Free Disgruntled by Asali Solomon Page B

didn’t contradict her.
    “Oh fuck this. It’s making my teeth hurt,” her mother said, indicating the television with her head. She worked the remote control until she landed on an old episode of Star Trek.
    “Mom,” said Kenya, “wouldn’t someone have told you? Yaya?”
    “You would think,” she said in an acid voice. “But I guess they didn’t want to break up their precious group.”
    “You were part of it, too.”
    “Not like them, Kenya. I mean, yeah, I was part of it. And I believed in it. But not like your father.”
    Kenya did not ask her mother to elaborate, but she continued talking anyway. “I’m going to level with you. You know I grew up in the projects. It wasn’t bad when I was little. It was just a decent place you lived with a bunch of other black people who worked hard, but it fell apart when the drugs and guns came in. Folks started going to jail, getting strung out, getting dead. The way I figured it, not getting pregnant, going to college, having a decent job, and taking care of my family was doing something for the community.” Sheila had taken her hands out of Kenya’s hair to make a mock-grandiose gesture when she said community . Then she turned Kenya back around roughly and continued to cornrow.
    “On the other hand, people like your father, or even Yaya and Robert, they grew up with daddies and all of that. They had a little bit more to prove, especially your father. He liked to tell a lot of stories, but did he ever tell you the one about when he used to run with some Panthers and a bunch of them got picked up by some white cops?”
    Kenya shook her head no.
    “Keep your head still. Yeah, well, everybody got slammed against some brick wall. They were all about to get hauled downtown and strip-searched, and your father pulled out a little card his mother had snuck into his wallet and gave it to them. So he got to go home without a hair out of place.”
    “Okay,” said Kenya.
    Sheila laughed. “I mean shit, I was the community. ’Course, I wasn’t a backwoods charity case like some people.”
    Cindalou.
    “Uhura,” Sheila said, now talking about the black woman in an aerodynamic minidress on the television. “You know she wanted to quit this show and Martin Luther King called her and asked her not to? Because she was a role model? Like Martin Luther King didn’t have anything better to do that day?”
    *   *   *
    The summer before Kenya’s second year at Barrett, Grandmama died of lung cancer. Kenya had grown used to her cough and didn’t think it was unusual that Grandmama often excused herself for several minutes of hacking in the bathroom. Kenya had also gotten used to finding the occasional tissue delicately spotted with blood around Grandmama’s house.
    “You need to get that cough checked out, Eveline,” her mother would say gently.
    “For what?” Grandmama would ask drily. “For them to tell me it’s a cough?”
    At Barrett, Kenya’s science class had been subjected to a terrifying weeklong unit on smoking. Phyllis Fagin had run weeping out of class and tried to win an audience at lunch wailing that her dad smoked cigars, which was even worse! It was true that Phyllis was, as the other girls said, a “drama queen,” but maybe Kenya might have cried, too, if she’d thought something like cancer could happen in her family. Family such as it was.
    When she died, Grandmama’s few remaining friends were dreaming away their days in nursing homes, which she called “the poppy fields.” Her funeral was a small cemetery affair on a muggy July morning, attended by Sheila, Kenya, a few neighbors, and Grandmama’s oldest sentient friend, a black dentist. Kenya had met the large, slow-moving, and deep-voiced Dr. Walton before. Grandmama had spoken proudly of his accomplishments as the only black dentist on the Main Line, but bitterly of what she characterized as his eagerness to get his hands into the mouths of white people.
    The service was presided