Black Boy White School

by Brian F. Walker

  He dressed quietly. It was the first day of classes, the official beginning of his Belton career. Now was the time for khakis and loafers, time to find if MLK Junior High had taught him anything worth knowing. If he was sharp enough to hold his own with the rich and privileged, it might make his time at Belton a little easier. If he wasn’t, then they would probably send him back home. And that would be fine with Anthony, too.

  Brody farted and Anthony took one last quick look in the mirror, reluctantly shook his roommate awake, and then hurried out the door. The hallway was filling with dazed freshman boys, wrapped in towels and heading to the showers.

  He went through the dormitory’s double doors and sat on the front steps. It was cold, and frost had turned the grass white. If this was Maine in early September, then Anthony didn’t want to be around in February. The doors opened behind him, and someone called him by the wrong name, telling him to go make up his bed.

  “All right, man,” Anthony said, but didn’t move.

  Zach sighed. “Come on, Tony, don’t be a smart-ass little freshman. Do it now, so I can go to breakfast.”

  “Go on, I ain’t stopping you. And quit calling me Tony, bitch. That’s not my name.”

  Zach stared for a few seconds with his mouth hanging open. Then he turned around and stormed back into the dorm. He was probably telling Mr. Hawley, but Anthony didn’t care. Until Zach learned how to show respect, the two of them were going to have problems.

  Anthony took his time but finally went back inside, made his bed, and then headed to breakfast. He noticed Paul and Khalik walking ahead of him and quickly caught up. When they saw the black girl sitting alone outside the dining hall, the three of them walked even faster. Paul sat down next to her, and Anthony stood on the other side. She looked like a young Beyoncé and her hair smelled like citrus fruit.

  “Excuse me?” she said, leaning away from Anthony but into Paul. “This ain’t the A train. Give a sister some room.”

  Paul and Khalik grinned triumphantly and shouted, “Brooklyn!” at the same time.

  Her name was Gloria, and she was a new tenth grader. A death in the family had delayed her arrival, and she had just gotten in the night before. Other than her roommate and a few other girls in her dorm, the three boys were the only people she’d talked to.

  “Well, don’t get your hopes up,” Khalik said happily. “As far as black people go, you pretty much found all of us.”

  “Not everybody,” she said, and smiled to herself. “George Fuller goes to school here, too, right?”

  Khalik dribbled and then shot an invisible basketball. “You know Big G? Planet Brooklyn strikes again, ya heard?”

  “Well, we ain’t seen him yet,” Paul said in a voice that was suddenly deep. “But that’s why I came here, to help my man win a championship.”

  “Me, too,” Khalik added, dribbling the ball again.

  “What about you, baby?” Paul continued. “You got any game? ’Cause I can teach you.”

  Gloria stood and looked down at the top of his head. Paul stood, too, but still had to look up to her. “Don’t worry, little fella,” she said. “I got enough game for both of us.”

  Anthony suddenly felt shorter than usual, and he was tired of being on the outside looking in. “Wish they had them some football at this school,” he offered. “Now that’s my sport, right there.”

  Gloria looked back and forth between Paul and Khalik, and then settled her gaze on Anthony. “You wishin’ they had dem some footbawl?” she said. “Where you from? Alabama?”

  Anthony’s face got warm, but he kept his voice even. “I’m from Cleveland,” he said. “You know, Ohio?”

  She rolled her eyes and said, “More like Slow-hio.” Everyone laughed, including Anthony, who would have let the beautiful girl insult him every day of the week.

  They went inside the dining hall and spotted George almost right away. He was huge and sitting at a table in the back of the room, along with another black boy and one that looked Puerto Rican. “Why does he have to be so damn fine?” Gloria said, and touched Anthony’s shoulder.

  “I don’t know,” he said, feeling suddenly jealous and reckless at the same time. “Let’s go on over there and ask him.” Anthony was pulling her along before she could answer. Paul and Khalik trailed behind them, whispering to each other. When they got close to the table, the older boys looked up. Anthony cleared his throat and introduced himself. “W’sup, man, I’m Ant Jones. You must be George, right?” He extended a palm, and the biggest boy slapped it.

  “Nice to meet you,” George said, but he was looking at Gloria. The other boys at his table were looking at her, too.

  “This is Gloria,” Ant continued, and then motioned to the other boys standing behind them. “This one right here is Paul. The other one is Khalik. They’re all from Brooklyn, just like you, I guess.”

  Paul and Khalik quickly slapped George’s hand, while Gloria shyly smiled. “How you doing?” she said, and then looked at the floor.

  “I’m good, baby girl,” George said, spreading his legs. “Especially right now.” He grinned and she looked down again, trying to hide her happiness. “So you’re from Brooklyn?” George continued. “What part?”

  “Brownsville. What about you?”

  “Bed-Stuy, do or die.”

  Paul hooted and so did Khalik. One of the boys sitting with George did it, too. Anthony frowned, but what else did he expect? “Everywhere I look, another New Yorker.”

  The Latino boy spoke up then and proudly thumped his chest. “No New York here,” he said. “I come straight from the mean streets of Lawrence.”

  “Don’t front, Hector,” the other boy said, laughing. “They don’t even have streets in that part of Massachusetts, mean or nice.”

  “Whatever, Jamaal,” Hector said. “We got streets, and we got Latin Kings, too.” He threw up signs with both of his hands, and Jamaal answered with stiff middle fingers.

  Just then there came a commotion from near the front of the dining hall. Someone had dropped their dishes, and most of the kids were cheering. When he turned his attention back to the table, Anthony saw that George was looking at him. “So where you from, shorty rock?” George asked. “Boston?”

  “Slow-hio,” Khalik answered before Anthony could. “You can hear it in his country-ass voice.”

  Anthony glared. “I can beat that ass slow, too.”

  “Damn,” George said while everyone else laughed. “Remind me not to piss you off. What part of Ohio you from? Cincinnati?”

  “East Cleveland.”

  Jamaal’s face lit up for a second, and he leaned across the table. “East Cleveland? I’m from East New York. You think they’re the same?”

  “I don’t know,” Anthony said, still wanting to punch Khalik. “Probably.”

  George looked back and forth between the two nodding boys and then started to nod himself. “Well, all right, Ant from East Cleveland,” he said, standing up. “Believe it or not, around here you gotta look both ways before you cross the street, just like back at home.” He bent down, put a hand on Gloria’s shoulder, and squeezed. “You let me know if you need anything, baby girl. Day or night.” Walking away, the big junior leaned into Jamaal. “Swear to God, son. She look just like Beyoncé.”

  Anthony’s first class that day was Algebra I, and he left it feeling dizzy. The same thing was true for biology, history, and Spanish. The only exception was English, but even then most of the conversation went over his head. If it wasn’t for the fact that Gloria was in there, Anthony wouldn’t have paid attention to anything.

  And it was all of the talking that confused him the most. Kids had something to say about everything. It didn’t matter if they had the right answer or not, or even if they kept to the topic; the teachers still let kids run their mouths until they ran out of words or until another student interrupted. Anthony had never experienced classes like that. Back at home, kids who asked too many questions usually got shut down or sent to the pr
incipal’s office. And as for the ones who had all the answers, sometimes they got sent to the hospital.

  So Anthony didn’t ask any questions that day or for much of that first week of classes. He rarely raised his hand or made a comment. He felt invisible sometimes, but it didn’t bother him at all. It was like his teachers knew it, too, and agreed to play along. He did finish all of his homework, though, and turned most of it in on time. Brody, on the other hand, was having trouble. If he wasn’t somewhere getting high or kissing Venus, he was strumming his guitar and singing off-key. The only time he worked was during evening study hours, when teachers patrolled the dorms to make sure none of the kids were goofing off.

  On one of those nights, Anthony and Brody sat at their desks, reading an assignment for Mr. Hawley’s English class. It was an old story about a black man in a segregated southern town, where he worked for a white family as a resident handyman. Although he was religious and often turned the other cheek, the man snapped one night and shot a lot of the people, black and white, young and old, he didn’t care who he killed. When he ran out of bullets, the man stopped by a river and waited for the advancing mob. They shot him to pieces and then displayed the riddled body in a store window. Near the end of the story, back inside the dead man’s modest room, it showed his Bible open to a passage about Judgment Day.

  Anthony put down the book and looked at the words from a distance. They were as blurred as the man’s final gesture. He could have escaped but took his boots off instead. It was like the man had wanted to get caught. Anthony glared at Brody, who, by the shocked look on his face, had also finished the reading.

  “Bummer,” Brody said, and flipped the book closed. Then he stared straight ahead and said nothing.

  The next day, before English class, Anthony was apprehensive. Kids were abuzz over the reading and ready to talk about it. Mr. Hawley breezed in and dropped his briefcase on his desk, pulled the cap off a dry-erase marker, and wrote WHY? across the whiteboard.

  Immediately a dozen hands flew up. And although they each expressed it in a dozen different ways, every kid agreed that racism had made the man kill.

  “Interesting . . .” Mr. Hawley stopped behind Brody and put a hand on his shoulder. “Is that what you think, too?”

  Brody shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Mr. Hawley glared. “You guess?”

  “I mean, yes,” Brody said, straightening up. “If you think about the time period, the place of African Americans on the social ladder, the way the white people mistreated and disrespected him in the story, it makes perfect sense that he would get fed up and go postal.”

  “Impressive,” Hawley said, and moved on. Anthony agreed and stared at his roommate, who sat in a sudden patch of sunlight that came in through the window.

  “Anyone disagree?” Hawley asked. No one raised a hand.

  “What about the Bible?” Hawley continued, and started moving again. This time he stopped directly behind Anthony. “Why did the author make the Bible so significant to the killer?”

  The hands on his shoulders made Anthony jump. Hawley was looking down at him and benevolently smiling. “What about you, Mr. Jones? Anything to add?”

  Everyone turned to look at him, and Anthony suddenly felt hot. “I don’t go to church,” he said, and stared at the table. Then he thought about something else from the story that had bothered him. It didn’t have anything to do with the Bible, but it did poke holes in everyone’s theory. Slowly, he raised his hand. “One thing,” Anthony said. “If he was mad at white people for mistreating him, then why did he kill black people, too?”

  Trouble came to the freshman floor on Friday, in the form of a sopping kid named Chris. Upperclassmen had pushed him around and thrown him into a brook, leaving him soaked and smelling awful. It was the latest run-in with the kids from Welch that had Anthony concerned. So far, he had managed not to get in any fights, but he was afraid that someone would test him.

  Later, after Mr. Hawley had checked them all in for the night, Anthony and a few other ninth graders snuck out of their bunks and to Chris’s room, to hear more about what had happened. “They called it Freshman Brook,” Chris explained, not looking at anyone. “Told me not to fight, that it’s sorta like school tradition to throw in the freshman boys . . . At least, that’s what they told me.”

  One of the kids called it hazing, and a lot of them looked relieved. It was an acceptable and expected abuse, part of the prep-school world not mentioned in the catalogs. For Anthony and a few others, though, it didn’t make any sense. He could never just let somebody punk him.

  “I don’t know about that one,” Anthony said, more to himself than anyone else. “Somebody put their hands on me . . . I don’t know.”

  “Right?” Paul added. “That’s some craziness, son.”

  One boy suggested that they go talk to Zach, but Chris shook his head. “Zach was there when it happened,” Chris said. “He didn’t throw me in, but he didn’t stop them, either.”

  At first it was silent but then Nate hissed, “We should go upstairs and put shaving cream on Zach’s face!”

  Brody laughed. “You guys gotta relax. . . . Take a chill pill, on the ill will, while you still . . . feel . . . Shit.” He laughed again, and everyone looked at him.

  “Nate’s right, though,” said a kid named Alex. “We should retaliate, but how? They’re bigger than us, and they have us outnumbered. . . . We need a plan. . . .”

  The boys looked at one another but didn’t speak. Brody broke the silence with a drumroll. “Outweighed and outnumbered . . . delaying our slumber . . . gotta figure a way, to make them all pay, for making Chris swim like a flounder . . .” Someone belched. “Thanks,” Brody continued. “I call that one ‘Ode to a Flying Freshman Fish.’”

  “No offense,” Alex said, “but we’ve strayed off topic. Our mission is to devise a plan, not mock the bard.”

  “The what?”

  “That’s me,” Brody said, bowing humbly. “Brody the bard, at your service. Bringing music to a deeply troubled world.”

  None of the talk made sense to Anthony. Just like in class, the way that he saw things seemed different from everyone else. No wonder he had never heard of hazing before. Back at home, it would get someone shot.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Wait for me,” Paul hollered from behind him. “You act like they’re gonna fire us.”

  “They might,” Anthony said, not slowing down. “Either that, or they’re gon’ put us with maintenance. You feel like unclogging toilets on Saturdays?”

  “Not me, son.” Paul picked up the pace.

  Anthony and Paul had work-study as part of their financial-aid package. They washed dishes three mornings a week to help cover the cost of tuition. After gobbling breakfast, they walked through the swinging doors and into the kitchen, past the ovens, and into the dish room.

  “Turn that down,” Paul groaned, already reaching for an apron. “Don’t wanna hear all that Spanish junk this early in the morning.”

  Unperturbed, Hector turned up the music. “This is Dominican music, Papi. Not Spanish.”

  “I don’t care what it is. You making me feel like I’m in the Bronx.”

  There was laughter, and Hector returned to his station. Anthony wedged his way past George and grabbed an apron from a hook.

  George looked down at Anthony and then at Paul. “Made you late again?”

  Anthony nodded. “Dude be spending more time picking out clothes than my mother.”

  “Don’t worry,” George said, almost a little sadly. “He’ll change.”

  “Change how?”

  Just then one of the cooks came in and gave them all the sign. George raised the big sliding door above the counter until it locked into place, and sounds from the cafeteria rolled in. “Change how?” Anthony repeated.

  “For the better,” George said, and then winked at him. “Don’t you know Belton makes everybody better?”

  There was a steady stream of dirty dish
es and then the rush before morning assembly. The boys emptied bowls and scraped plates, stacked the dirty dining ware into special trays, and then ran them through the machine.

  “Ever notice how there’s only black people in here?” Hector said, leaning against the counter. “Serious, look around. How come don’t no white boys work the kitchen?”

  “’Cause we’re on financial aid,” Anthony said. “We need it and they don’t.”

  “And you ain’t even black, Ricky Martin,” Paul said. “So chill.”

  They laughed and started pulling off their aprons. George stood in the doorway in front of them and cleared his throat. “They have white kids at Belton on financial aid, too,” he said. “They just don’t work in here, with us.” He reminded them of the students in the bookstore and the library. Many of them didn’t even have dark hair. “That’s not the point, though,” he continued. “Look at the percentages. For every one of them that’s doing work-study, you have another three that can buy the whole damn school.”

  Anthony thought about his arrival on campus and all the expensive cars. He’d met kids who dined with diplomats and took family vacations in Greece. But so what? Sometimes he thought all their money made them soft, but that didn’t make Anthony dislike them. George, on the other hand, was scowling. Anthony said, “Are you pissed just because some people here have money?”

  “No,” George snapped. “I’m pissed because we only got a spoonful of students of color, and every one of us is on financial aid. I’m pissed because it makes it look like every black person in the world is poor. And if they think we’re all poor, then they probably think we’re all stupid and eat watermelon, too.”

  “But we are poor, right?”

  George glared at Paul and shook his head, rubbed a big hand down his face, and sighed. “That’s not the point,” he said evenly. “Let me put it another way. Where do you think financial aid comes from? And please don’t say from washing dishes. . . .”