Nostrand Avenue by Kenji Jasper

Author:Kenji Jasper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The tension starts with some underling saying, “We shouldn’t give 100K to no niggers.”

And that, of course, is when the guns were pulled.

The hallway is long and narrow. Gilda is standing in front of you and three other guys. Standing in your way are ten white men, also young, also angry, and also armed. You are all willing to die in the name of the flag you wave. But Gilda is the counselor here, the peacekeeper. The neckline of her top plunges toward her cleavage. Her print skirt wraps tightly around her hips. She is a middle-aged woman at the center of men with far more physical prowess. This teaches you the power of women, Black women in particular.

“Now, we’re all going to walk out of here,” she says. “But that’s not because we have to. I have no problem putting holes in any one of you white boys that wants to play this shit like we’re in a Jim Crow country. That is over. The price we agreed to is the price we agreed to. We have what you asked for. You have our money.”

The white boys look at each other, then at us. Then they hand over the bag.

“He doesn’t speak for us,” their leader says, bending the knee. “I do.”

* * *

There’s a tree at the top of the hill that was once two trees. You can see its history at the roots. They started as one but they split into two, pieces of the same whole that would never meet again. At 21, sitting in her basement, her flawless face surrounded by brick and flawless things, Gilda once told you to find a tree like this one where you stand. The one you found was in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

This one is next to the Anacostia River, with the perfect view of both the Douglass Bridge and the towers of exorbitant condominiums that form their own skyline between the river and Nationals Park. She told you to find these places, to use them as conduits for energy and spirit to come together as one. These are the places where you make decisions. And you are here to discern the meeting that has yet to take place.

You are cautious about anything that has to do with Brooklyn, paranoid even. You think of Shaheed, and Sam and Miel and the Muertos on Winthrop, and all the years shrink into a single thread that has yet to snap. But when you last left her, Jelly was of light and not of the darkness that nearly took you under. Like Khujo, there was never that thing between you and her. She’s always been married, and now they have a kid. Happy units remain off-limits when you’re a dude with an aura that tends to kick doors in for you.

Jelly taught you the basics of yoga. She taught you how to stretch your spine, how to arch your back in the cobra with the soles of your feet pointing to the sky.

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