She doesn’t want him to be just another black boy. Black is the color of a murder of crows, the color of a hand over your mouth, and no child of hers, over her dead body—no, you better not never call him that. This is what she tells Miss Miller after Malik is kicked out of ballet for the third week in a row, when Miss Miller stresses that it is not because he’s, you know, black.
Malik is seven. He is just playing when he pulls Mary Claire’s ponytails like udders and laughs when he says that he doesn’t know if her “milk” is white or chocolate. Mary Claire considers this for years, how Malik pulled her apart, how he knotted and nauseated her in the best and worst way. Unsimilarly, Malik’s mother does not mind this curiosity, doesn’t consider why Malik is so invested in Mary Claire’s ambiguous skin. A brown mother has her son’s back. If she doesn’t, they’ll shoot him in it.
Anyhow, Malik has any young boy’s obsession with a young girl. Look, she has long hair. Look, she’s dressed like a mermaid, that sort of thing.
“Look at his skin,” his mother Maura demands now. “It’s not black. It’s brown.”
Then, as if she has nothing over this woman other than an unhappy marriage, Maura dangles the wedding ring that is not as big as she would like for it to be in front of Miss Miller’s face.
The next week, Maura practically drags Malik to ballet class; he is so unmoored. Malik doesn’t like being bothered with anything his father doesn’t consider a sport. At the age of seven his masculinity is fragile, but his grip is strong. He grabs his mother’s hand as tight as a broke man’s budget and pulls in the opposite direction. Once again , he is late for class.
The week after that, Maura carries Malik to ballet class over her shoulder. Maura is persistent, brown women have to be—unbreakable, unmistakable, highly capable. When a brown woman wants a break, she calls her sister, it’s a damned shame she can’t rely on anyone else. Anyhow, Maura chooses ballet for her son because she’s never seen a coon pirouette a la seconde, never seen an Uncle Tom execute consecutive tour jetes. Ballet is safe (thugs don’t twirl), albeit a little effeminate and her husband Marvin would have a fit if he knew. Of course, Marvin did know but was a proficient actor.
Twenty years later, and Malik does not have to ask his legs to move, does not have to look in the mirror to know that his lines are long and his leaps are high. Though his mother is long gone, he has lived out her dream. He’s made it, he’s major, come on, homie, he’s major. He’s major? Yes, by industry standards and his own. Malik changed the motherfucking game, introduced a whole new consumer market to La Bayadere and Don Quixote and Swan Lake. He’s brought the black man’s cool to ballet, got folks around the way plieing and shit.
Do you think BAPs from the hood were checking for men in tights before him? Never. Malik can get any woman he wants, so they say. Within his boasting of being a black “first,” he chooses an Armenian with eyes green like four leaf clovers.
Malik has just finished a performance at Lincoln Center when a man with bright red cheeks and an overgrown beard stands on his chair and yells, “Dance, nigger, dance.” Just like that, boasting of pride and propriety. Malik can hear the man clearly, through the applause, a beamlight of sound.
Malik cannot believe it and later takes his concern to the New York City Ballet, who then takes what Malik said to Lincoln Center’s general manager, who eventually brings in the managing director and the producing artistic director, who Malik believes are the big guys, but really the big guys won’t let Malik sully their hands. With an establishment founded by John D. Rockefeller III, maybe you can understand why.
“Don’t be crazy,” the artificial big guys say. “We can’t control the audience.”
When the ABGs smile, they look like a clowder of cheshire cats, they are smiling like they know something he doesn’t, and Malik can smell their amusement, he is an elephant in this way.
Audiences imitate the bearded man’s early diatribe. It begins to sound like a chant, even a song, part of the routine, dance, nigger, dance. And soon Malik can not only hear it after a performance, but during rehearsals, while eating ramen at the noodle bar in the East Village, while having lazy, disengaged sex with his green-eyed girlfriend, while listening to the new Childish Gambino album on the record player he bought for nostalgia’s sake. The chant is so loud he cannot hear himself think, he cannot wipe the shit from his ass without mouthing the words, it is so damned catchy, Why didn’t he think of it himself? Oh, right, never leave it to a black man to set up his own demise. That is what they refer to as black-on-black crime.
After Malik’s next performance, when the chant is louder than it has ever been, Malik shouts, The owner of this theater doesn’t care about brown people! His mother has taught him not to say black. Now in the theater that holds 1,200 people, Malik has created a silence so disruptive it threatens to unbury lies laid to rest with John F. Kennedy. No one is around to tell Malik that he chooses to hear the chant, that his condemnation of the audience only infringes on their free thought.
Later, his manager takes him aside and says, “I’m your guy. I’m here for you. You know that. I’ve always been here for you, but you can’t say crazy shit. You just can’t.” Malik thinks, Did this motherfucker just call me crazy?
Malik is called into the office for his recklessness. When he walks in, the ABGs are already talking about him, he can tell. Whatever they have to say now, Malik cannot hear. He’s lost his hearing on top of everything else, and his voice, his voice is gone too, he’s like a stork in this way.
Upon leaving the office, a brown ballerina pats him on the shoulder, Missy, he knows her, not well, but they’ve danced together on multiple occasions. She reassures him now, or maybe she warns him, pities him? Malik doesn’t realize his hearing has been repaired when, like a crow’s caw, she says, “Don’t let it get to you.”
Well, fuck her, she should know better than to think he would ever be so weak. He is the best, he is the best damned dancer in the company, the best damned dancer in New York, the best damned dancer on the East coast. Fuck it, he is the best in the world. How fucking dare they try to diminish him. It’s a set up. His mother would know what to do, his mother would know what to say. She’s not here, but don’t you fucking feel sorry for him, he’s a man after all. Malik puffs his chest out and moves around town like a barn swallow.
Malik is lying with his girlfriend when he remembers Mary Claire, from so long ago. Malik doesn’t know that Mary Claire thinks of him, she thinks of him often, the discussion he initiated inside of her. She frequents his shows. Malik doesn’t know that Mary Claire would hate him if she knew him now, she would say that Malik doesn’t care about anyone but himself. Malik doesn’t know that Mary Claire wouldn’t be so wrong about that.
The thought of Mary Claire passes like the illusion of time, and Malik turns to his girlfriend and asks, “If a tree falls in the forest but it doesn’t make a sound, is it still a tree?”
“That’s not how it goes,” she says, laughing. His girlfriend’s mouth is big, bigger than it used to be before the hyaluronic acid. He believes he loves her mouth, loves the pink lip gloss that makes it shine like the neon sign of a strip club. Her mouth costs $1,500 every four to six months, but her laugh is priceless.
Nobody tells Malik or his girlfriend to Runaway because every bracelet comes with a price tag, and you should leave if you can’t accept the basics, and there are plenty bitches in the baller-nigga matrix. And now, with crack music playing in the background, Malik has sex with his girlfriend’s ripe strawberry lips and her four leaf clover eyes because brilliant dancers should have sex with beautiful women.
Janelle M. Williams received her BA from Howard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from Manhattanville College. She was a 2017 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. She is currently a senior program manager at Writopia Lab, a flash fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine, and a non-fiction editor for Inkwell Journal. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Kweli, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, SmokeLong Quarterly, Split Lip Magazine, midnight & indigo, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. Her flash fiction story, Harlem Thunder, was long listed for The Wigleaf Top 50 (2020). Her website is Janellemwilliams.com, and she tweets and instagrams @Janelleonrecord.
Photo by Ojo de vidrio on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND