Page 56 of Certified To Handle You 2

I reached around her and picked the bracelet back up before handin’ it to the woman behind the counter. “Lemme get this.”

Sha’Nelle looked over her shoulder at me.

I paid for it, took it out the lil’ box and reached for Sha’Nelle’s hand. She watched me while I fastened the bracelet around her wrist, and once I had it on her, I turned her hand over and looked at how it sat against her skin.

“Yeah,” I murmured. “That look good on you.”

She looked down at it, then back at me with that same look she had been givin’ me on and off all day. I slid my hand around the back of her neck, pulled her close and kissed her forehead before lettin’ her go.

“Thank you,” she said soft.

I leaned down and kissed her cheek. “You welcome, pretty girl.”

We kept movin’ after that, and somehow one game turned into damn near every game we passed. If Sha’Nelle stopped and looked at somethin’ too long, I was already pullin’ money out. I had already won her some shit from another booth.

We spent a couple hours out here without me even realizin’ how much time had passed. That was probably the best part about the shit ‘cause I wasn’t lookin’ at my phone or thinkin’about how to get this fine ass woman back. We was just outside enjoyin’ each other, and the more time passed, the easier everything between us felt.

By the time we left the park, Sha’Nelle had enough shit in her hands that I ended up carryin’ most of it. A big ass stuffed bear was tucked under one of my arms while I held her hand with the other, and she had her candy and some other shit in her other hand. We probably looked crazy as hell walkin’ down the sidewalk, but I ain’t give a fuck.

There was a museum a few streets over that I had seen while we was drivin’ through Midtown, and when we got closer, I noticed the banners outside advertisin’ a Black art exhibit. I looked toward Sha’Nelle and nodded toward the buildin’.

“You wanna go in there?”

She looked toward the banners. “Yeah, I do.”

I carried all the shit we had won back to the car first, then we walked over to the museum together. I ain’t know what the hell I was about to see ‘cause museums wasn’t really my thing, but once we got inside, even I had to admit, some of this shit was hard.

One room had me and Sha’Nelle slowin’ down soon as we walked in that muthafucka. The whole exhibit was Black art, but it wasn’t no regular portraits hangin’ on white walls.

The first piece took up damn near the whole side of the room, and from where we stood, it looked like this big ass paintin’ of a Black woman underwater with her eyes closed and her braids floatin’ all around her.

When we got closer, I realized the shit wasn’t completely painted.

Her braids was real hair sealed under layers of clear glass, and inside every braid was tiny pieces of handwritten letters, birth certificates, recipes, newspaper clippin’s and old pictures of Black families. The water around her was made out ofthousands of pieces of blue and clear glass, and depending on where we stood, different faces started showin’ up under it. I moved a lil’ to the left and saw a woman holdin’ a baby. When I stepped to the right, she disappeared and this old man sittin’ on some porch showed up in the same damn spot.

“Wait,” Sha’Nelle said as she grabbed my arm. “Move back over there.”

I stepped back where I was, and she moved with me until the woman and baby came back into view.

“Oh my God,” she murmured, starin’ at it. “That is beautiful.”

I looked at the piece again. “Yeah, this shit different.”

The next part of the exhibit opened up into this big ass room, and the first thing that caught my attention was the ceilin’. Hundreds of long pieces of fabric hung from that muthafucka in different shades of red, purple, blue, green and gold, but they wasn’t just hangin’ straight down. They twisted through the room in these long ass waves that made it look like the whole ceilin’ was movin’ even though none of that shit was.

Sha’Nelle tilted her head back while we walked underneath it. “This is beautiful.”

“Yeah, they did they shit with this,” I said as I looked up too.

In the middle of the room was this big ass sculpture of two hands, and I ain’t even know what it was made out of until we got closer. Thousands of tiny pieces of metal had been shaped into fingerprints, and every fingerprint had a name pressed into it.

The hands was damn near twice my height, reachin’ toward each other without actually touchin’.

Sha’Nelle walked around one side while I went around the other, and when we met again, she was readin’ the plaque beside it.

“They collected fingerprints from Black people in forty different countries,” she told me.

I looked back at the hands. “All them muthafuckas?”