“I mean I don’t think I should have to be home before dark. I don’t think... well, I think I’m old enough to come home when I please.”
“When you please.”Pa raised an eyebrow at me. “Nick, what are you talking about? What do you have to do at seventeen, besides go to work and come home? Are you looking to be traumatized by the world?”
I couldn’t quite explain to him what I wanted... a chance to explore life without worrying about trauma at all. The confidence to move through the world like I belonged in it. Like Isaiah. He was effortless. He didn’t waver. The only way I’d get like him was by breaking free from my father’s rules.
Pa looked from my eyes to my feet. “Your weight is down,” he said. “There are boys far more strapping than you being taken down every day. White folks are trying to take a young man down as we speak, over a rumor he’s attacked a white woman in an elevator, for which there is no evidence. Do you know what that means?”
I shrugged. I knew he’d tell me anyway.
He leaned forward in his chair. “It means a white man needs no true motivation to want to kill a Negro. Don’t ever tell me you should do what you please, Nick, until you’re really out there on your own. Understood?”
“Yes, Pa.”
I had to resign. He exited the conversation as if it were a story he had finished printing, already forgotten in favor of his next lead, and placed his full attention back on his work.
I stormed to my own room, heart in my chest.Maybe if I didn’thave to go somewhere else for work in the first place, I’d have no reason to be out late, sir!
I closed the door to my room and plopped down at my desk. I kept a little Chinese fan my mother had brought back from New York when she went to help Uncle Beet, Auntie Lorraine, and my cousin Daisy move seven years ago. Mama was in heaven now. A fire at her hospital took her away, but the fan helped keep her nearby. Next to it was this rolled-up map that Daisy gifted me before she left. She found this map at the train station; someone had left it behind.
In my annoyance, I unraveled the map. It showed the world in perfect detail, and it was labeled by color, which showed colonial possessions. So many places in the world were owned by people who weren’t from there originally. The colonizers tried to control them but they still found joy. Their spirits were invincible!
I traced my finger over the printed image, mapping exactly where I wanted to go. French West Africa and Brazil were at the top of my list. There were Negro boys there too, fighting back against control, but the boys there had different customs of living entirely.
Perhaps their fathers didn’t doubt their ability to brave the world on their own. Perhaps they were in control of their own destinies.
2.
I was certainly grown up enough to leave the house without exchanging words with my father, but when I tried to sneak past Pa’s office in the morning, he called me into the room.
“Nick, take these papers to the office,” he said, without lifting his eyes from his notes.
There was a stack of papers waiting for me on the side table by the door. “Yes, sir.” I read the headline on one of the sheets—“Dick Rowland: True Criminal or the White Man’s Scapegoat?”
Pa’s little radio crackled with a newscaster’s voice. “This just in: Tensions are still rising between protestors downtown. We see white people in outrage surrounding the courthouse where they have Rowland.”
“This man’s safety is in danger because of the crimes they accuse him of,” Pa mumbled to himself more than me. But then louder than before, he added, “We need this story on as many doorsteps as possible. You hear me? Go directly there orwe risk missing the printer deadline.”
“Yes, sir.” There was nothing to say before I left, my bag packed to the brim with his papers. I was not allowed to write stories, but Pa always asked me for help distributing.
I was a human mule, visiting the littleTulsa Staroffice where seven writers in one spacious room typed away. My father as senior editor did not have to be there all the time. His position gave him all kinds of special benefits, like working from home. These seats were all filled by people who had impressive backgrounds and could write about sports, or politics, or current events with amazing insight. But me? I knew next to nothing except how to drop things off, according to him.
I was so fed up that I just dumped Pa’s papers on the first desk I saw.
The writer, a tired woman with round glasses and her hair in a bun, snatched the papers up and read the headline. “These are from Mr. Carrington?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Her eyes widened as she scanned the words. “A bit inflammatory, isn’t it?”
“Don’t know,” I said, with a shrug. “Haven’t read it!”
And I walked out the shop! I was just a boy working for a shoe-shiner, right? Who cared about my opinion?
I checked my pocket watch every hour during work—what I was waiting for, I did not know. Perhaps for Isaiah to come back again and take me on some new adventure.
The shop was quiet as dusk rolled around, and I noticed Mr. Wallace didn’t come in to check on me. I found him outside, standing in the road between the shop and the pawn shop across the way.
There was a commotion on the corner. A white man stormed out of the pawn shop with a gun. Usually the white tourists were respectful, but this guy... He was going wild, running down the street, screaming at random people, “Your kind ain’t welcome in Oklahoma!”
