"Never know what?" I asked her.

"How far they'll go to get you."

Grandma told me that we had to stop by Walmart before we went home. She said Walmart had a sale on her new favorite brand of wig, Wigs4Blax, and that she might as well get the wig today since this was her half-day off.

My grandma had three jobs. She worked as a housekeeper at the Island View Casino. She washed and ironed clothes for three white families in town. And she sold pound cake and fruit salad every other Sat.u.r.day afternoon.

When we pulled into the lot of the Walmart, a green pickup truck flew past us and d.a.m.n near knocked the front end off the Bonneville. Grandma stuck out her arm and secured my chest while slamming on the brakes. "Jesus give me strength," she said. "What in the world is wrong with your children?"

It was the middle of the day, so most folks who worked hard and sweated for a living were still at work. Grandma was getting ready to park next to this orange and gray Cadillac sitting on 22-inch rims.

"Young folks ain't got nothing better to spend that money on except long cars and crazy tags?"

"What?"

"What a n.i.g.g.a do in the dark will d.a.m.n sure come to the light somehow."

"Grandma?"

"Yes, baby."

"I appreciate how it sounds when you say 'n.i.g.g.a' and I'm sorry about acting a fool at the contest."

"Shhhh," Grandma said and parked the car. "And leave your little brush in the car. Folks in here likely to steal everything that ain't nailed down."

The Melahatchie Walmart was always packed. Always. I never had anything stolen the hundreds of times I'd been in there and folks always looked so happy walking around, especially in the electronics section. I walked with Grandma to the wig section of the store and this old white woman with wrinkly skin, a maroon scarf around her pudgy neck, and her hair in a ball came up on us.

The woman's nametag said "Louise Ellsington." She had gold for days draped on the outside of her scarf, and on her fingers were the shiniest rings I'd seen in real life. She walked up onto us lightweight fast, with one hand on her hip and the other on her chin.

"Hey. h.e.l.lo'ew there!" she said. "We want y'all to know'ew that today, we've got a special on our Wigs4Blax brand." She pointed to the raggedy looking wigs on the sale rack. "We sure do'ew."

I could tell that the lady was from Jackson and had probably worked in the outside malls in Jackson before taking a job at the Melahatchie Walmart. At the outside Jackson malls, all the older white ladies with hair in a ball and penny loafers always said "o" sounding words like "o'ew" sounding words, but in Melahatchie the "o" sounded like "o" no matter who said it.

"So'ew," she said, "if you buy one of those Gary curl wigs, y'all get a free year subscription to the new Ebony magazine..." she trailed off, and just looked at me. I tried to look away, then look back, but she was still watching. "Y'all got a talkative little devil there, don't y'all?" she said to Grandma. "Were you the one doing all that talking on TV yesterday?"

"Yes ma'am," Grandma said. "My baby does love to talk. Don't pay him no attention." She patted me on the back. "Now how much did you say the Gary curl wig was?"

I couldn't believe Grandma was talking like that in front of that lady. Her voice, her body, everything shrunk. It was like she wasn't even Grandma anymore. I never heard Grandma say "ma'am" to someone who was younger than her. The rumor was that Grandma actually brought the Jheri (not "Gary") curl to Melahatchie from Milwaukee back in the early '80s. Now she was acting like she couldn't even p.r.o.nounce it right, all because she was talking in front of a weird-looking white woman who couldn't even p.r.o.nounce "so" and "do."

Grandma and I held hands as we walked back to the Bonneville.

"If Tom Henry coulda seen you raising h.e.l.l on TV, he woulda swore up and down that he was looking through his red eyes at himself."

"Why?" I asked her.

Grandma started getting comfortable in the driver's seat chair. I could tell she was about to go into one of her Granddaddy stories. The stories always started different, but every one of them, except the one that ended with him disappearing in Lake Marathon, ended with Granddaddy acting like a demon and destroying something before Grandma intervened.

"I remember one Sat.u.r.day we got to fighting 'bout money or something like that," she started. "He was tired of me working all these jobs, you know? Anyway, Tom Henry claimed he was going for a walk to get his mind right. I knew that meant he was 'bout to get that d.a.m.n stuffed monkey and walk off in them woods across the road from the house.

"Anyway, while he was gone, his friends Cherry and Shank come over here looking for him to go fishing. All three of us, we out there on that porch, you know? 'Course I ain't tell Cherry or Shank he was over in them woods with no fake monkey, so I just said he wasn't nowhere to be found. Soon as I said that, here comes your granddaddy prancing out them woods with that monkey in his hands and one of those s.h.i.t-eating grins on his face. Tom Henry walks up on the porch and tries to hide the monkey behind his back.

"Cherry says, 'Tom, what the h.e.l.l you doing holding on to a ugly little fake monkey off in them woods, man? Ain't you done outgrown dolls and hide-and-seek?' Like I told you before, I reckon your granddaddy reacts like a demon when somebody stands on his own porch and calls him crazy. So Tom Henry commenced to beat the clothes off of Cherry and Shank. Off! You hear me?" Grandma was laughing hard as she could and smiling ear to ear. "And when the police came, Tom Henry was still beating both of them to the white meat until I calmed him down. He spent two nights in jail for that."

Grandma got busy when it came to her sentences. With Grandma's at-home sentences, it was like there was no screen between her mind and your ears. You got all of her, all of her voice. She could destroy anyone in the region in a sentence contest, including LaVander Peeler and me, as long as the judges were fair. I realized then, though, that Grandma's at-home sentences and her in-the-car sentences were completely opposite of her at-the-mall-sentences.

"Hey Grandma," I said. "Would you tell that story at the mall in front of that white lady, with the same dynamic sentences?"

"First of all, that wasn't no story. And I don't know nothing about no dynamic sentences," she told me. "That's the truth. And the truth ain't got a thing to do with that d.a.m.n white woman, City."

"Oh. Okay," I said, knowing she was lying through her teeth.

THAT WIRELESS.

Grandma and I walked up on the porch of her house. Hurricane Katrina tore up Grandma's old shotgun house eight years earlier, but within a year, she'd gotten a new shotgun house built in the same spot. The house was raised off the ground about a foot and a half by some cinder blocks. The porch led to the front door, which opened to the living room, and from there, depending on what angle you looked in the house, you could see through the bedroom, the dining room, and the kitchen.

Grandma didn't have a hall, either, like the houses on TV and in books. Grandma's house had a living room with an old floor-model big-screen TV, a gla.s.s table with some Bibles and photo alb.u.ms on it, a played-out stereo that only ever played Mahalia Jackson, and my Uncle Relle's sleeping bag right in the middle of the floor. Uncle Relle stayed with Grandma probably four times a week. Anyway, pictures of our family, the ones live and dead, were all over the living room. Walk ten more feet, there was a dining room with a plastic chandelier over a round wooden table. On one side of the table were two big deep freezers full of dead animal parts and food from her garden. On the other side of the table were a washing machine and a basket filled with the white folks' clothes Grandma washed to make a little more money. Fifteen more feet and there was a tiny kitchen. Four more feet and you were out the back door, under a clothesline, where there was a scary work shed I was never allowed to go in and a chinaberry tree.

I kept looking at Relle's sleeping bag, wondering when he was coming home. I wanted to know what he thought of what I'd done at the contest the night before. I figured he was going to be the only person in my family who was actually proud of me.

"Grandma, do you get wireless yet?"

"Wireless? Wireless what?"

"Internet!"

"Naw, we ain't got none of that mess, and you ain't gonna be hooking up no wireless to my TV."

"It ain't got nothing to do with the TV," I told her. "It's so people can check their email. What does Uncle Relle do if he wants to check his email?"

"He heads up the road to the library like everybody else, I reckon."

I wanted to push it more but I didn't want Grandma getting mad at me. I know Melahatchie was only a bus ride away, but it felt like a time warp. It always felt like it was behind whatever time we were in up in Jackson, but after Hurricane Katrina, it's like time went fast in reverse instead of just slowing down.

"Why you sweating, City?" Grandma asked me. "Go in the bathroom and wipe your face off." I turned to open the screen door and half-stepped in the door when Grandma finished her sentence: "...and go get my switch."

"What!?"

I stared at Grandma's face, not hardcore like I had the power to shoot liquid heat from my eyes, but more like I had X-ray vision and I was looking at the raggedy spinal cord that held the skull, that held the mouth, that held the tongue that formed those terrible words, go get my switch.

"You remember where it is, don't you? Go on and get my switch now," Grandma said. "You can't be acting a fool like that in front of them folks. You know we can't have that."

Man, she said it so calm. Like it was only a whupping. Grandma hadn't whupped me in two and half years.

But what could I do?

Nothing except drop my head, walk through the front screen door, through the living room, through the kitchen, out the back screen door, around the side of the house, and under the chinaberry tree. I had just matured to a point where I could get nice with myself in places other than the shower and the bathroom at school, and here I was about to get a beating like a child.

I almost hated this part of the beating way more than the actual beating. The antic.i.p.ation and fear of all those lashes builds and builds, and then you realize how shameful it is that you're about to get your a.s.s and back beaten by the same switch you're about to pick. And the whole time you're thinking that you don't wanna mess up on purpose and pick a little thin switch. You also don't wanna pick one that's too big to leave welts, because that means Grandma is gonna take her fine a.s.s out there to pick the switch herself. And it didn't matter how deep in that bush the perfect switch was, Grandma would always find it.

I narrowed my choices to a slender one with a lot of leaves on it, or a big one that wouldn't wrap around my fat back too well.

Now, I had to hand it to her.

Should I smile or cry?

Grandma was out on the porch scaling the nasty big fish we were going to eat for dinner when I finally made it back.

Should I smile or cry?

I opened the screen door and waited for her to extend her hand.

"Here you go, Grandma." I acted like I was going to hand the switch to her, but when she reached for it, I dropped it on the ground and took off through the screen door, through the TV room, through the kitchen, and out the back screen door.

And Grandma came flying after me.

I ran on the other side of the clothesline and tried to use one of her yellow fitted sheets as protection. "Boy, put down my d.a.m.n fitted sheet," she yelled. "Put it down!"

I threw the yellow fitted sheet on the ground and ran and ran. And Grandma ran and ran, too. Then she stopped by my granddaddy's work shed, right next to the chinaberry tree. She threw down that wack switch I gave her and then dove right in the bush and pulled out a switch that looked like a six-foot whip with a handle.

I understood right there that I wasn't simply running away from the greatest whupper in our family. h.e.l.l, I was running away from the greatest whupper in the history of Mississippi whuppings.

Grandma started running after me again. When I reached the back of the house, she was in the switch's reach, but she tried to turn the corner too sharp, and slid into a split.

d.a.m.n.

I knew Grandma would no longer just beat me for acting a fool at the contest. In the fourteen years that I'd known Grandma, she'd whupped me about six times, and the crazy thing was how she never looked at me like she wanted to rip the spine out of my back when she was whupping. You could tell that it was just regretful work for her.

Five minutes later, I was sobbing and balled up on the ground like a greasy, burnt-brown cinnamon roll with good waves. To tell you the truth, I felt honored to be whupped by Grandma. And I felt proud that during the entire whupping I never let go of my new brush.

After the beating and bath, Grandma prayed for me while I sat on the bed. Then we ate. I got so full off of nasty-looking, good-tasting catfish and fries, sweet iced tea, and thick pound cake that I couldn't breathe. I helped Grandma do the dishes, then we jumped in her bed to take a little nap before The Bernie Mac Show and Meet the Browns came on. I asked Grandma if it was okay for us to sleep on top of the sheet in our underwear with the fan directly on us.

Even though I was lying there in my underwear, Grandma looked at me in a way that made me feel like I was wearing something top-notch like a leather tuxedo with matching Jordan 6s. And even though my mama had seen me naked way more times, I felt less weird about Grandma seeing me. Grandma had a way of looking at you when you were naked that didn't make you feel terribly fat and soft. Most other folks, especially my mama, looked at me naked and made me feel like the fattest, softest ninth grader out of all the states in the Southeastern Conference. My mama tried not to look like that, but you could tell that she was trying too hard by the way she kept cutting her eyes away from me and saying stuff like, "We should probably start buying Diet Mountain Dew, Citoyen."

But with Grandma, whether I was naked or not, she looked at me the same way. To tell you the truth, if Grandma was trying to get the hem right on my slacks, she could have accidentally b.u.mped into my s.c.r.o.t.u.m sack and I wouldn't have cared because I knew that Grandma wouldn't have cared. If anybody else b.u.mped into my s.c.r.o.t.u.m sack like that, I'd probably act like I was dead or paralyzed until they left.

Grandma just looked at me without talking for about fifteen seconds. That's a long time to look at someone who is right in front of you. She smiled real thick and slung her arm across my chest. "Them folks is millions and millions of miles away from here today, you hear me? Million miles away," she said. "I want you to read the Bible every day you're here. You trying to get free, but you can't do it by yourself. We gotta get you to that water, City. That's why your mama sent you here."

"Wait." I sat up in bed. "That's messed up. Mama really sent me down here to get whupped and baptized for what happened at that contest?"

I waited for an answer, but the lids of Grandma's eyes slowly fell down. Her breathing got all heavy again, and about six seconds later, Grandma was asleep, her thick arm still slung across my chest, protecting me from something she wanted me to believe was millions and millions of miles away.

MYMY, COACH STROUD, AND POT BELLY.

I grabbed my book and my brush and decided to go out and see if my Melahatchie friends had ever heard of Long Division.

I really only had three Melahatchie friends: Shay, MyMy, and Gunn. Gunn lived in the Melahatchie projects. Shay lived right down the road a little. MyMy lived in a trailer in the Mexican trailer park right next to Grandma's house. The only white people in the whole trailer park were MyMy and her mama.

The dirt underneath the Mexican trailer park was like the dirt at a playground, except it was darker and redder and filled with lots of perfect rocks. There were paper-sack-colored flat rocks with three or four deep sc.r.a.pes, rocks the shape of chicken nuggets, black rocks that looked like charcoal, and dirty white ones with sharp edges.

I walked maybe two steps on that dirt when four limping rat dogs starting howling and running circles around these two women who were working on this broken-down Explorer.

The women saw me looking at them and they stared at me like I had a smushed little foot growing out of my cheek. I didn't know if they looked at me like that because I had a brush in one hand and that Long Division in the other, or if maybe they had seen the contest and heard what I said about those Mexican kids from Arizona.

As soon as I stepped to her door there was MyMy's beady eyes, holding her Magic Slate, and looking crazy as ever. MyMy was ten years old and she was still in that phase where you find a detail about yourself that's different than everyone else and you try to make that one thing "your" thing. Her thing was trying to talk as little as possible, so she always carried this Magic Slate so she could write what she wanted to say. The only time she'd talk was if she was in the woods across the road from her house. She called those woods the Magic Woods.

MyMy's Magic Slate was the old-school kind with the thin plastic over the top, the kind where you wrote with a little plastic pencil and if you wanted to erase it, you had to pull the plastic up. If you met MyMy, you probably wouldn't be surprised that she would communicate through a Magic Slate. Nothing about the girl was regular. Her gla.s.ses weren't even regular gla.s.ses. They were these cheap greasy magnifying gla.s.ses that let you see every little movement her eyes made. Her eyes seemed to be back further in her head than normal. And they were blue. But the black part in the middle of MyMy's blue eyes was big and beady. And even when they looked at you, they kept zooming back and forth way too fast. It made me scared to look at her sometimes. One of the only regular things about her was that she always wore some New Orleans Hornets mesh shorts like the kind I wore to sleep back home.

As soon as MyMy walked down the steps of her trailer, I could tell by the way she held her head that she wanted me to hug her.

I didn't hug her, though. I just said, "MyMy, did you see me on TV?"

She nodded up and down.

"What did you think?" I asked her. "You can be honest." MyMy shrugged her shoulders. "What would you have done?"

She pulled out her Magic Slate and wrote, "You and Baize are Fameus."

"Girl, I know you know how to spell famous," I told her. "Did you even know Baize?"

MyMy just looked at me and didn't say a word. Even before Baize Shephard went missing, everyone in Melahatchie talked about her like she was their best friend. Baize was one of those girls who had thousands of friends on Twitter and Facebook, but she wasn't that close with anyone in Melahatchie except my friend Shay.

MyMy and I were headed to the Magic Woods when we saw these two big green trucks with confederate flags in their back windows. They were parked in the middle of the trailer park.

"Mean white men drive them trucks," MyMy said.

"That 'not talk' thing you do, I'm just letting you know it ain't cute. And how are you gonna call somebody white when you are white as a bleach stain?"

MyMy just laughed and said, "Bleach stain."

We walked in the opening of the woods and I was rereading the beginning of Long Division to get a sense of where this hole in the ground was. MyMy s.n.a.t.c.hed the book from me and opened it to the first page.

"Your name is in this book," she said.

"I know," I told her. "Keep reading. Baize is in there, too. You see the name of the second chapter?"

"I don't want to," she said and threw the book down. "I don't like that book."

"Why? You should read it. It's not a hard book to read." She just looked me in the eyes and didn't say a word. "All the time you been in these woods, MyMy, have you ever seen a rusty handle that leads to a hole in the ground in these woods?"

"Why?"

"Have you seen one or not?

"I think so," she said. "I think it's over here."

I followed her and sure enough, hidden by some pine needles, was a rusty brown handle coming out of ground. "Oh s.h.i.t. You ever pull that handle before?"

MyMy started walking away from me. "I don't think we should open that."