The World Doesn't Require You Page 3

  David heard his son bawling, newly awakened by the shouting. He wanted to ignore it, let Gwendolyn answer the call. But David needed a break from the argument. From the music that burst in his brain. He scooped up his son and rested him on his shoulder. Looking out the window always calmed the boy. Together, they gazed out onto the world. Randy continued to cry and bawl though, squirming in his father’s arms, piercing his father’s eardrums, disrupting his father’s thoughts.

  Sunday morning, it felt to David that his life was hanging off a cliff and its fingers were becoming tired. He had told no one what he’d experienced at the Cross River. How could he? They’d dismiss him as a lunatic. Christ III and Jeez always spoke of talking to God. People accepted them. Why wouldn’t people accept him too? After all, he was a church elder. Didn’t that give him the right to talk to God? He had thought of the Sunday guitar solo as his sermon. His voice wasn’t strong—it sounded scratchy and rough—so he didn’t often sing, but this time he had to, didn’t he? There was much to say. He’d play the Sunday solo by ear, though he had not only forgotten God’s words, but also the substance of His message.

  The band warmed up. They moved robotically through “Amazing Grace” and methodically through “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

  God spoke.

  Bodop bop bop bddaaaa! Bow bop bow, God said.

  Scapidee skip skip bop bddatt-skabaidee pop, David replied.

  Huh? Nat said as he tapped the drums. David didn’t reply. He looked to the wooden slats of the high ceiling. Nat banged on the drums rapidly, two beats at a time, to get his boss’s attention.

  David turned to him.

  What was that? David asked.

  You zoned out on me, man, Nat said.

  That sounded good. That sounded damn good. That sounded like the beat of the river. Like the town. You need to do that while we playing. Yeah, man. When I give you the word. You double up on them beats. That’s our sound. As a matter of fact, keep working on it. Keep practicing until the service starts. We gonna do something special for the solo.

  Man, Dave, that’s crazy, Nat said.

  Naw, said Case. Might as well do something strange. This may be the last time we play this place. I’m with you, David.

  Nat started pounding, doubling up his drumbeats.

  I don’t know if I can keep this up all the way through the solo, he said.

  You, skaba dip skaba dip, never know, David scatted, skaba dip dip, what you’ll be able to do do do, bop bop bdddattt, until you go ’head and do it.

  When the service started, David nodded to his wife and son in the front row. Gwendolyn raised Randy’s tiny hand and waved it at his father. Chillum sat a few rows behind them. All the regular faces smiled up at him, but they now looked strange. Glowing eyes and glowing mouths full of judgment, as though they knew what lay on the horizon. At the normal points in the service, the band played all the usual songs. “Amazing Grace.” “Go Down, Moses.” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” God whispered to David, speaking in scats. Do it! God called. Do it now!

  Christ III, wearing a blistering white suit with long tails that scraped the floor and bleached white alligator boots, delivered a sermon about the evils of poverty. Nat snuck in some doubled drums here and there, but no one was ready for what happened when it was time for the solo.

  David whispered God’s words as the saxophone started and the drums came in, first in English, then in God’s scatting, which he came to realize was the one true language, the language that time had lost, the language of the rolling tongue. Nat doubled the drumbeats and people in the audience swayed, suddenly alive as God’s music entered them.

  David threw his hands into the air and started scatting. He spoke an entire monologue full of many of God’s secrets, and what the congregation couldn’t understand through their ears, they felt in their chests. People gasped. Which wasn’t unusual, as God’s truth can, at times, be hard to take. Some waved their hands and shook and writhed like snakes through the aisles. The music made the people dance sexy, lusty dances. Free-spirited movements that drew attention to their thrusting, shaking nether regions. Just about the whole congregation let loose. No one gave a damn who looked on.

  After ten minutes, Christ III wiped the sweat from his brow, strode over to David, and attempted to whisper something into his ear. David put his arm around his brother and scatted loudly. A woman in the front row passed out.

  When David paused, Case—without giving it a second thought—began playing his notes backward, and the rest of the band followed. Nat pounded harder and harder until he became exhausted and dropped his sticks to the floor. Case’s saxophone faded out. The bass player stopped. The organist stopped. David scatted a line more, his hands raised above his head. He walked down the center aisle with his arms still in the air, his band, the choir, and Christ III at his back.

  Christ III took the mic, his voice full of rage and damnation.

  What you heard was the music of the devil, he said. A son of God has been seduced. You just seen a child of God speak in tongues, not like the righteous, but like a beast!

  David Sherman, the last son of God, opened the doors and walked out into the bright day, feeling nothing at all like the demon his brother accused him of being. Instead, he opened his arms wide while the sun beamed upon him, feeling light, as if the ground were no longer beneath his feet and he was drifting in midair, ascending to Heaven.

  The Nigger Knockers

  The knock, knock joke, much like the Negro spiritual, began as a means of clandestine communication, a way for the enslaved to pass information to each other beneath the radar of hostile whites.

  —Hiram Skylark Rollicks, Signifyin’ Revolt: Black Rebellion in the Antebellum South

  My brain had liquefied for the night. That’s what work, at least my job, does. Long day, short—makes no difference. Pop the top any weekday evening and you’ll find a slushee. There I sat, zombiefied in that purgatory where rational thought and loopy subconscious visions mingle. A slack-jawed demon. Probably drooling. The glow of the nightly newscast projecting across my face.

  I didn’t recognize the shrill buzz of the doorbell at first. It buzzed loud, louder than I remembered it being. A second buzz forced me to jump from my couch, landing on my feet and then toppling to the floor like I wore the legs of a scarecrow. Disoriented, I looked about, trying to place everything: the disheveled living room with clothes and newspapers strewn around, the piercing buzz, the darkness. My head felt detached from my body. For a brief moment I existed outside time, and then I groped for the concept.

  Another irritating screech. I stumbled to the front door and peered through the peephole. I saw nothing, and as soon as I walked to the bathroom the buzz sounded again, long and loud like someone leaning into the button. After I finished, I returned to the foyer and looked out the window and again saw nothing.

  I sat on the couch and rested my clearing head on a pillow and the doorbell buzzed again and again. I felt my nerves jangling. Racing to the door, I snatched it open, and there stood no one. Nothing.

  Cute, I yelled to the open air, the trees, the birds, the houses, the grass, and the curve of the horizon. Very. Very. Cute. Now run along, kids.

  As I shoved the door closed, I heard cackling and saw a dark boot at the edge of the entryway. The door swung open and in walked a man I hadn’t seen in years.

  My nig-nig, he said as he walked into my living room with a bag over his shoulder. It was Tyrone James, my long-lost childhood friend. What’s up, Deez, he said, how’s life treating you, man?

  Deez was a nickname I had rarely heard after my first lonely semester at Freedman’s University when I would see Tyrone around campus. He and that stupid nickname had faded from my life. I’d heard he moved away.

  Tyrone’s entrance pissed me off more than a little, but his cocky half smile always defused things a bit. It said, Relax, It’s all a bunch of bullshit, but it’s not; except when it said, It’s all serious, but it’s really just a bunch o
f bullshit. He’d been that way since elementary school.

  He made staying angry with him an impossibility. Though, for some reason that I can’t understand and won’t analyze, I felt the need to go through the motions.

  What the hell is wrong with you? I barked across the room. You’re ringing bells and hiding like a little kid? If I had a gun you would’ve caught one in your chest.

  Relax, Deez. You wouldn’t shoot an old friend in the chest, now, would you? Man, I been here forever and you ain’t even offer me nothing to drink yet?

  I watched as Tyrone walked from the foyer into the kitchen, where he snatched a twenty-two-ounce bottle of Crazy Ninja malt liquor from the refrigerator door. This didn’t bother me because the stuff tasted like piss and I only kept it in the fridge for guests, but other than my girlfriend, who didn’t drink much, I hardly ever had guests. He took a long first sip and then turned to me and said, Want one?

  I shook my head and returned to the couch. He parked himself next to me and we made small talk. He told me he was nearing the end of a doctoral program in cultural studies at Freedman’s University. The school was still, as he put it, full of a bunch of bougie niggas and I told him I expected no different. He asked me when I planned to marry Sameeka and it surprised me that he remembered her, but I shrugged and changed the subject. We reminisced, comparing notes on people we had grown up with—Molly and Andreason and Shit-Shit and Cliff and Leonard who married Roxanne. I hadn’t seen or heard from these people in years, most I hadn’t even thought about. He wanted me to tell him about my work, but the less said about those gray cubicle walls that close in on me every afternoon, robbing me of oxygen and years, the better. After a long silence I said what I’d been thinking all along.

  What’s up, doc, huh? Why you disrupting my life?

  He reached into his bag and pulled out a neatly bound stack of pages with a shimmering plastic cover.

  This right here is a draft of my dissertation, he said. It’s short, two hundred and fifty pages. I feel like I nailed it, though. But, shit, what do I know? I’m paying a fortune for a Ph.D. in cultural studies, so I can’t be that bright.

  I took the bound manuscript into my hands. It felt heavy. I looked at the title and fell into an amusement, a raw laughter so deep and pure that I was cleansed when it began to subside. “Nigger Knocks: A Brief Cultural History.”

  You got to be kidding me, man, I said. This is what you wrote your dissertation on? What’s your next book on? Tag? Throw Up and Tackle? Hide and Go Seek?

  Yeah. See, that’s the reaction I be getting most of the time, but people don’t understand how important this childhood game (at this phrase he raised his fingers and turned them into quotation marks) has been to the development of this country. People never even stop to ask why it’s called Nigger Knocks. As kids did we ever ask? Naw, we just knocked. It was fun too, right?

  So why do they call it Nigger Knocks, Professor?

  Well, it started on plantations back in like the 1700s and shit, he said standing up and gesturing. I became the class and he, the instructor. Slaves used to knock on the Big House door and run. It was a way to steal food and weapons and shit; a way to help niggas escape through the Underground Railroad or the Forgotten Tunnel—man, they used it for all kinds of things. While white folks, or even a house slave, answered the front door, there’d be black folk taking bread and hog meat and shit out the back. Bet they ain’t teach you about that at Freedman’s University.

  Naw, they didn’t. That’s actually interesting. Go on.

  Look at you. Not giggling now. Give it a read. It’s a quick read. At least I hope it is. If it doesn’t grab you in the first fifty pages, you don’t have to keep going. I’ve known you nearly all my life, I can trust you to be honest with me, right? Tell me it’s trash if it’s some trash. But don’t mock my shit, though. Don’t take my scholarship for a joke.

  He sported that mean little half smile when he asked me not to ridicule him, so I wasn’t sure how to take him. Perhaps it was a joke. Perhaps he was serious. I just didn’t, and still don’t, know.

  I wasn’t laughing, though. As I leafed through his manuscript, several passages caught my eye.

  Tyrone took another Crazy Ninja for the road and before he left I agreed to read his book and give him comments.

  I found myself busy that week, so I gave it to Sameeka to read, and she returned one night amazed that a clown like Tyrone could have such insight. Still I let the thing sit for two and a half weeks. Really, I’m lying to myself when I claim that it was busyness that kept me from reading. Back then I mostly spent my free time surfing the internet for nothing in particular, fucking around on Facebook, occasionally remembering the manuscript (mostly when Sameeka mentioned it, which she did with an annoying frequency).

  Tyrone called one day to tell me he’d be coming the next night to collect his book. I panicked, as I’m a man of my word, but then I sat in my lounging chair, and in the pool of dim light that I prefer for reading, I gently turned the pages as if holding delicate parchment that could at any moment fall to pieces in my hand. I devoured it in a single sitting, reading long into the early morning hours when I should have been sleeping. I dragged my tired self to bed at five. My alarm sounded at seven-thirty a.m. and the neighbor’s dog started barking madly shortly after that. I raised my head from the pillow and then sank back into it, sleeping through the noise. Being late to work bothered me—really it did—but now it concerned me less.

  I found Tyrone’s work sublime. He wrote the kinds of sentences that had a nice texture on the tongue and tasted good passing from my mouth. For so many years Nigger Knocks had never even entered my thoughts, and now my friend’s words made the game into a shiny new thing.

  Tyrone performed a kind of sleight of hand, somehow transporting me back to my childhood days. I could feel the knocks at my knuckles and on the palms of my hands. My old neighborhood, those plain Northside streets with their identical houses and neatly trimmed lawns, seemed foreign and exotic filtered now through the elegance of my friend’s manuscript.

  Tyrone even mentioned me, though in passing, in one of his many recollections of running through the Northside of Cross River banging on doors and windows, pressing rapidly on doorbells, and escaping into the day. He perfectly described the rubber soles slapping against the black tar beneath our feet; being chased by winded and out-of-shape adults; the days when we collapsed at our rendezvous points high with dizzying laughter.

  He had convinced me. Nigger Knocks changed the world and I wouldn’t want to live on a planet in which kids had never conceived of knocking on doors and racing away. Former slaves constructed this town one nigger knock at a time, to paraphrase my friend. What was once unknown to me now seemed obvious. I hadn’t been just playing a childhood game. I was participating in a tradition of rebellion, the same tradition of rebellion that lead [sic] to the abolition of slavery, the weekend and the forty-hour work week [James 12].

  When he arrived at my doorstep the next evening, I sat in the lounging chair making frantic notes which I had started writing at work and continued at home, forgoing my usual nap. I had twenty handwritten pages and I could have composed twenty more. It annoyed me that when I answered the door, Tyrone hid himself in the bushes. I didn’t want to play games.

  After he rose from the shrubbery and shook the leaves, the dirt, and the twigs from his clothing, it took no longer than a moment for me to get to the heart of it all.

  I’ve never . . . I paused. What kind of damn substances you on, Tyrone? How do you even think like— I’ve never even read anything like this.

  Damn, Deez. He shook his head and slumped a bit. That bad, huh?

  Bad? No, this is the craziest—in a good way—shit I ever read.

  Great, he said. Now we can go nigger knocking.

  What?

  It’s time to go ring some bells, knock on some windows. Doorbell Ditch, as the white boys would say.

  But we’re adults.

  So?r />
  Come on, Tyrone—how old are you? Twenty-five?

  Twenty-six.

  What we look like, I said, twenty-five and twenty-year-old men running around nigger knocking?

  The pursuit of freedom, he said, misquoting himself, often begins with a rap on the door.

  Around here? We’ll get shot out here, jackson.

  Look, I’ve made the mistake of writing this whole thing without even testing my theories. I’m on my way to becoming the typical academic. All brains, no balls. They encourage that over at good ol’ FU, but that ain’t me. No sir. Intellectuals have got to get out there nigger knocking with the people. Nigger knocking was one of the very first things our ancestors did to spark the Great Insurrection.

  No shit, I replied. I read the manuscript.

  They knocked on that door, hid out—he banged three times on my wall and crouched low by the side of the chair, acting it all out—and when old Master Johnny Weaver came outside looking, they stabbed that cracker right in the gut. The only successful slave uprising in this country—ever—started with some nigga knocking on a door and running away. Well, I guess he didn’t run away; um, you see what I’m getting at. We have to do what the common folks do. If the people are nigger knocking, I got to be nigger knocking too.

  Tyrone’s manuscript had set my brain ablaze and stirred long-dead urges. What I really wanted to do, had planned to do, was stay home and write something of my own despite having no clue as to what, if anything, I had to say. The uncertainty of it all gave me the excitement of a young drunk.

  But for some reason, instead of staying home, I agreed to go out nigger knocking.

  He first picked a house in a quiet part of the Southside. I parked my beat-up old thing at the far end of his street. It shook and rocked as I cut the engine. We began slowly walking, almost tiptoeing, to the door. I looked in the window and saw the outline of a man sitting in the dark, lit only by the blue of his television. I whispered, He in there. I see him. He watching television.