They Come in All Colors

by Malcolm Hansen

  Dad stood in the kitchen, ironing a dark tie, in nothing but a white T-shirt, boxers, and black socks. He was good with an iron—said he’d learned it in the ROTC. Never told me anything about what else he’d learned, though. Mom sat hunched over the kitchen table with a nest of pins and rollers in her hair, blaming the fact that we were running late on all the time it was taking her to fashion my suit coat to fit over my cast.

  My fingertips tingled, and my hand was purple. When I showed Mom, she answered by telling me that we had no ice in the house and to talk to Dad about fixing the freezer, and then took hurriedly to the back door. She returned with my wind-blown button-down, snatched the iron from Dad, and began ironing it, all the while quizzing me about all that was going on in town.

  I held my hand up over my head because that seemed to relieve some of the pressure.

  All I know is that someone broke into Mister Abrams’s pool. And the police are still trying to figure out who did it. And that everyone in town is betting their bottom dollar it was Toby—coloreds included.

  How can you be so sure?

  Derrick.

  Mom wasn’t surprised. She seemed to know Derrick better than she let on. Anyway, my fingers felt a little better. At least I could wiggle them a little. Mostly my middle finger, which I was starting to think was the most important. That warm, fuzzy feeling was making me bold.

  I’m guessing because he was the only colored ever close enough to it to ever actually have a shot at getting his whole body inside, not counting Aurelia. Or Edna. Or Mister Hardee, for that matter. But they’re too old, probably. Besides, Edna never left the laundry room, and Mister Hardee was always out front, clipping the hedges. But what really gets my goat is that Pop’s the only damned person in town who’s still upset about it and won’t let me go back. We ran into Derrick and the guys last week, and they were on their way there. Why, I bet they’d probably been swimming in there the whole time, splashing around and having the time of their lives.

  Mom was standing at the ironing board, talking with her back to me. Huey, that pool’s done for. I assure you, it’s a ghost town back there right now. Stanley may as well fill it in with dirt and plant petunias. Because they’re never gonna find who did it, and no one except maybe a few kids is ever stepping foot in that pool again until they do. That’s just how people are around here. It’s Blakely or bust for all of Akerburg’s swimmers from here on out, I can promise you that. So you may as well just put it out of your mind and forget it.

  I kicked the table leg so hard I nearly busted my toe. Mom set the iron down and held the suit coat out. I was still trying to wiggle my cast into a shirtsleeve as stiff as an envelope.

  If you ask me, it was a harebrained idea for Mister Abrams to have ever built that pool in the first place. That pool was never anything but a place for fat, lazy old white men to twiddle their thumbs and sip drinks as they chatted about the weather in between spraying their crops. If you ask me, your father’s silly insistence on giving you swim lessons there when he knew good and well we didn’t have the money for it is partly to blame for this mess. I don’t give a hoot about four generations of Fairchilds having been varsity swimmers, either. It’s as much to blame as all the rest of it. Never did get his money back, either. My word. Opportunity of a lifetime, my A-S-S. And the stupidity of paying up front! I never will understand that. Will you just look at the fix it’s gotten all of us in? Maybe if people like him hadn’t, Toby would still be alive.

  I’d been bracing for Mom to say those words ever since we came home from the pool that day ten dollars poorer and with nothing to show for it but a bruised ego and a canceled swim lesson. A big part of me was relieved that she’d finally come out and said it. I hopped over to her, dragging my suit coat behind me.

  I’m sorry, Mama. I really am. I don’t care about that pool or swimming. Don’t care if I never learn to swim. I’m done thinking about that pool. Done. Done. And done.

  XVIII

  WHEN MOM ASKED WHY I hadn’t ever invited Zuk over, I told her that I wanted to wait for our circumstances to improve. When my second year at Claremont came and went and we were still living in the Jacob Riis Houses, she said that maybe it was time for me to swallow my pride and invite him over anyway.

  The problem was that I was in the midst of creating a persona at Claremont that bore no resemblance to the reality of my life in the projects. Claremont was changing me: having been introduced to the possibilities that came with erudition, I began speaking, acting, and even dressing differently. In the short span of two years, I was hobnobbing with the distinguished alumni, colleagues, and friends in attendance at our quarterly meet and greets. There was the artist M. C. Escher and Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the new World Trade Center towers being built downtown. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations was there once. My favorite had been Professor Barnard, who had recently performed the world’s first successful heart transplant. He stopped by on a visit from South Africa, and stood beside the buffet table munching on cheese and crackers, telling me about how he’d hummed Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 to steady his hands during the procedure. He wiped his lips on the back of his hand, took a swig of wine, and said every surgeon did it. Not to that particular song, of course, but they all had their own personal please-God-help-me-not-fuck-up-this-one song. He chuckled. That was exactly what he called it. The acronym swooped over my head when he read it back to me, perhaps because I was thunderstruck. The whole idea of the world’s leading heart surgeon having someone’s heart pulsing in his hand as he hummed like a kid gluing his model plane together—fuck. That little piece of trivia felt like a gift. It brought the most historic medical procedure the world had ever known so close to me that I could practically smell it myself. For a second, that beating heart was right there in my hands and I knew deep down that maybe I could do something cool like that one day, too.

  Of course, I brought every bit of insight I culled from those gatherings home with me. My newfound presumption of equal standing in my relationship with Mom was alternately troubling to her and the source of immense pride. What Dad had withheld from me, Claremont seemed to be holding out to me with an open hand. I seemed to be in store for something truly special, and the last thing I wanted to do was to let my guard down. So no, I wasn’t in a hurry to surrender my meticulously crafted persona only to become universally known, reductio ad ignominia, as the kid who schlepped in on the 6 train from the projects every day.

  By my third year, I realized that something had to give. I told Mom that I was open to the idea of having Zuk over in principle. I suggested a neutral venue, perhaps something unassuming, like a pizzeria over near Tompkins Square Park. That was sort of in my neighborhood. At least we could walk there. It wasn’t a well-to-do area by any stretch of the imagination, but it was becoming artsy, which lent it an aura of acceptability. But none of that would do for Mom. She desired nothing short of hara-kiri, or, as she called it, authenticity.

  She wouldn’t stop trying to convince me that it was worth doing, and her constant badgering endured past midterms and continued through the Easter recess, at which point she lured me to some storefront church uptown on the promise of finding God. Who apparently lives up in Harlem. And as a preacher splattered his faith over the unoccupied chairs in the front row, she sat beside me with the big, bulbous afro that she only ever wore uptown, pestering me under her breath until she’d worn my defenses down to a nub. I was sitting on a foldout chair in the back, breathing in the frankincense wafting in from the street vendors outside, listening to the steady beat of African drums in the distance, and watching the men in full-length tunics and bow ties passing down 125th Street greeting each other with as-salaam alaikum when Mom whispered in my ear, What’s the worst that can happen?

  Poor Mom. After two and a half years, she still didn’t comprehend what it meant to be a seventh grader at Claremont Prep. Mayor Lindsay’s son wasn’t thought sufficiently pedigreed to warrant admission that fall, which was a sour
ce of tremendous pride to the rest of us. We despised the mayor’s antiwar rhetoric. Several notable alumni were on the board at Lockheed, and military conflict was good business. We’d talk about it in the restroom while drying our hands and fixing our hair in the mirror. Not the military-industrial complex, but Mayor Linday’s ragtag son. And even as I joked with the others about that poor SOB who’d had to settle for the Dutching School, I knew perfectly well that when I exited the banter would turn to me. The kid who some viewed as the dark-skinned charity case delivered at the behest of the United Nations from the South, which was like a Third World country to all of them. To others I was the poor, underprivileged, minority boy who was living with his mom down in the East Village. As vexing as all that was, somehow it didn’t keep me from harboring the view that there was nothing left to learn about me that couldn’t in some way be viewed as compromising. Not only was Dad not the CEO of General Electric, Exxon, Shell, Mobil, Dow Chemical, or DuPont, he wasn’t even acting like a dad. So yes, I kept my cards close to the vest.

  I might have scoffed, but in the end, I magnanimously forgave Mom her ignorance concerning the nature of privilege and the importance of a well-maintained image. How could she possibly understand? I was quite happy to continue my charade indefinitely if need be, and here she was hell-bent on exposing me. After a great deal of reluctance, I waved the white flag and surrendered.

  The collection basket was slowly making its way back to us. Mom dug out two dollars from her coat pocket and dropped them in. She handed me the basket. I peeked inside, took a couple of bucks out for myself, and relayed it across the aisle.

  • • •

  I WAS HAVING second thoughts. On the day that Zuk was supposed to come over for dinner, it occurred to me that there was so much that could go wrong—and would. So I did what any twelve-year-old desperate to protect a highly vulnerable reputation would do: I drew up a term sheet and handed Mom a pen and pointed to the kitchen table. In front of her was a list of topics that I thought damning and therefore deemed inappropriate for polite dinner conversation. I unilaterally forbade her to discuss any of them in the company of one Ariel J. Zukowski. The sheet read,

  I, Peola Jezebel Hicks, do swear to abstain from any conversation of a partisan nature and pertaining to, or that may include mention of, the following topics (referred to herein as “the Black List”), listed here in no particular order, under penalty of death, or so much money that I will never, ever be able to repay it.

  All “isms,” including, but not limited to,

  Communism

  Capitalism

  Zionism

  Judaism

  The Black Panther Party

  The Nation of Islam

  Palestinian statehood

  The Vietnam War

  J. Edgar Hoover

  The Johnson administration

  COINTELPRO

  Executive Order 10925, aka affirmative action

  Quota systems, interpreted broadly

  Race as a factor in intelligence

  Any US president ever

  The Mets’ first-round draft pick

  Race

  The transit workers’ strike

  The best bagel in the East Village

  Race

  Tobias Wetherall Muncie, etc., etc., etc.

  Signer:

  Witness:

  Peola Jezebel Hicks

  Hubert Francis Fairchild, the first

  What can I say? It’s a minefield out there. Admittedly, the list was a little longer than I had expected. But at the end of the day, these were the things that got argued over in class, were debated at lunch, and spilled out onto the sidewalk after school. In other words, I knew exactly where Zuk stood on current events.

  It’d be a shit show if I allowed Mom to say whatever popped into her head. It’d been a couple of years now that she’d embraced feminism wholeheartedly and had, as a consequence, been given to reckless proclamations on a whole raft of issues. Ever since, her progressiveness had been growing at an unsustainable rate. But lately it had accelerated to such a degree that even I hardly recognized her anymore. She was becoming radicalized in a whole new way. It was like she’d transmuted overnight from lowly sheep to big bad wolf. I don’t care how good her cooking was, Zuk wouldn’t be able to keep it down. Because even if she’d only recently adopted many of her views on the Johnson administration and the politics of imperialism, she spoke in a way that left no room for debate. It was getting so bad that I expected her to come home any day now wearing a black beret, dark sunglasses, and wielding an assault rifle.

  Zuk and I, on the other hand, had a different outlook. Debating was more a sport to us than life or death. Maybe that was because we shared an innate optimism about world affairs. We believed in the imperturbability of human progress—that is, that things just kind of worked themselves out on their own. We viewed ourselves as being living examples of the success of the working class. As screwed up as things were, we still believed that the country was fundamentally on the right course. A ruling class was a necessary evil. Imperialism was human nature. No matter how good one’s intentions, you couldn’t please everyone. Our job wasn’t to try to change the nature of things but to make sure we ended up on the winning side. While Zuk and I made plans for the houses we would own one day, picturing their circular driveways, sprawling yards, tennis courts, and pools, Mom talked like she wanted to tear all that down. She spoke dreamily about a revolution that would obliterate the very establishment we saw it within our reach to join. I couldn’t fault Mom for being bitter about the opportunities she’d never had, but I wished that she could just be happy that all of that could be mine. We just had to let go of the past and embrace the golden future that being at a place like Claremont would ensure.

  Oh. And race—well, that just never seemed to come up. Which meant that Zuk and I agreed on most everything except which Mets batter would be better to have at the plate in a pinch.

  Even if I’d become something of an organ grinder’s monkey, I cherished my status. Whether by hook or by crook, I can’t honestly say which, I had somehow joined the ranks of the buttoned-up crowd. Aside from not being able to gloat to Dad, things weren’t all bad. I was learning what mattered in life, and understood how I fit in. It was nice being among the people for whom life was going according to plan. Frankly, it didn’t matter so much to me that they weren’t members of my immediate family. I was learning to take what I could get.

  So when I explained to Mom why I felt that the Black List was necessary, she had the nerve to act like she was doing me a favor just by agreeing to put on a pretty dress instead of the denim trousers she’d intended to wear with a turtle neck and hoop earrings. I vetoed everything but the earrings. It was bad enough that Zuk was going to see our twenty-third-floor shoe box with its bleak view of the sooty buildings across the courtyard and the morass down at ground level. Of course, I was concerned. From my point of view, anything could happen.

  I told Mom that it wasn’t exactly her, per se. It was just as much our building and the surrounding public housing complex, our neighbors, our block, and the entire garbage-strewn, rat-infested slum of the East Village. In fact, it was everything. Her budding militancy annoyed me, but that was just part of it. In truth, it was us. It was who we were. It was the very idea of public housing and the frictional drag on civilization that people like us represented in fabled institutions of learning across the globe.

  Mom sat down. She took her time looking over the Black List. She made a motion to sign, then hesitated. She saw Toby’s name at the very bottom. She tapped it with the pen and looked up, puzzled.

  Toby?

  Oh, Mother. For heaven’s sake. Please, not now.

  I looked at her flatly and said that as heroic as Toby may have been, he just wasn’t flattering to my self-image. Hurt welled up in her eyes. So I explained matter-of-factly that it was nothing personal. He simply didn’t portray me in the light in which I desired to be seen. It was a difficult co
ncept for me to have to convey just then. I could see the defenses rising in Mom’s darkening countenance. She wasn’t nearly as receptive to it as my friends at school had been.

  Listen. It’s just not how I want to project myself into the world, okay? The associations he calls to mind are all wrong. I know that you may not get it. But these are choices we make in life. And I want the things that I surround myself with to suggest skyscrapers, not garden hoes. Does that make sense?

  Mom recoiled. Jesus Christ, Huey. What’s that school done to you?

  I composed myself. Okay. Fine. You want to have it out? Suit yourself.

  When I asked if Hamilton or Lichenberger or any of the other fellas I went to school with were descendants of slaves, she said probably not. When I asked Mom who in his right mind would choose to be the descendant of a slave if given a choice, she gave me a contemptuous look.

  You don’t have a choice.

  Don’t be silly. Of course I do. We all have choices. Everything is a choice.

  She called me, of all things, a disgrace to my race. I asked what she was referring to, precisely. Only the week before, she was peddling the idea of the whole concept of race as a sham concocted by a few eighteenth-century white men with powdered hair to more conveniently consolidate power, and now here I was, not having even had time to shit out the food I’d been eating at the time, come to find out that I was betraying it. I asked if it was possible to betray something that didn’t exist. Because I was starting to feel like she’d drawn me into one of M. C. Escher’s sketches, where the thing being drawn was itself a physical impossibility, yet there I was, looking right at myself standing inside it.