Thrown-away Child

say.”
    “How would you say it?”
    “Things going to get worse before they get better Maybe the country slide into a horrible, violent depression. By then, probably just about all the po-lices and all the soldiers going to be black. Which by then, you got the hope of all the people riding on black men. See my meaning?”
    “No.”
    “White folks, they going to reject that kind of hope. See—true heartbreak.”
    Now I saw.
    At least two minutes passed without either one of us saying anything. We sipped coffee and thought our separate thoughts. Time-outs from talking are the natural results of a conversation that runs deep.
    Joe Never Smile finally spoke. “Claude bring you round here about that young black boy I take on his ride to glory yesterday, over by Pastor Hearn on Poydras Street?”
    “Did you know him?”
    “No, I didn’t. He just another tragedy folks don’t want to give a name to.”
    “Why not?”
    “Ain’t easy to carry on if you got to be recalling sad names. Folks these days, they just live and let die.”
    I had nothing to say to that. Not that it mattered Joe Never Smile had enough to say for us both. I figured he would eventually tell me anything I wanted to know, along with a lot of other useful things, so long as I allowed him his own pace. Trying to change Joe Never Smile’s pace would be like trying to turn around the Queen Mary in shallow water.
    Joe looked down at the newspaper opened on the table in front of him. “Back a couple of years, they run a story about another black boy here in New Orleans—name of James Darby, just nine year James and his class over to Mahalia Jackson ElemeI1 tary School, they all write to the president about what’s on they minds. James letter, it touched the big man himself—enough so he wrote him back. Which is how come it made the news.”
    “In New York it was news, too.” I remembered the James Darby account in the Times. “The kid was obsessed about random violence.”
    “You right. James, he wrote ‘Mr. President, I want you to stop the killing in the city. I think somebody might kill me.’ I am never going to forget them exact words. The boy wrote the big man in April, you know. Then come May and little James, he got shotgunned to death walking home after a Sunday picnic.”
    “On Mother’s Day it was.”
    “I bet you never heard of two other black boys shot dead here same day as James Darby.”
    “No.”
    “One was ten year old, the other two. The young one, he was a shield in a gunfight. Nothing unusual about either one of them two colored boys and how they go. They didn’t write no letters to the White House. Know what I’m saying?”
    “I know, I know.” I was now rubbing my forehead. ‘I’m the same as you, in a sense.”
    “What you talking?”
    “In the sense of the sorrow business. I myself have seen all kinds of kids stretched out on morgue slabs— teenagers to toddlers.” My breathing came hard. “I’ve seen babies snuffed in dumpsters.”
    Silence.
    There was something dear and fierce and protective in Joe Never Smile’s lined face, something that made him the father of us all. He whispered, “National goddamn disgrace.”
    “I need to ask you something.”
    “Go ahead ask. Claude say you all right.”
    “It’s about that boy you took to glory. After he was killed, his body was mutilated—branded with the letters M-O-M-S. There was a man by the name of Cletus Tyler who was killed, the same day as the boy and his body was branded the same way.”
    “Yeah, I know about all that.”
    “I know what the letters stand for. But what’s the meaning?”
    Joe Never Smile sighed. Then when he started talking he sounded like a man making a deathbed confession.
    “Mutants, orphans and misfits—that all go back to before the war,” he said. “War Between the States I’m talking about. You know Congo Square?”
    I said I had heard mention of it on the radio, when Huggy Louper tuned in WWOZ in his taxicab. Joe Never Smile told me that today’s Louis Armstrong Park is built around the old Congo Square, where slaves were allowed to gather on Sundays back in the plantation era, to amuse themselves and to dance the calinda.
    “That’s a old African voodoo dance by way of slaves arrive here to New Orleans from Saint Domingue and Cuba,” he said. “Black folks talk about danse calinda anymore—that’s the Creole French for it—they pretty much showing ignorance.”
    “How so?”
    “They only know about