What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (phonics story books txt) 📕

“Oh, Tuyen, what’s the big deal?” Oku asked, when she finally got through his father’s annoyance for calling so late.

“Well, I know she went to see Jamal, and you know how depressed she gets with that.”

“Yeah, right.” Carla had lain paralysed on her futon for a week the last time Jamal was in trouble.

“Give it till tomorrow. I’ll come by before class.” Oku rang off quickly, his father in the background grumbling about people calling at all hours.

Now they were all three in Tuyen’s dilapidated apartment. They forgave the mess because she made great coffee. They had all become used to the mess anyway. It was useful—after visits to Tuyen, they usually went home and launched into vigorous cleaning. Oku and Jackie both headed for the shabby armchair in the corner. Jackie won out with her diva stare at Oku.

Jackie had dyed her hair red and now had a second-hand clothes store, calling herself “Diva,” greeting customers effusively, and flattering them into scandalous excess buying. “Girl, you look good!” she would ooze, leading someone to buy the most improbable outfit. She had stayed home alone nights since she was nine years old, refusing to be babysat any more at Liz Dorry’s house while Jackie’s mother and father went partying. She had watched late-night television, FashionTelevision, MuchMusic, MuchMoreMusic, “Entertainment Tonight,” “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” “Trading Places,” “Martha Stewart,” “Emeril Live,” and hip-hop videos on Black Entertainment Television. Her argot was one her mother and father could not decipher for all their own hipness. She spoke valley girl, baller, hip-hopper, Brit mod, and French from watching RDI. She had sat there night after night, absorbing the television’s language and culture and getting familiar with its speakers and citizens, changing her face into the drawn profile of a supermodel, her smile large and petulant, her ever-present long polished fingernails, her attitude snap, worldly, and dismissive as Naomi Campbell’s. She had a German boyfriend, Reiner-Maria, who dyed his hair a dripping black and wore ominous leather and played second guitar in a band. They sounded like Ministry, Throbbing Gristle and Skinny Puppy. Jackie had found Reiner cruising the industrial scene that moved around the city from one ubiquitous dungeon-like club to another when she was in her black dress, black eyeshadow, multiple-pierced earlobe period. None of Jackie’s friends ever remembered Reiner’s name. They just called him the German boyfriend.

“What’s the dillio?”

“Well, Jamal got caught for carjacking. You know that, Oku.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“You hang around with him sometimes, don’t you? Up there in the jungle?”

“I see him, but I don’t know what he’s into.”

“Yeah, right.” Jackie wasn’t impressed.

“Now, you know I’m a grown man, I’m not into that shit. Those are young guys fucking around. I check for him ’cause he’s Carla’s brother, but you know, them young brothers are hard core, man.”

“So you know about it, right?”

“Hell, they see me coming. I’m too cerebral for them. I just get some ganja up there, check some guys I know, older guys, man.”

“But couldn’t you have talked to him?”

“I did. But it’s a man thing, know what I’m saying?”

“Man thing? What the fuck!”

“Yes, a man thing, Jackie.”

“Well, it’s a man thing to be in jail?”

“Rite of passage in this culture, girl. Rite of passage for a young black man.”

“Well, your ass is not in jail, Oku.”

“No, but you know what I mean, don’t you? I can get jacked up any night by the cops just for walking in the wrong place. You know that, Jackie. Don’t front like you don’t. You talking in another language now? You forgotten how life is?”

Oku needled Jackie, every chance he got, about the German guy. He was jealous. He’d had a crush on Jackie since grade ten, but she paid him no mind except to send him on errands for pop and cigarettes. She was the reason Oku first hung out with Carla and Tuyen, thinking they were Jackie’s best friends so they would lead him to Jackie somehow. They’d become close anyway, despite his lack of success so far. Oku was a poet. He lived in his parents’ basement, listening for his father to leave so he could raid the refrigerator upstairs. His mother didn’t mind, but his father had told him he would never deny him a roof, but he had to work to eat. Bring home good grades from the university—that was his primary job. His father also meant work renovating houses like he did. Summers were hellish for Oku. Fitz, his father, always had a friend who could give Oku a job hauling gyproc or insulation. Oku couldn’t bear coming home dusted in plaster and covered in paint and wounded by falling hammers. He listened instead to Miles, he investigated the futurist squeaks and honks of the Chicago Art Ensemble, he travelled the labyrinthine maze of Afro-jazz base and drum, jungle. He worked it all back to Monk’s “Epistrophe.” He thought his father an unfortunately small man, small in the mind, and one day he would maybe just tell him so. And he loved Jackie, though he knew he hadn’t a hope.

None of them took each other home in those teenage years. The only place they went to once or twice was Jackie’s because Jackie’s mother and father were cool. Or so they all thought, except Jackie. In fact, they took nothing home, no joy and no trouble. Most days they smoked outside school together, planning and dreaming their own dreams of what they would be if only they could get out of school and leave home. No more stories of what might have been, no more diatribes on what would never happen back home, down east, down the islands, over the South China Sea, not another sentence that began in the past that had never been their past.

They’d never been able to join in what their parents called “regular Canadian life.” The crucial piece, of course, was that they