Native Son

[Outfoxd]

It's halfway through Bryant's school year at General's Pride. His reputation has only grown, and his hands have taught lessons. The difference is that he's not being taken care of by Uncle Ronnie, but his mother. She is spending her time trying to undo the damage her brother has done.

She had to pick him up from school, like Ronnie had to do a couple years ago. He had decked some white kid and busted his orbital bone. He was lucky to not be brought up on assault charges. He had managed to get off with an expulsion.

He thought he had just earned himself a little vacation, but Delia Carver didn't see the way things Ronnie did.

He was standing in the living room, facing her. She was sitting in her favorite chair, in her ragged nightgown and her housecoat with curlers in her hair, staring at him. He never realized how intimidating his mother was before now.

"Ma, I..." She silenced him with an upraised palm.

"I just want to look at you."

He was confused, but he tried not to hide it. He wondered if he should have said something, but then she kept going.

"Tryna get a good picture of my boy. I wanna remember you like you are."

She kicked back, reclined in the chair, shaking her head.

"Cause if you keep this up, I ain't gonna have my little boy any more."

"What are..."

"You shut your mouth when I'm talking, Bryant." Delia said.

He did.

"You think you're fighting and winning. You just damning yourself to an early grave. Punching these kids is only going to prove to them and everybody that you the low-down nigger they expect you to be. You want to be that?"

Bryant wisely kept his silence now.

"You know what they do to low-down niggers? They lock them up forever. Or they hang them. However they feel that day."

Delia reached over to the table next to the chair, grabbed her pack of Marlboro Reds. She slapped a cigarette out, stuck it into her mouth and lit it with her cheap plastic lighter. All the motions were done with a deliberation that only served to make the normally small looking woman seem larger than life.

"Your daddy died fighting for this country. Bryant, I don't wanna lose you, too." She looked him in the eye. "Lord Jesus, you look just like him."

She took a pull on her cigarette, blew the smoke out through her nostrils. Bryant thought this was a good time to talk.

"Well ma, what do I do about these kids anyway? Someone says shi...stuff to me, I can't let it go. White people think cause they the natives they can say what they want."

Delia pulled the cigarette out of her mouth between index and ring finger, leaned forward.

"Yes you can. And you have to let it go. It's words. What's words gonna do, boy?"

She put the cigarette back into her mouth. It flapped in her mouth as she spoke, and Bryant idly wondered how it stayed in there.

"You gonna learn that white people ain't evil. They just people like us, have to deal with the world they live in."

- - -

His belly was on fire, he knew that much. He was surprised that it didn't really hurt. He just felt interminable heat rising up from the top of his crotch to his sternum. As he held his stomach, he could feel more and more blood spilling out of his body, through his fingers. The Mason bitch hadn't followed him to finish him off, and he was alone. He didn't know how much time he had left, just knew there wasn't much.

"Fuckingmotherfuckingbitch. Shiiit." He drew in a breath, spat out some blood that had welled up in his mouth.

As he took laborious steps out in the open ground of the compound, he spotted a camera lower to the ground, attached to the side of one of the buildings. He walked to it, purposeful, determined. He knew how to kill this last bit of time.

"This...this what you wanted to see, 'Merica?" He said through the blood in his mouth as he walked.

"Thassright. The nigger bleeding. The nigger dying, for his crimes."

He dropped to a knee, then his stomach. He started crawling toward the camera. He was leaving behind a trail of blood.

"Michael Sechooler. Benjamin Latimer. Kami Steele. I 'member all of them. They ain't die 'Mericans. Died kids. Like I am."

Bryant made it to the camera. He rolled himself to his back, stared as best he could into it.

"None y'all gonna remember me though. I'm another nigger hanging from the tree. 'Nother nigger twisting in the wind, waitin' to be cut down."

The fire was subsiding. The end must have been coming. He thought of the innocents he was leaving behind, of Megan, of Marilyn, still out there. He hoped Luke had found Megan and was keeping her crazy little ass safe. He hoped Marylin had managed to find Juliet, and said what she needed to.

"God bless y'all."

He turned his head back to the camera.

"Hey ma. You was right. They just people."

He died smiling. Understanding.

M24-Bryant Carver: Deceased