Heads of the Colored People Read online

  It isn’t true, at least not in Paris’s case, that you can sense what the future holds. That day, she had jokingly, in an exercise of character acting, avoided pronouncing Riley’s name near the word “death” or at the graveyard or while dressed as Eucliwood, lest she kill him. But no psychic, metaphysical force warned her to tell Riley not to go to Comic-Love or to avoid arguments without spoils or to immediately put his hands up when instructed to do so. Nothing told her, still humming “Say My Name” in her best humming voice, not to walk toward the large crowd of flashing lights, police cars, and costumed and uncostumed bystanders. Her stomach urged her to look away, once she got close enough to be sickened, but she couldn’t then.

  She didn’t feel more alive from the surge of panic in her body or in comparison to Riley on the ground.

  Years later, she would regret not drawing the offending officer that day. Since then, she has sketched his face over and over, penciling his name and image in her notebook as a sort of plea, saying it aloud, wishing that she, like Eucliwood, could pronounce the names of those she wanted to die and make it so.

  When an artist named Kevan Peterson wrote to her about a project he wanted to finish—really, to finally begin—Paris was glad for her sketches of Riley.

  5.

  A well-read, self-aware, self-loving black man with blue contact lenses and blond hair and a periwinkle suit was shot down in Los Angeles after a reportedly violent altercation with a well-read street promoter, who was also shot, after police officers answered a complaint. “Who was also shot” here signals the afterthought that was Brother Man, Richard, because he was not the one with the blond hair or blue contacts or in any way exceptional, except for his size and the things he had overcome (too many to name here), and his comic books.

  And you should fill in for yourself the details of that shooting as long as the constants (unarmed men, excessive force, another dead body, another dead body) are included in those details. Hum a few bars of “Say My Name,” but in third person plural if that does something for you.

  A few more points I should not leave to the imagination: in the chalk drawing on Fifteenth, you can see Riley’s leg kicking out like Spike Spiegel and an additional rectangle above the outline of Richard’s hand, where he might have held his comic books or a laminated mock-up.

  The picture the Associated Press chose came from a Throwback Thursday photo that Riley had posted on social media, a picture of him in a costume from an undergrad party, at which he wore an oversize blue shirt and a bedazzled blue bandana over cornrows. His mother, and girlfriend, Paris, explained repeatedly that he was not dressed as a thug, but as nineties Justin Timberlake.

  Brother Man’s picture was an old mug shot, accompanied by a story that emphasized a criminal charge from five years ago—for child support nonpayment and tax evasion—and his penchant for false names.

  Both men’s families would say the pictures didn’t say anything, that that’s not how anyone who knew them would remember them.

  The Neil deGrasse Tysons disagreed over the number of gunshots they heard; the one in blackface said ten, while the one with a brown face called black said thirteen. The autopsies would not conclude, but there might have been marijuana in Riley’s or Richard’s systems, at some point.

  6.

  I think a cop shooting is too melodramatic when the story was interesting on its own, and my preoccupation with race is perhaps overdone, but it was O’Connor, I think, who said—and I say “I think” here more as a device, to affect a sort of nonchalance, when in fact I know she said—everything that rises must converge or something like that (“or something like that” serving as another affected clause). But that makes the ending sound intentional or overdetermined, when it wasn’t, though I believe—I know—it was Donika Kelly who said “the way a body makes a road,” or in this case an outline, impression.

  • • •

  How to end such a story, especially one that is this angry, like a big black fist? The voice is off-putting. All the important action happens offscreen; we don’t even see the shooting or the actual bodies or the video. Like that one guy in fiction workshop said, meta is so eighties. The mise en abyme is cool but overdone. This is a story of fragments, sketches. Dear author: Thank you for sharing this, but we regret.

  I concede that it might have been so much more readable as a gentle network narrative, with the cupcakes and the superheroes and the blue eyes and the nineties image-patterning. But I couldn’t draw the bodies while the heads talked over me, and the mosaic formed in blood, and what is a sketch but a chalk outline done in pencil or words? And what is a black network narrative but the story of one degree of separation, of sketching the same pain over and over, wading through so much flesh trying to draw new conclusions, knowing that wishing would not make them so?

  THE NECESSARY CHANGES HAVE BEEN MADE

  Though he had theretofore resisted the diminutive form of his name, in his new office, Randolph felt, for the first time, like a Randy.

  If Randolph were truthful, he could admit that he began acting like a Randy months before Isabela and especially the week before the holiday. That Tuesday, after Isabela had wished him a tepid “Happy Thansgiving” and he was sure she was gone for the weekend, Randolph had picked up the little silver picture frame on her desk and spit-washed her face and meager breasts through the glass, swirling his index finger until she blurred into a mucoid uni-boob. He returned the frame, packed his things into two blue copy-paper boxes, and shuttled them to his new office, hoping his bonsai would survive the transition and the dark holiday. Even with the lamps he purchased, the room was dim, but he was determined to keep the fluorescents off. His new office sat at the back of a musty corner near the janitorial closet, but it was, he reassured himself, his musty corner. He drove home for the break pleased with his victory and the progress and restraint he showed in achieving it.

  Before Isabela, DIY had been the subject of Randolph’s irritation, and before DIY, Crystal, before Crystal, Fatima, and before Fatima, Randolph’s mother, the Virgin Mary, and a girl who sneered at him in second grade.

  • • •

  Before Isabela, when Randolph was first hired at Wilma Rudolph, an HBCU, the department chair, Carol, had introduced him to Dr. Ivan-Yorke, saying that he should meet with her at least twice during the semester so that she could provide a letter for his file. Other than the fact that Randolph and DIY were two of the only three black professors in the department, he wasn’t sure why he was assigned to Ivan-Yorke. She didn’t work in his specialization and hadn’t written anything of note in decades. Her eyes sat high on her head and deep in her face, which, because of its plumpness, reminded Randolph of gingerbread dough. Randolph had seen her the day of his interview limping down the narrow hallway in what he described later to his friend Reggie as some sort of funereal muumuu but which at the time struck him as a plain black dress.

  “This is Dr. Randolph Green, a new assistant professor,” Carol had said, “from Preston.” Dr. Ivan-Yorke glared coolly down her square glasses before lifting her head slightly and gesturing for Randolph to examine the collection of office mugs displayed on her shelves. Randolph’s glance—for he was astute at times—picked up a DIY theme. One mug, lavender with white lettering, said, “Keep Calm and Do It Yourself.” Another said, “A Job Is Never Done until I’ve Done It.” Carol looked at him apologetically, laughing a little. “That’s right. I forgot to tell you that everyone here calls Dr. Ivan-Yorke ‘DIY.’ Her favorite saying is—”

  “Do it yourself,” DIY interrupted, with one flaccid arm raised toward her collection.

  “Ha,” Randolph forced.

  “Come closer,” DIY whispered. “I’ve been here for over twenty years.”

  There was no one in the hallway or the nearby offices. Randolph didn’t understand why she spoke so quietly.

  “I’ve read some of your work,” DIY mouthed. “Why did you leave the prestigious Preston?”

  “You know,” Randolph
said. “Wanted to try something different.” He didn’t say what he told others: that he wanted a reprieve from performing his status as an antistereotype or that he needed a break from the beneficence of liberal guilt, all eyes on him, the expectations of smiling, gesturing women. He felt one of his migraines already. They started in the small indentation at the base of his head, where neck meets pituitary cavity. The veins constricted as though a nylon cable were forcing the blood up, up, and out of his forehead. Pressure flooded the ocular nerves, concentrating itself behind one eye or the flat bone around his temple. He saw no aura, only felt the violence of it all.

  “You know how it is,” Randolph repeated.

  “I don’t,” DIY said, turning back to her desk.

  Carol and Randolph saw themselves out of the office.

  • • •

  Randolph hadn’t wanted to share an office any more than he’d wanted to teach at a historically black university, but Wilma Rudolph was the only other university in the city and was the only one still looking for an advanced assistant professor in the late spring, and by then he’d have done anything to get away from Preston and what he and Reggie called its “tyranny of whiteness.” It turned out, to Randolph’s dismay, that while the students at Wil U were mostly black, the faculty was nearly as homogeneous as Preston’s, especially in the humanities. The school, he felt, was run almost entirely by women, and Randolph came to understand them as an unholy sisterhood of pseudofeminists, with DIY as their unofficial leader, Carol their henchwoman-in-training, and Isabela their likely successor. A black man, he told Reggie, was just as much a token there as on the other side of the city.

  The consolation prize for the job was his double office with the most enviable windows in the building. The other nontenured faculty members were housed in two slums on the third and fourth floors of the building, sitting five or six people to spaces that should have been called carrels. But the two faculty members who’d shared the office previously had left on short notice, bequeathing to Randolph a large, well-lit space of his own. Until Isabela.

  She was hired in late September, a month into the school year, after the department chair of Spanish and Portuguese received complaints from students that their class was unassigned to an instructor. A professor from the Spanish department walked into Randolph’s office with a woman at her side, gestured toward the partition and second desk, and told Isabela, “This will be yours,” before she introduced herself and Randolph’s new office mate. Isabela smiled in a way that most people, including Randolph, would perceive as warm, and asked his department.

  “English, literature really.” Randolph smiled back.

  “Oh, good. You will help me. I’m from Venezuela. My writing in English is not so good.”

  “Well, neither is my Spanish,” he’d said with a laugh.

  “This is my first time teaching in the States,” she said. “I taught in Venezuela.”

  “It’s my first time teaching at an HBCU, too.” Randolph wanted to make that clear.

  “It’s a beautiful campus, very green,” she said.

  “It’s a campus,” he said.

  She smiled and nodded for a reason Randolph couldn’t interpret, then began to unpack the little rolling suitcase she had brought. Randolph showed her where to find office supplies, how to adjust the thermostat, which had a tendency to stick, and how to sign up for the university’s text-alert system. At Preston, crimes on or near campus were summarized in a monthly email from PR, probably to minimize the sense of widespread criminality, though the numbers were likely similar to Wil U’s. At Wil U, crimes were part of the daily tableau. Alert: reported sexual assault on the fourth floor of Wiley. Alert: students robbed outside McGill. Alert: black Mitsubishi Gallant stolen from West Featherringhill parking lot. Sometimes students sounded like they were going to fight in the hallway. Once, two faculty members did. The anxiety didn’t even register for Randolph anymore, he said, but he thought Isabela, especially as a woman, should be prepared.

  Isabela, however, seemed almost unfazed as Randolph told her the stories. She nodded, her eyes serious as he spoke. “The school where I taught in Caracas is very violent.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Where I grew up was rough, but I didn’t expect it at a university, even one in the South or in the hood.” He put the word in scare quotes. “Ghetto?” he asked, unsure if she understood.

  She shrugged and twisted her lips, as if to say she’d expected it. “People are the same, where you put them.”

  Randolph shrugged this time. He finished the tour of the office by telling Isabela that he liked to keep the lights off because of a sensitivity to artificial light and, he emphasized, because of the great windows in the room. The office faced south and was fully lit until the late afternoon most days, the trees outside providing just enough shade so that the sun never felt sharp. She nodded slowly, her lips pursed. He continued, “We can close the office door if things get too loud in the hall.”

  Randolph realized as soon as the words left his mouth their potential for misinterpretation. He should probably keep the office door open, for her sake, for the sake of propriety. He watched her face for discomfort and found none. Still, he started to explain that he hadn’t meant anything, but she just said, “Yes, I don’t like lots of noise.”

  He thought they would be friends. They were about the same age, unmarried and content with that status. Randolph didn’t want to date another coworker, and Isabela, he said, wasn’t his type anyway, though Randolph’s friends would say that wasn’t true. He wouldn’t even meet with his former coworkers at the Preston campus, for fear of running into his ex Crystal, a history professor who said that Randolph’s passivity belied chauvinism and that his book proposal, The New New Paternalism: Romantic Racism and Sexism in the Post-Postracial Era, would continue to go nowhere until he confronted his own masculinity issues. Crystal confused Randolph, because she wanted him to be angrier, scarier in bed, bought him books on erotic asphyxiation, called him Smaller Thomas during an argument, and concluded that he had low T, but broke up with him after he got “too rough.” She couldn’t have it both ways, he argued. “You always overcorrect or undercorrect, but never get it just right,” she cried.

  When describing Isabela, then, Randolph oversold her undesirable aspects: She was not unattractive, but flat, bland yet aggressive. She wore her brown hair in a ponytail, which accentuated her ears. All her features were tiny—her ears like those of a little old man, and her nose, a narrow point with a slightly beaked end—yet overpronounced.

  Isabela, he later learned, wanted to settle into life in the United States, maybe find a tenure-track job, before dating. It was a perfect situation for maintaining a platonic relationship, which Randy insisted he wanted. They both felt underdressed among the students, who alternated between church and club wear to classes. They laughed easily. She ate trail mix from a Ziploc bag. Randolph ate granola mixed with M&Ms. They kept their respective desks tidy and arranged their bric-a-brac just so. They shared disbelief at their students’ general boldness.

  • • •

  One rainy day in mid-October, Isabela sighed, a bit dramatically, Randolph thought. She must have had an altercation with a student, but when he asked, she said, “Randy, it is very dark in here today. May I turn on the lights?”

  Randolph considered how to answer. He didn’t want this to become a pattern. “Oh,” he said. “Well, remember, I keep them off because I can’t deal with the fluorescent bulbs. I get migraines.” He pointed to his chestnut-colored forehead and frowned.

  She nodded. “Yes, but it is very dark.”

  “It’s fine today, I guess. I’m leaving soon, but in general, I prefer not to have them on.” Randolph fiddled with his necktie.

  She turned on the lights. The department chair, Carol, stepped into the office as Randolph packed up his bag.

  “Oh, Randolph, I’m glad I caught you,” she said, her face flushed, though it always looked that way. “I was going to email you,
but I was walking by the office anyway. Dr. Ivan-Yorke says you two haven’t officially met for a mentoring session. Remember you need to meet twice each semester. I wouldn’t wait too long. You know how it is after the break.”

  “I’ll get on that.” Randolph fake smiled.

  “Great. Hi, Isabela,” Carol said before she left. “How’re you liking the office?”

  “It is very nice with the lights on,” she said, looking at Randolph.

  Carol paused, and glancing at Randolph said, “I suppose it would be.”

  Randolph didn’t know what to make of Isabela’s comment at the time, so he focused on Carol’s. He’d avoided his mentoring meetings because DIY struck him as another nut among many in the school’s canister. Though he was six feet three, he felt something shrink in her presence.

  • • •

  A few days after the first time she requested more light, on a day that Randolph did not recall as particularly overcast, Isabela beat him into the office, and when he arrived all the lights were on. He sat down at his desk and considered how he should approach the situation. Perhaps she didn’t understand the severity of his medical problems. He could call her over to his desk and pull up a Wikipedia page about migraines. He could say, in Spanish, that he really preferred natural light to all this fake stuff, which changes the rhythm of the brain and disrupts work. He could tell her that he’d been generous by using headphones, instead of speakers, to listen to music, so the least she could do was let him leave the lights off.

  He said, pantomiming an expansive space, “The windows are very big, bright, don’t you think?”

  She said, “Yes, but an office without lights? It is very strange. It doesn’t look nice.”