The Twelfth Card

I’ll never put anybody ahead of you again, like I did when I was with your moms. You’re the one I should’ve been trying to save—and not by taking that trip to Buffalo.”
    “No! You don’t get it! It’s not about what you did. It’s your whole goddamn world I don’t want any part of. I don’t care about Strivers whatever it is, I don’t care about the Apollo or the Cotton Club. Or the Harlem Renaissance. I don’t like Harlem. I hate it here. It’s guns and crack and rapes and peoplegetting fiended for a cheap-ass plated bling and drugstore hoops. It’s girls, all they care about is extensions and braids. And—”
    “And Wall Street’s got insider traders and New Jersey’s got the mob and Westchester’s got trailer parks,” he replied.
    She hardly heard him. “It’s boys, all they care about is getting girls in bed. It’s ignorant people who don’t care how they talk. It’s—”
    “What’s wrong with AAVE?”
    She blinked. “How do you know about that?” He himself had never talked ghetto—his own father had made sure he’d worked hard in school (at least until he dropped out to start the “career” of defacing city property). But most people who lived here didn’t know that the official name for what they spoke was African-American Vernacular English.
    “When I was inside,” he explained, “I got my high school diploma and a year of college.”
    She said nothing.
    “I mostly studied reading and words. Maybe won’t help me get a job but it’s what drew me. I always liked books and things, you know that. I’m the one had you reading from jump . . . . I studied Standard. But I studied Vernacular too. And I don’t see anything wrong with it.”
    “You don’t speak it,” she pointed out sharply.
    “I didn’t grow up speaking it. I didn’t grow up speaking French or Mandingo either.”
    “I’m sick of hearing people say, ‘Lemme axe you a question.’ ”
    Her father shrugged. “ ‘Axe’ is just an Old-English version of ‘ask.’ Royalty used to say it. There’re Bible translations that talk about ‘axing’ God for mercy. It’s not a black thing, like people say. The combination of saying s and k next to eachother’s hard to pronounce. It’s easier to transpose. And ‘ain’t’? Been in the English language since Shakespeare’s day.”
    She laughed. “Try getting a job talking Vernacular.”
    “Well, what if somebody from France or Russia’s trying for that same job? Don’t you think the boss’d give them a chance, listen to ’em, see if they’d work hard, were smart, even if they spoke different English? Maybe the problem’s that the boss is using somebody’s language as a reason not to hire him.” He laughed. “People in New York damn well better be able to speak some Spanish and Chinese in the next few years. Why not Vernacular?”
    His logic infuriated her even more.
    “I like our language, Genie. It sounds natural to me. Makes me feel at home. Look, you’ve got every right to be mad at me for what I did. But not for who I am or what we came out of. This’s home. And you know what you do with your home, don’t you? You change what oughta be changed and learn to be proud of what you can’t.”
    Geneva jammed her eyes closed and lifted her hands to her face. The years and years she dreamed of a parent—not even the luxury of two, but just one person to be there when she came home in the afternoons, to look over her homework, to wake her up in the morning. And when that wasn’t going to happen, when she’d finally managed to shore up her life on her own and start working her way out of this godforsaken place, here comes the past to yoke and choke her and drag her back.
    “But that’s not what I want,” she whispered. “I want something more than this mess.” She waved her hand around the streets.
    “Oh, Geneva, I understand that. All I’m hoping for is maybe we have a couple of nice years here,’fore you off into the world. Give me a chance to make up for what we did to you, your mother and me. You deserve the world . . . . But honey, I gotta say—can you name me one place that’s perfect? Where all the streets’re paved with gold? Where everybody loves their neighbors?” He laughed and slipped into Vernacular. “You say it a mess here? Well, damn straight. But where ain’t it a mess one way or th’other, baby? Where ain’t it?”
    He put his arm around her. She stiffened but she didn’t otherwise resist.