Hard Revolution

leather church shoes, must have had something on the tips of those soles for dancing, ’cause they made a sound.

“Why you laughin’?” said Derek. “I ain’t tell no joke.”

“That how you give a girl a compliment? My name is all right? ”

“It’s pretty,” said Derek quickly, and before he lost his nerve added, “Just like you.”

He turned and went up the street. He passed a German man, one of the last whites on the block, who had once thrown hot water at him and his brother for playing too close to his house, and a boy he recognized who was cradling a Daisy lever-action BB rifle he had gotten for his birthday. Ordinarily Derek Strange would have stopped and checked out the gun. But he kept going, looking over his shoulder at Carmen Hill, still standing there tapping her foot, smiling that smile, her eyes alive, those deep dimples of hers…

That girl bothered him nearly every time he saw her. Least he had had the nerve to tell her she was pretty. He wondered what her smart self thought of that.

At 760 Princeton, he took the steps up to his home.

SIX

THE FAMILY LIVED in a row house that Darius Strange had divided into two apartments. A single mother who worked at the cafeteria down at Howard University, not much more than a mile away, lived in the bottom unit with her three wild sons. Darius had bought the house after answering an ad in the Washington Post that read, “Colored, NW, Brick Home.” After putting three hundred and fifty down, he had secured a GI Bill loan at 4 percent. His nut was eighty-six dollars a month, and so far he had not missed a payment. The tenant downstairs was often late with her rent, but she was trying her best, and often he let her slide.

The Strange unit consisted of two bedrooms, a living room/ dining area, and a galley- style kitchen. The furniture and appliances were old but clean. A screened-in porch, where Derek Strange often slept on summer nights, gave onto a view of a small dirt-and-weed backyard and then an alley. The alley, and the grounds of Park View Elementary up the block, were the primary playgrounds for the boys and girls of Princeton Place and those on Otis Place, the next street to the south.

Derek Strange entered the apartment. His father had settled in his regular big old chair, the one facing the television set, a new twenty-one-inch Zenith with Space Command remote control. He had the latest Afro-American spread out in his lap. On the TV screen, James Stewart and Stephen McNally were firing rifles at one each other, both of them having found protection in an outcrop of rocks.

“Young D,” said Dennis Strange, eighteen, tall and lean like his father, dark skinned like the entire family. Dennis was seated at the table where the Stranges took their meals. He, too, had a copy of the Afro-American before him. There were always extras around the house.

“Dennis,” said Derek.

“What you been doin’, man?”

“Playin’.”

Dennis rubbed his fingers along the top of his shaven head. “With your white-boy friend?”

“So?” Derek stared at the gunplay on the TV screen. The sound of ricochet was loud in the room. “Why they tryin’ to kill each other, Pop?”

“One man took the other man’s Winchester in the beginning of the movie,” said Darius Strange. “They just gettin’ around to settlin’ it now.”

Derek looked at the tabloid-sized newspaper in his father’s lap. Derek and his best friend, Lydell Blue, delivered the Washington edition of the newspaper to neighborhood subscribers on Tuesdays and Fridays, earning roughly two dollars a week each. This was real money to them. Derek always tried to read the paper, too. Unlike the stuff he read in the Post and the Star, the stories in the Afro described his world.

Often, though, the stories scared him some. The front page of the latest issue talked about this boy Mack Parker, only twenty-one years old, who got beat half to death and dragged out of his cell by a lynch mob down in Mississippi. His mother was sayin’, “Oh, Lord, why?” ’cause no one had seen Parker since the mob threw him in a car outside the jail. Reminded Derek of the story of that boy Emmett Till, which Dennis was always goin’ on about, who got murdered down there for nothing more than whistling at a white girl.

But in this apartment, with his mother, father, and big brother, Derek felt safe.

“Where Mom at?” said Derek.

“Kitchen,” said Dennis.

Derek walked by the Life magazines stacked on a table by the sofa. The cover story of the issue on top was one in a continuing seven-part series called “How the West Was Won.” Darius Strange had collected every one. Dennis called it “How the West Got Stole” just to annoy their father. The same way he made fun of those programs his father loved to watch at night during the week: Wagon Train, Bat Masterson, Trackdown, and the like. These days, seemed like Dennis and his father were at each other all the time.

Next to the eating table sat a Sylvania hi-fi console combination with records stacked on top. His father listened to some jazz, but mostly the rhythm and blues singers who had started out in gospel. Derek liked to look at the album covers, photos of people like Ray Charles and that Soul Stirrers singer, and a big boy on the Apollo label named Solomon Burke. He wondered what it was like to sing for all those people up onstage, have that kind of money, have the finest women and the Cadillac cars. He wondered if his father, who smelled like grease, sweat, and burned meat when he came home from work, was envious of these men’s lives. Derek didn’t like to think on it too much, because it made him feel bad to imagine that his father would ever leave their home.

As Derek tried to walk by him, Dennis grabbed hold of his shirt and pinned his arms at his side. Derek managed to place the bottle of milk he was holding atop the stack of records. Once he had done this, he tried to break free, but Dennis was too strong. Derek did the only thing he could, dropping to his knees, taking Dennis down with him. They hit the floor and rolled.

“You can’t get away from me,” said Dennis.

“Punk,” said Derek.

“Call me that again and you’ll be lookin’ like one of them polio kids. They’ll be havin’ to fit you for some of them braces and stuff.”

“That’s enough,” said their father, his eyes on the TV.

Derek rolled Dennis so that one of Dennis’s hands was pinned beneath him. Derek felt around and tried to get purchase on Dennis’s other hand. Instead he grabbed Dennis’s crotch.

“You like that, boy?”

“Like what?”

“You got your hand on my rod!”

They rolled into the hi-fi and laughed.

“I said that’s enough,” said Darius. “I ain’t even finished payin’ on that console yet.”

Darius Strange had bought the hi-fi and the television on time. He had first gone downtown to George’s, on 8th and F, but the salesman there, a chubby white man, had treated him with disrespect. When he walked in, Darius had heard Chubby laughing with one of his coworkers off to the side, talking about he was gonna sell that guy a “Zenick” and saying, with his idea of a colored voice, “Can I put it on lays- aways?” Chubby hadn’t thought he’d heard him, but he had. Darius hadn’t raised a stink about it, but he’d left right away and driven over to Slattery’s on Naylor Road, where the man himself, Frank Slattery, had written him up for the Zenith and the Sylvania, gotten him credit, and delivered it all the next day. The colored money got put together with the white money in the register, and once you counted it out come closing time, you couldn’t even