The Fugitivities

by Jesse McCarthy

Genres: African American; General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A singular and powerful debut novel about a young black American learning the difficulties of forming your own identity when society has already assigned you one.
Like most recent college graduates, Jonah Winters is unsure of what’s next. A young black American raised in France and living in New York City, he tries on a couple of careers only to find that nothing feels right. And as Jonah struggles to
envision his future, he feels pressured by his friends and family to put the struggles of his community before his search for self.
But then a chance encounter with an ex-NBA player with his own regrets inspires Jonah to take his life into his own hands. Deciding to leave the country entirely, he sets off for Brazil. And as he makes and breaks friendships on the way,
reflects on his past relationships, and learns to rely on himself, Jonah slowly forms an understanding of self, community, and freedom that is rarely afforded to young black men.

Release date: June 8, 2021

Publisher: Melville House

Print pages: 256

Sample

Perspiring, dizzy with heat and exhaustion, Jonah stopped at the corner of Underhill and St. Johns and plunked down the armchair he had trundled through the leafy streets of Park Slope, along the wide sunbaked extension of Flatbush Avenue, and, at Grand Army Plaza, around the imposing monument to the “Defenders of the Union,” where bronze charioteers looked out over the construction of a condominium tower. The rich folk in the Slope had a habit of throwing out nice furniture in the summer, and he was determined to furnish his new apartment. The haul had been pretty good so far—a “reclaimed-wood” bookcase, a banker’s desk lamp, a vaguely Oriental side table—with the only downside being that the crib now had the eclectic air of a showroom.

He was about halfway down the block when he took note of the commo­tion surrounding a double-parked Grand Cherokee directly across from his building. The vehicle was loaded down with equipment for living: a cream leather sitting chair crammed in at an angle, trash bags full of clothes, a plastic crate stuffed with video-game accessories, assorted lotions and hair products. Foodstuffs, cooking appliances, a bottle of Crisco, remained stranded on the sidewalk awaiting transport. A man carrying a stereo unit emerged from the brownstone across the street and hollered. At the boom of his voice, a somber boy in a durag, one earbud pendant, looked up. At the man’s side stood a little girl with beaded braids, wearing a backpack; she saw Jonah and ducked behind her father’s knee. “You heard him, go help your father,” shouted a woman from the front passenger side, where she must have been trying to find more room. Her gaze passed over Jonah, assessing and dismissing in one sweep, before turning to the stoop as she called out the girl’s name in a high sweet voice.

It took Jonah a moment to understand what he was seeing even though it was the simplest thing in the world. The expression on the face of the man carrying the stereo was concentrated and severe. He arranged the equipment in the back seat, then turned to go back in for whatever remained. The boy still stood curbside, staring blankly at nothing in particular. They would have been neighbors, but as it stood, Jonah was only a straggling stranger who happened to be moving in while they were moving out. There was no trace of sadness in the boy’s face, no trace of fondness or regret for the street he was leaving, only an intimation that fairness was something he had never known and never would.

The scene stuck in Jonah’s mind as he struggled with the chair up two flights of stairs to the apartment. Isaac was in the living room unpacking his records. Jonah shoved crumpled newspapers and packing materials out of the way and set the chair in the corner facing the window with the fire escape, then dropped his exhausted body into it. Focused completely on his own task, his roommate barely registered Jonah’s entrance. The brother had more records than a DJ. Isaac wasn’t actually that involved in the music scene; mostly he just listened to a small handful of albums on rotation. When they had first moved in, Jonah would find him there at all hours, sitting on the bare floor in the unfurnished room with his back up against the wall, one leg outstretched, locked in deep concentration, now and then murmuring a word or two, nodding his head in solemn agreement with the sound.

“Folks next door are moving out,” Jonah said as he watched his friend digging through the crates, meticulously arranging his collection, unfazed by the room’s stifling heat. Everything had to be strictly alphabetical—his Main Source record, with its splash of atoms, he held aloft momentarily like a rare talisman, before sliding it in next to Madlib and Mahalia. That was Isaac, cool as a fan.

“Oh yeah . . . it’s gonna flip.”

“I feel like I should say or do something, you know . . . and then I’m standing there looking a fool with this vintage armchair in the middle of the street . . . like I’m a harbinger of doom or some shit.”

“Yeah, I don’t know, man. It’s like the migration all in reverse. Same old story though, chief. Black folk moving out, white folk moving in . . . you know the deal. They stay on top like an apostrophe.”

The conversation moved on to a recent television show, dropping the issue without acknowledging they were doing so, though both were eager to change the subject for reasons they didn’t yet feel they could share. There would, in any case, be no conclusions to that conversation, and the concrete reality they shared was the next day’s dawn commute to another training session in Canarsie.

Jonah had met Isaac one month earlier at the orientation assembly for a teacher-training program at the Canarsie High School auditorium. They were around the same age and had followed the call to fill the ranks of the city’s teaching corps, decimated by decades of decay and demoralization that had driven the most qualified teachers out to better, wealthier, and whiter districts, where the parents were on the right side of the law.

He found himself among a hundred or so would-be teachers crammed into the school’s gymnasium. There was no ventilation and like the rest of the educator corps, Jonah sweated into his interview attire as he tried to make sense out of the raucous commotion, the bleating cell phones, the shouted orders and pleas for attention. A team of young folk in matching polos circu­lated frenetically through the rows of folding seats thrusting documents into people’s hands. A beleaguered administrator shouted into a microphone until the hive cooled to a bearable hum. A series of officials took to the mic to enumerate rules and policies. They made frequent use of the words “rigorous” and “compliance.” The intimidating legalism culminated with a deadline to report to the Department of Education on Court Street for fingerprinting. Something about the way the brother seated next to him kept his quiet made Jonah think he must be there to teach math. After a quick glance and a hesitant pause, Jonah turned to him and they settled on an awkward dap. Jonah commented on the heat and the hectic crowd. If the teachers were this bad, Isaac said softly, he hoped the students would be saints.

When the teacher orientation broke for lunch, they went out together in search of a bite. Jonah was thinking sandwiches, but Isaac seemed to ignore that proposition and they ended up gravitating to a Crown Fried Chicken. After waiting in line and getting their orange trays with menu items #1 and #2, they secured a table of their own with a view looking out onto a set of mid-rise housing projects arranged like Tetris blocks along a stretch of Ralph Avenue. Over wings, Isaac mentioned that he had split up with his girl and needed a place. Jonah was living in a hostel and needed a permanent roof over his head too. They agreed to join forces and they were already discussing neighborhoods and rent when they returned to the gymnasium to fill out more forms.

The gears of metropolitan bureaucracy did their thing, and Isaac and Jonah were duly anointed with stamped (or photocopied) city certificates asserting their aptitude for pedagogical instruction in the public schools. A week later they were signing a lease. The rent was steep but between their two salaries they could afford a place within walking distance of Prospect Park. They would live together, but they would be working far apart; an obscure lottery system determined which schools they would actually serve in. When the numbers came up, Isaac was directed to a school in Brownsville—Never Ran, Never Will—and Jonah to a school in Red Hook, a neighborhood he associated mainly with On the Waterfront.

It wasn’t until they were living together, going through some of the same experiences, that Jonah really got to know his new roommate. Isaac’s folks had fled the chaos and violence in Detroit for the suburbs of Richmond where he grew up a little more isolated but a whole lot safer. It was the trade-off people had to make—the lucky ones, those who already had some­thing going, a minister in the family, a funeral-home director, a mother who had broken into one of the public school systems. They took advantage of the affirmative-action door jimmied open ever so briefly after the riots, raised Reading Rainbow kids, and never looked back. That was basically, Isaac told him, how he’d ended up everywhere, in that sweet spot where admissions officers were always hunting for precisely his demographic, the ones who had been afforded all the benefits of a better zip code, but who would also color in the brochure and the website appropriately.

Jonah wondered, as he always did, how his own ambiguous but affluent upbringing would go over. A black dude from Paris? But his new friend was unimpressed, if interested. “That’s cool. A brotha from Paree. They got barbecue over there?” Isaac had a line for everything, but nonetheless this underwhelmed curiosity pretty much summed up the attitude he held generally. Isaac had been all over the US, on school trips, to visit friends and family. But he had never left the country. He wasn’t opposed to the idea; he simply never had the means, certainly not to go somewhere on his own. One time, his junior year of college, he had been on the verge of visiting a girlfriend in Jamaica, but they had broken up a few weeks before he was set to go. Now Jamaica was out of the question. Next chance he got, though, he was hoping to use his first paid vacation days as a teacher to go somewhere else in the Caribbean, maybe Trinidad or Barbados. “Frenchman, you gotta teach me to use them words the way you do,” Isaac would say, screwing up his face. “L’amour, les misérables, les incompétents. Love them French horns, too. I knew a football player in high school named Terrence who played the French horn. He wanted to go to Virginia State and play for the Trojans, but he got injured in a practice senior year. He ended up dropping out and going into the military. Haven’t heard nothing since.”

In spite of the disparate slots and different ladder rungs Isaac and Jonah had alighted on, everything they learned about each other confirmed how significantly their trajectories converged once they graduated with their degrees. Jonah had attended an elite private college in New England, and Isaac a public university in North Carolina. Yet they both knew former classmates who had started more lucrative careers in consulting or banking or found prestigious internships with distinguished institutions and nonprofits, while they were both now engaged in something like charitable work, in “giving back,” as people said.

On balmy evenings, they’d sit with beers in the front room and share stories about hallway incidents. When Jonah was buying, he walked over to Flatbush to purchase one of the new floral microbrews; when Isaac was buying, it was always Miller Time. It was a mellow ritual. They listened to Isaac’s favorite records, originally his mother’s. There had been some tension around his acquiring them. Isaac had started a small collection of his own during his senior year of high school. When he came home from college over spring break of his freshman year, he wouldn’t leave his room for days. He threatened not to go back and eventually showed his mother a note from the school therapist. They talked about it, and she made a deal with him. If he would go back to school and get his education, he could take some of her own records with him. It was, he said, just one of many ways in which she’d probably saved his life.

The poor righteous teachers sat back in their bougie furniture and talked about “the situation” as they half listened to the plush tones of the Emotions or seventies-era Bobby Womack. There was always music in the air. On Sundays, Jonah awoke to the Clark Sisters ringing all down the hallway and into his room. The scratchy records somehow thickened things, popping softly in the air while they bantered until Isaac, without interrupting his train of thought, switched them out.

“The situation” was everything and nothing in particular. Even though the friends almost never agreed on why, or what, it meant, or what was to be done about it, they agreed and mutually reinforced each other’s opin­ion that something had gone fundamentally wrong. It was in everything. Language and manners, gestures and traditions, entire understandings could be hollowed out overnight. Things had gotten weird, glitchy, like the looping video of the second plane. Twisted creeps were coming out of the woodwork all across America. Berserkers armed with gleaming shotguns and tubes of K-Y Jelly slaying Amish schoolgirls. “Active shooters,” in the new parlance, burning holes in the bodies of fellow college students cowering under their desks. Wars and shadow wars multiplying, mutating without a semblance of purpose. The inferno of Katrina. Corpses floating through the Ninth Ward. The Malebolge of the Superdome. The death of the oceans. Texaco dumping crude runoff in the rainforests of Ecuador. Jihadists slitting throats. Ice caps collapsing. Narco wastelands. The interfaces taking over. The death of the heart. Everywhere and in everyone, the situation was drawing out the worst; the sickos were gaining the upper hand.

On paydays, Jonah and Isaac walked to a new soul food joint on Frank­lin Avenue, run by a West Indian woman who had anticipated the changes coming to the presently less gentrified parts of Crown Heights. Isaac was offended by the lack of white bread stuck to the bottom of his wings, but the sauce wasn’t bad, and over drinks they talked politics and traded gossip, arguing fiercely about the importance of various music critics they had, in reality, only just discovered.

In the dark on the walk back, they’d swagger, partly on account of the rum and sugar, but also because they felt the eyes of the battered neighbor­hood watching, and even though not a finger or even a holler was ever raised in their direction (although occasionally it seemed it might happen, and plenty of adventurous white kids, especially white girls, had gotten robbed in the area since their arrival), they knew with unspoken certainty that they were alien to these corners and that no amount of Garveyite pleading would ensure their safe passage should things take a different turn.