Melting Pot: A Short Story by M. J. Cross

      

John 13:34

~

“Don't punish me with brutality

Talk to me, so you can see

Oh, what's going on?”

-Marvin Gaye

~

It was the spring of 1977 in Somerville, Massachusetts. April 13^th. Some of my brothers recall this day with levity mastered skillfully overtime, because dissecting that afternoon with clinical focus stirs up a surreal pain that others in my family care to forget. I can’t forget however. 

It brought the police to our door steps, and days later, Mayor S. Lester Ralph. It even found small notoriety in The Somerville News, but try searching for those excerpts in their archives now. I’ve tried. It’s as if the battle we fought never happened. Polished over like some mundane afternoon in the middle of some insignificant month, but my family and I know better.

Afterschool, and as usual, I was in the kitchen hanging under Mama as she cooked a speedy dinner. She tried in earnest to shoo me away to my sisters, Nicole and Delourdes. They were washing dishes and I wanted no part in it. Our small apartment housed a troupe of hungry mouths that needed feeding. Last one in the kitchen got grate, the burnt scraps of the meal, and being the youngest, I was generally the last one for all things.

I made sure it wasn’t going to be me. I was in prime position to be the first one served if I stuck close with Mama.

I was supposed to be doing homework, but Papa was too busy fixing a dresser the twins broke in their room to ensure my work was done. The oldest, Jack, fresh back from work, laughed nearby as Papa lit into the twins for being so careless. The twins were a hand full even at twelve.

My father’s voice didn’t weaken one bit as he hammered away in their bedroom. “You two-” BANG! “-too fucking old for this!” BANG! “-always breaking something. Don’t just stand there idiots!” BANG! BANG! The sounds of his hammer were thunderous throughout the apartment.

I was happy it wasn’t me on the other side of Papa’s yelling and cursing. Since finally landing a job in a kitchen, Papa brought back more than just desperately needed income. His words became fiercer, hurtful at times, and his temper was shorter with us. He got to smoking through two packs of cigarettes in a week. His hardened persona was the result of months of rejection and being forced to take on labor that cheapened his former carpentry skills.

Papa was working with his hammer, when the front door flew open, smashing into the adjacent wall. At first, I confused the sound as Papa’s hammer.

At the door was George, who was lifting his bicycle into the house. Sweat ran down the sides of his face. His shirt was stretched out its stitches and several of the buttons were missing. He was covered in dirt. His fine dark hair was dusted shades lighter than it should’ve been. His pants were stained with mud that had started to crust over. He breathed hard as he barricaded the door shut with the full weight of his body.

Everything stopped at once and filled with a church-like silence found in congregations deep in meditation. Mama turned away from the stove. The girls left the water running in the sink. George’s wild breathing was all I could hear.

A sob wrenched from Delourdes, “They did it again.”

Nicole threw her arms around Delourdes to absorb her deluge of tears. She swayed Delourdes in her arms and gently cradled the back of her head.

They. I knew who They were. We all did in some way. They picked on us every chance they got. They peed on Delourdes one day as she walked home from school. They yelled at the twins for coming into their stores. They kept Papa from finding good work.

“Joseph!” Mama called for my father. “Come here! Quick!”

I wanted to latch myself on to my mother as she ran to George, but my limbs were hardened in place. I twisted and pulled nervously at my stiff fingers to feel limber again.

“They’re coming after me, Mama,” George’s voice sprung tears to my eyes. To this day, I’ve never heard him so exhausted. “They’re coming.”

Mama screamed again for Papa, and before I could let out a weak cry, Nicole quickly pulled me into her arms. I buried my face in her side and ignored the pain of her bony hips. Inside her embrace, I squeezed my eyes against tears and listened to the muffled sounds of Mama pleading for my father.

When Papa emerged, his voice brought some order to the surging chaos within me. He was a carpenter. He made things right whether with his hands or words. He was going to fix this too.

The twins beat him to the front room and tripped up Mama as they clamored over George.

“Damn! George! You look horrible!” The twins finished each other’s sentence.

With a hammer gripped in his hand, Papa asked tersely, “What happened to you?”

“They took my bike. They can spit on me and call me names,” George swelled with anger, “But they won’t take my bike.”

George’s ten-speed varsity bike was leaning against the wall. It had a metallic blue frame with curved handles and thin wheels. Now days, a bike like his would be considered vintage goods, but during those times, and to George, it was a luxury he worked hard for. He saved up from washing restaurant dishes and mopping bank floors just to get the bike no one else had. It was supposed to get him around faster. My mother thought he had too much pride in the bike, but her rationale was rooted in the Islands. She never understood how much one’s possessions defined status in our new world of concrete project-homes and segregated hoods.

A satisfied smile spread across George’s face as he recounted how he found the gang of boys that stole his bike and broke one of their noses to get it back. “Don’t worry, Mama,” he shrugged off her touch. “I’m fine. I biked as hard as I could, but they followed me. They’re coming.”

“Why didn’t you just let it go?” Mama argued with him. “They could’ve killed you!”

George looked Papa dead in the eyes, and with his head held defiantly, he said, “I fought them back.”

Papa’s harden exterior didn’t leave room for much soft emotions. That’s why I remember his curt, approving nod in George’s favor. He understood why George fought back, but it wasn’t what Mama wanted.

Mama flew into a rage. She grabbed the bike and throttled it violently in her hands. She screamed up to the ceiling for God to give her the strength of Samson to break the machine that evoked so much pride. She threw it to the floor in desperation. She looked as if she wanted to stomp it under her foot, but she stopped in motion. She looked to the window, horrified.

“Do you hear them now?” Mama cried, “All for this damn bike!”

They were outside. Their taunts and catcalls rose and crashed outside our window in waves. Their collective voices ranged of violent intent. They shouted for George’s blood. They called for the nigger. Their taunts resounded heavily in my head just as Papa’s hammer did.

Jack, who was silent up to that point, paced the room and mumbled angrily, “Papa, we gotta do something. They can’t do this to us.”

“You will stay inside this house.” Mama pointed daringly at Jack.

“This is our home,” Jack replied to her. “If we don’t feel safe here, we won’t feel safe anywhere.”

Mama walked away from him invoking the Lord’s name.

The twins were brave and stupid enough to peek out the window.

“Wow! Look at! All of them!” The twins shoved each other aside to get a better view.

George looked out the window with them and said in surprise, “They brought more people.”

Suddenly, George and the twins dove to the floor and glass shattered over them. I expected to be swept up a cloud of fire and my lungs fill with smoke. What I thought was a firebomb was actually a brick. It hit the floor with a terrible thud and rolled once, twice, before stopping against a wall.

Jack stayed out of the plane of view to pull the twins and George to safety.

Mama retrieved her bible and growled for God to intervene. She made her way back to the kitchen. She slammed her book and thick hands on the table. It rattled as she knelt before it with hands clasped in praying.

“Pray with me,” Mama ordered everyone in the house, but only Nicole moved to pray next to her. Nicole said later that Mama held her hand so tightly, it went numb.

Delourdes and I jumped at the sound of banging against our door. George wasn’t against it anymore. There was nothing to hold the door back if someone wanted to get in.

As the door shook, I wished it were reinforced with steel. It quickly appeared to be paper thin and held up by weak swears.

A grim look came over Papa’s face. I looked back and forth from him and the door.

Papa’s face was so red. He had high-toned skin that could’ve passed for white, not white enough to get him good work, but white enough that his face rouged brighter than I had ever seen.

In Papa’s tightened grip, the hammer jiggled to life, trembling in anticipation.

Shouting on the other side of the banging door came from our neighbor across the hall. He wanted to know if we were okay.

Jack quickly opened the door for our neighbor, who stood in the hallway in nothing but his shorts and sandals on. His jailhouse muscles made Jack look puny. Across the hall, our neighbor’s wife clung to their apartment door with an infant in her arm. She straddled one foot in the hallway and the rest of her safe in her apartment.

“Man, can you hear them crackers!” Our neighbor spoke. His time in the House of Corrections taught him to mask his anxiety with foul words, “Them mothafuckers want to kill us! Ain’t nothing but lil’ fucking honkies either!”

Papa looked around the room at Mama praying, Nicole wincing in pain, and shards of glass on the floor. The shouting outside got so loud Delourdes covered her ears.

I can only imagine what Papa was thinking, because he has refused to talk about this day in any length. The most I got out of him was as a result of an alcohol-induced stupor. He has taken to drinking and smoking daily now.

In a land that was supposed to be free of war, our home was under attack. Our home was supposed to be a refuge from war, a refuge from Them, my father could’ve been thinking. They, outside our house, the whites, wanted to take away what safety we had from Them. Like George, Papa was probably thinking that he had enough.

Without a word, he walked past our neighbor and down the hallway towards the front of the apartment. His greying beard glinted like curls of steel as he left.

“Your father’s fucking crazy!” Our neighborhood said to Jack as they followed after him.

It’s tough to say what order the rest of us followed. We all moved to quickly for Mama to catch. George wasn’t going to let Papa and Jack finish something that he started. He had too much dignity for that.

The twins were easily swept up in the excitement, and I couldn’t let my brothers go out there by themselves, especially not Papa.

Nicole yelled at me to come back as I flanked my father and the army of angry black panthers around him. Our neighbor incited us with his foul words. Jack had managed to take off his belt and hold it like a whip in his hands. The twins bounced on their feet as if boxers in pre-fight. Papa waved his hammer around threateningly.

Delourdes told me that she and Nicole left Mama praying feverishly in the kitchen and ran up to the shattered window to see what was going to happen.

Our neighbor’s wife protested what we were about to do, but she slammed her door as soon as we stepped outside.

It was us versus a mob of angry red-faces that piled around our sidewalk and stretched into the middle of the street. The sea of white people was mixed young and old, an army of thirty strong. Cars had honked their horns to get by. Some stopped and watched the spectacle.

A swarthy boy with a bloody nose and bloodier shirt seemed to be leading them so Papa spoke to him. His accented English was Bohemian, but menacingly chilly.

“You get the fuck away from here,” Papa pointed with his hammer.

“You heard the man!” Our neighbor backed him up. “Run on home to yo mommas.”

The mob spoke all at once, agitated and angry. Frothing forth from their mouths were more curses. Called us out our names and called our mother despicable things. My father at his foulest of speech wouldn’t dare say in our presence the things they called her.

The weather was cool and even. The sun was hanging towards the west like a Frisbee caught in a tree. Despite such balmy weather, the sun felt like a skillet to my skin. The heat that built up around my father, my brothers and I would’ve blown the top off a thermometer.

From the corner of my eyes, Jack’s grip tightened around his belt. It swung back and forth threateningly, a black mamba hissing its own silent creole to warn others back.

The sound of blood pulsing in my ears reminded me of cicadas on a blazing summer afternoon.

One of Them hurled a rock, a stray loosened by the earth by winter plows. I ducked in time, and it struck one of the twins in the chest instead. Papa responded by throwing his hammer out into the crowd like a tomahawk. A scream erupted from Them. It echoed like a battle cry, full of rage and red. They surged forward, and we launched from the steps together like stallions off a cliff. We collided with Them in full force.

We were horribly outnumbered, but we swung wildly, belting back attacks and trading punches and kicks. We were a mess of ingredients in a melting pot left to stew in our juices, but we were too spicy, too ethnic to be assimilated. We were boiling over the rim, spilling out into the streets for the world to see.

Throughout the fight that battle cry never ceased, growing more intense and girlish as the moments dragged on.

Through a ring of tussled bodies, I spotted the boy with the never-ending battle cry. Both his hands covered the right side of his face as blood poured from his forehead. Blood trickled down his white arms and broke away in many directions like veins outside his body.

I like to think that time slowed down so that I could record this grisly image to my memories. Perhaps I was spared much of the brutality, because I was the youngest and smallest. That was short-live, because in my distraction, I was knocked to the floor.

That afternoon, I got my first black eye.

The police showed up minutes later to disperse the mob. We learned from them that the hammer actually struck one of the boys’ in the face. He required stitches and was recovering in the hospital.

This fight turned out to be what got us evicted from our Somerville home. Mayor Lester Ralph came to our house the next day, armed with State Troopers. He demanded that we leave.

Papa tried to protest by the Troopers strung him up by his neck until he grudgingly agreed.

We moved out as quickly as we could, probably so that no other mob would come back for retaliation, but this time at night.

Whether we won or lost this battle is a matter of opinion in my family. What matters most is that we did it together. We protected what we had left. It was us versus Them. It has always been us versus Them, and probably will be for the rest of our lives.

~

In dedication to my Loves, especially George and other members of the Joseph Family, who lived this.

April 2 2012 - June 19, 2012