The Cruisers Read online

It wasn’t a whole plan but I didn’t want to say that. It was like a little bit of Gone with the Wind, a little bit of real history and some of that luck Mr. Culpepper said we were going to need.

  “Look, in the movie Gone with the Wind they had a bunch of black people on their plantation but they didn’t call them slaves. They called them servants like they were just working there part-time or something,” I said. “If they had signs around their necks that read ‘Slave,’ then the movie would have been different. Slavery was the name of the thing going on then, and we got to bring the name to this set. If LaShonda can work her Facebook connections and her IM circuits to let everybody know what we’re doing, we might pull something off.”

  “Which is what?” LaShonda asked.

  “We get all the blacks in the eighth grade to start acting like they’re slaves and bowing and crossing the hall when they meet the white students.”

  “I’m not doing that,” Kambui said. “No way. It’s stupid, man. I’d rather go down swinging than lame my way through this crap.”

  “I don’t think it’s stupid, Kambui,” Bobbi said. “I see where Zander’s going. Say the teacher comes into the room and asks who took a book off the desk and everybody turns and looks at LaShonda—”

  “Why does it have to be me?” LaShonda asked. “I don’t take people’s books.”

  “Right,” I said. “But you’d have to answer the questions about it if we all acted as if you did.”

  “And we’re supposed to be acting like slaves so that Alvin has to answer the questions about his attitude?” Kambui had his arms crossed.

  “Not only Alvin,” I answered. “But everybody who is saying it’s just a freedom of speech thing and it’s just a play thing and it’s everything except what it really is, a lot of joking around that’s making people feel bad.”

  “And suppose it doesn’t work and they just keep on with their ha-ha attitude?” Kambui asked.

  I looked over at him and took a deep breath. “This is Tuesday. We’ll get it together for Thursday morning. I’ll run off a broadside edition of The Cruiser tonight and we’ll give that out tomorrow. Then, if the joint doesn’t run by Friday afternoon I’ll punch Alvin out at three o’clock,” I said.

  “I don’t think you can beat Alvin,” Kambui said. “But I’ll run with it until Friday.”

  “If it don’t work out I’ll see what happens Friday,” I said. “All I’m asking is that you work for me until then.”

  “Wait a minute, I just thought of something,” Bobbi said. “You might have noticed something about me, folks. Like, I’m cute and white. What am I supposed to be doing when you’re walking around acting like slaves?”

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  “She can hold the guns,” Phat Tony said. “We can contact the Bloods, the Crips, and the Mexican Mafia and get them on our side of the ave.”

  “I just want to get with the program,” Bobbi said. “Not get pushed to the side.”

  “Instead of us all acting, let’s run with a visual,” Kambui said. “We can have signs around our necks. Remember reading about the civil rights movement and the brothers carrying signs that read ‘I Am a Man’? That’s what I need to feel like, right now. A man.”

  Kambui’s idea was good and I went with it. “Okay, how about us wearing signs that just say ‘I Have Been Degraded’?” I said.

  “Then I can be on board,” Bobbi said. “It sounds like a plan to me.”

  I told everybody that I would make the signs up and have them ready to wear. I knew I could run them off on our printer and then glue them down on some heavy oak tag.

  The Jackson brothers, Kambui, and LaShonda left together and I knew they would be talking about me.

  “You sure about this?” Bobbi asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s going to work?”

  “If I were you I’d bring some bandages to school Friday morning,” she said.

  The thing was that if it didn’t work and I did fight Alvin it would be just enough to get me kicked out of Da Vinci. Maybe even all the way to Seattle.

  THE CRUISER

  CRUISERS DECIDE THAT

  SLAVERY DIDN’T MATTER!

  The Da Vinci Cruisers, who were trying to make peace between the North and South factions and prevent the Civil War, have come to an agreement with the Sons of the Confederacy that slavery was not an issue because the feelings of black people don’t matter. “You can say anything you want about black people,” said Zander Scott. “We don’t matter because, as Alvin McCraney has pointed out, we aren’t civilized. So our feelings don’t count.” We therefore encourage all Da Vinci students and teachers to disrespect everything dealing with African Americans for the rest of the school year. We also offer the following resolution for the approval of all Da Vinci students: It does not matter that the Africans brought to America from 1619 to 1807 were degraded into a state of slavery and that they, and their descendants, can still be degraded today within the halls of Da Vinci Academy.

  —The Cruisers

  CHAPTER TEN

  I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned!

  Mom has this thing she does with her teeth. First she flosses, then she brushes, then she uses this machine that sends water through her mouth. She’s got great-looking teeth and wants me to do the same thing but I didn’t think I wanted to go through all that. She’s got another thing she can do, even with the water running and toothpaste foaming around her mouth. She can hear a telephone.

  She made a signal for me that our phone was ringing and pushed me toward the living room. It was LaShonda.

  “I thought you were running on empty but now I think you got something going on,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “I called about ten of the black kids I know and told them your plan and they were all over it!” I could hear the excitement in her voice. “You know, nobody was speaking out but now that you’ve got something they can run with they’re coming around. How many signs did you make?”

  “Twenty-five,” I answered. “Then I ran out of ink because I did it in Photoshop on my ink-jet.”

  “Get some more ink,” LaShonda said. “I got a feeling.”

  “There aren’t that many black kids in the school,” I said.

  “Zander, word has spread—it’s not just the black kids calling me,” LaShonda said. “Get the ink!”

  I told Mom what LaShonda said about what was happening, showed her the sign, and told her I needed to cop some printer juice. Her money wasn’t that heavy but she gave what she had.

  “Demonstrations always work,” she said. “At least they let people know you’re pissed off.”

  I hadn’t thought of that, but it was something to tell the kids at school.

  I got the ink and started making more signs. They measured eleven by seventeen on card stock and they looked good. The bold lettering took a lot of ink but the words really stood out. I looped the ends of the string and stapled them to the card stock so the signs could be hung around the neck. All in all there were nearly a hundred signs, although I didn’t think I’d need half of them.

  As I put the signs together I started telling myself not to be nervous. It was as if I was overhearing myself saying, “Calm down, Zander, calm down.”

  I really wanted the demonstration to be successful. Maybe I even needed it to work. LaShonda’s call gave me confidence, but then I started thinking that maybe the message wasn’t strong enough. Kambui and LaShonda had both said I was coming on too weak. It was clear that we were being degraded. Everyone knew that and, for a while, I wondered if I had enough ink to do the whole thing over with something stronger. But then I thought about the signs that the workers in Memphis carried that read “I Am a Man.” People could see that the workers there were men, but the way they were being treated, as if they just had to do what they were told and take whatever salary the city offered, people had to be reminded. That had to be the starting point. Before I went to bed I went
into the living room and kissed Mom good night.

  “You’re really nervous about this demonstration, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Yeah, I am,” I answered.

  Thursday morning. Kambui was sitting on my stoop when I got downstairs. I had the signs in a Macy’s box. He looked them over and nodded.

  I HAVE BEEN

  DEGRADED

  As we walked toward the school, I asked Kambui if he was scared about the demonstration. He said no.

  “Me, either,” I said. “My mom says demonstrations have always worked. At least they’ll know we’re pissed off.”

  “I’m not nervous because this one won’t work,” Kambui said. “I’m nervous because they’re going to laugh at us, then tomorrow you’ll fight Alvin and get beat up, and then we’ll get kicked out of school, slide into a life of crime, and go to jail for the rest of our lives. Case closed.”

  “LaShonda said that a lot of kids were interested,” I said. “I just hope that nobody gets mad enough to start a fight.”

  When Kambui and I got to Da Vinci I could sense that something was already going on. Mr. Culpepper was sitting downstairs at the security desk with the security guard and they were looking around as if they were trying to figure it all out. I knew what had happened. When LaShonda had made her calls somebody had called somebody who had called somebody who had run it all down to Mr. Culpepper.

  I took the signs into my homeroom and took some of them out of the box. LaShonda and Bobbi came in and they both took a stack of signs to hand out to the kids who wanted to get involved.

  I was hoping for the best as I slipped a string over my head, positioned the sign across my chest, and headed for Algebra.

  Math was usually a little interesting, but today was even more interesting because our teacher acted like he didn’t care about the signs the black kids were wearing. He just kept talking about how the ancient Egyptians figured out the height of the pyramids.

  But the whole time he kept checking out the black kids in the class wearing the signs that said that they were being degraded.

  Then, when the class was almost over, Kelly Bena opened the door and blew into the room. She looked around for a hot minute, spotted me, and came to my desk.

  “Can I see you outside?” she asked.

  I looked over at the teacher and he nodded that I could go. Picking up my books and the signs I had brought with me, I followed her into the hallway.

  Kelly stood very close to me and spoke quietly like she always did.

  “Zander, I’m not a racist and I don’t like being treated like one,” she said. Her whole body and face looked mad but she still spoke softly. “This is not fair and I’m going to complain to Mrs. Maxwell!”

  “Who said you were a racist?” I asked her.

  “Nobody said it,” Kelly answered. “But if the black kids walking around with signs about being degraded can look at me in the same way that they look at the Sons of the Whatever, then they’re putting me in the same category as them, and I resent it.”

  There were tears running down her face and I knew she wasn’t into any acting. I didn’t know what to do.

  “I’m not saying that you were degrading us.”

  “Zander, I can see your point. But when you make things this simple—just black against white—you’re including everybody,” Kelly went on. “And I don’t want to be degraded by anyone for who I am or what I am. I go out of my way not to degrade anybody else. If anybody is being degraded, then we’re all being degraded.”

  I handed her a sign.

  Kelly looked at the sign and then at me. Her mouth moved as if she was trying to say something, but nothing came out. Then, in one quick movement, she turned the sign around and put it across her chest.

  As she walked off I knew it was good and bad. She was saying that the black kids had to own what we were doing the same way that I was saying that Alvin and his crew had to own what they were doing. Okay, but she was also pinning the tail on Alvin, just as I hoped she would.

  The period ended and when we went into the hallway there were groups of kids gathered around the bulletin boards where we had put up the broadsheets. It was Mr. Weinstein, the gym teacher, Cody’s father, who tore the first one down.

  “You’ve got to put that back up!” I heard Cody say. “It’s a school rule that you can’t take something down from the bulletin board unless it’s obscene.”

  “Cody, don’t you go starting trouble!” Mr. Weinstein said. “Because that’s against my rules!”

  “Put it back up, please!” Cody insisted. “Sir.”

  Mr. Weinstein dropped the paper on the floor and stormed down the hallway. Cody picked it up and tacked it back onto the bulletin board.

  Sidney Aronofsky came up to me and asked me for a sign. Soon I was passing them out to more kids, blacks and whites, girls and boys.

  LaShonda had been right. A lot of the kids at Da Vinci had been checking out the Sons of the Confederacy and hadn’t liked what they were doing. But they had been quiet until we had given them a way to express themselves. We gave out all of the signs, and before I knew it a lot of students were speaking to me. They were telling me how they were glad that someone was speaking up. One boy said that his grandfather had gone South on a bus with the Freedom Riders.

  “He got beaten up,” the kid said. “But on the way home he was thinking that was the only fight he had ever won.”

  In Language Arts, Miss LoBretto changed the lesson to a poem that Yeats had written called “The Second Coming.”

  “Who knows what Yeats meant when he wrote the lines ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,’” she asked.

  We spent the rest of the period talking about Yeats and the poem and about people speaking up when they see something wrong.

  I was feeling good when Phat Tony came up to me after Language Arts.

  “You’re the Zander man,” Phat Tony said. “I might even let you join my posse.”

  “Mr. Scott!”

  I turned to see Mr. Culpepper less than four feet away from me. Ashley saw him and came over quickly.

  “This is a private conversation, Ashley,” Mr. Culpepper was talking through clenched teeth.

  “Better make it fast because I just called the city newspapers,” Ashley said. “You know, I call them if I have news and they call me if anything big breaks in the city. That’s the way we …”

  I didn’t get to hear the rest of what Ashley had to say because Mr. Culpepper was dragging me down the hall. All the time he was muttering in my ear that I had better stop whatever it was that I was doing or he would personally execute me.

  By the time he let me go, we were down near the watercooler outside the recording lab. Mr. Culpepper had me against the wall, his nose a quarter of an inch away from mine, and telling me how much I was going to enjoy the great beyond.

  I think he really wanted to do something dramatic, like give me the evil eye and turn me into a frog or something, but in the end he just breathed some really hot breath in my face and walked away.

  “Hey, Zander!”

  I turned to see Alvin McCraney coming toward me.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t think this was about race, really,” he said. He looked uncomfortable. “We were just acting, brother.”

  “We’re just acting, too,” I said.

  “But guys are saying they don’t want to be like me and I didn’t mean it to be that way—you know, racist—in the first place,” Alvin said.

  “That’s not the way it seemed to the black kids,” I said.

  “And I guess most of the white kids saw it that way, too,” Alvin said. “Yo, man, I’m, like, sorry and everything.”

  “Whatever,” I said, mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  By the middle of the lunch period Mr. Culpepper had called an assembly of all the eighth-grade students. I asked Ashley when she thought the newspaper reporters would arrive.
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  “They weren’t interested,” she said, behind her hand. “There was a fire in the State Office Building and the local reporters are covering that. But, as my grandfather used to say, sometimes even the threat of truth is useful.”

  From the Poetry Corner of The Palette

  What Does My Heart See?

  By LaShonda Powell

  What does my heart see

  When I close my eyes to the pain

  My sisters must feel?

  Does it have secret visions?

  Remembered dreamscapes

  That twist reality?

  What does my heart hear?

  When I close my ears to the words

  That thunder the air?

  Is there some elusive tune

  Pulsing through its valves

  Like a gone mad iPod

  Humming Swahili?

  What does my heart feel

  When I close my soul to the grief

  That stinks up the air?

  What sad list of excuses

  Can I give myself

  Pretending I don’t know

  How a stone heart breaks?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Suddenly, Everybody Is a Hero

  Mr. Culpepper showed a new talent as he stood on the stage in the auditorium talking to the eighth grade: the ability to turn very red from the top of his upper lip to his forehead while turning just a little red around his chin.

  “The entire project is canceled! You will go back to the usual way of dealing with the units on the Civil War. There will be no more Union and Confederate factions. There will be no discussions on slavery outside of the classrooms. There will be no broadsides posted on any bulletin board, student or otherwise, without my permission.

  “Anyone who disobeys my directive will face disciplinary action, detention, and possible dismissal from Da Vinci Academy.

  “All racial matters will be resolved by me in the privacy of my office! Is there anyone in this assembly who is not clear as to my instructions?”