Free Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

scratch the finish.”
    We worked together about two hours. Ronalda caught on pretty quick, but she was stil behind. We puzzled over sine, cosine, and tangent, but the class was already doing complex proofs. At the end of the session, I did my homework and let her copy it with her nervous handwriting.
    “What time do you have to be home?” she asked me.
    “No particular time,” I said, “as long as I’m back before my mother gets home at seven.”
    “Do you want to see the basement?”
    I fol owed her down the stairs into a laundry room, pausing at the luxury. My mother and I had to take our dirty clothes to the Laundromat and sit there for ninety minutes while our clothes spun in the coin-operated machines. James offered to help us buy a stackable set, but our apartment didn’t have an outside vent for a dryer.
    The dark-paneled basement was as large as the rest of the house, but it gave a different vibe. The upstairs was clearly Ronalda’s stepmother’s territory, bright with natural light and gleaming with crystal and mirrors. Pale blue china platters were displayed face out beside cobalt glassware.
    The basement, on the other hand, was a manly space, equipped with a Ping-Pong table, wet bar, and cable TV. The atmosphere was cool and damp like earthworms and smel ed vaguely of strawberry incense.
    Ronalda clicked on the heater that dominated the far wal , near the component set. It was painted green and was shaped to resemble a fireplace.
    It hummed on, and fake logs glowed orange. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” Ronalda said.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Let me empty out the dehumidifier. That’s one of my chores.” She went to what looked like a smal metal cabinet and pul ed out a pan of water, which she emptied into the washing machine.
    “My dad comes down here a lot,” she said.
    The whole place was decorated to show the world how much Mr. Harris enjoyed being a black man. On the wal s were line drawings of men whose images I saw at school during Black History Week — Malcolm X, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other faces. I wasn’t completely sure, but I thought one of them invented the stoplight. Among these pictures was a just-born portrait of Ronalda’s little brother, Nkrumah. On another wal was a poster of Hank Aaron hitting his 735th homerun. The one woman in this portrait gal ery was half-naked. I kept staring at the poster, trying to decide if she was pretty or not. Her dark-skinned body shone with oil. Between her pointed breasts was a bul et-studded strap. Her thick afro was decorated with bul ets and from her hips hung even more bul ets, hiding her privates.
    The image confused me. The very fact that she was splayed out naked meant that she was supposed to be sexy, but I had never seen a pinup this dark or this nappy. I imagined myself halfway between this woman and Marcus’s favorite, Jayne Kennedy. Like Jayne, I had the hair, but like Ronalda’s father’s fantasy, I was dark as burnt brass. At the bottom of the poster, just under her knee-high leather boots, was a caption: THINK ABOUT
    IT.
    I pointed to the picture. “I don’t get it. Think about what?”
    “Al men like to look at pictures of naked women,” Ronalda said. “My boyfriend, Jerome, you should see al the pictures he got.”
    I nodded as though I understood this, but the picture made me feel a sort of roaming sadness in my stomach. I wondered how James decorated his private spaces. He wasn’t a back-to-Africa man, so I knew he wouldn’t look at naked women with nappy hair. Maybe his fantasy women would sprawl on the hoods of limousines. Maybe they’d be inside the cars, resting their breasts on the steering wheel, wearing nothing but chauffeur’s caps with yards of glossy hair tumbling out from underneath. I thought about it.
    “You want to look around?”
    I nodded again.
    “This is my father’s study.” She opened a door and led me into a smal room crammed with books and more il ustrations of black men looking serious. She