Locomotion (2 page)

Last night this commercial came on TV. It was this white lady making a nice dinner for her husband. She made him some baked chicken with potatoes and gravy and some kind of greens—not collards, but they still looked real good. Everything looked so delicious, I just wanted to reach into that television and snatch a plate for myself. He gave her a kiss and then a voice came on saying
He'll love you for it
and then the commercial went off.

 

I sat on Miss Edna's scratchy couch wondering if that man and woman really ate that food or just threw it all away.

 

Now Ms. Marcus wants to know why I wrote that the lady is white and I say because it's true. And Ms. Marcus says
Lonnie, what does race have to do with it,
forgetting that she asked us to use lots of details when we wrote. Forgetting that whole long talk she gave yesterday about the importance of description! I don't say anything back to her, just look down at my arm. It's dark brown and there's a scab by my wrist that I don't pick at if I remember not to. I look at my knuckles. They're real dark too.

 

Outside it's starting to rain and the way the rain comes down—tap, tapping against the window—gets me to thinking. Ms. Marcus don't understand some things even though she's my favorite teacher in the world. Things like my brown, brown arm. And the white lady and man with all that good food to throw away. How if you turn on your TV, that's what you see—people with lots and lots of stuff not having to sit on scratchy couches in Miss Edna's house. And the true fact is alotta those people are white. Maybe it's that if you're white you can't see all the whiteness around you.

Today's a bad day
Is that haiku? Do I look
like I even care?

The monsters that come at night don't
breathe fire, have two heads or long claws.

 

The monsters that come at night don't
come bloody and half-dead and calling your name.

 

They come looking like regular boys
going through your drawers and pockets saying

 

You better not tell Counselor else I'll beat you down.
The monsters that come at night snatch
the covers off your bed, take your
pillow and in the morning
steal your bacon when the cook's back is turned
call themselves The Throwaway Boys, say

 

You one of us now.
When the relatives stop coming

 

When you don't know where your sister is anymore
When every sign around you says

 

Group Home Rules: Don't
do this and don't do that

until it sinks in one rainy Saturday afternoon
while you're sitting at the Group Home window
reading a beat-up Group Home book,
wearing a Group Home hand-me-down shirt
hearing all the Group Home loudness, that
you
are
a Throwaway Boy.

 

And the news just sits in your stomach
hard and heavy as Group Home food.

It's Halloween
The first-graders put pumpkin pictures and ghost
drawings all up and down the hallways.
We don't do none of that in fifth grade.
We don't want to.
I mean, we're not supposed to want to.

 

But sometimes
I do.

 

There's these two guys I know who sometimes snatch
little kids' trick-or-treat bags. That ain't right.
Once when I was a little kid
this big teenager guy snatched mine.
If I'd a had a big brother,
he would've beat the guy down.

 

But I
don't.

When people ask how, I say
a fire took them.
And then they look at me like
I'm the most pitiful thing in the world.
So sometimes I just shrug and say
They just died, that's all.

 

A fire took their bodies.
That's all.

 

I can still feel their voices and hugs and laughing.
Sometimes.
Sometimes I can hear my daddy
calling my name.
Lonnie
sometimes.
And sometimes
Locomotion
come on over here a minute.
I want to show you something.

 

And then I see his big hands
holding something out to me.

 

It used to be the four of us.
At night we went to sleep.
In the morning we woke up and ate breakfast.

Daddy worked for Con Edison.
You ever saw him?
Climbing out of a manhole?
Yellow tape keeping the cars from coming
down the block.
An orange sign that said Men Working.
I still got his hat. It's light blue
with CON EDISON in white letters.

 

Mama was a receptionist.
When you called the office where she worked,
she answered the phone like this
Graftman Paper Products, how may I help you?
It was her work voice.
And when you said something like
Ma, it's me.
her voice went back to normal. To our mama's voice
Hey Sugar. You behaving? Is the door locked?

 

That stupid fire couldn't take all of them.
Nothing could do that.

 

Nothing.

Ms. Marcus says mostly sonnets are about love
I think about Mama and Daddy and my sister
how Mama and Daddy are somewhere up above
and Lili's just far away enough for me to miss her.
Ms. Marcus says “sonnet” comes from “sonetto”
and that sonetto means little song or sound
It reminds me of that guy's name—Gepetto
the one who made Pinocchio from wood he found
Ms. Marcus says you gotta write things a lot of times
before they come out sounding the right way
I know this poem's not about love but at least it rhymes
Maybe I'll get the sonnet thing right one day.
If I had one wish I'd be seven years old again
living on President Street, playing with my friends.

Whenever that song came on that goes
Come on, baby, do the Locomotion,
Mama
would make us dance with her.
We'd do this dance called the Locomotion
when we'd bend our elbows and move
our arms in circles at our sides.
Like our arms were train wheels.
I can see us doing it now—in slow motion.

 

Mama grinning and singing along
Saying all proud “My kids got rhythm!”
Sometimes Lili got behind me and we'd
do the Locomotion around our little living room. Till
the song ended.
And we fell out on the couch
Laughing. Mama would say
You see why I love that song so much, Lonnie?

 

See why I had to make it your name?
Lonnie Collins Motion,
Mama would say.
Lo Co Motion
Yeah.

Today in class Ms. Marcus said
Take out your poetry notebooks and describe somebody.
Think carefully,
Ms. Marcus said.
You're gonna read it to the class.
I wrote, Ms. Marcus is tall and a little bit skinny.
Then I put my pen in my mouth and stared down
at the words.
Then I crossed them out and wrote
Ms. Marcus's hair is long and brown.
Shiny.
When she smiles it makes you feel all good inside.
I stopped writing and looked around the room.
Angel was staring out the window.
Eric and Lamont were having a pen fight.
They don't care about poetry.
Stupid words,
Eric says.
Lots and lots of stupid words.
Eric is tall and a little bit mean.
Lamont's just regular.
Angel's kinda chubby. He's got light brown hair.
Sometimes we all hang out,
play a little ball or something. Angel's real good
at science stuff. Once he made a volcano
for science fair and the stuff that came out of it
looked like real lava. Lamont can
draw superheroes real good. Eric—nobody
at school really knows this but
he can sing. Once, Miss Edna took me
to a different church than the one
we usually go to on Sunday.
I was surprised to see Eric up there
with a choir robe on. He gave me a mean look
like I'd better not
say nothing about him and his dark green robe with
gold around the neck.
After the preacher preached
Eric sang a song with nobody else in the choir singing.
Miss Edna started dabbing at her eyes
whispering
Yes, Lord.
Eric's voice was like something
that didn't seem like it should belong
to Eric.
Seemed like it should be coming out of an angel.

 

Now I gotta write a whole new poem
'cause Eric would be real mad if I told the class
about his angel voice.

Hey Pops,

 

Today our teacher showed us this poem by this poet guy named Langston Hughes. It made me remember something. That long time ago when you read us that good-night poem about that guy who loved his friend. And it made me kinda think that maybe Langston Hughes is the same guy who wrote that one because his name sounded familiar. Underwater familiar—like I dreamed it sort of. I'm not gonna try to explain. I figure you understand. The only thing about what Ms. Marcus read was it wasn't a
poem
poem. She said it's called an epistle poem and it was a letter. I didn't know a letter could be a kind of poem. So now I'm writing one to you to say that even though we can't do stuff like go to the park on our bikes or eat hot dogs from that cart where the guy who always wore the Yankees cap yelled at me for being a Mets fan but gave us a discount if we bought four hot dogs—and we always did—and ate them standing there arguing with him. Even when the Mets lost again and again. I just wanted to say that even though we can't do that kind of stuff no more, I haven't forgot none of it. I'm gonna go see if I can find that poem about that guy loving his friend. I hope it's by Langston Hughes.

 

—Love, Locomotion

Up here the sky goes on and on like something
you could fall right up into.

 

And keep falling.
Fall so fast
and so far
and for so long you don't
have to worry about where you're gonna live next,
where you gonna be
if somebody all of a sudden
changes their mind about living with you.

 

Up here, you could
just let your mind take you
to all kinds of beautiful places
you never been before in real life
Tahiti, Puerto Rico, Spain,
Australia with all those kangaroos hopping around
and then you can come on back
and call the place you come back to
home.

Once I saw a house fall down on a lady,
Lamont says.
That ain't nothing,
Angel says.
Once I saw this dog
get hit by a car. He went way up in the air and
when he came down again,
he got up and ran away. But he stopped at the corner,
Angel says.
And died.

 

Eric squints up his eyes.
Looks out over the school yard.
The sky's real blue and no wind's blowing.
I shake my head, trying to shake that dog out of it.
Once I saw a little boy,
Eric says, all mysterious.
And then in my dream, he was a man.

 

We all look at him and don't say nothing.
Far away, I hear some girls singing real slow and sad
Her mother, she went upstairs too.
Saying daughter oh daughter
what's troubling you . . .

 

That ain't no tragedy,
Angel says, giving Eric a look.
More than what Lonnie seen,
Eric says, grinning at me.

In my head I see a fire. I see black windows.
I hear people hollering. I smell smoke.
I hear a man's voice saying
I'm so sorry.
I hear myself screaming.

 

Never seen nothing,
I say.

I got a 39 on my math test
'cause
I don't understand numbers
'cause
you say 1 + 1 = 2 and I go why? You say just
'cause
like just 'cause somebody said it means it's the truth.
And since I don't believe the things people say is
always the truth
'cause
sometimes people lie
it's hard to understand math.

New boy comes in our classroom today
Ms. Marcus says
Say good morning, Clyde,
and the new boy says
Good mornin', y'all
and the whole class falls out laughing
so hard, Ms. Marcus taps her pointer on the desk,
her face so mad it's purple
R-e-s-p-e-c-t,
she says
Respect!
we repeat the way
she taught us to—a thousand times ago.
New boy's looking down at the floor
looks real sad, says
I'm sorry, ma'am
and the class tries hard not to laugh
but some laugh spills out of us anyway.
You've nothing to be sorry about,
Ms. Marcus says.
Lamont whispers
He should be sorry he's so country
Eric says
Look at his country clothes
New boy knows
they're whispering about him,
puts one foot behind his leg
like he wants to crawl right inside himself.
He's wearing high-water pants, light blue socks,
a white shirt
buttoned all the way up

tight around his neck
Check
Eric says
Check out his country hat
New boy's holding the hat in his hands
Granddaddy hat in his hands the kind
with the black band going around gray felt
New boy looking like he wish he could
just melt right on outa the room.