A Primer for Bay Negroes: Chronicle One

It's Sunday.  The fatigued 30-year-old black mother sits in the underground train station, dank and wet with midnight San Francisco air.  She leans into her bike, regrets riding it down the hill to work.  After work, the uphill dig looms in her mind, in her muscles, she recalls the ache from that last mile.

Behind her, an Asian boy, in big jeans and Raiders cap is wrapped around his girl.  She plays with his knee.

-- Why you was looking at that nigga so hard?  he says.
She, -- You trippin nigga.

The black mother's hands turn cold.  Her mind speeds into making sense here.  Who is their nigga subject? Is he black?  Is he their friend?  Is he a schoolmate?  Is he Asian?  Is this alright?  She wants the warmth of her limbs to circle back.

She crosses into where she can make it alright. Correct the chill.
To herself, -- they're from Oakland where Asians are niggas too.  Everybody wants to be a nigga in Oakland.  They are as much out of town as I am, here in San Francisco.  Their family is new to the country.  They don't know nothing about niggas feet smoldering at the foot of dogwood trees.  Their nigga is not your nigga.  Don't be hurt. They are wandering, here, and Oakland generates its niggas in the first generation.  Sense.

She holds her bike erect and stands to move.  Her lips force a smile.  She spots a bench, two white bears in lumberjacks and work boots lean into each other.

Fading military tattoos show beneath the tight creases at their elbows. They are hairy and their skin rough.  The taller one's hand steadies the back of the other.  They are drunk.

She is tired, so she sits. She nods hello and waits for her train.  Two minutes flashes over the marquee.  Fremont train, two minutes.  The train will carry her under the Bay, back to Oakland, the city a friend said was --wall-to-wall niggas.  Oakland is soft to her.  She can walk through all of Oakland those street niggas don't ever bother her or her daughters.  Those street niggas know the story of black mothers and children alone.  They watch out for her.

A breeze rises and the train's horn signals to her, you will be home soon.  She's better.

Behind her the bigger bear asks his lover, "You liked that nigger, didn't you?"

She cannot believe her fortune.  She is cold again.  These these two muscled men will have to pay for it all.  The cold fires from her mouth.

--You two bitches,  who you calling nigger?
Their slow drunken sorry-s do nothing.

She is cold again, struggling to grip her bike's handlebars onto the train.

"Fremont train to West Oakland Bart."

Bay Air

                                                               

Dinner was done.  All the dishes cleared from the tiny kitchen table.  The open patio windows invited a waft of cold bay air to wend through the house, through the slatted furnace grates in the floorboards.  The cold sat down in the living room on the couch, in front of the muted oversized flat screen television that they’d bought together; unknowingly, at that moment, consigning themselves to defeat before they’d ever committed to this last of last foolish romances.  Some loves linger far past years of usefulness and fire and trying.  This love did not linger.

The day it ended, Shawna woke with a scratchy throat and knew who to blame.  She looked at the rolls that laziness and disinterest had folded into her sleeping lover’s back and imagined herself hunched over a well-lawyered desk, punctilious in signing all necessary-- and some extra--contracts allowing for a silent, pain-free dissolution of her dead dead and done marriage to this woman who used to be able to stop her breath, merely walking through the room and picking up a pencil.  Now they were pals who touched each other only out of habit and politeness.  She couldn’t remember the last time they’d kissed –well, besides the times they both needed to come--it didn’t happen.  The Saturday afternoon shows for the neighbors, with the windows wide open onto the street--Oh sweet Jesus!  Or even counting through Redwood Park, predicting the averages of leaves on the ferns growing beneath the shade of their unknowing, aged caretakers.  The splendid years gone and rolling toward regret, Shawna would have to tell her by noon.  Keep regret at bay.

She asked her future former lover to meet her at home for lunch.  She had a plan.  She’d made roasted chicken sandwiches, home fries with thin sliced garlic and strawberry lemonade, the pulp drawn out and set on a folded napkin.  She sat by the window, gazing out at the huge oak tree at the front of her surly cross-the-street neighbor’s yard.  She imagined how the tree felt knowing it would never leave that spot; it would always be beholden to the soil that held its roots, the sky that greened and sooted its leaves.  The light would change between seasons leaving the tree, at its root feeling a deep down greediness.

But the tree had learned these patterns and braced against what had become predictable let downs, expecting more from longer sweeter daylight and less of short tepid nights.  Winter drove it bare.  It cried for warmth and refuge.  It cried in cycles aligned to the change of light.  Then one day it noticed itself as a sliver of light reached under a cloud and shined upon a pool reflecting the tree back at the tree.

Shawna heard the car engine settle, the car door slammed, and footsteps climbed upward.  She noticed a shift in her breath.