Harlem Thunder
In the darkening days of fall, Tiffany listens to the Isley Brothers on repeat, not a rhythm but a mood. She sits waiting in her Harlem classroom, where soon twenty sets of ten little fingers will grip her shoulders. The children she teaches attach to her like low-hanging fruit, and she pauses every so often to consider them, to adjust her hold on them.
Javaris is the first student in class, the first to give Tiffany a running hug. He is a charming ten-year-old whose innocence is out of pocket. He wears it as a smile that extends the full length of his face, which is dark but not so dark as the student who sits next to him and speaks more Wolof than English. Javaris is the color of Tiffany’s grandfather, an American brown that makes her want to search its roots.
“Let’s say a prayer for Ms. Daniels’ grandpa,” Javaris says, after Tiffany explains her absence from school last week was due to her grandfather’s funeral. Tiffany smiles thinking of the magnitude of her kids’ small bodies, then frowns acknowledging the bleakness that follows their light. Javaris has an IEP—ADHD and ODD and dyslexia—and she pushes aside the dismal trajectory of his life. She thinks of Andre instead. She’ll see him for dinner tonight. His arms are well-built PVC pipes, and yesterday he held her like a glass vase, a two-handed grip that stopped her feet from touching the floor.
Tiffany wouldn’t call Javaris her favorite student, but she likes him a lot. He asks to go to the bathroom, whispering the question really close to her ear, and then stands back smiling, as if it is a secret, as if he has just shared something special with her. He knows she’ll say yes, and she wonders why he makes such a show of asking. She waves him forward. “Go on,” she says, appreciating that today won’t be the spectacle of last year’s talent show or the shitstorm after the state test. Javaris is having a good day.
It’s not that she’s sad for the man she thinks Javaris will become, but she’s sad for what she knows he’ll have to overcome. Some never get out. That’s what it is with her ex Eric; he's still in it. That’s what prickled Tiffany’s doubt.
After class yesterday, it was “Footsteps in the Dark,” but today it’s “Voyage to Atlantis,” and Tiffany’s feeling melancholy, like the end of the month or freezer-burned ice cream, like her mother when she worked with at-risk youth over a decade ago. Back then the Isleys’ hum of conundrum escaped Tiffany, but now a 200-dollar leather jacket hangs from her chair, the sleeves of her strawberry-patterned blouse are rolled to her elbows, and she feels guilty. Here she is, just operating within it all. To think, Tiffany Daniels—her mother’s child.
Sometimes her mother seemed like a prop, held up by her father’s optimism but too flimsy to stand alone. Tiffany wonders how a woman like that could weigh so much. She doesn’t want to fuck things up like her parents did, when one became too heavy and the other floated off, so Tiffany made a choice yesterday, the sort of decision that only gets harder with age.
“I don’t think we should talk anymore,” she’d said to Eric. “At least not right now, not while I’m still figuring things out.” Not while I’m getting to know what Andre means to me is what Tiffany meant, and she swears the world shifted, or at least his breath did. The phone dropped to her side, and she didn’t hear him hang up, but when she pressed the phone back to her ear, he was gone, just like her grandfather, in a hiccup, in less than a heartbeat. There are only so many chances.
It’s dark out now because Tiffany stayed at work late—not grading papers or lesson planning but just thinking. Her mind rushes with the last after-school bell, and it takes a while for her to get out of whatever moment she’s in. She sat for two and a half hours today, a long stretch that only Ron Isley could pull her out of.
Tiffany has never been one to look at the stars, though recently they seem implicit, complicit. When she gets home, the sky outside of her apartment is thunderous with Harlem magic. She looks for the stars, but they are nowhere to be found. She knows they are only hiding, behind plumes of marijuana smoke and hunched shapes sitting on stoops, shooting the shit, the block’s R&B on blast, cartoon lives spilling from concrete infrastructure.
Inside of a brown building, identical to its neighbors, sits a three-bedroom apartment, newly renovated with a washer and dryer, deemed a Harlem gem by the blond broker who found it for Tiffany and her two roommates. On the way in, she runs into an older neighbor, a fast-talker with a slim face and an almost imperceptible limp. “Hey, Teach,” he says, and she waves, heading to apartment 2C where Andre is waiting with dinner.
“They’ve already made up their minds. They’ll just box him in, tell him he can’t learn, find a reason to lock him up,” Tiffany says to Andre over fried whiting. This is only their third or fourth date, and yet they’re comfortable, having been old friends.
“Who?” Andre says, laughing. His laughter is like a curly fry, one of the good ones, coiled three or four times upon itself. The fries they’re eating now aren’t curly but straight and golden with a good amount of salt. She puts handfuls in her mouth and hopes that her comfort eating in front of Andre counts for something. She doesn’t lick the ketchup from the crease of her lips. “Slow down,” he says, laughing again. “Who were you talking about?”
“Javaris,” she says.
“Who’s Javaris?”
Though some might call Javaris the boy who threw the chair and broke a window, Tiffany just says, “You haven’t been listening.”
“You haven’t been speaking. Not about him. What does Javaris have to do with anything?”
Tiffany wants to laugh with Andre but can't find the start of it, so she shrinks into the remnant of his sound instead. “He has everything to do with everything. Don’t you get it? Everything matters. Every little thing,” she says, almost a whisper.
Andre doesn’t laugh now. He looks confused, and Tiffany wonders if she’s made the wrong choice. She is in a mood, looking for a rhythm. She is too tired to hold her head up, too old to be unsure, but either everything matters or nothing at all.
Janelle M. Williams (@Janelleonrecord) received her BA from Howard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from Manhattanville College. She was a 2017 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kweli, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, SmokeLong Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Auburn Avenue, midnight & indigo, and elsewhere.