The Substitute: 1898 Wilmington

1898 WILMINGTON Book Two “The Record” a novel XXL Bolígrafo A work of fiction inspired by true events. The 1898 Wilmington coup and massacre in North Carolina is real, and its history is kept accurate here. Bianca Okafor, Dr. Osei, the Freeman family, and all present-day characters are invented. The real people who lived and died in Wilmington are honored from a respectful distance and are never given invented words. CHAPTER ONE The Locker The locker had done nothing to Bianca Okafor, and she had put a dent in it the size of her own fist, and she did not regret the locker so much as the fact that the locker had been the thing in reach. That was the part nobody at the school understood, and the part she would never have tried to explain to them, because explaining it would have required them to first believe the thing she was angry about, and they did not believe it, and their not believing it was, in a way she could not make anyone see, the actual thing she was angry about. The locker was not the problem. The locker was just closer than the truth. She sat now in the detention room, sixth period, a Thursday, with a referral on the desk in front of her that said destruction of school property in a box, and she looked at the words in the box and felt the familiar old fury bank itself down low and hot, because destruction of school property was, like every official sentence ever written about her, technically true and completely false at the same time. She had dented a locker. That was true. The referral did not have a box for because Mr. Harmon stood up in front of the whole class and said the Civil War was about states' rights and when I raised my hand and said it was about slavery and read him the actual secession documents, the ones where the states themselves say it is about slavery, in their own words, he told me to watch my tone. There was no box for that. There was only the locker. There was never a box for the reason. Bianca had figured that out a long time ago. The form was designed that way on purpose, she was certain of it, designed so that the only thing that could ever be recorded was what a person like her did, and never what had been done to them first, so that the record, the permanent official paper record, would always and only ever show a Black girl breaking things, and never once show why, and then people could look at the record and say, see, look at her file, look at all these incidents, as if the file were a mirror and not a weapon. She had a lot of thoughts like that. She had more thoughts than she had anywhere to put them. That was the whole problem of her life, if you boiled it down, more truth than the world had room for, all of it backing up inside her like water behind a wall. She took out the notebook. She always had a notebook. She went through them fast, one every few weeks, filled front to back in small furious perfect handwriting, and she showed them to no one, ever, because a notebook was the one place the truth could go and be safe, the one place with no box on it, no tone to watch, no teacher rounding a corner to catch one frame. She wrote in it now, fast, the pen almost tearing the page: Harmon. States rights. Told me to watch my tone. The documents literally say slavery. They say it. You can read it. He teaches from a book that lies and when you show him the truth in the actual words of the actual people he calls it a tone. She underlined tone three times, hard, and sat back, and her chest was doing the thing, the hot pressure thing, the too-much-truth-and-nowhere thing. And only then did she notice the substitute. ◆ ◆ ◆ He was already there, which was strange, because substitutes were never already there. He was an older man, dark-skinned, in a gray cardigan buttoned wrong by one hole, with a dented steel thermos at his elbow and a newspaper folded into a tight neat quarter, and he was doing the crossword. In pen. Bianca clocked the pen the way she clocked everything, filed it, because a person who does a crossword in pen is either a fool or is never wrong, and this man did not have the face of a fool. He had not looked up when she came in. There were three others in the room, a boy asleep on his arms, two girls passing a phone under the desk, and the sub had said nothing to any of them, had just sat, doing his puzzle, letting the room be a room. "Phones in the box," he said now, without looking up, and slid a shoebox to the center table, and Bianca noticed it came a little farther than his arm should have sent it, and filed that too, under a heading she did not have yet. The two girls ignored him. Bianca watched, curious despite herself, to see how he would lose, because subs always lost, that was the whole nature of a sub, a person the room could tell was temporary and therefore powerless. But he did not escalate. He clicked his pen once and set it down, and something changed in the room that Bianca could not have pointed to, no sound, no flicker of the lights, just a sudden weight, like the second before a person you respect says your whole name, and one by one, not looking at each other, the two girls put their phones in the box, and even the sleeping boy stirred and dug his out and dropped it in without lifting his head.