I'm Down: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

untrained adult eye, it looks playful.
    Then Caprice belted out, “Her ass is so flat, it looks like two saltine crackers that done lost they box!” Kids cackled and pointed and grabbed their chins and said, “Cap” and “Roast.”
    “What are they doing?” I asked Darnell, because his pee smell made him accessible to me.
    “Well,” Darnell said. “You just got capped on. That roast is ’cause you’re roasted.”
    “Capped on?” I asked. But I was too low on the totem pole for even the pee-kid to talk to me for very long.
    He just said, “Yeah,” as he walked away.
    And so, I found out that day that what was happening to me was called, “getting capped on.” And it wasn’t about the intelligence of the insult. Caprice and Jamal were not particularly clever, but they had confidence and could work a crowd like Marc Antony. The one who needed to borrow some ears.
    I became immediately fascinated with Caprice and Jamal’s fearlessness. When I looked at capping as a skill, it was completely foreign and exciting to me. In fact, half the time, the caps didn’t even make sense. Caprice came up to me on the side porch that day and said, “You look like a broke-down Teddy Ruxpin.” And even though I didn’t get it, people laughed. I wanted that kind of confidence. And later that day when Jamal said I was “a powdered dooky doughnut,” a voice rang out clear as a bell in my head:
Hey, I’m funnier than this guy!
    I had no idea where the voice had come from, since I had never even told a joke. But the voice was uncanny, and for whatever reason, I believed it.
    So for that next week at GSCC, I got taken down over and over again by their caps. But at night, I practiced capping like an upstart fighter training for a championship. I had seen that movie
Rocky
and I fancied myself kind of like Rocky, if he could talk. I practiced in the mirror, trying to place my hand on my hip just so, while rolling my neck for emphasis. I tried snapping in a
Z
. I tried closing my eyes and waving my hand in the air. And I tried every possible ending for a sentence that starts out: “Your mama.”
    The next Monday morning, as my sister joined her friends Gitana and Rene jumping rope. I walked into the playroom with my usual apprehension and took a seat on the floor with my copy of
Highlights
, Jamal, the earring-wearing terror, saw me from across the room and headed toward me with a self-satisfied look on his face. Caprice and posse followed closelybehind him, as Jamal swaggered up to me and said with a smirk, “Morning, Mush-na.”
    The other kids laughed and said, “Ooooh,” which hardly seemed called for. But it baited Caprice to one-up him.
    “Look at her,” Caprice said. “She’s such a cracker, if she has a bowl of soup she dunks herself.”
    The crowd ate it up, and in an attempt to soak up some of Caprice’s laughs, Jamal repeated her punch line as though he had come up with it. “She dunks herself!” The desired result was achieved—the attention returned to Jamal.
    What happened next was one of the most magical moments of my entire life. I remember turning to Jamal and the words coming out of my mouth as if in slow motion: “
Am I being talked to by a burnt chocolate chip cookie?
” I had the neck roll and everything.
    The cap came out of my mouth before I thought it through and was an amalgamation of things I had heard around, so it surprised me when a girl named Myvette shouted, “It’s true! He dark!” And I realized I had just told a “He’s-so-black joke.”
    The crowd was surprised and started roaring, and so I decided to push my luck. I took a second to regroup before striking again—this time at Caprice. I put my hand on my hip and said, “Your mama’s so lazy, Jesus will come back before she finishes your hair!”
    The laughs of the excited kids washed over me like manna. They grabbed their chins and cried “Cap!” and “Roast!” They pointed at Jamal and Caprice. Then something happened