Black Card Read online

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Published by Catapult

  catapult.co

  First Catapult printing: 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Chris L. Terry

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-948226-26-4

  Jacket design by Zoe Norvell

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by

  Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965036

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Prologue: Fall 1997

  Black Card: Summer 2002

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Superhero Origin Story

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Statue of Robert E. Lee

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  One Time

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Alternate Me

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Magical Negroes

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Thank You

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  FALL 1997

  I was finally black again. I sat on my bed, waiting for proof. Gray smoke oozed under my bedroom door and through the crack where windowpane met frame. The popping of needle on vinyl started so loud that I rubbed my thumb across my fingertips, expecting to clench the sound. A grimy hip-hop beat kicked in, with distorted drums, bass that rolled a pencil across my desk, and a half-measure loop of a soul singer wailing.

  I steeled myself against the hurricane, pushing toes against floor, elbows against knees as I leaned in and bobbed my head short but loose, striking that tenth-grade balance of icy cool outside and whirring inside. I jumped when Lucius kicked the bedroom door open. His baggy jeans made a flag-in-the-wind snap as he stomped his boot. A black hoodie covered the top half of his face, but not his sparse goatee or the zit under his right cheekbone. I watched in silence, averting an identity crisis with every word I didn’t say, every gesture I didn’t make.

  The door slammed shut behind him and he stepped to the middle of the small room, a husky specter floating in the sickly light. He jabbed his chin at me and I stood to face him, thumbs in my hoodie’s kangaroo pocket, shoulders and head back, equally ghoulish.

  “You had a big day, bruh,” he said, his voice deep and rough for a teenager, cutting through the hip-hop beat.

  I nodded.

  “Let’s see the highlights.” He stepped to my right and pointed at the closed door. A beam of light shot through the opening between my curtains and a countdown flickered above the doorknob, 4-3-2-1. Lucius crossed his arms and we stood side-by-side on the scuffed floorboards, watching the makeshift screen.

  Part one

  Black-and-white footage of me in a polyester PE uniform, standing on a gleaming wood floor. My eyes widen in surprise when a basketball lands in my hands, then I seem to push it away. The camera follows the ball’s arc across the paint and through the net. Quick pan back to my face shifting into a sunny grin as I hit a three-part handshake with another kid and hustle off-camera.

  “A’ight,” Lucius said. “You was lucky to hit that shot, but the daps at the end sealed the deal. I’m glad we been practicing.”

  I nodded and said, “Me, too,” then kept my head moving with the beat. We turned back to the door.

  Part two

  A montage of me standing at my school bus stop with a slim backpack slung from one shoulder, slouching at a desk in class, and sprawling alone on my grandparents’ couch, watching TV. In each shot, my eyes sparkle, my nose wrinkles, and I bring the top of my right fist to my mouth like I’m rocking an invisible microphone.

  “Now that’s the way to laugh,” said Lucius. “We don’t cheese. They don’t need to see our teeth. This ain’t a slave auction.”

  I did a purse-lipped smile, then flipped my hood up over my head, too.

  Part three

  Me on my bed an hour before, cradling a phone on my shoulder. The music in the room quiets to forefront the staticky voice of one of my old friends up north whining, “I can’t understand you! Did you just say you wanted to ax me something?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Lucius ran his eyes over my pale freckled face and kinky red-brown hair. “Your mixed ass might not really look like us, but the least you can do is try and sound like us.”

  I smiled again, agreeing silently.

  Lucius punched my shoulder, then we repeated the handshake I did in PE, finishing by bumping chests to fists. Lucius stood back. The music cut out and the light grew angelic and bright. I sat on the bed as he swelled his chest and spoke with the gravity of an award presenter.

  “I know you been having your doubts. You were black by default growing up around those white folks in the suburbs, but this move changed a few things. You finally got around us brothas and realized them rap tapes didn’t make you black.”

  He pointed to my dresser, where hip-hop and alternative rock cassettes mingled freely in a plastic rack.

  “Think about how far you’ve come,” he said. “The basketball players in your history class stopped clowning you for asking why they call each other ‘shorty.’ You stopped wearing that Beastie Boys T-shirt you got at the beach.” He shook his head sadly at my Raggedy Andy–looking ’fro. “If only we could get you to a barber on the regular.”

  I smiled sheepishly and touched my hair, my blackest feature.

  “Still,” Lucius continued. “You realized that dropping the ‘g’ from ‘skateboarding’ didn’t make it any less white boy—” He held a palm up. “Now, I know, you been showing me these skateboard magazines. And they got some brothas in there. But it doesn’t go down like that here in Richmond, V-A. We old-school Down South. ’Sides, you gotta know the rules before you break ’em.”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes, and used my heel to nudge my skateboard further under the bed.

  Lucius continued, hands joined inside his hoodie pocket, “I know you been going through some ‘tragic mulatto’ nonsense since you got here, feeling like no place is your place. But I see you working hard, and it’s starting to come natural.” Lucius paused, watching me whip fist to mouth a second too late to cover my grin, then said, “That’s why I’m finally presenting you with this.”

  Triumphant horns blared as Lucius slowly drew his right hand from his pocket, thumped it on his heart, then held a wallet-sized laminated card up next to his face. A heart-swelling soul song kicked in and
I craned forward.

  BLACK CARD was written on the front in gold, diamond-encrusted capital letters. I reached for it, grinning, so happy to be a real brother. But Lucius pulled it close to his chest. “Hold up.”

  He turned my Black Card over in his hand as the music faded out.

  “Brotha,” he said, and sized me up.

  I puffed my chest and ran my tongue across the front of my teeth.

  “I hereby bestow you with this Black Card. Carry it with you, as proof that you’re one of us, because . . .” He squinted and started to read from the back of the card, “This card entitles the brotha or sista who bears it to all black privileges, including but not limited to: Use of the n-word, permission to wear flip-flops and socks, extra large bottles of lotion, use of this card as a stand-in for the Big Joker in a spades game, and, most important, a healthy and vocal skepticism of white folks aka crackers aka honkies. To be renewed in five years, upon evaluation.”

  He nodded reverently, then pressed the card into my outstretched palm. His voice shook when he said, “Do well, brotha. Do well. Smoke the biggest blunts, kick the illest rhymes, and even when you’re out rollin’ around on that skateboard, remember that this,” he folded my fingers over the card before taking his hand away, “is yours.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you,” and held the card for a moment before standing and slipping it into my pocket. It warmed my thigh.

  The light went back to normal, but my room had a new type of sparkle. The unmade bed by the window was now part of a lineage of black people’s unmade beds, the ball of colorful skateboard T-shirts on the floor by the closet were just like any black person might have. I smiled, satisfied. The world was starting to make sense.

  Lucius put his arm around my shoulders and said, “Y’all havin’ mac ’n’ cheese for dinner?”

  I pushed his hand off. “Nigger, we already ate. Always tryna—”

  I could feel him freeze, so I turned. He squeezed the front of my hoodie into his fist. “It’s nigg-a, not nigg-er. We don’t say it like that.”

  Instantly, I was thrown back to every time I was scared I’d said the wrong thing around some black people, the thing that proved I didn’t belong, that I liked rock music and didn’t go to church, that I’d missed something important by living around white people. My hand slapped my front pocket. Lucius let go of my sweatshirt and pointed at my hand. “Maybe I was too quick in giving you that card. Maybe you got more to learn. Maybe,” he narrowed his eyes, “you ain’t a real brotha.”

  I stepped back, shaking my head, until paper crumpled under my butt and I was sitting on my desk.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “You got it now, but you gotta maintain it.”

  BLACK CARD

  SUMMER 2002

  ONE

  I was playing bass in a punk band called Paper Fire. We were popular enough in our sliver of the music scene that we could play to a basement full of people in most cities. On this night, we had a gig in Wilmington. We were rumbling down the interstate near the North Carolina border when the singer/guitarist Mason shouted, “Watcha doing up there?” from the driver’s seat.

  “He’s doin’ black stuff,” Russell the drummer answered from shotgun.

  I was lying in the plywood loft that stretches over our amps, drums, and guitars. I fired back a response that would have got me lynched fifty years earlier: “I’m lookin’ out the back window for white women.”

  We all laughed.

  We got “black stuff” from a comedy video we watched at a crash pad after a show in Pittsburgh. The comedian spotted a white man with a black woman in the crowd. In the nasal white guy voice that black comics do, he said, “This week, honey, we’re doin’ black stuff. We’re going to see that new movie with the rappers in it and we’re going to the Def Comedy Jam.”

  I’d recently started soaking up black pop culture, hoping for pointers, and this joke was the first time I could confidently call bullshit on what I heard. My black father’s and white mother’s interests overlapped naturally. They didn’t have to plan individual racial fixes.

  Still, when my white bandmates snickered across the couch at me, I knew I was stuck. “Doin’ black stuff” became the answer to what I was up to when I was lost in thought. I wondered if the joke reminded them I was black, or helped them deal with the fact that there was something different about me and them, but I still liked it because it confirmed my blackness.

  “Well, tell us if you see any good white women,” Mason said, tapping the top of the steering wheel. “So we can protect ’em from you.”

  “What would Mona say to you checking out babes?” asked Russell.

  “Nothing,” I answered. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  Sigh.

  “Who’s Mona?” asked Mason, flicking his eyebrows in the rearview even though he’d had a girlfriend for over a year.

  “We work with Mona,” I said, hoping the subject would change. Dating a coworker usually ends with an unemployed person.

  “Mona’s tight,” Russell said, and dragged on his cigarette.

  I nodded, even though the guys weren’t looking my way.

  “Like, other girls are tight too,” Russell said, then lowered the radio a bit. “But, you know how everyone always knows who cute girls are?” he asked.

  “Sure, sure,” said Mason. Richmond’s a gossipy, small city. Dating is tricky.

  “She didn’t useta hang out with someone we know. She’s no one’s ex. She isn’t even some classic girl that we’d always see working somewhere and wonder how we’d ever get to talk to her.”

  “She hot?” asked Mason.

  “Yes,” Russell and I said at once.

  There was a pause while Mason waited for us to elaborate on our answers, and I thought about how there seemed to be a thin layer of cool water under Mona’s skin, just enough to make me want to touch it and feel still.

  Then I blurted out, “But she not, like, a hot girl. She’s a cool girl. And that’s more important.”

  Russell nodded and took another drag.

  Mason shrugged.

  Mona came up to my shoulder, and I could see where her shiny round dreadlocks escaped into her bandana. She drove a dusty Saturn, wore faded jeans, and kept skittery folk CDs in rotation at our coffee-shop job. In other words, Mona was a black hippie. I wish I knew more black hippies, because they set me at ease. They’re basically a combination of my folks.

  She started after this other hippie, who went by Nesta even though his paychecks said Ethan, quit to work at the new Ben & Jerry’s ice cream place, which he called “B&G’s.” She was friendly to the awkward dudes who came in with their laptops, and the tips were higher, so I didn’t mind that I’d always wind up mopping when we worked together.

  Our first shift together, Mona stood about two inches closer than expected when I was showing her how to work the espresso machine. I caught myself staring at her reflection in the chrome, thinking we looked good next to each other, even when we were funny mirror distorted.

  I hoped she’d like me if she knew I was black. My Prince CD came on the stereo and I said, “My dad loves this song.” Then I listened to two seconds of utopian keyboard funk before saying, “My dad’s black.” Feeling less suave by the instant, I put my hand to the curls on top of my head and said, “People can’t always tell.”

  She smiled, kept smoothing the plastic wrap on a plate of peanut butter cookies, and said, “I could tell.”

  She was covering my shift. I wondered if any of the regulars would be pleasantly surprised to see her instead of me. I texted her, How are tips?

  Nap ruined, I wiggled out of the loft and sat on the bench seat behind Russell and Mason, rolling my stiff shoulders, watching Russell ash his smoke into a green plastic soda bottle. He’s an easygoing, scruffy redhead who looks like he was born in a baseball cap. We’ve drunk countless beers on the porch of the punk house where, at twenty-four, he’s the oldest of six roommates.

  Mason’s a nervy
, dark-haired guy with broad shoulders and sunken eyes. He always seemed to have an ulterior motive. We were technically roommates, but his girlfriend lived half a mile from us and had air-conditioning. You can guess where he tended to stay.

  “One of you guys gonna ask her out?” Mason asked.

  I opened my mouth but no sound came out. Russell got busy shaking another cigarette from the pack in the cup holder. Mason chuckled and shook his head.

  “Don’t get jealous of each other,” he said. “Don’t break up the band.”

  “We won’t,” I said.

  “I never went out with a black girl before,” Russell blurted out.

  “She’s black?” Mason asked.

  “Yeah.” Russell nodded and took a drag.

  I sat dreading the question I knew was coming next.

  “How about you?” Mason asked me.

  “Yes, I’m black.”

  “Nice try, dude,” Mason said. “You ever dated a sista?”

  “Man, you ever know him to date anybody?” Russell punched Mason’s shoulder and the van wavered in the lane.

  If I cussed him out, I’d have to prove him wrong, and I couldn’t. It had been thirteen months, three weeks, and two days since I’d had sex. When I hit the one-year mark I told myself I was gonna give up on trying. Tell that to my body, though. That last girlfriend had been white, and she’d ended it because she was “looking toward life after college.” The girl before her was white too, but dark and Jewish, which made me feel a bit better. And before her were a couple high school relationships that lasted a month each.

  Except for a mixed girl I made out with in twelfth grade, none of these girls had been black. I did plenty of looking, got shot down a couple times, and never quite clicked with any black girls in high school—not their fault, I knew I was the odd man out. I’d been relieved to have the friends I had, even if most of them were white, but lately I’d been sure I was missing something.

  I glared while Mason hooted at Russell’s joke.