There were lots of peanuts around our house during the month of August. Mom would spend nights cooking and boiling them, and Dad would station me by the side of Oglethorpe with scale, scoop, and bushel baskets of them to sell during the day. When harvest wound down, Mom and I worked together on math problems in the kitchen. She continued making regular trips back and forth to the library. I’d spend my mornings collecting seeds out back, studying the beetles and bugs around our house, and in the evenings I would rack my brain over my times tables at the kitchen table while Mom was at the sink, emptying the boiled peanuts into a colander. When the last of the water had drained, she would empty the peanuts into a grocery bag, dump in some salt, and shake the bag. We seemed to be getting into a new routine of doing things.
Then, one night, I was on the floor in my room working on a list of birds, beetles, and worms that I’d spotted on our grounds when Mom barged in and snatched the pencil out of my hand. She was bawling. I looked up and asked why. She just handed me a suitcase and told me to pack my things.
Is Dad coming?
No.
Is it something I did?
No.
Which I doubted. Whenever they argued, it always had something to do with me.
Where are we going?
On a little trip.
To Missus Muncie’s?
No. Maybe a motel or something. I dunno. Ask me later.
When are we coming back?
Soon. Now hurry up.
Mom left the room. I sat there for a minute, quiet. I put my list aside and pulled open the top drawer of my dresser and shoved a handful of T-shirts, some comic books, and my home-run ball into the suitcase. I latched it shut and tried my best to hold back any tears. I was becoming quite a pro at that. I gathered up my jeans and high-tops and poked around under my bed for some socks.
I turned around at the door and, before closing it behind me, said goodnight to Snowflake. I didn’t have the heart to go over to her cage and tell her what was happening. I felt it would be easier for her this way. I knew that it would be the end of her if I went over to her cage and broke the news to her face. She was much too sensitive for that. She’d be in pieces, and I wasn’t sure she’d be able to put herself back together. So I just mumbled something about how important it was not to be afraid of the unknown and left. Dad had been avoiding me. When I cornered him in the bathroom, he explained how much he wished that he could come, but that someone had to take care of the farm. I told him to just stop, because I knew all that. I just wanted to be sure that he took good care of Snowflake while I was gone.
It was dark out when I stepped out of the house. I remember the sound of the crickets and the smell of boiled peanuts coming from the kitchen as I waited out on the stoop for Mom. I got into the truck with a sickly feeling in my stomach. The steel-belted radials Dad had bought made a distinct hissing sound. A blinking yellow light hung above an empty intersection in town. The eight-o’clock bus was sitting in front of the Rexall. I’d seen that bus pass through town my whole life, never dreaming that I’d one day be on it.
We weren’t the only ones there. Missus Smeel was sitting on one of the shell-backed chairs, waiting for the driver to open the door. Dad stood by quietly as she told Mom about how she was off to visit a nephew a few towns over, in Rowena, who wasn’t doing so well. He was sick. It wasn’t clear what he had, so she wasn’t sure how long she would be gone. All she knew was that she was going to stay until he got better. Mom smiled politely.
The driver opened the bus door at eight sharp. I grabbed a window seat and pressed my lips into a smile as I looked out at Dad. He was blurry. I was afraid that if I closed my eyes, the image of him standing there curbside, shouting out to me how much he loved me, would disappear forever. It was a strange feeling, him standing there looking at me like that, talking to me through the glass, telling me to be sure to brush twice a day. And to eat all my collard greens. And not to worry about Snowflake because he’d take care of her just fine—would even send me pictures. And to be sure to behave. And do as Mom instructed. And not to worry because he’d write tons and we’d talk on the phone all the time.
We pulled away. Dad grew small in the distance, then was gone. My stomach was knotted so tight it hurt. Cordele Road was unfamiliar and new in the dark. It seemed much smaller and narrower, somehow. Or maybe that was just the effect of the wall of darkness on either side of us. There was only the bright glare of the bus’s headlights and the soft glow of the occasional streetlamp. Then the streetlamps tapered off and disappeared, and we were flanked by immense tracts of inky nothingness. A stretch of pines converged high above, and it felt like we had entered a tunnel. The smell of clover and milkweed seeped in amid the sound of hissing tires, and the wet asphalt reflected the soft glow of the occasional streetlamp.
Mom asked how I was doing. I smeared the tears from my face and didn’t answer. She said she understood. I wasn’t so sure. Up until then I had thought that we were just going to spend the night at Miss Della’s or something—that we’d be gone for a week at the most. But as the bus rolled farther and farther away from Dad, I felt as if someone were pulling my heart out of my chest. Then we turned onto a highway bathed in the glare of sodium-vapor lights. I looked up at Mom. I had no idea where we were going and was too afraid to ask.
XXXII
BIG RIGS SWOONED DOWN FROM concrete cloverleafs onto multilaned highways and filed past. Mom dozed off on my shoulder. I couldn’t sleep. I cracked open Sea Devils, only to find myself continuously rereading page thirty-seven. It was Dad. I was unable to get out of my mind the image of him standing in front of those rusty shell-backed chairs we’d sat on together all those years. I must have eventually passed out. Next thing I knew, Mom was shoving me, whispering in my ear for me to wake up. It was time to get off.
I was squinting and my neck hurt. Sea Devils was crumpled up beside me, and my lap was covered in peanut shells. I flicked them off and followed clumsily after Mom with my suitcase in hand. I stepped out of the dank, airless cabin and down onto a curb that stank of piss and garbage. A black lab was dragging his butt across the sidewalk, streaking it brown. A woman dressed in two pairs of trousers and drinking from a bag walked up and asked me for spare change. Mom was standing by the shiny metal keel of the bus, putting her hair back together as she waited for the driver to open the hatch. I ran over to her. Where are we?
I was surprised to discover that school in New York didn’t start until after Labor Day. Which I guess, in a way, was a boon. I’d just assumed that every place started when we did back home. School wasn’t exactly my top priority just then, but getting a little extra summer was always a good thing. It helped knowing that I wouldn’t be joining a class of complete strangers a month into the school year. I didn’t want to be that oddball kid standing in the open doorway beside his teacher that everybody’s staring at. I’d had that feeling once and didn’t want it again.
Mom had counted on being able to get a job as a bookkeeper, but something about her not having her papers in order was holding things up. She’d found the brochure for the employment agency sitting atop the end table in our rooming house. No matter her explanations and demonstrations of all she knew about broker statements and tax returns and accounts receivable and payroll or her facility with ledgers and financial reports, everyone just shrugged and claimed that it was out of their hands without a previous employer who would vouch for her.
It’s called a work history, ma’am. Certainly you must have at least one? I mean, it’s obvious that you know how to use a ten-key. We just need a piece of paper corroborating the professional experience from which your skills came. It’s standard procedure. It protects us in the event that you royally screw up down the road—basically saying to our clients that we weren’t complete imbeciles for handing over their books to you. Surely you can understand that?
When Mom explained why she was unable to provide such a thing, the lady suggested she enroll in a class or get a certificate or
some other form of accreditation. Sure, it would take her a little time, but on the other hand, she could do it with her eyes closed. When Mom explained that she didn’t have money for that, her voice started to crack. She looked like she was about to start crying when the lady offered her a job cleaning office buildings instead. Her first paycheck didn’t come for a whole month, at which point she discovered that the Imperial Employment Agency had deducted a quarter of her wages. Mom had never heard of such a thing. She couldn’t believe that was legal. The woman from the agency said, It’s all detailed in the contract you signed, ma’am. When Mom asked to see it, the woman got up and retrieved it from a file drawer. She smiled primly and showed Mom. Mom said yes, but it was way down toward the very bottom of a page busy with very small print. Mom had to hold the page up close to her reading glasses to be able to make out the words.
On the train ride home, Mom said that would be the last time she made that mistake. What struck me was the amount of times I heard Mom utter those very words, time and again, that first year in New York. Huey, it’ll be the last time I make that mistake. Come to find out, there are a lot of rookie mistakes you have to make in a town like this before you’ve exhausted them all.
For all the ease with which Mom had landed that cleaning job, it took another year before she finally landed at the Blumenthals’. When the lady from the agency called, she rattled on for a whole five minutes about how it was a plum assignment, and all the stuff that Mom would be expected to do, how she’d have to dress, and things to avoid saying in front of her new boss. Mom put her hand over the mouthpiece and asked if I thought she was good enough to cook for other people. I just looked at her. She took her hand from the phone and accepted the job.
For all the hoops that Mom had to jump through before the Blumenthals finally hired her, it only took a year for the Blumenthal twins to declare their undying love for her and for Mister Blumenthal to fall in love with her cooking and for Missus Blumenthal to fall in love with her cleaning and to ask what on earth she’d have to do to keep her for life. That was around the time Missus Blumenthal decided to pull some strings and get me into Claremont Prep.
Mom came home that night and poured herself a glass of vino—she’d started calling it that shortly after having started at the Blumenthals’—plopped herself down on the sofa, and made it sound like it’d been her plan all along. When I came to find out that Claremont was interested in me primarily because I was colored, I worried that maybe I wasn’t dark enough, only to learn from Missus Blumenthal, on the taxi ride back from the guided tour, that they loved boys like me. She patted my knee and assured me that I was different, but not too different.
It didn’t hurt that Mom had talked me up. She called me the next Ignatius Sancho, Satchel Paige, and Booker T. Washington all rolled up in one. If you have no idea who they are, don’t feel bad; neither did I. I think they were famous accountants or bookkeepers or something. I’d never heard of any of them. I didn’t realize until much later the full extent to which she’d talked me up. Which, now that I think about it, is probably why she freaked when Mister McGovern, having gotten hold of her at the Blumenthals’, informed her that I’d been taken into police custody.
Mister McGovern went to great lengths to convince me that despite my standing out like a chimp in a china shop, everyone’s heart was in the right place at Claremont. Which I knew in my heart to be true. Which is why I could have sworn that I was only going to get a slap on the wrist and maybe lectured about the risks of becoming just another colored boy with a criminal record.
Then an actual officer of the law arrived, with handcuffs and everything. After a couple of minutes conferring privately with Mister McGovern, the police officer escorted me downstairs. He opened the back door of his patrol car, then told me to watch my head and closed it gently behind me, kind of like Froeger’s chauffeur does. So that was nice. When he got in, I told him the quickest way to my place, then explained that my mom was still at work and wouldn’t be home for another three hours. He asked if I was a latchkey kid. Then he shook his head, sighed, and said he saw this sort of stuff all the time.
His name was Officer Pavlicek. I remember because I’d stared at his name tag in disbelief while he’d slapped the handcuffs over my wrists. I shouted out that I was going to sue the pants off Mister McGovern, Claremont, Officer Pavlicek, and the New York City Police Department for wrongful arrest and unlawful custody of a minor, not to mention public humiliation, slander, defamation of character, and probably fifty other things. I figured knowing the arresting officer’s name would likely come in handy every bit as much as the pictures I planned on getting of my bruised and chafed wrists.
Officer Pavlicek headed north on Fifth Avenue, turned right on 125th Street, driving past all the storefront churches, juke joints, smoke shops, five and dimes, barbershops, billiard halls, and discount grocery stores they’ve got up there, and headed straight across the Triborough Bridge, all the while talking into his rearview mirror about how us mouthy rich kids think it’s all a big joke and how we think that we have it all figured out, not realizing that the world’s been handed to us on a silver platter. I couldn’t help but grin. I was about to lean forward and set him straight, but then decided that I kind of liked being mistook for a Bilmore or a Hamilton. So I sat back in the thick, textured vinyl seat and kept my mouth shut and took in all the tugboats and garbage barges clogging up the East River as we blew through the tollbooth.
We pulled up to the front door of one of those special sanatoriums they have clustered together out there on Randall’s Island to keep all the loonies away from the rest of us. The clean-cut colored man sitting at a desk stationed just inside the heavy front door asked if I was violent. Officer Pavlicek shook his head no and proceeded to remove my handcuffs. When he had them off, the colored man, who was dressed in all white, asked to see the underside of my forearms. He assured Officer Pavlicek that it was SOP. Officer Pavlicek obliged, then hesitated with both of my wrists in hand at the sight of my right arm. He said, Jesus Christ, kid, your arm is bent to shit. Who do you go to for repairs, Dr. Strangelove? He chuckled before remembering what he was looking for.
He’s clean.
The colored man behind the desk nodded.
Officer Pavlicek said sayonara and left. The colored man handed me a plastic tub and instructed me to change into the clothes inside it. I looked at him, confused, and asked what I was supposed to do if they didn’t fit.
I hesitate to talk about the time I spent in that facility because I’d like to someday manage to forget about it. Naturally, I was shaken. I’d just been dropped off at a fortified cement vault of a building with no way out. I wasn’t entirely sure what it was exactly, although, to be sure, I was starting to have a few guesses. I was standing inside a yellow circle painted on the concrete floor. The changing area was wide open and freezing cold. Something about it made me feel like I was standing in the middle of an empty stadium. As I stood there, taking in all the steel and concrete and thick wired glass and Plexiglas and closed doors, it dawned on me what I was in store for. It was just like Mom had said: the colored man behind the desk was going to try and make me forget who I was. Which, however tenuous, was all that I had. Aside from Mom, it seemed to be the one constant in my life: I was a Claremont boy. I decided that I wasn’t going to let the colored man behind the desk take that away from me. When he asked me a second time to kindly change into the clothes in the tub, I politely refused. I said that if it was all the same to him, I would prefer not to. The orderly sighed, nonchalantly picked up a black telephone, and made a very short call. I don’t think he said more than two or three words into the handset. In short order, two white men, also dressed in white, were standing on the perimeter of the yellow circle painted on the floor, looking at me. They asked the colored man at the desk where my restraints were. The orderly explained that I’d been compliant until he’d requested for me to change out of my blazer, at which point, I became belligerent. One of the men iss
ued me a warning. He explained what would happen if he had to enter the circle. He gave me one last opportunity. I took a reflexive step back, away from him. He stepped into the circle and hurled me to the floor, pressing the side of my face against the cold cement while the other man forcibly undressed me, one clothing item at a time. When they at last had all my clothes off, including my underwear, they kicked them from the circle, wiped the sweat from their temples, and gave me the option to either go naked or put on the clothes in the plastic tub.
I changed. The two men shepherded me down a narrow hall and up several flights of stairs. They tossed me into the back of a single-file line composed of other kids my age, dressed in the same avocado color I was. The man told me to go with them. Two other men accompanied the line, one at either end of it, and they were also dressed in white. Neither took notice of me as they barked out a series of names—told this person to slow down, that person to speed up, this person to stop talking, that person to stay in line. We passed through a series of heavy steel doors and bare hallways and entered a long corridor that dead-ended at a set of double doors, where we were told to stop. I recognized the sound coming from behind the doors. It was a squeaking sound. Balls were being bounced. The guard opened one of the doors, and we plodded into a small gymnasium, single file.
• • •
THE COMMON AREA was essentially a bus terminal, repurposed. Steel-legged plastic chairs were stationed around the concrete wall on the periphery. Instead of waiting six hours for a connecting bus, I sat, alternately glancing up at the wall-mounted TV and over to the pay phone, desperate for one of the other kids to get off it. I called Mom at the first opportunity. She asked if I was okay and told me that she’d spoken with the authorities and assured me that she was doing everything she could to get me out, but that it wasn’t as straightforward as one might hope, and in the meantime to be cooperative—that was the main thing.
They Come in All Colors Page 31
