Fire Shut Up in My Bones Page 11

  Another boy at Gibsland Elementary who would help change my life didn’t take to me at first meeting. Alphonso was a smart and popular boy, and didn’t approve of my being touted by Russell. He was thin-built, handsome, and sand-colored, with eyelashes as long as a spider’s legs. He was quick-witted, and he dressed better than the other boys. He was born in Dallas, but his mother was from Gibsland and had moved back to marry a local man who’d gotten a big insurance settlement after a work accident left him with burns over most of his body.

  Alphonso picked at me, prodded me, trying to provoke me. It worked. Within the first week of school, we had a fight. I had never had to fight before, and I doubt if he had either, because we just swung our fists wildly. I’m not sure if either of us even landed a punch.

  As is often the case, the boy you have your first fight with becomes your best friend. He became mine.

  My new friends had anointed me, and I became who they thought I was, a boy full of life. They hadn’t known me when I was withdrawn, when I felt most dead. They hadn’t witnessed my awkwardness. Here, I was a blank slate. I could be whoever I said I was, whoever they wanted me to be. I could transcend my life by transforming myself. And so I did.

  I also became the caulk between Russell and Alphonso—the popular jock boy and the popular smart boy.

  Each day we ate our lunches quickly, went to the vending machine for candy, then headed to the playground, furnished with all-metal play equipment and paved with gravel-covered asphalt. The place was alive with giggles and screams, wisecracking and signifying.

  We swung so high on the swings that the chains grew slack. We played tetherball until our hands were swollen. Beyond the playground was a baseball field with decaying bleachers where we played kickball. Occasionally we ignored the bases and played roughneck football, which I was surprisingly good at.

  I realized that boys were wired to follow the strongest among them. And in this I had a genetic advantage. I was taller, faster, more agile, and stronger than most boys. And I took what nature gave me and pushed it beyond that limit. I had to be the best at everything—basketball, football, kickball, dodgeball, everything—to be the boy Russell had told everyone I was. In fact, whenever I came up short I took it as an existential threat, and willed that it would never happen again.

  Around this time, whenever my mother could afford it, she took us to Shreveport’s Municipal Auditorium to see the wildly popular stars of the Mid-South wrestling circuit—a bunch of washed-up football players as outlandish characters in a soap opera of good and evil, tights and testosterone, cage matches and smackdowns.

  “The Big Cat” Ernie Ladd. That was the name of my favorite wrestler. Six feet nine inches tall. Over three hundred pounds. All muscle. A north Louisiana native. A Grambling graduate. A local hero.

  The wrestling matches were among the only crowded events my mother would take us to after we saw a woman fall in front of a car at the Natchitoches Christmas Festival of Lights. We had been sitting on the embankment by the river listening to a band. After the last song, the crowd made its way up the hill and began crossing the street. Right in front of us was a young white couple, drunk on love and liquor, holding hands, the woman’s hair blowing in the night breeze. But on the road a car was creeping through the crowd like a turtle through tall grass. The woman stumbled in front of the car, but the driver didn’t see her. He continued to inch forward. The woman’s boyfriend banged on the car as the woman screamed. My mother, traumatized, whisked us off to our car.

  But the wrestling matches we still went to.

  We got the cheapest seats, but no one yelled louder or had more fun than us. The wrestlers played on racism and patriotism, ignorance and fear, producing characters of the most exaggerated stereotypes, particularly the villains.

  Kamala the Ugandan Giant, a supposed cannibal, wrestled in face and body paint and a loincloth. The Great Kabuki, wearing kumadori face paint, blew a mysterious, blinding “Asian mist” into the faces of his opponents. Abdullah the Butcher, “the Mad Man from Sudan,” sadistically dug forks into his opponents’ open wounds. A black man called the Junkyard Dog wore a dog collar around his neck with a chain attached. Nikita Koloff, “the Russian Nightmare,” sought to prove Russian superiority. Kaffiyeh-clad Skandor Akbar, an “evil Arab,” managed a stable of other heels called Devastation, Inc.

  I loved these diversions. They kept my mind off Chester’s betrayal. Although I only occasionally thought of it now, with every recollection it grew more sinister—his sin pushing past the possibility of forgiveness, my spirit pushing past the possibility of restitution.

  In the wrestling matches, each time a character was slammed to the mat it produced a thunderclap. One night after the show, we worked our way down to the main floor so that we could touch the mat. We ran our hands across it. Someone slapped it. Bam! It turned out that the mat was like the skin of a large drum, pulled tight. The slightest touch produced the same sound as when one of the wrestlers was slammed into it. In a way, it was disappointing, but in another way, it was inspirational. I was realizing that a strong presentation could be constructed from whole cloth, as long as you were a good enough actor to make it believable. I vowed to channel my aversion to conflict and aggression into a mastery of it. Henceforth, my interactions with suspect guys would be marked by full-throated, bare-knuckled hostility—I wouldn’t run from a threat, but into it, hard. I never wanted to be a victim again.

  Like the thistle of a flower, I set up sharp defenses to protect myself. I developed a bit of a strut and an arsenal of slick comebacks, all bullshit and bluster. I avoided fights by pretending to welcome them, all the while praying no one called my bluff—a lot of “I wish he would!” when I secretly hoped he wouldn’t.

  I wasn’t so much afraid of the battle as of the loss, which would punch a hole in my new armor. I still didn’t know how to fight. I didn’t know how to bob and weave. I didn’t know the sting of a punch—how it jolted the skull, cracked the ribs. I didn’t know how to use that pain to fuel ferocity. And I didn’t get any practice at home. My mother had grown up fighting, but my brothers and I never fought. We never wrestled. We didn’t even slap-fight or shadowbox.

  My new façade was like a thing made of matchsticks—fragile and in constant danger of going up in flames.

  It was Alphonso who taught me another way to show strength. Thanks to Mrs. Collins, I now had confirmation that I was smart. But Alphonso was smarter. He did well without trying. He taught me how to use my wits. He knew how to mark his space with his words because he was too thin to defend it with his fists.

  He also knew how to reduce another boy with a look. It was the kind of look that caught you at the ankles and moved up your body like an iron, flattening you, pressing out all the air and all the confidence, until his eyes set on yours with a blank stare that your insecurities invariably read as mockery or pity or some such. Nothing nice. Then he’d look away into nowhere, just before your mouth puffed with a question or your eyes tightened with anger. He: uninterested. You: unworthy.

  He knew how to look at you in a way that made you beat yourself up, so that he never had to, because he knew he couldn’t. It was the kind of look that left you so wounded that every time Alphonso laughed—whether hours or days had passed—you were sure that he was laughing at you. Alphonso knew this. That’s probably why he laughed all the time. I too learned to look at boys with the kind of look that made their minds play tricks on them, the kind of look that said disdain, mockery, pity, nothing nice.

  I also learned something about popular children that I had never known because I had never been popular myself: they are never comfortable because they are exhausted. Staying on top is harder than getting there. They’re racked with insecurities. They know that their perch isn’t necessarily permanent. There is always someone waiting and wanting to snatch the crown, always someone willing to betray you in order to be you. The people by your side aren’t necessarily on your side.

  But exhaustion and
betrayal were already things that I knew well, from my much darker days, so these new forms suited me just fine. In fact, they were easier to manage than the others.

  I took what I could learn from Russell and Alphonso and combined it with the lesson I had learned from Shane: prove your superiority—both intellectual and athletic—as often as it is challenged. I now had all the tools I would ever need to ensure that I would never go unseen or unacknowledged again.

  So when we finished tussling in the playground, we returned to class sweaty, disheveled, grass in our hair and stains on our knees—happy. There was no trace of the broken boy, at least not a noticeable trace.

  Just as I was learning how to overcome the deficit of feeling dead on my journey to becoming a man, I had to overcome the complexity of race to become a black man in particular. The first time I heard someone call me a nigger, it forced me to reconsider the way black men and white men dealt with each other in the world I inhabited.

  My family’s interactions with white folks happened mostly when we went shopping. And those encounters could be fraught. Often things went well, like when we stopped at Mr. Nolte’s dry goods store, where my mother would inspect the bolts of fabric stacked in the store window like cordwood. She got a couple yards of “these” and a few swatches of “those,” and she might buy me a new pair of Chuck Taylors if the eggshell white of mine was past the point of being restored by washing.

  But just as often, things went sour. Pity the poor cashier who miscounted my mother’s change. Nothing got my mother’s dander up more than feeling she was being cheated. This was another trait she’d inherited from Mam’ Grace. My mother often told us the story of how Mam’ Grace’s mother had one day walked ten miles to a store to shop and, upon returning home, realized that the store had shorted her a dime. She walked all the way back to the store to retrieve the dime, for the principle of it. Mam’ Grace and my mother wanted all of their dimes as well.

  Occasionally, white people would sell goods in the black community. There was the egg lady, an elderly white woman in an aging brown jalopy who drove door-to-door selling the eggs her hens laid. There was the man who sold bulk ice cream treats from the back of a refrigerated truck. But perhaps most memorable was the white insurance man who came by once a month to collect his premium and mark our card paid. When he appeared, Uncle Paul was transformed from a gentle old man into a scared little boy. He wrung his hat in his hands while staring at the ground and shuffling his feet. He talked to the man without ever looking at him, and he agreed with everything the man said before the man could fully get the words out.

  “Yas’m.”

  “Yas suh. Sho nuff is a perty day. I, I . . . I thought we’s gone git some rain yesdiddy.”

  “Nah suh. I feels jus’ fine.”

  He had learned a language and a protocol dictated by fear and necessary for survival. Like many older black people, he suffered from a chronic reflex racism. Having heard tell of—or witnessed, or experienced—so many horrible things done at the hands of white folks, he feared most and trusted few of them.

  As soon as the insurance man left, Paul’s irritation bubbled up.

  “That old white man always comin’ ’round heh askin’ questions,” he’d say with a scowl.

  In Gibsland, our racial role-playing was subtle and sophisticated. We had an unspoken understanding: we simply danced around each other, moving to a tune that everyone knew but no one sang—warm smiles sharing space with cold stares, public platitudes dissolving into the ugly things that found voice behind closed doors. If people learned to hate, they also learned to hide it. I never heard or saw anything overtly unpleasant in public. That is, until the first time I was called a nigger.

  I was walking on Main Street and a pickup truck with a flatbed filled with white boys about my age passed by. One of them stood up when he saw me and yelled “Nigger!,” the word trailing off as the truck sped by, salting the space between us with bitterness. We stared at each other until he was out of sight. I was stunned.

  I had always heard the word used collegially, jovially:

  “What up, my nigga?”

  “That nigga crazy!”

  “My nigga, my nerve, my jelly preserve.”

  “Nigga please.”

  As children, we used the word playfully in nursery rhymes, like “Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe,” to solve mini-disputes about who went first, or got the last piece of chicken, or played with the toy next.

  Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,

  Catch a nigga by the toe.

  If he hollers, let him go.

  Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

  You. Are. It.

  And, of course, there was the aunt we called Aunt Nigga, a name we relayed with love and without irony. She was the mother of the other cross-the-line cousin who walked with his wrists turned out.

  I didn’t realize the word was a perfect little weapon when it was in the wrong mouth—a missile that could be launched from the back of a passing truck by one boy at another. I didn’t realize how well it captured and projected loathing and hostility. The only other word that stung as much was “punk.” Niggers and punks. Punks and niggers—both words people spat out more than said, both now aimed at me, both hurting me more than I thought I could be hurt.

  The next time I heard “nigger” used that way, it came from the only white person in our class, one of the left-behind whites who couldn’t afford to attend one of the all-white academies. She was a Presbyterian, which as far as I could figure meant that she never cut her long hair and always wore long skirts. One Black History Month, the teacher called on her to answer a question. She rose nervously and said, “My daddy told me that I ain’t have to learn nothin’ ’bout no niggers.”

  That didn’t go over well in a room full of black children.

  Hearing that word made me reconsider everything I thought I understood about my life. The hills we drove over on our way to church, the hills that hid the oil—maybe these were the hills that would have been ours if white folks hadn’t taken them from one of my great-grandpas. Or the bad white man who’d forced Great-Grandpa Columbus to choose between the land he’d earned and the woman he loved. The white teachers in Ringgold who’d never tried to reach me when I was drifting away, but instead moved me to the slow class at the first sign of trouble, a class filled with other black children, mostly black boys.

  I thought about how older black people tried to pass a fear of white men on to us. “If you don’t act right, the police gone git you.” “Police” was just a term of art for white men. Sometimes they dispensed with the euphemisms altogether and just said, “That white man is gone git you,” pointing to any white man in sight. You could see the fear in their eyes, like they were remembering things they weren’t saying. It was real, the fear was. And that is what they hated, being afraid.

  I was even afraid of white Santa Claus. My father’s sister, the one prone to wild exaggeration and flat-out lying who had married the almost-white preacher with the almost-white hair, convinced me one Christmas that Santa came in the night and blew black pepper into the eyes of bad little boys. And she said he’d told her that he planned to do that to me. As I started to cry, she started to laugh. From then on, I tensed up whenever I saw the white man in the red suit with the black pepper.

  I could easily have followed these racial cues: that white people were to be feared, to be kept at a distance, to be fed with a long-handled spoon. I began to internalize this fear. I sometimes felt like the monkey in the cage at the potato farm—familiar, but strangely different, constrained as a lesser being to a small world within the greater white one. And when white people looked at me, I often felt they were doing so with jack-o’-lantern smiles—frozen and hollow with a dim light behind the eyes. I could have quietly taken my place in the covert racial warfare playing out all around me.

  Luckily, I was saved from that fate by Big Mama’s relationship with a white family she worked for in Arkansas—the Beales. Mrs. Sophia and Mr. Beale had a child,
a boy named Cody, who had an unruly mane of sun-bleached hair. Big Mama was their housekeeper—the kind of work my mother vowed she’d never do. Big Mama also worked in the Beales’ gas station and convenience store, strategically positioned at the crossroads where the road from the Bend met the highway.

  Mr. Beale’s store was the main store in the area, and it provided a comfortable living for his family. To me, it was an air-conditioned paradise of fats, salts, and sugars—Vienna sausages and potted meat, pork rinds and spicy peanuts, pickled cucumbers, pickled pigs’ feet, and pickled eggs.

  Mr. Beale was a rugged man and a heavy drinker. Many days he drove me around with him as he attended to his business. He had a beat-up pickup with a cooler full of beer next to him on the seat, from which he’d crack open fresh brews en route. He also cursed a lot. He called everything a “sumbitch.” Dishonorable people, stubborn cattle, mud-stuck tires, whatever: “That sumbitch!” But he was also the kind of man who valued hard work above all else, seeing it as the best judge of character. Maybe that was why he seemed to hold Big Mama—and Jed—in high esteem.

  In a way, Big Mama’s relationship to the Beales was one of the most stereotypical of Southern life: a poor black woman keeping house for a well-off white family. But that fact never manifested itself to me in their behavior. I was too young to think more critically about the complexities. To me, the Beales treated our family like their own, and vice versa, so that was how I saw all of us: as one big family. Once a white man came into the store while Big Mama was behind the deli counter. He looked at her and told Mr. Beale, “I don’t want no nigger cuttin’ my meat.” Without missing a beat, Cody, who was just a boy at the time, let the man know in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t want Big Mama to slice his meat, he wasn’t getting any. Cody showed the man the door.