Playing Hard To Get
“You’re excused,” Kali said and they backed away carefully.
?
“Who made you come here?” Malik asked after offering Tamia a seat in his office. While the room seemed much bigger on the outside, most of the wall space was taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Even the tiny windowsill was burdened with makeshift shelves and books. Sitting down, Tamia thought there was no way Malik could’ve read each of the titles—she was wrong.
“What was that in there—what you were teaching those boys?” she asked, unconsciously ignoring his question as he slid on a black, sleeveless T-shirt bearing the image of Marcus Garvey.
Malik didn’t hear her question either. He sat in his seat and continued his thought. “—because I know a woman like you probably hasn’t been to Harlem since Obama was elected.”
“I want to call it karate, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t—tai chi maybe? Tae kwon do?”
“—maybe not even before that…maybe never.”
Suddenly, face to face, it was as if the two strangers could finally hear each other, and at the same time they answered above each other:
“Capoeira. It’s an Afro-Brazilian art form—just people having conversations with their bodies.”
“Why would you think someone had to force me to come here? You’re my client.”
Realizing she was getting nowhere quickly, Tamia put her purse on the chair beside her and smiled politely.
“Maybe we should start again,” she said. “I’m Tamia Dinkins.”
“I’m guilty,” was all Malik replied.
“We’ve already established that, and now we can move forward with trying to gather more information for your hearing. Now, as I told you, the more I know about this place—and you—the better.” She pulled a legal pad from her bag.
“What about what I need to know about you?”
“About me?” Tamia laughed a bit. Never once had a client asked her anything about herself. On their first meeting, most everything they needed to know about her was posted on the wall behind her desk. “Oh, you mean my history? I went to NYU Law. The firm recruited me before graduation.” Married to this announcement was Tamia’s pride at her achievements. A top law school. A top firm. It put her at the head of the very elite in America. It impressed most everyone when they heard it, and that expectation was clear in her tone.
“Excuse me, sister, but I don’t care about any of that,” Malik said. “What…” He paused and looked along the spines of the books on his desk—Molefi Asante, Cheikh Diop, Clarke, Sertima, hooks. “What do you know about the Afrocentric community?”
“The what?” Tamia asked, looking up from her pad.
“The Afrocentric community.”
“You mean like black people? The black community?”
“No, the Afrocentric community.”
“I’m not sure where you’re going,” Tamia said. “I’m black. I’ve been black all of my life, so of course I know about African American people.”
“Okay,” Malik said, “let me start somewhere else—have you read The Souls of Black Folks?”
“Yeah, of course.” Tamia nodded, happy she had found somewhere to connect with Malik. She couldn’t understand why his tone was so indicting, almost smug in the way Charleston’s voice was when he realized someone he knew hadn’t gone to a tier-one law school or any one of her girlfriends spotted a fake Gucci. “W. E. B. DuBois—the Talented Tenth.”
“You would remember that.” Malik laughed heartily. “What about The Mis-Education of the Negro?”
“Carter G. Woodson,” Tamia shot back, still trying to figure out what he meant by his comment about the Talented Tenth.
“Ashay Ashay.” Malik smiled and Tamia was sure it was the first time she’d seen his teeth. Nice.
“Okay, look, I don’t understand the purpose of your questions. What do a bunch of books I read at Howard have to do with your case?”
“Sister, what I do…what we do here is about the Afrocentric community. About helping African people displaced in America find some semblance of freedom, understand who they were, who they are, what they could be, and who wants to stop that from happening,” he said with as much pride in his voice as Tamia had when she listed her accomplishment. “And if you don’t understand that, if you don’t believe in that, if you’re just another one of these blind niggas walking around on the plantation, thinking slavery is over, I don’t think you can help me. See, I’m not interested in participating in some exercise in the American Injustice system, so they can just lock my African ass up. If that’s what those devils want to do, they’ll do it. It don’t matter what ‘case’ we present. The devils run the system, the judge, the lawyers, the verdict. To them, a nigga selling five keys of crack is the same as a brother educating fifty former niggas—that’s fifty years. But what they don’t know is that I’m going to keep doing what I do out here in there.”
“So, you don’t believe in the criminal justice system?”