Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Author:Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah [Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

There is no ring. Just a hall on the F block. Lawrence leads me there and we have to walk through half of general pop it seems. All those bodies just walking around, it’s easy to forget what freedom looks like. Compared to where I stay, this is freedom. A lighter layer of hell.

“White bro look crazy,” I hear them say as Lawrence leads me to where I’m to kill a man called Ruiz.

It smells like stink and iron, like something is dead and rotting.

Lawrence leans back to me and speaks into my ear so I can hear him. He isn’t holding the black wand, so even as I walk toward a man that’s waiting to kill, I know that the pain I feel will be of the earth and not of hell, and so I worry not at all. No worry in me. Joy even.

“If you win tonight, that’s a week I promise you there won’t be any Influencer. If you lose, I don’t care what kind of shape you’re in, you’re gonna have a long night, you understand me?”

“Thank you,” I say.

“I want you to try to hurt him, okay? Don’t worry about him. That’s what he’s gonna be thinking too. And if you don’t win today, you understand, don’t you?”

“Thank you. I understand.”

He looks forward and I know as well as anything in this world that I will not allow myself to go back to the black wand.

“You better.”

“Why the fuck he smiling so much?” one of the men, a gray shirt and pants, says.

“That’s not a smile,” another says. “That’s that shit.”

“Oh shit,” says a man so short he looks like a child. “Sorry, bro,” he says to me, to the idea of me.

I look at them and they look down to the ground, or they stare as if I’m the animal they’ve always hoped to see. They stare like they want a reminder of what never to become.

“That’s that Cheese Rash shit. They be cheesing like that after the Influence. That’s fucked up,” says a voice that comes from a face I can’t see.

“You’re next if you don’t shut the fuck up,” Angel 2 says, and the voice disappears. In the far end of the block they’ve put four orange cones on the ground. The bodies are arranged into a square. The ring is made of men of different colors, all wearing the same color. And then, next to each cone, there are the guards in tan and black and shining badges on their chests and weapons wrapped around their waists.

In the “ring,” sitting on an orange bucket turned upside down, is Ruiz. In our first match a month and a half ago, Ruiz made it so my nose won’t ever look the same. I woke up to Lawrence telling me the next day I really was about to feel the pain. And he was right. Whoever holds the black rod is always right. Remember this above all things you’ll ever know. Remember this before you remember your own name.

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