the two levels Read online

  the two levels

  Jonathan R. Miller

  Copyright © 2015

  # black lives matter

  www.jonathanrmiller.com

  contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  about the author

  Chapter One

  Almost seven years ago, I was floating around inside my momma’s tummy and then—whoosh—I was born.

  Even though I didn’t know it yet, my name was already Jasmine.

  It was amazing.

  Back then, I only went to the bathroom in my diaper and I only drank milk, and when I wasn’t drinking milk or going to the bathroom in my diaper, I was probably fast asleep. Babies need to sleep a whole lot to help them grow—my dad told me that. Babies also need to cry a whole lot, no matter if they’re a boy or a girl, so I probably cried about everything back in the old days. I don’t really remember those times very well, to be honest.

  But I do remember being a toddler—that’s another word for a baby that runs everywhere and gets into a lot of mischief—and I remember transforming into a preschooler and then a kindergartner and finally a first-grader. I remember all of the schools I’ve ever been to, and I remember all of the teachers I’ve ever had.

  By the way, I’ve always really liked school, and I’ve always really not liked school.

  Neither one, exactly. So both.

  I remember going with my parents to the Children’s Discovery Museum in the light-purple building on a funny street named Woz Way. I also remember going to Happy Hollow Zoo, where I would sometimes try to pet the stinky, lazy goats in the petting area, but the goats never wanted me to touch them—they only wanted to be fed alfalfa pellets! I could tell by the way they would stuff their wet noses into my empty palm like, “Hey. Is there any food in there? Is there any food in there? Huh? Huh? Is there? Is there?”

  I wanted to like the goats. But I didn’t like them at all, actually.

  Momma is the one who taught me that—how you can want to like something. She also taught me that you can want to not like something, and you can even want to want something, but none of that means you will! It sounds so silly to say all of those things in a row. But they’re all true somehow.

  I remember when our dog Rufus (Roof the Woof) died from getting too old, and I remember when we had a fire in our old kitchen at 5535 Green Dory Lane, San Jose, California, 95112. I remember when my ulna (the smaller of the two arm bones) broke when I fell off a round-and-round ride at the playground, and I remember the pink scratchy cast I got at the doctor’s office afterward.

  It hurt so much, by the way—when I broke my ulna bone, I mean. I used to think that getting my hair combed hurt so much, but breaking my ulna hurt a whole lot more than that.

  I still hate getting my hair combed, though, for the record.

  Oops. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that I “hate it.”

  What I meant to say is that I “really, really don’t like it.”

  That’s another thing Momma taught me—not to use the word hate unless I really have to. She says that hate is a bad word to use because it’s one of the hardest words to take back if you change your mind later. Hate boxes you in—that’s what Momma always says.

  You shouldn’t lock yourself in a box like that, Jasmine.

  I don’t think I’ll ever change my mind about hair combing, of course. But just in case.

  • • •

  Oops. I realized that I got way off track just now.

  I started talking about growing into a first-grader, which made me talk about my broken ulna bone, which made me remember the things I really don’t like, and then—boom—I totally forgot about the amazing thing I wanted to tell you.

  Sorry about that.

  My dad tells me that I get distracted whenever I get excited, and right now I’m super excited because of this:

  I’M FLYING UP IN THE CLOUDS AT THIS VERY MOMENT!

  REALLY! IT’S TRUE!

  Right now I’m on a giant airplane, cruising at thirty-five thousand feet in the sky, and I’m sitting on a seat cushion that could be a floatation device if I needed it to be, which is pretty cool in my opinion. My mom is sitting on one side of me, and my dad is sitting on the other side. They put me in the middle so they can team up on me if I start acting like a P-A-I-N in the A-S-S.

  Um, hello? Mom and Dad? You can just say the words out loud, okay? Even the bad ones. I know how to spell almost everything at this point.

  That’s what I want to tell my mom and dad, but I don’t really do it. Actually, to tell you the truth, there are a whole bunch of things that I want to say out loud, but I only say most of those things inside my head, where no one is allowed to hear them except me.

  And now you. Now you get to hear them too!

  Okay, so here is what’s happening on the airplane right now:

  My tray table is lying flat in front of me, and I’m eating a crumbly shortbread cookie from a shiny red wrapper, along with goldfish crackers and honey-roasted peanuts that I sometimes pretend are little dead beetle fossils. I’m allowed to have free Sprite refills and neverending cartoons and video games on the computer, which I get to hold in my lap. I have to wear headphones the whole time, but that’s okay; I’m allowed to work all the buttons by myself, even the volume slider.

  I told you it was amazing, didn’t I?

  • • •

  We’ve been flying for like a thousand years at this point.

  I’ve spent the whole time playing the same video game on the computer, but I can’t beat the stupid boss on the third stage of level two—the one that has pools of hot lava everywhere. The boss is flying around in his UFO, taking the floor away from underneath my feet, block by block, until I have nowhere left to stand! Once the floor is gone, I fall into the lava pit below and—bloop!—I’m dead. Do you know about that level?

  It’s impossible to beat. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do it.

  But do you know what I can do?

  It’s pretty cool, in my opinion.

  I can throw a goldfish cracker in the air and catch it in my mouth, like, almost every time. Maybe only three times out of ten I might miss and it’ll fall on the floor.

  Watch this.

  Oopsies.

  I missed.

  “Jasmine,” Momma hisses. She leans over the armrest between us, leaning in so close that our heads almost touch. “Don’t you start getting wild—I’m serious. We haven’t even been in the air an hour.”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “You know better than to throw things,” she says. “Or at least you better know better.”

  That sounded kind of funny—you better know better—but I stop myself from laughing because Momma looks pretty serious right now.

  “It’s okay, Momma. I can get it,” I say. I start to climb out of my seat so I can pick up the goldfish cracker from the floor.

  “Jasmine. Put your seatbelt back on,” Momma says. “And don’t even say a word. Just do it.” She shakes her head from side to side as she looks at me. “I swear—you’re unbelievable sometimes.”

  “But what about the five-second rule?” I ask.

  (Do you know about that rule? The five-second rule says that you have five seconds to get something off the floor before the germs have a chance to crawl all over it. I really, really like the five-second rule.)

  “There’s no such thing,” Momma answers.

  I stare hard at Momma’s face to see if she’s messing with me.

  But she isn’t messing. I can tell right away.

  “Of
course there’s such thing as the five-second rule,” I say.

  “Not on a plane, there isn’t.”

  “Why?”

  Momma rolls her eyes. “The bottom of everybody’s dirty feet,” she answers. “That’s why, Jasmine. Plus, five seconds are long gone anyway—it’s too late now.”

  (I kind of already knew all that, but sometimes the questions come flying out of my mouth before I have a chance to think.)

  Like usual, I do exactly what my mom tells me to do. I let the goldfish lie there on the floor and get eaten by the germs—I don’t even look down at it. I put my seatbelt back on, like Momma said, but I don’t do it as fast as she probably wants me to.

  By the way, I hate the metal flap of the seatbelt. I got my finger skin pinched in there one time.

  That’s right—I said hate.

  I won’t ever change my mind about that.

  • • •

  Do you want to know where I’m flying to?

  I really hope you do.

  Or would it be better to know where I’m flying from? Or maybe both?

  Okay, so right now I’m flying home to San Jose, California, from a country called South Africa, which is located on the continent of regular Africa. Today was the last day of our three-week summer vacation trip.

  Actually, it was work and vacation—my dad was doing some work for his job. He’s a surgeon, which means he’s a doctor that does operations on sick people (I can’t remember if I told you that already).

  And do you know what’s really weird? I also had work to do during our trip! Can you believe that? I’m only six-and-three-quarters, but I still had a job to do!

  Momma said my job was to start getting in touch with my roots.

  That wasn’t a very good name for the job, in my opinion, since I didn’t get to touch a single root—not even one. I wasn’t even outside (where a tree might be) for most of the root-touching time!

  “I don’t mean actual tree roots,” Momma told me one morning. We were sitting side by side on the bed in our hotel room—Dad was in the bathroom going Number Two, I think. “I mean the family tree type of roots. The roots that connect you to history.” Momma reached over and poked me in the tummy. “I want you to get an idea of where you come from.”

  “I come from San Jose,” I said.

  “I mean where your people come from.”

  “You’re my people. So is Daddy,” I said. “Both you and Dad are my people. So my people come from Chicago.”

  Momma made a big sigh and closed her eyes. “I mean black people, Jasmine. Black people. Do you understand what I’m trying to get across to you?” She shook her head back and forth. “Your people are from Africa, and your people are black. You are black.”

  “Okay,” I said, shrugging. “But I don’t get why I need to see my roots to know that. I already get what I am.”

  “You might understand some part of it. Maybe. But you don’t have a clue what being black really means,” Momma said. “The importance. That’s what all this is about.” She made a hand gesture toward the window like there was something there I needed to focus on. But when I looked, all I could see was a few grey skyscrapers and a clear blue African sky.

  “Well, I don’t want to,” I said.

  Momma didn’t respond for a few seconds.

  “You don’t want to.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to.”

  “And what exactly don’t you want to do?” Momma asked. “Learn something about yourself? Become less ignorant?” She stared at me, frowning. “What don’t you want exactly, Jasmine?”

  “To be black,” I said.

  The hotel room got very, very quiet all of the sudden.

  Momma didn’t talk to me for a long time after that.

  Oops.

  I’m really sorry for what I just did.

  I messed up just now.

  I wanted to tell you about my summer vacation trip, but I accidentally told you a story that had skin color in it.

  That was definitely a mistake by me.

  I know I’m not supposed to talk about skin color, especially with somebody like you—somebody I just met—because it might make you feel different or weird. Or even worse, it might make you think that I’m different or weird.

  I hope I didn’t make you feel bad. And I hope I didn’t make you think anything bad about me.

  But since the (black) cat is already out of the bag, I guess I might as well tell you the rest.

  Momma was right about me—I’m black. But technically I’m both black and white. The black part comes from my momma, and the white part comes from my dad.

  See? Black AND white.

  Neither one, exactly. So both.

  If you ask me, my skin isn’t really black or white or anything in between—it’s colored a little bit tan and a little bit yellow, I would say. It isn’t exactly the color of anything I can think of, really, but if I had to choose the closest thing, I’d pick creamy-smooth peanut butter (the already-blended-together kind, not the kind with oil floating on top). My hair is almost the exact same color—like creamy peanut butter on my head! Don’t tell Momma, but one time I asked everyone at school to start calling me PeeBee—like a peanut-butter sandwich!—but no one would do what I wanted, like usual.

  That’s okay, though.

  It’s probably for the best. If my friends would’ve started calling me PeeBee, my momma would’ve probably found out about it, and she wouldn’t have been very happy. The only nicknames my Momma likes me to use are Jas and sometimes Jazzy.

  Oh, by the way, there’s another thing I don’t want you to tell my mom about.

  Please don’t tell Momma that I called myself both black AND white just now.

  Momma doesn’t like it when I say that about myself. I can tell.

  “The world is going to see you as black,” Momma says sometimes. “And that makes you black. Period. End of the story.”

  So I guess that’s the end of that part of my story.

  So, during my root-touching time in South Africa, I had to go to a bunch of museums full of bones and old tools, and then to a couple of broken-down buildings and dark dungeons where lots of bad things happened to black people like Momma and me a long time ago, right before we came in the bottom of a boat to America. Momma cried at some of the places we visited, which was a lot of work for her, too, I think.

  I guess we all worked a little bit during the trip.

  See? I told you it was work and vacation. Neither one, exactly. So both.

  But do you know what’s amazing? During the vacation part of the trip, I got to go on an actual safari!

  It was real. It wasn’t like going to the zoo or anything I’d ever done before.

  There were real-life giraffes and a white rhinoceros and impalas and leopards and even a pride of lions (they’re called a pride when they’re all in the same family—I guess that’s because they’re proud of it). All of the animals were outside in the wild places they would be in real life, not sitting behind bars in a pretend world that the zookeepers built for them.

  There was this one time on the safari, my dad was trying to get a picture of a yellow-belly mud turtle outside the jeep, and he totally fell backward into a huge thing of muck—ker-blap!—right on his B-U-T-T. Then, while he was trying to wipe himself off, it was like he was getting poop all over his hands. It was so funny.

  • • •

  I’m bored.

  We’ve been on this plane for a least a million decades.

  By now, I’ve already watched every single cartoon in the world, I’ve played all my video games like a thousand times each, and now Momma says I can’t have any more snacks because dinner is soon, so there’s nothing to do except sit here. My whole body feels like it’s filled to the top with a million fat grey millipedes that are wriggling and squirming all over each other, trying to find an escape hatch.

  “Jas,” my dad says. His voice snaps at me like the metal seatbelt flap.

  “What?�
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  “Stop doing that,” he says. “You know better.”

  I have no idea what Dad is talking about. I’m not even doing anything except sitting here trying not to die from being so bored.

  “Jasmine,” Dad says again. “Quit hitting the seat. I’m serious.”

  When I look at my hands, I see my fingers dancing around on the little TV screen attached to the seat in front of me—I didn’t even know my fingers were doing that! The screen is showing a map of the world, and I can see our little plane on the map with a line behind it showing the path we’ve taken so far. The map shows that we are about to leave regular Africa and start flying over the ocean blue.