered his window a crack and squinted at the road ahead. Warm soupy gusts of chemical fumes and car exhaust buffeted the soulful audio-love inside. They were hurtling toward the prickling points of holding tanks, pharmaceutical plants, the megalith forms of malls and factory-discount outlets, RKO-style radio masts rising into irradiant haze. Everywhere and nowhere, isolated suburban lights winked like fireflies as they sailed down the trunk roads of the Garden State through the summer dusk.

  Pleasantville was a residential community that fed off the perpetual transit of gamblers, criminals, and retirees passing through on their way to Atlantic City. His father had booked a room for them in a budget motel in the shadow of the casinos. But with the roads increasingly snarled in beach traffic, they decided to take a break and stop for dinner at the Walt Whitman Service Area outside Cherry Hill before making the turn on Route 40 that would take them toward the ocean. Over fried chicken and curly fries, his father started loosening up.