laughed with him.
“That’s right, punk,” the boy yelled, and they laughed harder until they saw Love grab one of the dirt bikes. Then they ran after him, all three of them.
Love threw his bottle and sped up High Street past the telephone booth. He rode standing in his socks. The air felt good on his face. He heard the pedaling of the other bike behind him, but he didn’t waste time to see how far back it was. He would keep riding until he saw the 580 and then turn; then they would be far enough away that it would only be one person to fight. He tried to remember what it was like to be in a full-on brawl without staff to break it up. How did you know when to stop? How did you keep from killing each other? He would go for the throat, choke him until he passed out so he didn’t have to keep fighting.
Love got to the overpass, stopped, and turned. Li’l Pit came right at him, howling at the top of his lungs like a young coyote. But he didn’t slow down. He sped past Love, jumping the curb onto the sidewalk. Love mounted his bike again and followed, catching up to him just as they turned on to MacArthur, and they headed west together.
SANTA RITA JAIL
AND HE CAME to the front of the recreation room and stood on the table with a book in his hand:
So we are brought ashore and we don’t know where our wives and sisters are. We have been unloaded separately, and when we call out to them, we are flogged. It is forbidden to speak in our languages. And even when we find a secret moment, the Africans around us are from different tribes and do not speak our language. That’s right, we have a tribe, we have a history and place of origin. That is why some of us are tall and thin, some of us are round and thick, and some in-between.
Do you know your tribe, brothers? Have you ever thought of yourself as anything but the children of slaves, with no history but that of an inferior and victimized race? Are you Baul, the great musicians of Africa; Zulu, the master iron-smelting spear-makers whose soldiers could not marry until they were forty; Mandingo, Wolof, Serer, Fula, Fanti, or Ashanti. Are you from Dahomey with their awesome female warriors, or of their enemy, the Yoruba of Oyo, artisans secured behind the village walls, whose king had to commit suicide if he had a vote of no confidence—now that’s Power to the People!
When we get off this ship, we still have our history within us, but we will not be allowed to tell it to our children. They will never know the accomplishments of our people. We will not be allowed to pass down the songs that teach of our tribes’ battles, the dances that tell of how the world began, or the sciences our ancestors discovered: how to make powder from the dried leaves of the baobab tree to cure dysentery; how to use the pyrethrum plant as an insecticide that doesn’t hurt animals and to which insects cannot develop immunity; how to use the leaves of the shea-butter for headaches. The Europeans would not have even been able to colonize Africa if they hadn’t learned from us that quinine from the cinchona bark could cure malaria. By losing the language, we lost the religion, the food, the crafts of building and farming, the art of our tribes’ baskets and healing.
We once held a position in our village: we were the scientist, the reader of the sky, who knew if there would be rain or drought this season by the smell of the wind and the cloud formations; or the zoologist, a Pygmy animal tracker, who knew the difference between a deer and an antelope dropping, between the paw print of a jaguar and the paw print of a lion. Or we were the slaves of another tribe; yes we might have been slaves of Black people, but we had respect, we had dignity, and we kept our culture to pass down to our children. In America, all will be wiped out, our children are given a new set of rules. Everything wise and powerful will seem to have been created by the White man.
CHAPTER 4
FEBRUARY
“That’s right, punk,” the boy yelled, and they laughed harder until they saw Love grab one of the dirt bikes. Then they ran after him, all three of them.
Love threw his bottle and sped up High Street past the telephone booth. He rode standing in his socks. The air felt good on his face. He heard the pedaling of the other bike behind him, but he didn’t waste time to see how far back it was. He would keep riding until he saw the 580 and then turn; then they would be far enough away that it would only be one person to fight. He tried to remember what it was like to be in a full-on brawl without staff to break it up. How did you know when to stop? How did you keep from killing each other? He would go for the throat, choke him until he passed out so he didn’t have to keep fighting.
Love got to the overpass, stopped, and turned. Li’l Pit came right at him, howling at the top of his lungs like a young coyote. But he didn’t slow down. He sped past Love, jumping the curb onto the sidewalk. Love mounted his bike again and followed, catching up to him just as they turned on to MacArthur, and they headed west together.
SANTA RITA JAIL
AND HE CAME to the front of the recreation room and stood on the table with a book in his hand:
So we are brought ashore and we don’t know where our wives and sisters are. We have been unloaded separately, and when we call out to them, we are flogged. It is forbidden to speak in our languages. And even when we find a secret moment, the Africans around us are from different tribes and do not speak our language. That’s right, we have a tribe, we have a history and place of origin. That is why some of us are tall and thin, some of us are round and thick, and some in-between.
Do you know your tribe, brothers? Have you ever thought of yourself as anything but the children of slaves, with no history but that of an inferior and victimized race? Are you Baul, the great musicians of Africa; Zulu, the master iron-smelting spear-makers whose soldiers could not marry until they were forty; Mandingo, Wolof, Serer, Fula, Fanti, or Ashanti. Are you from Dahomey with their awesome female warriors, or of their enemy, the Yoruba of Oyo, artisans secured behind the village walls, whose king had to commit suicide if he had a vote of no confidence—now that’s Power to the People!
When we get off this ship, we still have our history within us, but we will not be allowed to tell it to our children. They will never know the accomplishments of our people. We will not be allowed to pass down the songs that teach of our tribes’ battles, the dances that tell of how the world began, or the sciences our ancestors discovered: how to make powder from the dried leaves of the baobab tree to cure dysentery; how to use the pyrethrum plant as an insecticide that doesn’t hurt animals and to which insects cannot develop immunity; how to use the leaves of the shea-butter for headaches. The Europeans would not have even been able to colonize Africa if they hadn’t learned from us that quinine from the cinchona bark could cure malaria. By losing the language, we lost the religion, the food, the crafts of building and farming, the art of our tribes’ baskets and healing.
We once held a position in our village: we were the scientist, the reader of the sky, who knew if there would be rain or drought this season by the smell of the wind and the cloud formations; or the zoologist, a Pygmy animal tracker, who knew the difference between a deer and an antelope dropping, between the paw print of a jaguar and the paw print of a lion. Or we were the slaves of another tribe; yes we might have been slaves of Black people, but we had respect, we had dignity, and we kept our culture to pass down to our children. In America, all will be wiped out, our children are given a new set of rules. Everything wise and powerful will seem to have been created by the White man.
CHAPTER 4
FEBRUARY
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