From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

we got to Jones Beach, it was ten-thirty and the beach was crowded. Mama took off her sandals the minute our feet touched the sand and carried them as we walked past the crowds, searching for a place to put our blanket.
    â€œHow ’bout here?” I asked.
    Mama was looking out over the water absently. She was in one of her distant moods again.
    â€œHere, Mama?” I asked again, a little louder.
    She looked around slowly, then nodded. “Yeah, this is fine.”
    We spread the blanket out and Mama lay back on it, pulling her earphones from her bag.
    â€œI think I’m gonna walk some,” I said, picking up my notebook. This one had a loop on the side for a pen. I took the cap off the pen and drew a tiny line on my hand. It skipped a little but seemed okay.
    â€œBe careful.”
    â€œWhat could happen to me on a beach?” I asked, moving backwards away from her.
    Mama winked at me. “Anything,” she said, smiling, then lay back on the blanket, her head moving slightly to the music.
    I turned away from her and continued down the beach, walking along the edge of the water so that it lapped up against my ankles. A group of small kids were building a sopping sandcastle. A tiny blond girl held a cup into the ocean, then ran back over to the group with it.
    Taking a look around, I realized again what I always realized when I came to the beach—that no one was as dark as me. Once, walking along here, I passed a bunch of white boys heading in the opposite direction. When I was only a few feet past them, one boy said, “Hey, it’s getting mighty dark around here.” And the other guys laughed so hard, you’d have thought that was the fun niest joke they’d ever heard. White boys sure are stupid. At first, I didn’t know what they were talking about, but as I walked, it became more clear. They had been talking about me. I felt stupid then, dark and ugly. Alone. It made me hate white people in a way I hadn’t thought about hating them before. It was before my notebooks, before I had a place to write stuff down—get it out of me.
    â€œI would’ve messed those white boys up,” Ralphael had said when I told him and Sean what had happened.
    â€œNo, you wouldn’t have,” Sean said quietly. “You would have kept on walking just like Mel did.”
    We got all quiet then because we knew it was true. If it happened all over again—five or six white boys on a mostly white beach and one sorry black kid—we wouldn’t have said anything. Simple. We would have been outnumbered. Outnumbered and mute as glass.
    But the amount of hate seemed to have more power to it than anything else. And that’s what we held on to when people got ugly with us. The hate—it’s like it kept us whole. But it’s not the kind of hate you wear on the outside. That would just make us go crazy. It’s the inside kind, that sinks so deep you can forget about it until something comes along.
    Walking along the beach now, I checked out the scene. It seemed too quiet, as though something was waiting around the edge of the day to happen. Kristin popped into my head. When she was leaving that night, she had said, “I like who you are, Mel. I really like you.” I didn’t say anything. You have no idea who I am, I should have said.
    A kid was crying somewhere. And further off, I could hear seagulls calling out over the ocean. A spray of salty air washed across my face. A man was fishing off a pile of graffitied boulders. I climbed up a few feet away from him, sat down, and started to write.

BEACHES
    Mama’s lying on a blue-gray blanket, tuned out to everything but the sun. I can’t see her. She’s too far away. The distance between us is a strange feeling. New. Like maybe me and Mama are drifting. . . . It’s hard to talk about it. Hard even to write about.
    This is Jones Beach. I’ve never been to a beach with no litter. We