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The roar from the lobby came without warning. The crowd pushed forward, the doors came open and all the cameras fell into position as Dame walked into the building. I inched up a bit, leveraging myself with Billie’s arm, so I could get a good look. From the door, shaking hands with Evan, he looked different than I expected. Than I remembered. Bigger in some way. He was dressed in a plain white T-shirt that was small enough to show his muscles, blue jeans with designs hop-scotched all over them, and extrawhite sneakers. Aside from the crew buzzing around him, he didn’t look flashy or out of place. And even from my position, about six feet away, I could tell by the shine in his eyes that he was just as excited as we were.
The man on the ladder signaled for the crowd to quiet down as Dame and Evan shook hands and chatted a bit in front of the cameras. Evan went to put his arm around Dame for one of the photographers who was with the local newspaper. It was a welcoming gesture, like one of the old guys was welcoming a kid made good back to town.
Dame made his way toward me, shaking hands down a line of teachers who’d taught him. I could see that he really had grown up. Puberty or testosterone or something had changed even his skin. I remembered him having a caramel complexion with common cocoa eyes, but now everything in his face was smoky. His brown skin was now a lacquered dark chocolate and his eyes were more mysterious and pointed. Even his hair had changed. Far from the little pointy sticks he used to sit in the back of the classroom and twist as he wrote in his notebook, his locks were now long and feral in a way that warned of enticing danger. Just a bit darker than his skin, it looked clean and soft like pre-spun cashmere rinsed in myrrh. It almost begged to be touched. Looking at the magazine cover I had at the house, I’d thought this was airbrushing or the effect of celebrity lighting, but no, it was the real thing. He smiled and his perfect, white teeth contrasted against his skin, making him shine effortlessly. He looked like a star. And as he walked the greeting line, one by one, the grown-up female teachers turned into grinning girls with crushes. How ridiculous they looked, I thought ... until it was happening to me, too.
As I watched him move, everything around me grew so loud, but all I could hear was my insides turning. Saliva spinning at the back of my throat. My pulse tickling the insides of my wrists. My breathing going slow, slow, and then the vibration of air tunneling down the center of my chest before an exhale whistled out of my shuddering body. It was like I was at a concert, catching a fever of emotion from everyone circled around me. It was a surprise that I’d felt this way, but I couldn’t ignore the energy and pretty soon, the excitement was inside of me. I looked down to see that my right foot had turned coyly toward my left ankle. I was standing there like a little girl. I wondered if anyone had noticed and quickly moved my foot back into position.
“Ms. Cash?” Dame stopped suddenly as he was talking to another teacher a ways down from me. “Say it ain’t so,” he said, laughing as he strutted toward me with the cameras behind him. “My favorite teacher! Ms. Cash!”
He scooped me up into his arms and spun me around so quickly I had to catch my breath. As he opened his arms and I slid back to my feet, I could feel the muscles in his chest.
“Oh,” I said, smiling and telling myself not to look at his arms in front of the camera. “I’m Mrs. DeLong now. I got married,” I blathered, and so I flashed my ring in front of the camera as proof.
“What?” Dame looked over at Evan grouped with some other people from the school board. “You married Dr. DeLong?”
“Sure did,” I smiled, inadvertently waving my ring again. “And we’re so happy to have you here to visit the school you once called home,” I said and one of the crew members whispered for me to look at Dame and not at the camera when I spoke.
“I couldn’t think of a better place to be,” Dame said sincerely. “When my manager said I had some time off before my world tour, I told him to cut me a check and book me a plane ticket home. I had to come see about my people. The Black Warriors.”
Benji Young, a boy I used to see writing rhymes in the back of the classroom with Dame, hollered, “Warriors” the way the kids did at pep rallies and other school functions, and the kids replied, “Warriors,” and everyone began to clap.
After the greetings and me getting my students settled in the auditorium, I escorted Dame and the crew around the school, so he could show off his old locker, the basketball courts, and the bathroom where he jokingly said he’d almost lost his virginity until the girl’s boyfriend walked in. As we walked around the school, Dame had the whole crew laughing, me included, with his memories of Tuscaloosa. While most people would think someone his age didn’t care about the place, Dame seemed to remember everything that made Tuscaloosa special and unique and every time he said, “Let me tell y’all about the time ...” everyone gathered and listened intently.
When we finally made our way to the chorus room, I was beginning to feel like a celebrity myself. Between takes, a woman popped out of nowhere and smoothed my hair, gave me a sip of water and redotted my lips with the gloss I’d given her—I still didn’t trust her to touch my makeup.
“This is where it all began,” Dame said. He dashed up the steps that led to the back of the room and sat right in the seat he once inhabited. “I used to sit right here and write my rhymes with T-Brill and Benji. We’d be in here bugging out ... just dreaming of making it big someday.” He stood back up and walked down toward my desk where I was standing behind the camera. After everyone shifted around, he looked at me. “And now I’m big ... and I have you to thank for that.”
“You’re very welcome,” I said.
“I know sometimes you must’ve felt like you weren’t teaching us a damn thing ... man, we were so damn bad!” He laughed and I nodded in agreement. “But you were teaching us. Just being in here and listening to your music and seeing you do something you loved ... sometimes that was all we needed to learn. We was coming out the projects and seeing what it was like to have a job where ain’t nobody looking to take you out. You know? That’s real talk.” His eyes grew more serious. “I know that ain’t something you can measure on a test, but it saved my life. It gave me a vision that I could do what I loved and not have to answer to anybody. I took that and ran with it. Literally! I ran right out the classroom and ain’t never come back.” Everyone except Dame and I laughed at his story. We kept our eyes on each other. “But now I’m here,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’m back home.”
When Dame and I finally made our way into the school auditorium, it was standing room only. The noise was so loud, Dame had to take the microphone himself to get everyone settled down. I was standing on the stage beside him. Evan and Mr. Williams were a few steps away.
While I’d sung in front of crowds at the church and traveled with the choir to places where audiences were twice as large, knowing so many people were watching and filming made me nervous. Was I standing too close to Dame? Too far away? Was my hair messed up? Should I have let the woman do my makeup? Did I look shiny? Did I sound crazy? And pretty soon, I had so many questions that I just wondered, Why am I on this stage?
“I’m one of you,” Dame said when he finally got all the kids to sit down and relax just enough so he could speak. “I’m not from the ‘dirty’; I’m from the dirt. Where folks got less than nothing. Got to go outside and eat fruit all day because that’s the only thing that grows free in your grandmama’s yard. I know some of y’all know what I’m talking about.” Their eyes locked on Dame, the students grew quiet. I’d never seen them so focused.
“And when that fruit runs out ... when them collards run out,” he went on, “you’re fast to do anything to feed yourself—to feed your family. And you know it’s wrong, but you’re hungry. Ain’t nothing worse than being hungry. I ain’t talking about the clothes you wear or the car you drive. Where you live. I’m talking about being hungry. And when my stomach was empty, I used to dream about someday just doing anything. Anything somebody would let me do. A garbage man. Anything. So I wouldn?
??t have to be hungry no more. But ain’t nobody give me a chance, so I went out in the street. And when that ran out, when folks started getting popped and the game got real bloody, I realized I wasn’t no street dude. Not really. I realized that I had to hustle to live for myself. So I could be Dame. Not what the world expects me to be.”
“We love you, Dame,” a girl cried out from the crowd.
“And I love you back,” he said and the auditorium filled with the sound of laughter and screaming girls. “And I love you so much that I’m giving this school, my school, a little bit of what I got out of hustling for myself. This money I’m giving is just for you. So you don’t have to be hungry in your school. So you don’t have to want someone to let you be anything. So you don’t have to get in the drug game and lose respect for your community and keep bringing us down.”
Led by the teachers, everyone began to clap at his last point and I was honestly surprised by what I was hearing. This wasn’t the young man I’d expected. The person who was saying this didn’t sound a thing like the Dame I’d seen on Entertainment Tonight, in magazines, and even in his songs. Suddenly I was thinking that maybe my father was wrong. Maybe none of us knew who the real Dame was from what we’d seen.
“This check is so you can have a chance at Black Warrior,” he added. “A chance to be better than your parents, better than your teachers, better than me. Because this is your future.” He paused and looked off toward the left wing of the stage. “Benji, bring the check out.”
Benji, who I’d since learned had become Dame’s bodyguard, walked out, carrying a huge, blown-up check like the ones television shows use when people win a million-dollar sweepstakes prize.
He handed the check to Dame and Evan and Mr. Williams came over to stand beside me.
“Would you like to do the honors?” Mr. Williams asked, handing me the microphone.
“Sure,” I said. I held up one side of the check and read into the microphone, “A check to Black Warrior High School in the amount of one million dollars, signed by Mr. Damien Mitchell.”
Everyone in the room cheered his name and then a few kids were rapping his lyrics and the camera crews were scampering to the front of the stage to get a picture of the two of us holding the check.
