Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read online

  At our meeting, the recruiter—a white man—gave me the “Your People Need You” talk, which sounded a little odd coming from him. “LSU doesn’t need you! Louisiana Tech doesn’t need you! Grambling needs you!” And, at the time, I still believed that the baby needed me. So, after some deliberation, I submitted and accepted the call. I would go to Grambling and stay close to Gibsland.

  I went to college before most other freshmen arrived, enrolling for the summer session that began in June. I declared a double major, in English—because I liked writing—and prelaw—because I figured being a lawyer would be the best route to becoming a politician. I took three classes that summer and got one of the most coveted work-study positions on campus—in the admissions office—because one of the women who worked there had grown up down the street from the House with No Steps. Like everyone else on that street, she even now called me Char’esBaby.

  There were a few other students working in the office, including a boy named Al-David, though folks called him Chopper for some reason that I couldn’t figure. He was a golden boy—in both color and concept—whose hair was a surfeit of soft waves and whose eyes were those of a person the world had treated kindly. But there was something about him—in the smile that didn’t quite stretch to its full width or the gaze that stayed locked on you one beat too long—that hinted at a cruel streak.

  The admissions office was in Adams Hall, the president’s building. Unbeknownst to me, this was where the cool local kids worked. Outwardly, I was a high-performing hick with a self-possessed manner—an underdog they didn’t mind rooting for. Inside was hiding the boy who dug “treasure” from junkyards, ate dirt, and was shadowed by betrayal.

  Often, without being fully aware of it, I withdrew into myself, silence falling over me like the dark on a moonless night. Some folks read that silence as burgeoning conceit. I found this curious. I also realized that their misreading did the same thing to them that Alphonso’s looks had done to folks in elementary school: it caused them to search themselves for flaws because they assumed that’s what I was doing. In this way, a quirk became an armament. I began to pretend that these silent spells were purposeful.

  And I began to suffer a common social climber’s delusion: feeling that I was from poverty but not of it, that I had been born out of sorts with my ambitions, that my struggle to correct the imbalance was a righteous pursuit—that I was not moving out of my element, but into it.

  Chopper and I spent the days cracking jokes and talking basketball and getting food. He wasn’t just cool, he was smart. Exceedingly smart. Brilliant even. With him I enjoyed the experience of not only matching wits but being outwitted.

  All I knew of Chopper outside the admissions office was that he was the older brother of a Grambling High School point guard I’d considered a rival—a boy named Brandon—and that he dated one of the most beautiful girls on campus. And that he was a member of one of the school’s four fraternities—the one everyone called the “Pretty Boys” because they seemed to attract and admit candidates who were boy-band handsome, the ones who dressed well and moved smoothly, the ones girls cooed over. The other fraternities hewed to similarly simplistic stereotypes: rowdy boys, nerdy boys, or country boys.

  Near the end of the summer session, I came to understand the racial undertones of what the white recruiter had told me to secure my commitment. Conversations about history, race, equality, and justice with Grambling teachers and students lit a fire in me and helped to mold my view of myself while allowing me to bend the views of other students. I believed then that not only did Grambling need me, but I needed Grambling.

  When the fall semester began, the campus was flooded with students, nearly half of them—three thousand—freshmen, many of whom would drop out before the next year. I had graduated in a class of about thirty students, and soon realized that at Grambling I was going to be just one of many, a status change I refused to accept. I couldn’t go back to being barely visible. So I decided to do one of the things I had always done to stand out: I would run for class president.

  The problem was that I didn’t have much money to finance the campaign. So I put on my only suit and went to the only bank in Gibsland and asked to speak to the president. After waiting a few minutes, his secretary waved me in. I told him what I wanted to do and that I needed help financing it. He smiled politely and nodded, saying he was proud that a local boy would have such an ambition and the gumption to ask him for a campaign contribution. He had one of the tellers give me a few hundred dollars and wished me well.

  I used some of the money to buy plywood and paint, to make billboards to place around campus. With the rest I made flyers and cards. I adopted the design from my favorite T-shirt, one with Martin Luther King on it, replacing his image with mine.

  A friend from Gibsland, who had been a trainer on my high school basketball team, helped me put the flyers everywhere we could think of. We slid one under every door in the freshman dorms, stuck one on every mirror in the bathrooms, and taped one inside every bathroom stall at eye level. Every evening I went to a wall on the side of the cafeteria always lined with freshmen. I would start at one end of the line and introduce myself to every person, asking for their vote, working my way to the other end.

  Some laughed at my cheap suit, the one I kept remixing all week with different shirts and ties: “Is that polyester?” Some teased me about the flyers in the bathroom: “Dude, I can’t even take a dump without seeing yo’ damned face.” Some tired of my persistence: “I already got a flyer.” But most admired me for trying hard and continuing to smile regardless of what they said.

  When election day came, I won by a landslide.

  Moments after the results were announced, a sports car pulled up and Miss Grambling stepped out. She was the college queen, elected the previous spring. Her name was Jackie, and she happened to be the daughter of the president of the school.

  She was strikingly beautiful—flawless brown skin, fine sandy hair arranged in a rising crown of curls, a natural dark smokiness around her eyes that other girls tried to create with makeup. She congratulated me and told me that I needed to hurry to a department store in the town of Ruston, three miles east of Grambling, to be measured for suits that she had chosen for the four class presidents to wear.

  One of the most public functions of each class president was to escort his class queen to football games as part of Miss Grambling’s court. Her escort was traditionally the Student Government Association president, but this year that president was a girl, so both girls were escorted by their boyfriends.

  The football stadium was named for the head coach, Eddie Robinson, who a few years before had become the winningest coach in college football history. It was a sunken stadium, carved out of the top of a hill, with sounds flowing up and over the rim—the crunch of shoulders, the roar of fans, the funky rhythms of Grambling’s famous marching band—like lava from the caldera of a volcano.

  In front of the band, in the first row, were the Orchesis dancers: girls in sequined leotards and heeled pumps sashaying a fusion of jazz, modern, and dirty dance.

  The crowd roared, waving streamers and banners, chanting to the tune of the band:

  G S . . . G S . . . G S . . . G S . . . U,

  (Pause)

  I thought you knew!

  The fans of the visiting team often joined in, but with a slight twist. They filled in our pause with a purple phrase:

  G S . . . G S . . . G S . . . G S . . . U,

  (AIN’T SHIT!)

  I thought you knew!

  And back and forth it went from us to them.

  Miss Grambling’s court made its entrance midway through the first quarter and slowly walked in descending class order, presidents and queens locking arms, down the stadium stairs to the front row.

  At halftime, after the band had performed, we walked once around the field and up to the president’s skybox on the other side of the stadium. There we were introduced to notable alumni, wealthy donors, and the
occasional visiting celebrity. Our job was to be gracious and to represent the best of the Grambling student—popular boys and pretty girls, all smart—to loosen donors’ pockets.

  From the first time I met the other three class presidents, they could talk about only one thing: they all wanted to pledge the Pretty Boys’ fraternity. I didn’t really know what it meant to pledge a fraternity, and I had no desire to join a secret society, living as I did a secret solitude. But I soon got caught up in their enthusiasm. They made it clear that boys in fraternities—and those who wanted to be—dismissed people who didn’t want to pledge as GDIs, goddamned independents.

  The presidents also pointed out that every twentieth-century black man worth his salt had belonged to one of the four black fraternities on campus: Thurgood Marshall, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King. George Washington Carver, Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and Huey P. Newton. Benjamin Mays, Percy Sutton, and Johnnie Cochran. James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Michael Jordan. Everyone.

  At Grambling the Pretty Boys ruled, they said. It was Chopper’s fraternity as well as the university president’s.

  There were two kinds of boys who wanted to be Pretty Boys, those seeking to enshrine their swagger and those seeking to compensate for their lack of it.

  The class presidents lacked it. And they were so obsessed with the notion of inclusion-as-completion that they couldn’t see that it was their thirst that undid them. Still, they spoke of it the way infertile couples speak of babies: beaming with hope but pregnant with disappointment, yearning for something that was not to be.

  The Pretty Boys were supposed to be ladies’ men—like Chopper. The presidents weren’t. They were all short and wonky, and none of the three had a girlfriend as best I could tell. They were about as different from Chopper as boys could be, the kind of boys I would have steered clear of if the choice were mine.

  But their excitement was contagious. Furthermore, the other presidents told me that the Pretty Boys’ motto was “Achievement in Every Field of Human Endeavor,” and that appealed to me. If wanting to be in that fraternity was good enough for all of them, and for Chopper, I figured it was good enough for me.

  I believed, too, that I had advantages that the other presidents didn’t. I wasn’t a pretty boy, or ladies’ man either, but I was tall and had been a high school basketball star. In male culture that carried weight. And, since back in grade school, when Russell had anointed me and Alphonso accepted me, I had been one of the popular boys. I knew how that world worked—what popular people thought about and worried about, what they valued and what they feared. I also had artistic skills the fraternity could use. And I knew Chopper, whom the members of the fraternity lionized.

  The class presidents told me that the only way to “make line,” to become a member of the pledge group, was to visit each of the members, “the Brothers,” at their homes and to lobby them for their votes. In fact, they had notebooks with all the Brothers’ names and addresses and a tally of how often they had visited each one.

  I told them that the next time they visited someone, I wanted to go. With the other presidents I visited all the Brothers, most several times, except the one I refused to visit, Nash, a square boy with a thick neck and bushy brows that sat like two rolls of quarters over hazel-green eyes. They were the kind of eyes that stirred up fear in folks. He was all muscle and anger and trouble. Nash didn’t fit the Pretty Boy image.

  He was also the fraternity’s most notorious hazer, known for paddling prospective pledges as a prerequisite for his advocacy and his vote. I was adamant that I would not be hazed before I was sure I had made the pledge group. In truth, I was still trying to reconcile myself to the idea of being hazed at all. It seemed such a foreign concept—submitting oneself to beatings by boys who would call you brother.

  I wanted to push the thought of it as far off as possible.

  The first semester, to save money, I lived off campus in a rented trailer with my brother Robert. But for the spring semester I decided to live on campus, for two reasons. First, if I made line, I didn’t want any of the Brothers coming to the trailer during pledging and bothering Robert; and second, because many of the freshmen felt that the president of the class should live on campus like most other freshmen.

  Because of my grades and my scholarship, I qualified for housing in the honors dorm, but I turned it down. I told the housing office to put me in the freshman dorm: if the freshmen wanted me to live on campus, I was going to live with them. It was the worst dorm on campus, Pinchback Hall, named for the man who during Reconstruction became the first and only black governor of Louisiana. Perfect for me, the boy who wanted to be the next one.

  But someone in the housing office had an odd sense of humor.

  On move-in day, I walked into my assigned room. It was dark and filled with the acrid odor of an unwashed body and unwashed clothes. Before me was a boy: shiny and dark and covered by rivulets of raised veins. His shirtless body cut a silhouette against the light of the small window behind him. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could make out the contours of his face. It had the serious look of someone whom joy had abandoned and trouble found. Like Chester, but without the smile.

  He introduced himself, “Pookie,” as we appraised each other. Neither of us spoke, but physiognomic judgments passed between us, embedded in glares of disapproval. His judgment of me: sweet. Mine of him: bitter. Without prompting, he began to tell his story. He had recently been released from prison. He said that his mother, who worked in the district attorney’s office in his hometown, was the person who had him put away.

  The way he told the story was not the way you talk to make a friend but rather to mark a space. He wanted to register the room as his, the way a dog pisses on a post or growls a lesser dog away from a bone. It didn’t work, but I recognized the effort and resented it. It was a form of aggression, and I didn’t knuckle under to aggression. I was thin, but I wasn’t weak.

  We were as different as two people could be. I could have stayed in the room and battled with him for dominance, but that seemed a waste of time and energy. I was the freshman class president trying to make a pledge line. So I went back to the housing office and demanded a room change.

  They switched me to a room with a brawny Cajun boy who liked to cook rice and beans on a hot plate. He was easygoing and kept to himself, staying out of my way as I stayed out of his. Still, every time Pookie saw me on campus, he’d yell “Roommate!” in a sardonic tone. It seemed to be his way of never letting me forget what he thought he’d done: scared me off.

  That semester, I took a freshman writing class, one with a couple of hundred students. One of our assignments was to write a personal essay. The day before the assignment was due, still uninspired, I stayed up all night, drinking Dr Pepper, taking NoDoz, and writing on my electric typewriter about the only thing I could think to write: the day I was baptized. As the sun rose and time for class approached, I was just finishing. I snatched the last page out of the typewriter and dashed off to class. I turned in the assignment without ever reading it over, just hoping that I wouldn’t fail.

  In a couple of weeks the professor had graded all the papers. In class he said, “One of these essays really stood out, so I thought I’d take this class period to read it to you.” I was barely paying attention until he began to read. Then I perked up. He was reading my essay. The class, seemingly rapt, listened until he was done, then burst into applause. I was bursting with pride.

  The professor returned everyone’s essay but mine, then asked me to meet him in his office after class. There he asked, “What’s your major?” I told him that I had a double major in English and prelaw and planned to go to law school. He prodded, “So, what are you going to do with an English major if you don’t go to law school? Teach?” He said it like a man unhappy with his job. I didn’t have an answer, but I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher. He said, “Why don’t you double major in mass communications and prelaw? Jour
nalism and English are not that different. And that way, if you don’t go to law school, at least you’ll have a profession you’ll like.”

  His reasoning made sense to me. The love of newspapers I’d absorbed from my mother was reinforced in high school when our 4-H Club adviser took us to visit the offices of the Bienville Democrat—the parish newspaper published in nearby Arcadia—and we got to typeset and print our names on actual newsprint. I wrote for the high school paper and even sent letters to the editor at the Shreveport Times, one of which they published—my first foray into opinion journalism. Writing and newspapers were a natural part of me, so I switched majors. I also joined the college newspaper, the Gramblinite.

  It was a good thing I’d settled my major, because soon afterward I’d be concentrating on only one thing. The Brothers voted, and I made the pledge group—with Chopper’s endorsement and over Nash’s objection—along with sixteen other boys. None of them were the other presidents.

  The night the Brothers let the boys know they had made the line and rounded everyone up, I was nowhere to be found. That’s because I was an hour away, on a stage in Shreveport, in a military jacket and tights, performing with the Dance Theater of Harlem.