Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  “Dunno,” said Antoine. “Main thing now François. He on probation already. We gotta be there for François. You be with us, right? François, he be counting on you. I see you talk to the cop. What you say, bro?”

  “Uhh… I say… I say François say something in Creole and everybody laugh and Estevez, he get François in a headlock,” said Philippe.

  “You sure?”

  “Uhhh… yeah.”

  “François do something first?”

  “Uhhh… no. I not see him do something first,” said Philippe.

  “You only say No,” said Antoine. “Nome sayin’? Nobody care what you don’ see. François say he need you, man. Only his bloods, his crew not enough. He be counting on you, man. Be bad if you not sure. You see, man. Nome sayin’? This be the time you show you bro—or you low. Unnerstan’?” He said “bro” and “low” in English.

  “I unnerstan’,” said Philippe.

  “Good. You be good blood, man! You be good blood!” Antoine said with what came close to glee. “You know Patrice? André? Jean—fat Jean? Hervé? They good blood, too!” More glee. “They not in the crew, neither. But they know, man! They know what Estevez did to François. They don’t ‘if I’m correct’ and all that shit. They good blood!” Glee seemed to turn into laughter aimed at Philippe. “Like you, bro!”

  Professor Lantier looked at his daughter. She didn’t understand what they were talking about, they were speaking Creole so fast. That was a good sign. Creole really was a foreign language to her! He and Louisette had steered her right! That was not une Haitian—in his mind he pronounced it the French way, “oon-eye-ee-tee-onnnh”—sitting so properly in that little chair. She was French. That was what she was by blood, an essentially French young woman of le monde, polished, brilliant, beautiful—then why did his eye fix upon those little fatty-fibrous mounds on either side of her nostrils?—poised, elegant, or elegant when she wanted to be.

  In a low voice, practically under his breath, he said to his mercifully Creole-free daughter, “Something happened at Lee de Forest today. That’s what I get out of it. In some class of his.”

  The two boys were heading in the direction of his office, with Antoine doing all the talking.

  So Lantier himself gets up and opens the door and says cheerily, in French, “Philippe! I thought I heard your voice! You’re home early today!”

  Philippe looked as if he had just been caught… doing something not very nice at all. So did his friend, Antoine. Antoine was a tough-looking boy, heavy but not too fat. Right now he had the tense expression of someone extremely anxious to head in another direction. What a mess the two of them were!… jeans pulled down so low on their hips you couldn’t help but see their loud boxer shorts… obviously the lower and louder, the better. The pants of both boys ended in puddles of denim on the floor, all but obscuring their sneakers, which had Day-Glo strips going this way and that… both in too-big, too-loose T-shirts whose sleeves hung down over their elbows and whose tails hung outside the jeans, but not far enough to obscure the hideous boxer shorts… both with bandannas around their foreheads bearing “the colors” of whatever fraternal organization they thought they belonged to. Their appearance—as American Neg as it could get—made Lantier’s flesh crawl. But he was forced to keep a cheerful demeanor clamped upon his face and said to Antoine, in French, “Well, Antoine… it’s been too long since you last paid us a visit. I was just asking Philippe, how is it that you’re out of school so early today?”

  “Papa!” gasped Ghislaine in a low voice.

  Lantier immediately regretted saying that. Ghislaine couldn’t believe that her father, whom she admired so much, would do such a thing as toy with this poor clueless fifteen-year-old just to see the baffled expression on his face. Her father knew Antoine didn’t understand one word of French, the official language of the country he had grown up in until he was eight. Her father merely wanted to demonstrate to her and Philippe what a Special Needs—the public schools’ euphemism—what a Special Needs brain this poor black-as-midnight boy had. After all, it was not as if he ever asked for bad blood. He was born afflicted with it. She couldn’t believe her father had ended with a question to rub it in a little further. Antoine couldn’t very well just stand there nodding. He was obliged to say something; “I don’t speak French,” at the very least. Instead, the boy was standing there with his mouth hanging open.

  The look on Ghislaine’s face made Lantier feel guilty. He wanted to make up for it by saying it so Antoine could understand it, and extra-cheerily to show he wasn’t trying to make fun of him. So he said it in English. He was damned if he was going to descend into the muck of Creole just to make life pointlessly easy for some fifteen-year-old with bad blood, but he did slather great gouts of cheer over his words and so many exaggerated grins ::::::Merde! Am I overdoing it? Is this big lout going to think I’m mocking him?:::::: He finally wound up with—in English—“… just asking Philippe, how come you’re out of school so early today?”

  Antoine turned toward Philippe for a clue. Philippe moved his head back and forth ever so slowly and unobtrusively. Antoine didn’t seem to get any clear message from that semaphore… an awkward silence. He finally said, “They jes say… They jes say… I’unno… They jes say school close early today.”

  “They didn’t say why?”

  This time Antoine turned a good ninety degrees, so he could look at Philippe head-on for a sign… any sign to tell him how to answer this one. But semaphores failed Philippe, and Antoine had to fall back on his old standby, “I’unno.”

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  He obviously didn’t want to say why, which interested Lantier… mildly… But quite aside from that, Antoine looked to Lantier like a fifteen-year-old Haitian boy trying to do an imitation of a pseudo-ignorant American Neg. Antoine finally muttered, “Naw.”

  Naw… what a performance!… What a perfect mime he was! He twisted all the way around toward Philippe again. His entire posture, his slumped-over back, his arms hanging slackly down by his hips, was a semaphore for “Help!”

  And what is that? At the base of his skull Antoine’s hair had been buzzed very short… and then carefully shaved down to bare skin, to create the letter C and, an inch away, the number 4.

  “What does the C4 mean?” said Lantier, still absorbed in his cheery act. “I just saw a C and a 4 on the back of your head.”

  Ghislaine gasped out another “Papahhh!”

  So Lantier smiled at Antoine in a way meant to project friendly curiosity. It didn’t. Now he could hear Ghislaine gasp out an “Ohhhhh, God.”

  Antoine turned about and gave Lantier a look of live hatred.

  “Don’t mean nothing. They’s jes some us, we in the C4”—duh see-fo’—“at’s all.”… Gravely humiliated… furious. And you best not be asking me any more about it.

  Lantier didn’t know what to say. Obviously he shouldn’t push the C4 button anymore. So he turned to Philippe. “You are home pretty early…”

  “You, too,” said Philippe. It was an uppity snarl, designed to impress Antoine, no doubt. It impressed Lantier, all right… as unforgivably, irredeemably impudent, an insult too challenging to let slide…

  But Ghislaine said, “Ohhhh, Papa…” This time the intonation she gave Papa begged him: Just let it go. Don’t dress down Philippe in front of Antoine.

  Lantier stared at the two boys. Antoine was black… in every way. But Philippe still had a chance. He was as light as he himself was… just a shade too dark to pass… but not too dark to keep him from achieving an all-but-white persona. What did that require? Nothing unattainable… verbal skill, a refined accent… a slight French accent was perfect for speaking English or Italian, Spanish, even German, Russian—oh, very much Russian… and it wouldn’t hurt if it should happen to recall the Lantiers’ ties to the noble de Lantiers of Normandy those several centuries ago. But Philippe was caught in a strong tide going in exactly the opposite direction. When they first arrived from
Haiti, Haitian boys like Philippe and Antoine had to run a gauntlet, an actual gauntlet! American black boys spotted them immediately and beat them up on the way to school and on the way home. Beat them up! More than once Philippe had come home with welts on his face, contusions. Lantier was determined to step in and do something about it. Philippe begged him not to—begged him! It would only make things worse, Papa. Then he’d really get it. So all the Haitian boys did the same thing. They tried to turn themselves as American black as they could… the clothes, the baggy jeans, the boxer shorts showing… the talk, yo, bro, ho, ain’t, ain’no, homey, mo’vucker, ca’zucca. And now look at Philippe. He had black hair as straight as Ghislaine’s. Whatever he did with it, it would be better than what he did with it now… which was wear it cut about three inches long all over and frizz it to make it look Neg.

  With all these things running through his head, Lantier didn’t realize how long his eyes were fixed upon his son’s face… with disappointment, with the resentful feeling that Philippe was in some way betraying him.

  The sudden silence made the moment intense.

  Philippe was now staring back into Lantier’s face not with mere resentment but with insolence, as Lantier saw it. Antoine no longer looked at him with live hatred, however. He seemed mainly to feel himself backed up in somebody else’s toilet. His eyeballs rolled upward for an instant. He seemed to be looking for some white-robed little person with wings who would fly over and wave a wand and make him disappear.

  It had turned into a Mexican standoff. Here are the enemies staring daggers at each other without moving a muscle or making a sound. Finally…

  “An nou soti la!” Philippe said in Creole to Antoine with his loudest, deepest baritone or, rather, bariteen gang voice (“Let’s get outta here”).

  Both turned their backs upon Lantier without another word and walked across the kitchen doing the pimp roll… and disappeared out the side door.

  Lantier was left speechless in the doorway of his little office. He turned back to his desk and stared at Ghislaine. What was to be done? Why on earth would an essentially bright, handsome, light-skinned Haitian, directly related to the de Lantiers of Normandy, like your brother, want to turn himself into an American Neg? Those too-big baggy pants, for example… the Neg criminals wore them in jail. The jailers weren’t about to go to the trouble of measuring an inmate before giving him clothes. They just gave them clothes that were obviously big enough, which meant they were always too big. The little Negs on the street wore them because they idealized the big Negs in jail. They were their heroes. They were baaaaad. They were fearless. They terrified the American whites and the Cubans. But if it were just the stupid clothes and the ignorant hip-hop music, and the vile Black English, which be primitive to the max, man, that would be one thing. But Haitian boys like your brother imitated stupid, ignorant Neg attitudes, too. That was the real problem. The Negs thought only “pussies” raised their hands in class during class discussions or studied hard for tests or cared about grades or little things like being courteous to teachers. Haitian boys didn’t want to be pussies, either, for God’s sake!—and so they began treating school like a pussy inconvenience, too. And now Philippe regresses from French to Creole. You heard him!—but you’re lucky. You don’t speak it, and you don’t have to bother understanding it… whereas I’m not so lucky. I understand Creole. I have to teach the damned language. What is to be done when it’s time for your brother to go to college? No college will want him, and he won’t want no college. Nome sayin’, man?

  After about a half hour of this, Lantier realized that he and Ghislaine weren’t talking about Philippe—because Ghislaine never got a word in about anything. He was just using her ears as a couple of receptacles into which he could pour his agony and the helplessness he felt… This endless soliloquy of disappointment would not solve anything. It would only depress Ghislaine and make her lose respect for him. An axiom popped into his head: Parents should never confess anything to their children… zero! nothing whatsoever!

  But he couldn’t avoid confessing to himself… in a rising tide of guilt. ::::::What is Philippe’s problem? It’s so obvious, isn’t it. His problem is, I let him go to Lee de Forest. My wonderful Art Deco house happens to fall within a school district whose senior high school is Lee de Forest. I knew it had a… a… a not-very-good reputation, “But how bad can it be?” I kept saying to myself. The truth is, I don’t even begin to have the money to send him to a private school. Every dollar I have goes right into the Art Deco maw of this house, so I can feel as French as I want to be… and of course Philippe buckled under the pressure of the Antoines and the François Duboises. He’s not a tough boy. Of course he feels desperate. Of course he grabs at any shield he can find. Of course he turns Creole. And I let it happen… of course… Oh, God… of course… for me. Then for God’s sake, be a man! Sell it for the sake of your son!… But it’s already too late, isn’t it… House prices in South Florida have dropped 30 percent. The bank would take every dime I got for it, and I’d still owe them money… But underneath all that I get a glimpse of the ogre who lives at the bottom: I can’t give up all this! ::::::

  So he said, on the verge of tears, “Ghislaine, I think… I have uhhh… I need to prepare for tomorrow’s classes, and I think—”

  Ghislaine didn’t let him struggle on. “I’m going into the living room to do some reading for class.”

  Once she left his office, Lantier’s eyes misted over. Obviously she had decided that she had better keep him company a while to make sure he got over this rocky state of mind that was pushing him over the edge.

  Lantier did have a couple of classes to prepare for. One was “The Triumph of the Nineteenth-Century French Novel.” This class was not made up of the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. No classes at Everglades Global University were.

  “Papa, come here! Quick! It’s on TV!” Ghislaine yelled from the living room. “Hurry up!”

  So Lantier hustled out of his office and into the living room and sat down with Ghislaine on the couch—Merde!—the stuffing was coming out the seam of one of the big square pillows he sat on, and he remembered very well how much upholstery cost, and he couldn’t spend that kind of money on a damned couch right now…

  On the television screen that’s the Lee de Forest High School, all right… what a scene… the yowling! the screaming! the chants! A hundred police officers, it looks like, trying to hold back a mob… a mob of dark faces, Negs and every shade of brown, Neg to tan, and in between… they’re yowling and howling, the mob, they’re all young—they look like students, except for a group of black students—no, they can’t be students—they’re more like in their twenties and early thirties, maybe. Scores of squad cars, it seems, with racks of lights on the roofs, flash away in epileptic sequences of red and blue and blinding clear lamps… they’re painful! the bursts of clear light! But that doesn’t keep Lantier from a sliced second of agony over how small and old-fashioned his TV set is compared to the TV sets other people have—plasma, whatever that is, no big hulking box of tubes or whatever’s in there bulging out in back of the screen like an ugly, cheap plastic rump… and everybody else’s is forty-eight inches, sixty-four inches, whatever that measures—sliced and diced that mini-moment and on the screen where all is uproar… a hulking brigade of policemen, a battalion… never saw so many in one place trying to contain a mob of yowling—those are students!—all those young Neg brown and tan young heads with their mouths wide open howling bloody murder from out of their gullets… squad cars all over the place… more racks of roof lights flashing away… The camera, wherever the camera is, focuses more tightly on the action… you can see the Lexan riot visors the policemen have and the Lexan riot shields… a frontline of Neg, brown, mulat, café au lait boys, and une fille saillante comme un boeuf push back against the shields… they look so small, up against the police officers, these yowling high school goslings—

  “Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” (What’s going on?
), Lantier says to Ghislaine. “Pourquoi ne pas nous dire?”(Why don’t they tell us!)

  As if on cue, a woman’s hyper-voice overrides the yowling—you can’t see her—and says, “They apparently want to drive the crowd back far enough—they’ve got to get the teacher—Estevez, we’re told is his name—he teaches civics—they’ve got to get him out of the building and into a police van and place him in a detention—”

  “Estevez!” Lantier said to Ghislaine in French. “Civics class—that’s Philippe’s teacher!”

  “—but won’t say where. Their big concern right now is security. The students were dismissed just about an hour ago. Classes are suspended for the day. But this crowd of students—they refuse to leave the school grounds, and this is an old building that was not built thinking about security. Police are afraid students will try to reenter the building, and that’s where Estevez is being held.”

  Lantier said, “Good luck getting him out of there! The police can’t hold back a mob of kids like that but so long!”

  “Papa,” said Ghislaine, “this is a re-broadcast! All this happened five or six hours ago, it must be.”

  “Ahhh… yes,” said Lantier. “That’s true, that’s true…” He stared directly at Ghislaine. “But Philippe didn’t say anything about… any of this!” Before Ghislaine could respond, the TV voice rose… “I think they’re gonna try to bring him out now. That small door there, at ground level—it’s opening!”

  The camera zoomed in… looked like a utility door. As it opened it created a small shadow on the concrete surface… Out came a police officer looking this way and that. Then two more… and two more… and yet two more… then three came squeezing out of the little—no, they were not three policemen but two policemen gripping the upper arms of a burly, balding, light-skinned man with his hands behind his back, apparently handcuffed together. Even though the hair on his pate was getting scarce, he must not have been more than thirty-five. He walked with his chin high but was blinking at a terrific rate. His chest bulged out against a white shirt whose shirttails seemed to be hanging outside his pants.