Moving East: Colfax and Josephine

The difference between standing by the stop at Milwaukee and Colfax and the stop at Josephine and Colfax is measurable. There's the hordes of high school children, the sudden increase in concrete (buildings, empty lots, broken and crumbling courtyards and churches), the smell of deep fried food.

It's eleven in the morning, which means I've interrupted the seemingly endless East High lunch hour. The kids are teasing and stumbling, crowding, shouting, calling to each other in every imaginable pitch, and avoiding all sorts of unnecessary eye contact. The empty school looms large to the north.

It's a comfort to me to know that when the bus arrives, I'll be relieved of all this adolescence.

I board the bus after two or three others, the first of whom is still arguing with the driver about her fare. I notice a heavy young man holding his very young baby against his chest. I wouldn't have known there was a child in all that cloth except for its small face among the layers. I find a seat near the back of the bus.

The bus begins to move, and a large black man standing near the front, holding the bar near the ceiling of the bus, deliberately faces the man with the baby. Without hesitation or shame, the standing man announces to the small group of people around him, "I just yesterday learned my baby ain't my baby. My girl told me it's zero percent. That baby is zero percent of mine." The crowd is completely unsettled, and a wave of excited chatter takes hold of the front of the bus. Disapproval, sympathy, laughter. The standing man just keeps talking about it. It seems he can't stop.

It appeared first that the tall black man knew his audience. He spoke as if to old friends. As if perhaps those around him knew the woman in question and her illegitimate child. Minutes pass, and interest in his story, his anger, his drama, fades into talk of cell phones and groceries and the tiny baby's impossibly tiny hands.

The black man moves slowly to the back of the bus and faces the front, watching the father with his baby, and waiting for his stop.