Call Me by My Name (11 page)

Tater wore it under his shoulder pads that day, and he would wear it at every practice and game for the rest of his career at the school. On those days when it got dirty or soaked with sweat, he washed it in a sink in the big bathroom where we showered. Using a small wire hand brush and a bar of Lava soap, he scrubbed it clean, then let it dry on a wire hanger at his locker.

Despite the T-shirts, and despite our honest effort to reverse a culture of losing at the school, the new season didn't start out well. Tater and I were juniors now, but it looked like a repeat of the year before. It's hard to say exactly why our team was so bad, but we never seemed to enter a game expecting to win, an attitude that our opponents made sure to exploit week after week.

Tater played cornerback and special teams, and each day at practice Coach had him quarterback the scout squad against the first-team defense. He showed potential running the option, but he was prone to mental errors that came from lack of experience. He was best when he tucked the ball and ran with it, and he could make all the throws, but everything about his game had an impromptu feel, like an actor making up dialogue when he forgot his lines. He looked confused and impatient as he set up in the pocket and let the ball fly, often to players for the wrong side.

I once asked our offensive coordinator, Bubba Valentine, why he and Coach Cadet never let Tater play quarterback in games. We were losing every week and what harm could be done?

“He needs to learn the offense better,” Coach Valentine said. “And we need to be careful not to throw him to the wolves too soon. Some people will want to see him fail for the obvious reason. We can't let that happen.”

“But he might not fail, Coach.”

“Right. And that could also be a problem.”

We played our games on Friday night, which made our Thursday practice the lightest of the week. After classes let out at three o'clock Coach Cadet convened a brief team meeting in the locker room, then we went out to the practice field for a walk-through. This amounted to both the offense and defense, dressed in gym clothes and helmets, stepping through assignments in preparation for the game the next day. I'd been starting since the Jamboree, and every Thursday without fail Coach Cadet called me into his office and handed over a film projector and spools of game tape for me to take home and watch overnight. The film showed our next opponent's game from the week before, and I studied it with a particular focus on the players I'd be facing, with the aim of learning their strengths and weaknesses and finding a way to get the better of them. Tired of his blunders at practice, Tater asked me if he could attend my home film sessions, and I went to Mama for permission.

“It's perfectly fine with me,” she said. “Your friends are always welcome, you know that. But you should clear it with your father first, just to make sure there are no misunderstandings.”

I caught him outside in the garden, after he'd had a rare good day of sleep. The tomato season was past, and he was chopping down the plants and folding rabbit manure into the soil.

“Don't you have any white teammates you could invite over?” he asked.

“It's Tater, Pops.”

“I know who it is. But he's still a black, ain't he?”

“You can't possibly know how you sound.”

He dropped more pellets onto the ground. “The neighbors won't like it, and it's not the example I want to be setting for you and your sister. But yeah, Rodney, he can come. He can even come in through the front door.”

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but all I did was stare at him.

“Your old man,” he said at last, “he's not so bad, now, is he?”

We set up the projector in my bedroom and played the film on an old bedsheet I'd hung from the wall with thumbtacks. We kept the door closed and the lights off and took turns with the clicker, watching plays over and over again. All the while we communicated with each other in the peculiar language of football:

“Look at Willie, Tater. See how far off the ball he is. He wants you to think he's going to drop back in protection, but he's really got Three Gap. Now check out Mike. Mike's going to fill the hole as soon as the center blocks down. Okay, now where is Sam? Tell me.”

“Sam's head-up on the tight end.”

“And what's the coverage?”

“Man.”

“And what should work here?”

“Play action? Maybe a draw, depending on down and distance.”

“What else?”

“Send the split end deep and pull Willie with him, then quick-pitch to the weak side. Or fake the pitch and tuck it and run.”

Willie, Sam, and Mike weren't the names of players on the defense. They were the three linebacker positions. The first letters of their names represented how they lined up against our offensive formation—weak side, strong side, and middle.

After a couple of hours Mama came to the door and shoved it open a crack. “Halftime,” she said, and the smell of supper pushed in and found us like a hammer blow. Behind her Angie was holding a tray loaded with food. One night it was shrimp étouffée; another it was overstuffed catfish and oyster po'boys and sweet potato fries. We didn't eat at the kitchen table because Pops wouldn't let us, but I was willing to give him that much as long as he didn't stop Tater's visits.

Tater and I lunged for the food before Angie could put the tray down. Some days Angie and Mama stood at the door, watching us with equal parts awe and admiration.

“We cook for hours, and then it's gone in minutes,” Mama said.

“Minutes? Seconds, more like,” Angie said.

“You should open a restaurant, Mrs. Boulet,” Tater told her after every meal.

Then Mama had her chance to say: “Thank you, sweetheart. Make sure you take a plate home to Miss Nettie, you hear?”

It never occurred to Tater and me that we should've been eating lighter meals on nights before games. We cared only about filling our guts with what tasted good, and we weren't discriminating in this pursuit.

The night before we played Morgan City, Angie brought in a ceramic vase along with supper, and sticking up from it were hand-painted cutouts of flowers. She'd made them with construction paper and decorated them with beads and baubles from old Mardi Gras throws. She'd then manipulated the flowers into forms that gave them a three-dimensional effect.

“Are these peonies?” Tater asked.

“Yes, they are peonies. One bunch is for you, Tater, and the other is for Rodney.”

“How do you know about peonies?” I asked him.

The question seemed to embarrass him. “I guess from paying attention.”

A guy who knew the names of flowers? I couldn't fathom it.

Later that night, after I'd given Tater a ride home in the Cameo and I was winding down before bed, I picked up a flowery scent that I hadn't noticed before. Tater had taken his bunch with him, and mine alone stood now in Angie's little ceramic vase. I brought my face down and inhaled. Sure enough, she'd sprayed perfume on the construction paper and made it smell like something from the garden.

Peonies, I supposed.

That was Angie for you.

At night, when he was tired and in a bad mood, Pops would ask Angie and me how the experiment was going. His cynicism didn't merit an answer, but we gave him a couple, anyway.

“Great,” Angie said.

“Very well,” I replied.

But the truth was quite a bit different. Most of the white students hadn't let themselves get to know the black kids, and the same could be said of many of the black kids—they had few white friends.

I'd hoped that white students at the new private schools in town would be returning in droves after reconsidering their decisions to break from the public system, but this wasn't happening. Instead whites continued to transfer out of our school. And now there were more black students than white ones; the 50–50 split had become a 60–40 split. When you walked down the halls between classes, you understood which group was the true minority.

“They're everywhere,” I heard Freddie Sanders complain one day. “You can't even have lunch without one of them coming over and trying to sit at your table.”

“Shut up,” I told him.

My priority was the football team, so I mourned the siphoning of talent. Add players from the other schools in town and we likely would've had a dominant football program. Instead we had the smallest enrollment in our district. We also were its biggest loser.

One night after practice I returned home and found Pops sitting at the kitchen table with the local paper spread out in front of him. He pointed. “Read this first, then you can eat,” he said. “Mama, get Rodney a glass of water.”

It was a story about a lawsuit filed against the school board by one of our assistant basketball coaches, Joshua Dupre, a black man. His complaint said that the basketball team counted sixteen players, all but four of them black, and yet it had a white head coach, Robbie Brown, who'd unfairly been named to the position by the board. Furthermore, Coach Dupre said he'd been a successful head coach at J. S. Clark for nearly twenty years, while his twenty-five-year-old boss had only four years of coaching experience.

The year before, I'd played for these coaches and thought they liked each other. At practice and in games, Coach Dupre had seemed dedicated to Coach Brown and content in his subordinate role. But all along, I understood now, Coach Dupre had believed he deserved to be in charge and would've been if not for his race.

After I finished reading the story, Pops rapped his knuckles against the table. “It took us two hundred and fifty some-odd years to get to this point and now they want it all overnight,” he said.

“But you can understand why, can't you?” I told him. “Wouldn't you want it overnight if you had to wait that long?”

He shook his head. “Good lord, boy, whose side are you on?”

At school our classes were now called advanced instead of top group, and they still were mostly white, even though they included more college-bound black kids. Beginning with homeroom, Tater had the same schedule as Angie and me. We always sat on the last row of desks on the right side of the room—Angie first then Tater and me behind her, in that order. Patrice Jolivette, peeking her head in the door one day, laughed and said we looked like an “ass-backward Oreo cookie.”

The legend of Tater Henry began when we played New Iberia at Donald Gardner Stadium before a crowd of a few hundred, mostly visiting fans. It was cold that Halloween Eve night, and we were 1–7 on the year, the second worst team in the district and only one win better than Lafayette Northside, which we'd needed an overtime miracle to beat.

Our team colors were the colors of the season, and Angie and Patrice and the other cheerleaders decorated the stadium with plastic jack-o'-lanterns, Spanish moss from nearby trees, fake spiderwebs made with yarn, and large cardboard cutouts showing spooked cats with spines raised. Hand-painted posters and banners rimmed the playing field:
SENIOR GIRLS SAY GEAUX TIGERS
,
BOO TO THE YELLOW JACKETS
, and my favorite,
GOD BLESS THE BIGFEET
.