Two weeks before I became an astronaut I had a lot of problems. And those problems all started with Just Rahim.
People always tell you to stand up for yourself. That’s what my dad, Damien, told me. “Don’t let no man shove you around, Kadie,” he said to me once, somberly. “Because then they think you always someone they can push around.”
Looking back, I believe there was bitterness in his voice. I think he’d been wishing he could push back at his job on the road crew. Because he’d always look vexed when he came home and sat in his armchair to watch TV and drank cheap beer.
My mom always said the same thing, though. “Don’t let them boys give you no trouble, hear?” That was the response when I was younger and complained about someone shoving us around and not letting us play basketball down at the court.
You would have thought I heard their voices talking to me when I turned the corner on a bright Saturday morning and found Just Rahim standing there with a cricket bat. But I didn’t. I didn’t hear anything. I just stared.
First off: who all has a cricket bat just lying around? St. Thomas is part of the Caribbean, but we’re also a part of the United States of frigging America. A territory, yes, but still a part. We drive on the left, sure, but the dollar’s green down here.
Just Rahim came from somewhere down island, and he wasn’t about to let you forget that. So he had that cricket bat.
We called him (behind his back, right?) Just Rahim because he never would tell us his first name. He was ‘just Rahim.’ I heard one of the old ladies on the street call him ‘Rahim Jr,’ though. His father supposedly ran a dog-fighting ring. And dealed drugs. And was mixed up with some gang or the other. All depended on who you talked to.
Either way, everyone knew to avoid Just Rahim. Because he was training hard to be just like his dad. And I’d had my head all up in the clouds, not paying attention to nothing, when I’d turned the corner and found him standing there with a grin just above his newly grown, curly chin-hair.
“Pass me you money and I won’t bust you up,” he said.
And just to make sure I understood, he poked me hard in the ribs with the tip of the bat.
Wasn’t the first time he’d done this. Avoiding Just Rahim had been a part of my routine for a long time, now. I knew ways to climb over barbed wire fences and hop yards to avoid the places he patrolled. I’d climbed over many walls, and knew most of the guard dogs in the neighborhood. I pretty much thought of those paths as the ‘other way home.’
“I don’t have no money,” I said. I worked a bit this summer helping paint some warehouses. A job my dad had gotten for me through a friend. But I had to give all the money I made over to the family, because things were tight.
Things were always tight.
I’d skipped lunch for a couple days to use the money Auntie Lynn gave me every day to get a book from the small bookstore down by the cruise ship docks and jewelry shops. Down where I was surrounded by the pale or sunburned tourists who pointed at my dreadlocks and acted like I was a part of the scenery.
I had been tearing home, thinking mainly about locking myself inside for a few hours to get through the book, which I’d spent hours choosing: poring over the opening chapters of each possible purchase before, reluctantly, deciding to gamble on this one.
And Just Rahim could care less.
“What you mean you got no money?”
“I ain’t got nothing.” I pulled my pockets out to show him. All I had was the book.
Just Rahim had the bat raised in the air between us, holding it lightly with one hand, and he was frowning.
As he looked at the book and realized why I had no money I knew what was going to come next, It was no secret I always buried my nose in pages, reading about wizards, or starships, or anything that let me escape from… people like Just Rahim.
Most of the rest of my family always took over the TV. If I wanted to control it all it was with a book and a room and some headphones for me. It was then I had whole universes to myself.
As Just Rahim shifted the bat, I realized in a rare moment of clarity, that all I had to do was reach out and pluck it away from him. His grip was loose because he was still mentally working through what he was going to do next.
Just Rahim, for one thing, wasn’t quick in the head.
So I dropped the book and grabbed the bat with two hands and yanked.
And to my everlasting surprise, and especially to Just Rahim’s, I pulled it free.
I was committed, now. I couldn’t take this back. If I did, the beating to come would be epic beyond anything I’d ever suffered at Just Rahim’s hands.
The only way was forward.
And forward was me screaming, “I don’t have no money, dammit,” and swinging the cricket bat like a baseball bat into the side of Just Rahim’s face.
He dropped. Just like that. Straight to the ground.
I threw the bat away and sprinted for home, terrified.
*****
Things back home exploded like when you toss a rock into a beehive. There were no secrets on the block. It was like the hot sun always burned them up and blew them back out into the wind with the heat and dust.
One of the old ladies on the porch of one of the bright yellow, concrete houses who saw the whole thing called ahead, and by the time I’d sprinted the half a mile down to our gate and shut it, my mother, Tiffany stood in the doorway. Her shoulders poked the top of the blue polo shirt as she crossed her arms.
She looked at me, horrified, trying to decide what to do, and then just gave up and leaned against the door. “What you done, child? What you done?” she kept saying as I pushed past her, panting.
I wanted to get into the cool dark of the house, where it was safe.
Because it wasn’t safe here out in the open. Just seeing the fear in her eyes told me that. She was more scared than I was.
My dad rushed home early and shoved his way into my room. His dreadlocks were tied back in a ponytail, but one of them slipped forward as he shook his head.
I knew some of my friends who got belted, and hard, when they got in trouble. But dad wasn’t the type. He was always tired. He worked as a painter during the day, a janitor at night, and then sometimes on the weekends he went down to Frenchtown to help the fishermen.
He was too tired, he told me once, to raise a hand.
He looked far, far more tired than I’d ever seen him.
“How you could do this?” he asked. “You know who that boy is? Do you know what his father can do to us?”
“I just…” I started to say.
“I always telling you the boy don’t think things through, you know,” Auntie Lynn interrupted, putting a hand on my dad’s shoulder as she came to the door. “Always rushing.”
I didn’t get in a word edgewise. Not as my cousins wandered in from wherever they’d been hanging out, as word spread even further by text, whispers, and gossip. As everyone in my family and extended family arrived to tell me what I’d done was stupid.
We all lived in Auntie Lynn’s house, packed in tight and battling our family feuds in the courtyard of a building that my great-grandparents had built themselves. Block by concrete block, or so Auntie Lynn said.
Most tourists, they come to St. Thomas and they go to a nice hotel and visit a nice beach. They take a boat trip to St. John. Usually they wander around downtown Charlotte Amalie and shop the jewelry stores.
But get a few blocks back from the waterfront, past the shops and restaurants, and you got into the crooks of the hills where we lived. Back where the yards had chicken coops and tough dogs, small gardens or brush, and we all crammed in as best we could.
Because it’s harder and harder to buy land on a small island. Harder still to afford it when everything is shipped in.
Harder still when jobs where in short supply, and tourism was faltering because there were few tourists.
We all jumped when my mom screamed. A burning book arced over our walls and landed in the concrete yard. Charred pages burst free when it hit. They scattered and swirled about in the air.
“My father on his way back,” Just Rahim shouted in an unsteady voice from the other side. “You go be dead, Kadie Stephens. Deader than dead.”
The flaming book sputtered out, a black lump of burnt out debris.
“We have to get you out of here,” Auntie Lynn said. They didn’t call her Auntie Fixit for nothing. She looked at my mom and dad. “All three of you have to leave right now. You don’t know what Rahim is capable of.”
I had ten minutes to pack a few clothes and books into a suitcase, and then one of Auntie Lynn’s friends came by in a beat up taxi to pick us up.
We fled the neighborhood. Auntie Lynn worked at a hotel on the Northside, and another friend of hers who owed her a big favor snuck the three of us into an unoccupied room.
That night I lay in a strangely luxurious bed with fluffy pillows and a soft top you half sank into. There was a sea breeze coming in through the patio windows, and the sound of happy people chatting away in a fancy restaurant down in the hotel’s courtyard.
“Why you don’t think?” my mom had asked at some point.
Laying down in bed, I remember replaying it all over in my head. I had been thinking. I knew that it was a lost fight. That Just Rahim probably was going to win, and take the bat from me. Or that I wouldn’t be able to pull it from him.
But I thought, at some point, someone, somewhere, had to pick that first stand. If they hadn’t, there wouldn’t be countries, or revolutions, or freedoms, right?
I’d been tired of the running. I just wanted, for once, for someone like Just Rahim to have to fight for what he was going to steal.
Because then maybe the next time he’d hesitate just a moment.
As my parents started to snore, I smiled a little. I couldn’t help it.
Just a little.