The Twelfth Card

She stopped fast. Her hands slapped her hips. “Enough!”

“Genie?”

“Just stop it. I don’t want to hear this.”

“You -”

“I don’t care about any of what you’re telling me.”

“You’re mad at me, honey. Who wouldn’t be after everything? Look, I made a mistake,” he said, his voice cracking. “That was the past. I’m different now. Everything’s going to be different. I’ll never put anybody ahead of you again, like I did when I was with your moms. You’re the one I should’ve been trying to save – and not by taking that trip to Buffalo.”

“No! You don’t get it! It’s not about what you did. It’s your whole goddamn world I don’t want any part of. I don’t care about Strivers whatever it is, I don’t care about the Apollo or the Cotton Club. Or the Harlem Renaissance. I don’t like Harlem. I hate it here. It’s guns and crack and rapes and people getting fiended for a cheap-ass plated bling and drugstore hoops. It’s girls, all they care about is extensions and braids. And -”

“And Wall Street’s got insider traders and New Jersey ’s got the mob and Westchester ’s got trailer parks,” he replied.

She hardly heard him. “It’s boys, all they care about is getting girls in bed. It’s ignorant people who don’t care how they talk. It’s -”

“What’s wrong with AAVE?”

She blinked. “How do you know about that?” He himself had never talked ghetto – his own father had made sure he’d worked hard in school (at least until he dropped out to start the “career” of defacing city property). But most people who lived here didn’t know that the official name for what they spoke was African-American Vernacular English.

“When I was inside,” he explained, “I got my high school diploma and a year of college.”

She said nothing.

“I mostly studied reading and words. Maybe won’t help me get a job but it’s what drew me. I always liked books and things, you know that. I’m the one had you reading from jump… I studied Standard. But I studied Vernacular too. And I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

“You don’t speak it,” she pointed out sharply.

“I didn’t grow up speaking it. I didn’t grow up speaking French or Mandingo either.”

“I’m sick of hearing people say, ‘Lemme axe you a question.’”

Her father shrugged. “‘Axe’ is just an Old-English version of ‘ask.’ Royalty used to say it. There’re Bible translations that talk about ‘axing’ God for mercy. It’s not a black thing, like people say. The combination of saying s and k next to each other’s hard to pronounce. It’s easier to transpose. And ‘ain’t’? Been in the English language since Shakespeare’s day.”

She laughed. “Try getting a job talking Vernacular.”

“Well, what if somebody from France or Russia ’s trying for that same job? Don’t you think the boss’d give them a chance, listen to ’em, see if they’d work hard, were smart, even if they spoke different English? Maybe the problem’s that the boss is using somebody’s language as a reason not to hire him.” He laughed. “People in New York damn well better be able to speak some Spanish and Chinese in the next few years. Why not Vernacular?”

His logic infuriated her even more.

“I like our language, Genie. It sounds natural to me. Makes me feel at home. Look, you’ve got every right to be mad at me for what I did. But not for who I am or what we came out of. This’s home. And you know what you do with your home, don’t you? You change what oughta be changed and learn to be proud of what you can’t.”

Geneva jammed her eyes closed and lifted her hands to her face. The years and years she dreamed of a parent – not even the luxury of two, but just one person to be there when she came home in the afternoons, to look over her homework, to wake her up in the morning. And when that wasn’t going to happen, when she’d finally managed to shore up her life on her own and start working her way out of this godforsaken place, here comes the past to yoke and choke her and drag her back.

“But that’s not what I want,” she whispered. “I want something more than this mess.” She waved her hand around the streets.

“Oh, Geneva, I understand that. All I’m hoping for is maybe we have a couple of nice years here, ’fore you off into the world. Give me a chance to make up for what we did to you, your mother and me. You deserve the world… But honey, I gotta say – can you name me one place that’s perfect? Where all the streets’re paved with gold? Where everybody loves their neighbors?” He laughed and slipped into Vernacular. “You say it a mess here? Well, damn straight. But where ain’t it a mess one way or th’other, baby? Where ain’t it?”

He put his arm around her. She stiffened but she didn’t otherwise resist. They started for the school.

Lakeesha Scott sat on the bench in Marcus Garvey Park, where she’d been for the past half hour, after she’d come back from her counter job in the restaurant downtown.

She lit another Merit, thinking: There are things we do ’cause we want to and things we do ’cause we gotta. Survival things.

And what she was about now was one of those had-to things.

Why the fuck didn’t Geneva say that after all this shit she was booking on out of town and never coming back?

She was going to Detroit or ’Bama?

Sorry, Keesh, we can’t see each other anymore. I’m talking forever. Bye.

That way, the whole fucking problem’d be gone for good.

Why, why, why?

And it was worse than that: Gen had to go and tell her exactly where she was going to be for the next few hours. Keesh had no excuse to miss the girl now. Oh, she’d kept up her ghetto patter when they’d been talking a while ago so her friend wouldn’t hop to something going down. But now, sitting alone, she sank into sorrow.

Man, I’m feeling bad.

But ain’t got no choice here.

Things we do ’cause we gotta…

Come on, Keesha said to herself. Got to get over. Let’s go. Bring it on…

She crushed out her cigarette and left the park, headed west then north on Malcolm X, past church after church. They were everywhere. Mt. Morris Ascension, Bethelite Community, Ephesus Adventist church, Baptist – plenty of those. A mosque or two, a synagogue.

And the stores and shops: Papaya King, a botanica, a tuxedo-rental shop, a check-cashing outlet. She passed a gypsy cab garage, the owner sitting outside, holding his taped-together dispatch radio, the long cord disappearing into the unlit office. He smiled at her pleasantly. How Lakeesha envied them: the reverends in the grimy storefronts under the neon crosses, the carefree men slipping hot dogs into the steamed buns, the fat man on the cheap chair, with his cigarette and his fucked-up microphone.

They ain’t betraying nobody, she thought.

They ain’t betraying the person was one of their best friends for years.

Snapping her gum, gripping her purse strap hard with her pudgy fingers tipped in black and yellow nails. Ignoring three Dominican boys.

“Psssst.”

She heard “booty.” She heard “bitch.”

“Pssssst.”

Keesh reached into her purse and gripped her spring knife. She nearly flicked it open, just to see ’ em flinch. She glared but left the long, sharp blade where it was, deciding she’d have a world of trouble when she got to the school. Let it go for now.

“Pssst.”

She moved on, her nervous hands opening a pack of gum. Shoving two fruity pieces into her mouth, Lakeesha struggled to find her angry heart.

Get yourself mad, girl. Think of everything Geneva done to piss you off, think of everything she be that you ain’t and never go