Best African American Fiction Read online

  Were there the time and space available to me, I could write at length in praise of these works and all the additional, equally outstanding stories not commented on. However, don't let that prevent you from jumping into this extraordinary collection of world- class fiction. You'll encounter many of our best and most familiar black authors publishing today, along with lesser-known but equally accomplished writers who in time are sure to join the ranks of the celebrated. Young people today don't have to wait till they discover Go Tell It on the Mountain in order to find inspiration as writers and readers—I hope this anthology will provide for them what Baldwin provided for me all those years ago.

  E. Lynn Harris

  Guest Editor

  Atlanta, Georgia

  May 2008

  STORIES

  PITA DELICIOUS

  ZZ Packer

  You know what I mean? I was 19 and crazy back then. I'd met this Jewish guy with a really Jewish name: Gideon. He had hair like an Afro wig and a nervous smile that kept unfolding quickly like origami. He was one of those white guys who had a thing for black women, but he ‘d apparently been too afraid to ask out anyone until he met me.

  That one day when everything went wrong, Gideon was working on his dissertation, which meant he was in cutoffs in bed with me, the fan whirring over us while he was getting political about something or other. He was always getting political, even though his Ph.D. had nothing to do with politics and was called “Temporal Modes of Discourse and Ekphrasis in Elizabethan Poetry.” Even he didn't like his dissertation. He was always opening some musty book, reading for a while, then closing it and saying, “You know what's wrong with these fascist corporations?” No matter how you responded, you'd always be wrong because he'd say, “Exactly!” then go on to tell you his theory, which had nothing to do with anything you'd just said.

  He was philosophizing, per usual, all worked up with nervous energy while feeding our crickets. “And you,” he said, unscrewing a cricket jar, looking at the cricket but speaking to me, “you think the neoindustrial complex doesn't pertain to you, but it does, because by tacitly participating blah blah blah you're engaging in blah blah com-modification of workers blah blah blah allowing the neo- Reaganites to blah blah blah, but you can't escape the dialectic.”

  His thing that summer was crickets—I don't know why. Maybe it was something about the way they formed an orchestra at night. All around our bed with the sky too hot and the torn screen windows, all you could hear were those damn crickets, moving their muscular little thighs and wings to make music. He would stick his nose out the window and smell the air. Sometimes he would go out barefoot with a flashlight and try to catch a cricket. If he was successful, he ‘d put it in one of those little jars—jars that once held gourmet items like tapenade and aioli. I'd never heard of these things before, but with Gideon, I'd find myself eating tapenade on fancy stale bread one night, and the next night we'd rinse out the jar, and, voila, a cricket would be living in it.

  Whenever he'd come back to bed from gathering crickets, he'd try to wedge his cold, skinny body around my fetal position. “Come closer,” he ‘d say. And I'd want to and, then again, I wouldn't want to. He always smelled different after being outside. Like a farm animal or watercress. Plus, he had tons of calluses.

  Sometimes I'd stare in the mid- darkness at how white he was. If I pressed his skin, he'd bruise deep fuchsia, and you'd be able to see it even in the dark. I was very dark compared to him. He was so white, it was freaky sometimes. Other times it was kind of cool and beauti ful, how his skin would glow against mine, how our bodies together looked like art.

  Well, that one day—after he'd railed against the Federal Reserve Board, NAFTA, the gun lobby and the neoindustrial complex—we fed the crickets and went to bed. When I say went to bed, I mean we made love. I used to call it sex, but Gideon said I might as well call it rape. Making love was all about the mind. One time, when we were in a position that would have been beautiful art, he said, “Look at me. Really look at me.” I didn't like looking at people when I did it, and when I looked at him, we locked eyes, and I must admit, it did feel different. Like we were—for a moment—part of the same picture.

  That night we did it again. I couldn't say for sure if the condom broke or not, but it all felt weird, and Gideon said, “The whole condom-breaking-thing is a myth.” But we looked at it under the light, the condom looking all dead and slimy, and finally he threw the thing across the room, where it stuck to the wall like a slug, then fell. “Lifestyles! Who the hell buys Lifestyles?”

  “They're free at the clinic,” I said. “What do you want, organic condoms?” We looked it over again, but that didn't stop it from being broke. Gideon made a look that just about sent me over the edge.

  I had to think. I went in the bathroom and sat on the toilet. I'd done everything right. I hadn't gotten pregnant or done drugs or hurt anybody. I had a little life, working at Pita Delicious serving up burgers and falafel. Almost everything was awful, but the falafel wasn't half bad. It was at Pita Delicious where I first met Gideon, with his bobbing nosetip and Afro- Jewish hair. The Syrian guys who owned the place always made me go and talk to him, because they didn't like him. The first couple of times he came in, he'd tried talking to them about the Middle East, and even though he was on their side, they still hated him. “Talk to the Jew,” they said whenever he came in. Soon we were eating falafel on my break, with Gideon helping me plot out how I was going to go back to school, which was just a figure of speech, because I hadn't entered school in the first place.

  When I came back to bed, Gideon was splayed out on top of the blanket, slices of moonlight on his bony body. “All right,” he said. “Let's get a pregnancy test.”

  “Don't you know anything? It's not going to work immediately.”

  He made a weird face and asked, “Is this the voice of experience talking?”

  I looked at him. “Everyone knows,” I said, trying to sound calm and condescending, “that it's your first missed period.”

  He mouthed the word Okay, real slowly, like I was the crazy one.

  When my period went AWOL, I took the pregnancy test in the bathroom at Pita Delicious. I don't know why. I guess I didn't want Gideon hovering over me. I didn't even tell him when I was going to do it. One pink stripe. Negative. I should have been relieved, relieved to have my lame life back, but the surprising thing was that I wasn't. Then I did something I never thought I'd do, something unlike anything I've ever done before: It was really simple to get a pink marker and take off the plastic cover and draw another little stripe. Two stripes, the test said, means you're pregnant.

  When I got back home, I told him the test was positive, and flicked it into his lap: “What do you care?”

  I told him that I didn't know what I was going to do—what we were going to do. He paced in front of the crickets for a while. Then he put his arm around me, like I'd just told him I had AIDS and he'd mustered the courage to give me a hug.

  “What're we gonna do?” I asked. I don't know what I expected— whether I thought I'd catch him in a lie, or have him say something about not wanting the baby, or what—I forgot. All I knew was that something was pressing down on me, drowning me. If he ‘d said anything, anything at all, I would have been fine. If he'd started talking about the dialectic or about mesothelioma or aioli or how many types of cancer you could get from one little Newport menthol—I'd have been all right. Even if he cursed me out and blamed me and said he didn't want the baby—I'd have understood.

  But he didn't say anything. I saw everything he was thinking, though. I saw him thinking about his parents—Sy and Rita—growing worried in their condo's sunny Sarasota kitchen; I saw him never finishing his thesis and going to work for some grubby nonprofit where everyone ate tempeh and couldn't wear leather and almost had a Ph.D.; I saw him hauling the kid around to parks, saying it was the best thing he ‘d ever done. Really. The best.

  I walked out of that room, out of that house he rented w
ith its really nice wood everywhere. I kept walking away, quickly at first, then so fast that the tears were the only thing to keep me from burning myself out like a comet. I wasn't running from Gideon anymore; but even if he was following me, it was too late. Even with no baby, I could see there'd be no day when I'd meet Sy and Rita, no day when I'd quit Pita Delicious before they quit me, no day when I'd hang around a table of students talking about post-post-feminism, no day when Gideon and I would lock hands in front of the house we ‘d just bought. Anyone could have told him it was too late for that, for us, but Gideon was Gideon, and I could hear him calling after me, hoping the way he always did that the words would do the chasing for him.

  ALBINO CROW

  Chris Abani

  I am looking for an albatross

  This is no joke. This is no curse. An albatross spread like the span of a hand across the soft white sky of a woman's left buttock. It is a sign, an omen of true love. I have seen it, here in the photo I have tucked into the safety of my wallet. I reach into the soft leather fold and shake it out, wrinkled and faded even behind the soft plastic laminate. A naked woman with blonde hair, on her side, her left rump riding up, lies on tussled sheets that spread away from her in a puddle of crimson, like blood, or maybe paint. Yeah, I decide, more like paint, all clotted and textured. And there, on the side of her left rump, the one riding up in the air, is the albatross, a full hand's span on her buttock. I stare at her face, which is in the shadow of her arm; I imagine she is smiling and her eyes, green, are alive with an expression somewhere between love, lust and awe. I love this woman. I love her in ways that words cannot contain, and I wake up some nights with the ache of her in my bones and I cannot sleep. I have never met her, this woman in the photograph, but I know her like blood.

  It is four a.m. in this no- man's land, a twenty- four-hour diner on the lower east side of town. I like it here, at this time, because it belongs to that strangeness, which is not night and not light, and it is peopled not by the lost, but the purposeful. The lost wander the city aimlessly, pushing carts, begging for change, dying for the shame of others, but we are a different breed, resolute and dedicated to the annihilation of anything safe and wholesome in our lives; we spill out of bars and houses, no matter the specificities, the domicile is usually the bottom of a bottle or some other such desperation, we spill out and into this diner while the rest of the city sleeps or twitches. I say, this diner, but I mean, these diners: there are many, for we, the driven-night-walkers, are many. We aren't vampires or any such gothic crap, we are scarier than that, we are the driven earnest souls of life and we come here to wait because we believe and we have hope and we stir that heady concoction into swine-swill-coffee and mix it in with eggs over- easy and hash browns, contemplate it in the crunch of crispy bacon. We are so full of shit and therein lies all the possibility.

  Returning to the photograph, I trace the outline of the woman's hip as I motion to the waitress for more coffee. I wonder what the name of this town is; I have been through so many, touring as I am with a new jazz band made up of a bunch of balding, early- retired baby boomers. Charlie, the bandleader, is the only real jazz musician among us. I should count myself too except that this is only temporary. And if keeping up with the towns is hard enough, the diners are impossible. My life in diners: forget that. I do this because I am chasing the woman in the photo, I must find her, this albatross- marked figment of my fevered dreams and desires, I live to find her and seduce her and make her love me. Make her love me in the same bone-aching way that I love her, make her love me so much that should she lose me and if, in a heart-crazed-state, she wandered into an AA meeting she would say, my name is Janis, my name is Janis and I am hooked on Clearwater. Yep, Clearwater and Janis. It was the sixties what can I say? At least she didn't name me MoonoverClearwater. That's a girl's name.

  Janis left so long ago I can barely remember her, but I burn for her still, burn for her the way I have burned for no other woman and though it has been at least twenty- six years, I haven't found her yet, or again.

  “Is that your wife, mister?”

  I look up at the waitress and shake my head. She could be Janis, except she is too old, and too ugly and brunette with a touch of grey. Her eyes are narrowed from smoke and I ask her:

  “Do you sell cigarettes here?”

  “No,” she says, though the way she shakes her head she doesn't need to speak. “Do you have one you could spare?”

  She looks at me, smiles, and then without speaking takes a packet of American Spirits out of her apron pocket and passes me one. I stick it in my mouth and she lights it for me. I blow smoke out lazily.

  “No,” I say, returning the photo to my wallet, though the question has long since passed. “No, she's my mother.”

  The waitress gives me an odd look, refills my coffee cup, slams the check down a little harder than necessary and walks off. The message is clear. I pay and leave, making sure to tip her just enough to piss her off, to make her want to chase me down the street and throw my money back at me. I smile and step out into the night. I will find you Janis, I say to the dark and the noise and the cars stirring up rain with their wheels. I will.

  This battered trumpet belonged to my father, who once had pretensions of being a jazz musician. I don't know how long he held onto this dream, but I know that by the time I was ten he wasn't playing anymore. He would sit on the roof and drink, drink and sob, holding the trumpet like some talisman against the night, and he would finger the notes, play whole songs without blowing into it once. I don't know what he might have sounded like in the days when the dreams burned intensely in him, but I know this: some of those breathless songs he played on the roof at night, tears running down his face and salting the alcohol on his lips, were probably the best things he ever played. So sad when the loudest and sweetest sound your soul can make is silence.

  Even though I share this with you and even though I sit here myself in the dark, smoking and sipping whiskey that burns like penance each time it goes down my throat, I am not mournful. I don't miss my father, I hated that fucker and I am glad he is dead. Of course there are those who would argue and say these outbursts are themselves proof of love, but I say screw them.

  So, this trumpet belonged to my father and I can play it. I can play the hell out of it. I play solos that bring tears of awe and frustration to the eyes of the other musicians, but although I get paid, I never take it seriously. It is just my revenge against my father. Like when he lay dying and I would play outside his door all night and keep that fucker from rest, from sleep. I made sure he died crying, sobbing his heart out, what little there was left of it. One song, “Hallelujah,” played over and over, the way I'd heard Jeff Buckley sing it, live, once in that long ago before night took it all, took Jeff and everything good.

  But here I am in a no-name-town by the pool of a no-name-chain-motel, in the dark because they have turned off the floodlights, playing the song that drove my father crazy, that filled his last wordless moments with a torment of sobs and incoherent cries. It is five a.m. and if I am disturbing anyone they say nothing. I can't sleep. I went from a gig to the diner and now back to the motel and this poolside, walking all the way, stopping only to buy a six- pack and a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Jack is the devil you know, the devil and god rolled into one. Ah what the heck, I am a bit of a drama queen, always have been, but then I figure I've earned it. My mother, albatross girl, left when I was seven months old for parts unknown, leaving me behind with her hate-filled husband, and her photo in his wallet. Of course like any self-respecting-but-self-loathing-because-he-never-made-it-jazz-musician my father took to alcohol and more self- loathing which he worked out on me with a belt or a piece of wood, whatever was handy, until the social workers took me away. I won't bore you with the details of my foster home arrangements and I won't say that my foster parents were terrible because they were not, or that I was shipped from home to home, because I wasn't. My foster parents were in fact good and in fact paid f
or me to have lessons on the battered trumpet I took from under my father's bed the night I left. That's how come I am so good.

  And don't feel sad for me because I returned to my father when I was eighteen. Returned to beat the crap out of him now that I figured I was big enough, old enough. But the fucker was sick. Cancer, he said. Doctors found two lumps the size of golf balls in both lungs, he said. I should have left, but there was no one else to take care of him and though I didn't want to, he was my dad. So I stayed with him in that one bedroom apartment, he in the bedroom, me in the living room, hardly going out, roaming it like some big cat caged and playing my trumpet, his trumpet, endlessly, until the neighbors got tired of banging on the walls, until the landlord got tired of coming around. Until. I stayed for the guilt and for hate, which sometimes can be a deeper love. Stayed and hated him and played.