Pawn (The Pawn Duet #2) - T.M. Frazier Page 0,42
give reason to all of this. Nothing that will make me feel any better about what I saw in the hallway. Nothing that can quell the unease and unrest. Nothing that can counteract the large dose of fucking WOKE now coursing through my veins.
Percy raises his eyebrows. “That’s not true,” he replies,
I point to the swastika hanging above his bed. “That says otherwise.”
He swings his legs to the end of the bed. “No, I mean the Reich doesn’t just hate black people. They also hate the Jews, Hispanics, homosexuals, bisexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, feminists…” He ticks the list off on his tattooed fingers. “Oh, yeah, and liberals.”
“So, just like the Nazis then?” I ask, feeling a sickness in my stomach. Acid trying to purify the hatred I’ve been swallowing and ignoring for years.
He swipes at the corner of his lip with his thumb and leans on his elbows. “Nope. The Nazis were also against alcoholics. And I don’t know if you’ve gotten a good look at the size of the bar at the gatherings lately, but you won’t find too much opposition to that here. Nazis also murdered the mentally ill, and well, you can’t exactly be sane to spout the shit that they do here.” He looks to the floor and rubs his palm over his face. “I know I wasn’t. I just wish I realized all this sooner, or never. This in-between shit is fucking killing me. But I was deaf to anything other than the hate ringing in my ears back then. That’s for fucking sure.”
“That’s who you were,” I tell him. “Albert Einstein once said, The measure of intelligence is the ability to change, and that’s what you’ve done. What you’re working on. Changing. I, myself, just realized what I’ve been passing off as witnessing and studying, is actually passive behavior. I’ve been standing by and watching all of this. The violence, the propaganda, the disgusting things said, without doing a damn thing about it. How does that make me any better?”
Percy scoffs. “Michaela, Not doing anything doesn’t make you a racist asshole. You never terrorized black-owned businesses or got locked up for burning a Jewish-owned hardware store to the ground for no reason at all. I was a racist asshole. You were a pawn in our fathers’ weird plans,” he says, trying to relieve me of some of the guilt I can feel he’s all too familiar with.
“So, were you,” I point out.
He rolls his eyes as if it’s not the same, even though we are both a product of manipulation. “Still, not doing anything don’t make you a fucking racist. It don’t make you one of them,” he points out. He reaches for a pack of cigarettes and pulls one out with his teeth, tossing the pack back onto the nightstand. He leans back against the headboard and lights it, staring up at the symbol above his head as he takes a drag, then quickly looks away from the symbol that probably haunts him at night, one he can probably still see even though his eyes are shut tight. “You ain’t ever been a bad person. I knew that when we were kids, and I know it now.”
A thought occurs to me. A truth I can set free.
“There is a wrong I can right,” I sit up and take a deep breath. “Pike isn’t the one who ratted on you. Who got you locked away.”
“I know,” he says, his answer taking me by surprise.
He frowns. “After I got out of the joint, my old man was spewing his regular bullshit about Pike. The blame he placed on him for me catching so much time had only gotten worse. Has only gotten worse. Not only was Pike the one who ratted on me, but he’s now the one responsible for my mother’s death. At first, I bought it. I didn’t think the old man would lie to me about some shit as serious as the person responsible for killin’ my moms. I did some diggin’ of my own. I asked some of the OG members who were around back then about my moms. Made them think I was just reminiscing about her. It turns out she ran away from this fucking place, from Darius, when I was seven. Darius always told me she was running from someone and left it at that. Never said it was him she was running from. I Googled her name and found the article. She died in a car accident shortly