Here is a short story submission from CCC English teacher Juan McAfee. Enjoy!
Shades of Blackness
by Juan McAfee
It is the year 2025, due to the effects of global warming today is another gray and drab day. However, the day shimmers aglow with our laughter. Me and my cousin Dre, who is twelve, one year younger than me, run through the house, teasing and funning. It is our blackness and our blood that makes us more than kin. However, we shall find later that it is our blackness, or which shade of blackness, not our blood that makes us useless to this government.
My cousin Dre and his family have come a long way to visit us for the summer. Due to the price of gasoline most folks like us can only travel once every other summer. Me and Dre get along about like always: Him getting’ the best of me even though I’m smarter. Him tickling my feet till my sides ache and I cry “uncle.” Dre and his two brothers crowded with me and my two brothers in our tiny bedroom. Dre spends most of his time in bed scaring me late at night, talking about spooky creatures in the dark.
It is a summer not unlike any other summer, or at least it feels that way. Our fathers sit out back most days talking sports, politics, and the lack of progress of humankind. His mother and my mother gab hours on end, catching up on old schoolmates, olds flames, and old times.
We only half listen, more concerned with bossing our younger siblings. We’re both the eldest, so we eat the most, we’re eager to compete, we scrap the loudest, and are first to go running when mothers call.
This summer Dre seems to have taken on a foreign edginess. Almost a sadness, but not quite. And while we fuss and wrestle, we’re older now and I sense he’s beginning to regard me as the young woman I’m becoming. But there’s something else eating at him. I ask him if something is wrong. He looks at me and I watch his eyes go weepy. Nothing’s the matter, he says. And it takes a while, but after a couple of days I provoke him back to mischief and he’s more his usual self.
In no time we’re roughing and tumbling about the house. This one afternoon me and Dre are playing hide and seek while our brothers take their naps. I tap Dre and he’s it. He counts slowly to ten as I scout out a place to hide. We’ve been warned to stay out of the front room, and keep our noise down or suffer a spanking. I’m bold enough to think I can hide right under mama’s nose and get away with it.
I tiptoe into the living room, crawl up under the old upright piano, and wedge myself in between it and the cloth-covered bench. From where I am, I can overhear our mama’s chitchat. My mama has the ironing board up in the dining room and is pressing out a week’s laundry. His mama is sitting at the table, one of her breasts out, nursin’ Dre’s new baby brother. There is a crack between the piano and the adjacent armchair which allows me to watch them without being seen.
Then here come Dre. He tiptoes up to the bench. I can see the quick little steps of his worn sneakers. I hold my breath. Next thing I know I’m looking into his eyes and teeth. He’s smiling and laughing silently at finding me so quickly. He gets down on all fours and crawls in under the piano and starts tickling the stuffings out of me, daring me to laugh out loud. I hold it in. I don’t want my legs tanned with one of them peach tree limbs my mama favors.
Then suddenly something his mama and my mama are saying catches our ears and we listen.
“I’ve had my last child,” his mama says. “This is it.”
“He’s such a pretty boy,” my mama says.
“He’s my favorite of the boys. He’s so light-skinned and look at this good straight hair. And lookahere at them gray eyes!”
“He takes after you.”
“I’m so glad the other boys didn’t turn out dark. You know this government isn’t very kind to darker skinned boys who come of age.”
My mama made a strange little laugh. “Thank God my little girl passed the physical exam at the Department of Coloration last month.” She continued. “Just barely though.”
“I’m so glad this baby didn’t turn out black and ugly like Dre. I can’t stand to look at nothing’ that black, and I feel so sorry Dre is as black as he is—tar black. Of course you know Dre must report to the Bureau of Beautification at the age of thirteen. I think the best law this government passed was to have all dark-skinned boys at the age of thirteen castrated. This world doesn’t need any more ugly, black as tar people.”
Me and Dre were staring at one another, our mouths and eyes as wide as could be. And saw hurt, pain and hate flood his face all at once.
I wondered what my aunt thought of me and my brothers. And my father too. All of us were only a couple of shades shy of Dre, who was what we called charcoal. At the same time I was filled with a powerful hate for the woman. She thought she was better than us because she was high yellow and closer to white. My mama had raised us to believe that that way of thinking, the way the government wanted us to think about ourselves, was sick and wrong. And now I was filled with shame. Why wasn’t my mother taking her to task?
Maybe she would’ve if she’d seen the tears burst silently from Dre’s eyes. She didn’t see the hardness that took hold of his heart. And she didn’t see me reach out my arms, trying to leap beyond my tomboy years to be the mother he lost in the instant.
Dre crawled out, went to the bathroom, and closed the door. He stayed there a long time. I went into the room where the others were napping and thought about it till I couldn’t think anymore. We would never speak about it. No seemed to notice the change in Dre during the rest of that visit. No one, except me, noticed how sullen, withdrawn, and mean-tempered Dre was becoming. I remember standing just off the hallway, by the piano, watching them leave. His mother reached out to touch Dre as he was going through the door. He jerked away and she gave him a puzzled look. I took it as a sign.
It was the last time I ever saw Dre. The only details I know are the ones I read about in the papers or saw on the news, of course the government controlled both so who knows what happened exactly. It was reported that Dre walked into the Bureau of Beautification and shot over fifteen people and then turned the gun on himself.
Before this incident happened Dre had sent a package to me. Inside were old photographs of Dre’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather. You should have seen them. They all looked like Dre, same color, same smile. I thought to myself, “They’re beautiful!”
