Gold Dust by Chris Lynch Page A

old. His voice came out very flat.
    “Worlds within worlds,” he said.
    I didn’t even try. “Huh?”
    “Because we function in our own worlds, even though we live in essentially the same place. My father is in the business of being West Indian, and people everywhere love him for it. While his son, on the other hand, spends his days in a place where it would be better not to make a point of it.”
    “What? What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
    What came next was the first harsh thing Napoleon Charlie Ellis or Richard Riley Moncreif ever said to each other.
    “How stupid are you, Richard, may I ask?”
    My first response was—I could feel it even if I couldn’t see it—to go all red in the face. My second was to walk faster and try to leave Napoleon behind.
    “No, no, listen to me,” he said, staying with me.
    “No. I don’t want to listen to you. I don’t want to listen to that, all right. You know, Napoleon, everything doesn’t have to do with that, does it? You’re always talking about the same thing, no matter what anybody else is talking about.”
    “What?” he said, and he laughed when he said it. But he didn’t think it was a bit funny. “Listen to you. Always talking about that ? You can’t even speak it. You can’t even say what that is.”
    “Yes I can.”
    “No, you cannot.”
    I breathed a couple of loud, exasperated, steamy whistly breaths through my nose. Then I said it. “Blackness,” I said.
    I knew why he was laughing now. I tried to hold my hard-guy face but it was a chore. I had heard myself, after all. I said the word in such a ridiculous stage whisper, like a three-year-old with a secret. It was the best argument I could have made for Napoleon’s side of things.
    “That doesn’t prove anything,” I said, giving up to a small laugh myself.
    Anyhow, I had managed to make him laugh. No small task. I didn’t want to mess with that just yet.
    We were nearing the bus stop in the square, the stop where all the Ward 17s waited to get bused out of here.
    “Right,” said Napoleon. “Here is a good example. You read the papers—”
    “Sports pages only,” I quickly pointed out.
    “Yes, well if you were not hiding in the sports pages you would know that this city is a place where a lot of people would do anything to keep from going to school with black people.”
    “Maybe, but—”
    “Richard, you have to know that that means a great many of the people who wind up in a school like yours—”
    “Ours—”
    “ Yours. You have to know that they are there because of hate. Because somebody hates—”
    “I don’t have to know that. I don’t have to—”
    “Yo,” came the call from the bus stop.
    “What?” I answered Butchie. Naturally enough I figured he meant me. But no. Not this time.
    “Yo,” he said again.
    Napoleon ignored him, held his head even higher than usual, and strode on.
    “Yo, Mowgli,” Butchie called, “you deaf, or ignorant?”
    I winced.
    Napoleon Charlie Ellis did a rapid veer maneuver across the street toward the stop. I followed quickly after him. “Come on,” I said, “you don’t have to pay any attention to this.”
    “ You don’t have to pay attention to it,” Napoleon said. “I do.”
    Once more, as seemed to be happening more frequently, Napoleon was suddenly up close with Butchie. “I am neither hard of hearing nor ignorant,” he said evenly. “That is not my name, and you know it is not my name.”
    “I just thought,” Butchie said, smiling, “that that’s what your papa said he called you.”
    This was really, really close. I had never seen somebody get as mad as Napoleon was now, without somebody swinging at somebody.
    “My father ,” Napoleon answered, “never said any such thing.”
    Butchie half-turned to face his group, which included Jum McDonaugh, Redheaded Beverly, and a dozen or so other kids who were only half-listening before but were inching closer now.
    “I am sorry,” Butch said. “I thought