Call Me by My Name (8 page)

That Sunday under the pecan tree, Pops cleaned a clutter of sacalait on an old cypress worktable. A lone stray calico watched from the shade of the ligustrums nearby. He was using an electric knife to fillet the fish—the same knife he used to carve the turkey at holiday meals. Inside, Mama and Angie made homemade ice cream with fresh cream and chunks of Ruston peaches we'd picked up after church at a roadside stand. I was sitting in the living room, pretending to work on a crossword puzzle. In actual fact I was trying to avoid being noticed because I was feeling especially lazy today and didn't want them to ask me to turn the handle on the ice-cream bucket. I was using the power of my mind to make myself invisible. So far I'd been successful.

“By the way,” Angie said, her breath thin for all the effort she was putting out, “Julie's maid told her last night that they would prefer not to be called colored or Negro anymore. She says they want to be called black now.”

“Is that true?” Mama asked. She was chopping a block of ice in the sink with a wood-handled pick. “Who makes these decisions for them? Do they all want to be called black? You're talking about millions of people. Was there a vote?”

“Julie heard her say it. So remember that at school tomorrow, will you, Rodney?”

My shield of invisibility had been penetrated.

“Rodney? Will you remember that?”

“I'll remember,” I said. “Whenever I see one, I'll walk up and say ‘Hi, I understand you're not a colored or a Negro anymore, but a black.' I'm sure they'll appreciate my sensitivity.”

“Rodney, come on, son,” Mama said. “Your turn to crank.”

I was giving it my all—and shaking the whole house—when Pops came in with water dripping from his arms. He'd rinsed the fish scales off outside with the hose but had forgotten to have a towel handy. He held his arms up like a surgeon who'd just finished scrubbing before surgery and was ready now for his nurse to help him get his gloves on.

“You're going to mess up my floor,” Mama said.

“It's water.”

“I know it's water, Dr. Kildare, but you've got fish mixed with it, and you'll leave little dots where you drip.”

I wondered if there'd be fights in the halls. I wondered if anybody was going to bring knives or guns or brass knuckles. There'd been rumors. One of our neighbors was keeping his daughter home just to be safe, as were a lot of other white parents. I didn't believe any of the stories, but Pops did. He had me doing curls with a pair of dumbbells to make sure my biceps broadcast a certain message.

Pops had caught the fish that morning, and we had them along with hush puppies, cucumber and tomato slices, and iced tea. We also had the ice cream for dessert and ate it from cereal bowls while watching TV. The news from Vietnam came to us in grainy black and white. My uncle Bay-Bay was there, fighting with the Marines. Pops liked to pretend his baby brother was still working on a crawfish farm in Evangeline Parish, rather than rooting Viet Cong out of tunnels.

He got up and changed the channel. “Ed Sullivan's still an hour away,” Mama said.

“In that case how about something we can digest by?” he said.

There was a hi-fi console standing along the wall, as big as a coffin. He put a Ferrante & Teicher record on the turntable with the volume turned low, and we ate our ice cream to the whisper of golden pianos.

“Pops, guess what?” Angie said. She didn't wait for him. “Julie's maid said they want to be called black from now on.”

I'd hoped we were done with it. She'd caught Pops as he was about to put another spoonful in his mouth. “They do? Who does?”

“Colored people,” she said. “Negroes.”

“They want to be called blacks now?”

“That's what Julie said.”

“Then we'll have to make sure to call them something else,” he said.

I kept looking at her. She didn't acknowledge me.

“When I was a child,” Mama said, “I had an uncle who used to say with utmost sincerity that he had no problem with the opposite race. Isn't that the most amazing thing? The opposite race . . . I mean, yes, he confused the expression, but don't you think he was really revealing his true feelings about colored—” She stopped herself. “I'm sorry, I mean black people. In any case, it stuck in my head and here I am mentioning it all these years later.”

“Like there were only two races,” Angie said, “the white one and the black one.”

“Exactly.”

“Most I know around here aren't even black to start with, like Simmons at the plant,” Pops said. “They've got something else mixed in—what you call cream in the coffee. In New Orleans they call that café au lait. When I was a kid we called that high yellow, but I understand it's not polite to say that now.” He ate some more and added as an afterthought: “You hardly see any
black
blacks anymore, the way you would have in the olden days, when they first got off the boats.”

“The boats?” Mama asked. “You make them sound so primitive. But they weren't the only ones who got here in boats. How do you think we got here? In jumbo airplanes? In air-conditioned buses?”

Angie: “You ever look closely at Tater Henry? He's a lot like Mr. Simmons—a palette of many colors, all blended together. You even have yellow ochre and umber in the mix. Best of all, there's vermilion, which I think makes all the difference. True black doesn't reflect light, anyway, and that young man is positively radiant, so what does that make him?”

“Yellow okra,” I told her. “What the heck is yellow okra?”

Pops got up and turned off the music. “Mark my words,” he said. “This experiment won't work—this black-and-white thing? I could blame the federal judge that's forced it on us, but I still say it's Abra-damn Lincoln who got this ball rolling.”

We knew when to stand up to him and when to let his declarations pass. If he looked overly tired, we let him get away with almost anything, and this day his eyelids were drooping and he slurred his words.

Angie and I finished our ice cream and brought our bowls to the sink. “It's like he forgets what year it is,” I whispered to her as Pops kept on.

“Not only the year, but the century,” she said.

T
he high school had moved to its new location only about five years before we got there. It was a large, rectangular-shaped pile of brown bricks that most people in town hated. It looked like an airplane terminal, some complained. Pops said it better resembled a mausoleum.

When the big day finally arrived, the sight of black students on campus didn't shock me much, nor was I traumatized by having to share the halls with them. A lone police cruiser remained parked all day near the front entrance, its red emergency light rotating on the roof, as if to warn against mischief. On my way to fifth-hour English class, I looked out the main doors and spotted a cop slumped behind the wheel. He was using his window as a pillow and sleeping the afternoon away.

“Shucks,” Curly Trussell said. “There wasn't a single stabbing all day. What fun is that?”

Integration, I quickly learned, was an elusive concept and easy to avoid despite government mandates. We might've attended a school with as many blacks as whites, but Angie and I had classes with few black students, and all of our teachers were white. Administrators had divided the student body into groups, ostensibly according to past academic performance, and Angie and I landed in the top group. Like me, Tater had been a solid B student the year before, but he was assigned to the second group, which better reflected the school's racial makeup. The third group, also known as the last group, was all black except for a couple of hardcore delinquents who probably belonged in a reformatory.

In rural towns like ours, people tended to judge the quality of any given year on how well the crops grew and the prices farmers got for them. But we measured our value on how many games the football team won. In a move that blacks opposed as much as whites, the local school board waited until classes started to let Coach Hollis Cadet assemble his team and commence practice. By forgoing two-a-days at the end of August, the board had only delayed the inevitable and guaranteed that we'd be unprepared and probably lousy once the season started. The board also canceled the Jamboree, the exhibition game that always opened the season. The decision incited such an uproar that a petition circulated calling for the heads of the board members, not a few of whom walked out one morning to find the trees on their front lawns draped with toilet paper. The local paper said the board was concerned about crowd control. How blacks and whites interacted after being thrust together at a large public event was an unknown that it didn't want to face.

“The board got something right for a change,” Pops said at dinner one night. “I say better safe than sorry.” He shoveled more corn in his mouth. “Nothing some people like more than an excuse to riot.”

Everybody knew my size made me a good prospect for football. The year before I'd started at left tackle on the freshman team, earning the award for Most Outstanding Offensive Lineman at season's end. I'd been planning to go out for the varsity as soon as practice started, if ever it started.

At the close of our first day of classes, Coach Cadet and his assistants stood outside the main entrance handing out bulletins inviting boys to try out. As I left the building he grabbed me by a shirtsleeve and led me off to the side. “Can I count on you, Rodney?” he asked.

His tone was almost confidential, even though we'd never had an actual conversation before. “To do what, Coach?”

“To make this school a winner again. We need team players like you, Rodney.”

Tater left the building moments later, but Coach let him walk right on by. Head bowed, hands nervously jiggling the coins in his pockets, Tater was waiting in line for a bus ride home when I caught up to him. “You going out for football?” I asked.

“I'd planned on it until a minute ago. Did you see that, Rodney? He looked right through me, like I was invisible.”

“He can't be expected to know the black guys yet. Cut him a break, will you?” I grabbed his arm and pulled him out of line. “Come with me,” I said.

He followed me back to the front of the school where the coaches were hitting up more prospects, all of them white.

“This is Tater Henry, Coach Cadet,” I said.

The way he looked at him, Coach might've just been introduced to a female tryout. “Your name is Tater, as in
po
-tater?”

“My real name's Tatum, Coach Cadet. But I couldn't pronounce it very well when I was little and the mispronunciation stuck.”

Coach seemed to find the explanation less interesting than I did. He glanced at his watch and checked the doors again to see who was coming out. “You play ball, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What position?”

“Quarterback.”

“You said quarterback or cornerback?”

“Quarterback.”

Coach Cadet smiled at the absurdity. “You don't want to be a quarterback,” he said. “Our playbook is eighteen pages long.”

They stood looking at each other: Tater silent; Coach Cadet smacking gum. “However I can contribute, Coach,” Tater finally said.

“That's what I want to hear,” Coach answered.

About seventy guys turned out the next day. We sat in the bleachers in the gym, and Coach Cadet and his staff looked out at white players grouped together on the left and black players huddled on the right. At the center of this arrangement was a divide a few feet wide, with only Tater and me sitting next to each other about halfway up.

For twenty minutes Coach harangued us about the differences between team players and turds. He'd played guard at Texas Christian many years ago, before helmets came equipped with face masks, and the tip of his nose was a cauliflower mass, the bridge a lumpy knot. Because his skin sunburned easily, he covered himself with cold cream to soothe the pain and protect from blistering. Today he was wearing so much of the stuff he looked like a Kabuki dancer, with a bright pink undertone peeking through. A whistle hung by an orange-and-black cord from around his neck.

Turds had no place in football, he said now in closing, and he vowed to run any off. “Are you a turd?” he asked one guy, pointing. Then he confronted another: “What about you, Nestor? You look like a turd to me.”

We all had to deny it. “Not me, Coach,” I said when it was my turn.

“I ain't no turd,” Tater nearly shouted when Coach Cadet came to him.

“Turds have been the ruination of many a fine football team,” Coach said in summation. “I'd rather have a bunch of team players without much talent than a bunch of turds with all the talent in the world.”

Next, Coach had his assistants form a half circle behind him, and he instructed the junior and senior players to come down from the bleachers and stand behind the coaches according to their positions. That left thirty sophomores, and now Coach had each of us stand for an eyeball test. He assessed our overall appearance and assigned us our positions without bothering to ask where we wanted to play. As expected, he sent me to stand behind the offensive line coach, and he had Tater join the defensive backs coach. Our entire future in football depended on a once-over that lasted no longer than five seconds, and after a while I noticed a pattern. White kids got the marquee jobs, such as quarterback, running back, split end, safety, and middle linebacker. The black guys got the less glamorous positions. Coach Cadet didn't explain why particular positions were the domain of whites only, but it was understood that blacks weren't suited for them. They ended up standing behind the assistants who coached the defensive line and secondary—positions, it occurred to me, that didn't require you to be very smart.

One black player, Rubin Lazarus, hesitated when Coach told him he was a defensive lineman. “But can I go out for linebacker?” he asked. “Middle linebacker?”

Coach Cadet laughed and glanced back at his assistants, all but one of them white. “The middle linebacker is captain of the defense,” he said. “He has to make quick reads and call out schemes, and this means he has to think on his feet. Can you do that?” Before Rubin could answer, Coach said, “I didn't think so.”

They made Curly Trussell a quarterback. Before the meeting started, Curly had knelt at one end of the basketball court and thrown spirals with a football to the other end. His passes were pretty to watch, and he'd demonstrated his accuracy by ricocheting them off a wall and landing them in a trashcan. The guys had erupted with cheers after each one found its mark, and Curly had danced around flexing his right bicep. Even the coaches had clapped for him.

“The opportunity will come,” I said to a dejected Tater, hoping to give him a lift. “And when it does, you'll make the most of it.”

“I'd rather not talk about opportunities,” he replied. That was the closest he'd ever come to complaining.

After the meeting, we were issued helmets, pads, and practice uniforms, and then we were ushered out onto the field and put through drills until dusk fell at around eight o'clock. The coaches pushed so hard that guys were falling out from exhaustion everywhere you looked. I puked once myself, a real gully washer that strangely left me feeling better when I was finished.

“Get it all out, Rodney?” Coach Cadet asked when it looked like I was done.

“I think so, Coach.”

“Good. Now get back out there and show me how bad you want it.”

Practices were compartmentalized by position, which meant I spent most of the day with the offensive linemen, or Bigfeet, as we'd taken to calling ourselves. Casting around for a name to illustrate who we were as a unit, we'd tried the Sasquatches for a while but found the word hard to say. Eventually we'd settled on Bigfeet, the plural of Bigfoot, the hirsute giant that was half man and half ape and so shy he rarely left the woods. I saw Tater only at the end of the day when it was time for team drills, and even then we had little contact. We closed out each workout with sprints, and he was the kind of guy who had to win each one, while I was the kind who was happy just to finish them at all. Coach Cadet had us huddle around him for one last speech, and then we headed to the locker room. Or at least we were free to go there. Tater always went to the weight room instead and lifted for another half hour. If I hadn't collapsed yet, he made sure I joined him.

Our bodies had changed dramatically since the start of that summer—Tater's more than mine. While I seemed to have added mostly girth, Tater had packed on muscle. He wouldn't be fifteen until November, but the thin kid who'd been all kneecaps and elbows was now so well put together you wondered how it had happened.

“Man, what does Miss Nettie feed you?” I asked him.

“Not enough,” he said, taking the question seriously. “She works late and most nights doesn't get home until I've already gone to bed.”

“So what do you eat?”

“I'll fry me some eggs or warm a can of beans. Sometimes it's cereal and milk. Whatever I can find in the house, I guess.”

One night after practice I was pumping out reps on the bench press while he spotted me. It suddenly became impossible to do another one, and Tater started grunting like a hog to push me on. “It's the fourth quarter,” he said. “Come on, Rodney. Do it for Regina.” Regina Perrault was a classmate, and I'd let Tater know what I thought about her. “Regina,” he said now. “Regina . . . Regina . . .
Regina
. . .”

And somehow I was able to get the barbell off my chest, extend my arms, and complete a final rep.

It was his turn next. He'd pressed a hundred and eighty-five pounds nine times, but he wanted more, and I was yelling him on: “It's all on you, brother. You've got to get it done. Come on, Tater. Do it for Miss Nettie—for
Miss Nettie
, Tater.”

He paused with the barbell fully extended, and his face went slack. A smile sputtered across his lips, and he gave his head a quick shake. “You get Regina and I get my auntie? Now that ain't right.” Then he started to laugh.

I went to grab the bar, but he quickly lowered the weight to his chest and pushed it out one last time.