The Residue Years by Mitchell Jackson

squad—hoop, football, soccer (though we don’t play no soccer in these parts)—with the fools waiting for the shop clerk to flip the sign, and let us in, and scrawl our names on a list nobody but nobody but her can touch. Niggers ready to Olympic-joust for first in the chair. When the clippers are cold, sharp, precise, before a showing late can mean a whole afternoon on ice. Believe me when I tell you, fresh cuts are serious business, especially at The Cut Above, which is damn near an institution. Soon as the sign flips we (the
we
being me, KJ, and Canaan) surge across the street with the rest. The barbers in prep mode, zipping their smocks, oiling their clippers, tooling their stations. The clerk puts us down on the list and sends my bros searching for seats.
    The shop meanwhile fills.
    See you got your nappy-headed brothers with you, one barber says, the resident shop funnyman.
    Damn, homie, I say. Hatetrocity at the crack of dawn? Let us live.
    You know me, he says.
    Yep, I say. Your hate runneth over.
    My bad, he says, twisting the top off a bottled juice. But I wouldn’t have to say it if you brought them in here more often. Your bros be lookin like Nigerians by the head by the time you think they need a cut.
    Gimme me six feet, I say, and ask Famous, the shop’s manager, to get a handle on his workers. Famous, by the way, is this type of guy: a being-caught-without-a-fresh-fade-is-a-crime type of guy. A man after my grooming heart.
    Mr. Funnyman asks about his first client and the clerk says it’s baby bro.
    C’mon, young Kunta. Hope you don’t break no teeth on my clippers.
    The clerk unmutes the TV in the lounge and teases the shop with a commercial of kids singing. The rest of the lounge, a couple dudes haranguing who’s the best high school hooper in the state. Near them this tight-jawed quasi-mute, a dude they say got a bad habit of taking stuff that ain’t his. A handful of unmentionables. And it’s one of them (thought I was the only one who caught it) glimpses a white girl jogging past the shop. Look at that shit, he says. Got pork Prefontaine-ing in the hood now.
    Big deal, someone says.
    Damn right, dig deal, someone says. It’ll be marathons next. Million-man dog walk after that.
    Why ya’ll mad? someone says. Make it easier to knock the pork.
    Pork, what’s pork?
    White meat, fool.
    Who wants that?
    All the smart niggers, that’s who. Trust the porkologist. You ain’t lived till you had a taste.
    Man, you silly.
    Sheeit. Knocking a white broad is a black man’s civil right. Even Malcolm approved.
    Malcolm approved, my ass.
    Real talk, boss. Check the history books.
    The clerk stomps into the lounge. She’s the girth of an NFL lineman (a few pounds off, no more). She don’t need to do more than wrench her lips for fools to quiet right the fuck down.
    It don’t matter why they’re here, they’re here, Famous says. You see them coffee shops and boutiques and bookstores down the block. Who you think they built them for?
    Famous got his nickname cause someone said he lived life like a movie. Most people would say that’s extra, but I say, a life with no stories, what’s the point?
    KJ’s ambivalent about his cut. Looks to me, with his shoulders hiked. My bro is always demurring, always deferring. But since it’s a 0.00 percent of reclaiming a vacated seat, it won’t be no assurance from intimate distance today. Give him a low one-lengther, I say from my perch. Dude’s averse to cuts, I say.
    Averse? the barber says. Averse! There you go with those SAT words. Man, don’t you know the shop got rules against that smart boy vocab?
    Funnyman’s got jokes, but maybe it ain’t knee-slap. How else to explain dude on the other side who used to go to grade school with me, who used to get teased something terrible about his droopy eye, who spent recesses befuddled by chapter books, needed extra time on