I assured her it was.
About a month after I was told of the segregated puppies, I had another interesting encounter with a different white colleague, this time while in the corridor outside my office. “Off to the pool?” I had inquired, motioning toward his large duffel bag. He was a thin man, very fit looking. I had taken him to be a swimmer.
“Basketball,” he corrected me.
“Oh? Where do you play?”
“Over in the campus gym.”
“Open shoot-around,” I asked, “or is there a league?”
“Actually, some of the faculty get together a few times a week to play.”
I nodded and wished him a good game. He thanked me and walked away. I went into my office and sat at the computer. When I looked up a moment later, he was standing at my door.
“I would have invited you to play, I just didn’t … um … get around to it.”
Before I could respond, he left again. But he came right back. “I didn’t even know whether or not you played.”
I smiled and said, “I’m a black male from Chicago’s inner city. Of course I got game!” Actually, I did not have game. From the age of five, I had failed to make every basketball team I had ever tried out for, except the teen league run by my church, which had a benevolent, no-cut policy. But I had always wanted to say I got game! to someone who might believe me.
Red in the face now, he again hurried away. I waited for him to return. When he did, he looked pretty shaken up. He apologized.
“For?” I asked.
“Well, it’s just that I wanted to ask you to play, but I didn’t want you to think I’d singled you out because you’re black. That could be considered racist.”
“True,” I said. “But it could also be considered racist not to ask me because I’m black.”
“You’re right, you’re right.” He lowered and shook his head, then looked up again. “I’ve just felt awful every time I see you. I feel awful even talking with you about it now.” But he should not have. When blacks integrate predominantly white institutions like academia, racial incidents are bound to occur, but they are almost always sparked by innocent gaffes rather than ill will. My colleague with the puppies wasn’t being racist when he made his request; he was, in his own unique way, simply trying to befriend me. Things got a little tricky when, instead of just admitting this, he accused me of fabricating our encounter. And that’s why I so appreciated the second incident, for this colleague’s honesty resulted in an open conversation about race. After we were done talking, I put no photograph on my door. Instead, I went to the campus gym.
There were a dozen white men already there when I arrived, most of them, I was pleased to see, feeble looking and elderly. As I approached the court, I shot an imaginary ball toward the basket. “Let’s see who in here’s got some game!” I yelled, and then I proceeded to be trounced. While I lay on the floor trying to breathe, I received looks from the players that seemed to be a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, as if I were some kind of fraud, not the genuine article. I had seen this look in academia many times before.
The first time was from my college roommate Lenny. He had spent the first eighteen years of his life in rural farmland so removed from integration that he had never met a black person before I walked into our dorm room. He confessed this several months later, but I had surmised it right off, based on the way his eyes widened when he first saw me, the panicky quiver in his voice when he told me his name, and how he had sat on his bed very quietly watching me unpack.
Things were strained at first. Lenny was nervous in my presence, while I, on the other hand, did not want to be in a dorm room with a nervous white farmer. But in time Lenny and I learned to accept our differences and each other, so much so that one night, three months into our four-month cohabitation, a few bottles into a six-pack of beer, he said, “You’re the first colored person I’ve ever known.”
“I prefer black,” I said, “to colored.”
“You do?”
I nodded. “But that’s not true for all of us. Some of us like to be called African American. Negro was popular for a while, but not so much these days. I’m thinking of bringing it back.”
“See?” Lenny said sadly. “That’s what I mean. I don’t know anything about the colored race.” Lenny was sitting on his bed and I was sitting on mine. They were positioned like an L, only mine was high in the air, resting on stilts. The beds had been stacked one directly above the other, but neither of us had felt comfortable with that. “I was a little afraid of you at first,” he confessed. “I mean, I didn’t think you were a murderer or anything. I’d just been told that colored people were, you know, different from white people.”
“How so?”
“Well, that you love fried chicken.”
I laughed. “And watermelon?”
“Yes!” He laughed too before adding, “And that you have little tails.”
“Pardon?”
“Little tails.” He held up his hands, maybe a foot apart. Neither of us spoke for a long time. And then, almost inaudibly, he asked, “Is it true?”
I climbed down from my bed and mooned him.
“Was that called for?” he asked.
I assured him it was.
Or so it seemed at the time. But not long afterward, I came to understand that it was not my best moment, just as I have come to see that putting the photograph on my office door was not either. Both my college roommate and my faculty colleague were groping their way toward racial understanding, and if I could have contained my frustration a little better, I might have been a more effective escort as they made their important journey. But I am on this important journey, too. We all are. And in those instances when we veer from the correct path, when we momentarily lose our way, the thing to do is to admit it, to speak truthfully about our imperfections and failings, rather than to pretend they do not exist. In other words, when dealing with the complicated issue of race, shouting “I got game!” will take you only so far.
THE PROFESSOR
When I arrived at the lab there was a huge batch of dirty beakers and test tubes waiting for me, and I wished the medical transcription course I was taking was already finished. I had only three more weeks before I received a certificate that said I could transcribe doctors’ orders, even though it was a skill that required no brain. I doubted some of my classmates could even read. My instructor must have doubted it too. He’d nicknamed me “The Professor” and was always calling on me to answer questions; once, when the class was on break and I was in the bathroom eating a Snickers, he started talking to me from the adjacent stall about college.
“That you, Professor?” he’d asked, even though he knew it had to be me; I was the only male student in the class. I got angry at myself for not making sure I was alone. When it occurred to me that he might have heard my candy wrapper, I started to sweat a little. My mouth was suddenly too rigid to move. For a few seconds, I couldn’t speak or chew.
“Tell me something, Professor. How old are you?”
I opened my mouth and pushed the answer past my Snickers: “Nineteen.”
“And why are you taking this course?”
“To get a certificate that says I can transcribe doctors’ orders.”
“Right. But why?”
“To get a job transcribing doctors’ orders.”
“I understand that,” he said. “But you’re pretty bright, as is evident by the way you’re evading my questions. It just seems that maybe you should set your sights a little higher. Maybe go to college.”
“I am in college.”
“This isn’t college.”
“Yes it is,” I responded. “It’s Medical World Technical College. Says so right on the classroom door.”
He ignored this, asking, “Any reason why you don’t?”
I didn’t answer.
“If money’s the reason, there are grants and loans. And scholarships. I’ll be happy to help you look into it. What do you say?”
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I declined his offer.
He was silent for a while, and then he asked, “What are you eating?”
“Snickers,” I said.
“Sounds good. Might have one myself.”
It took me two weeks before I could look him in the face after that because it’s an embarrassing thing to be caught eating a Snickers while you’re on the toilet, but when we did make eye contact he didn’t mention it. He didn’t mention college either. Neither did I. College just didn’t seem to be for me, even though I knew I was as smart as the hematologists I worked with. Sometimes, while I scrubbed the test tubes and beakers, I could hear them next door talking about politics, one of my favorite subjects, and the things they said usually didn’t make much sense. A few times I’d nearly gone in there to join the conversation. Instead, I argued with them right there at my sink, quietly making point after point, none of which, I was sure, they would have been able to refute. But that wouldn’t have been their fault. They were only hematologists. I was The Professor.
DRAGON SLAYERS
I was at a Christmas party with a man who wanted me to hate him. I should hate all whites, he felt, for what they had done to me. I thought hard about what whites had done to me. I was forty, old enough to have accumulated a few unpleasant racial encounters, but nothing of any significance came to mind. The man was astonished at this response. “How about slavery?” he asked. I explained, as politely as I could, that I had not been a slave. “But you feel its effects,” he snapped. “Racism, discrimination, and prejudice will always be a problem for you in this country. White people,” he insisted, “are your oppressors.” I glanced around the room, just as one of my oppressors happened by. She was holding a tray of canapés. She offered me one. I asked the man if, as a form of reparations, I should take two.
It was midway through my third year in academe. I had survived mountains of papers, apathetic students, cantankerous colleagues, boring meetings, sleep deprivation, and two stalkers, and now I was up against a man who had been mysteriously transported from 1962. He even looked the part, with lavish sideburns and solid, black-rimmed glasses. He wasn’t an academic, but rather the spouse of one. In fact, he had no job at all, a dual act of defiance, he felt, against a patriarchal and capitalistic society. He was a fun person to talk with, especially if, like me, you enjoyed driving white liberals up the wall. And the surest way to do that, if you were black, was to deny them the chance to pity you.
He’d spotted me thirty minutes earlier while I stood alone at the dining room table, grazing on various appetizers. Brenda had drifted off somewhere, and the room buzzed with pockets of conversation and laughter. The man joined me. I accepted his offer of a gin and tonic. We talked local politics for a moment, or rather he talked and I listened, because it wasn’t something I knew much about, before moving on to the Patriots, our kids, and finally my classes. He was particularly interested in my African American literature course. “Did you have any black students?” he inquired.
“We started with two,” I said, “but ended with twenty-eight.” I let his puzzled expression linger until I’d eaten a stuffed mushroom. “Everyone who takes the course has to agree to be black for the duration of the semester.”
“Really?” he asked, laughing. “What do they do, smear their faces with burnt cork?”
“Not a bad idea,” I said. “But for now, they simply have to think like blacks, but in a way different from what they probably expect.” I told him that black literature is often approached as a record of oppression, but that my students don’t focus on white cruelty but rather its flip side: black courage. “After all,” I continued, “slaves and their immediate descendants were by and large heroic, not pathetic, or I wouldn’t be standing here.”
The man was outraged. “You’re letting whites off the hook,” he said. “You’re absolving them of responsibility, of the obligation to atone for past and present wrongs …” He went on in this vein for a good while, and I am pleased to say that I goaded him until he stormed across the room and stood with his wife who, after he’d spoken with her, glanced in my direction to see, no doubt, a traitor to the black race. That was unfortunate. I’d like to think I betray whites, too.
More precisely it’s the belief that blacks are primarily victims that I betray, a common view held by both races. I, too, held it for many years, before my workshop with James Alan McPherson. I knew when I started my academic career that I owed him a debt to teach black literature in a certain way. “Less time needs to be spent on the dragons,” as he told me once, “and more on our ability to forge swords for battle, and the skill with which we’ve used them.”
The man at the Christmas party, of course, would rather that I talk about the dragons. And at first, when students take my class, they are surprised, even a bit disappointed, to see the course will not head in that direction. But by the end of the semester, they have been invariably uplifted by the heroic nature of African Americans, in part, perhaps, because it is the nature found in us all.
BULLETS
The pharmacist was an elderly black man whose hands trembled as much as mine. I watched the paper flutter as he held it close to his face, trying to read my writing, which was all but illegible in the true fashion of doctors. But I wasn’t a doctor. I was just a twenty-year-old unit clerk who forged prescriptions.
I often wrote them for barbiturates but I liked amphetamines most. They mimicked the high I got from cocaine and they were easier to consume; sometimes while at work, without missing a beat from the patients’ labs I was filing, I’d just toss a few in my mouth and chew them like cashews. I couldn’t do that with cocaine. And besides, cocaine was expensive and lasted only a few hours, whereas a bottle of Dexedrine was relatively cheap and could last a week or more, depending, of course, on how many I prescribed.
This was a felony, I understood, punishable by many years in prison, so I tried to take the right precautions. I knew to use the doctors’ narcotics numbers I stole only once, and I never revisited the same pharmacy. I knew, too, that it was important to look like a respectable member of society, so I always wore a suit and tie and sometimes I carried The Wall Street Journal. But these things cannot help you when your nose, raw from cocaine use, suddenly begins to bleed.
The pharmacist had left by then to fill my order. He was thirty feet away, standing behind a glass partition and looking at rows of shelves crammed with colorful bottles, when a gush of liquid rushed over my lips and down my chin. This would be a bad one, I knew, as these kinds of bleeds often were, as persistent and messy as a gunshot to the temple. While I dug in my pocket for the tissue that I always carried for such an occasion, I tilted my head back, trying to keep the blood where it belonged, but all that did was redirect its descent so that now it trailed down both of my cheeks. I tore off two small pieces of Kleenex and stuffed them in each nostril, and then I used the rest of it to begin wiping my face and neck. Unfortunately, the pharmacist came back before I could finish.
“Good Lord, young man, are you all right?”
I put the bloody tissue in my jacket pocket and lowered my gaze from the ceiling to the old man, who was removing his glasses and looking very concerned. The thing to do here was run, but I had enough coke and alcohol in my system to make me think I could talk my way out of this. Especially when I saw that he was holding the white bag containing my Dexedrine. I leaned against the counter, hoping I looked casual, like some guy in a bar waiting for his martini, except that my nostrils were clogged with paper and my face was smeared with blood. I opened my mouth to offer an explanation, but I’d lost my nerve. All that came out was, “I’ll be okay.”
The pharmacist nodded slowly, a gesture of sudden understanding. “Can I see some identification, Mr….”—he put his glasses on and lifted the bag to his face—”Mr. Jenkins?”
I patted my pockets, then pointed toward the door and said my wallet was in the car. As I backed away, he stood there not moving, waiting for me to step outside, perhaps, so he could
reach for the phone to call the police. But if he intended to do so, I’d be long gone by the time they arrived, and all they’d find would be two pieces of tissue, small and bloodied, like bullets taken from a corpse.
THE MECHANICS OF BEING
When I’d decided to write a novel based on my life I was in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, starting my second year. I’d recently found some statistics that said there’d been a 60 percent chance I’d end up dead or in jail; I had stories to prove just how close I’d come. But after writing the first draft, my tale of black teenage delinquency seemed too clichéd to me, told too often before. I decided to write about my father instead.
My father lost his sight when he was twelve. Climbing the stairs to his Chicago brownstone, he somehow fell backward, hitting his head hard against the pavement and filling his cranium with blood. It would have been better had some of this blood seeped out, alerting him to seek medical attention, but when the area of impact did no more than swell a little and throb, he tended himself by applying two cubes of ice and eating six peanut butter cookies. He did not tell anyone about the injury. He also did not mention the two weeks of headaches that followed, the month of dizzy spells, or that the world was growing increasingly, terrifyingly dim.
His mother had died of cancer four years earlier. His alcoholic father was rarely around. So at home my father only had to conceal his condition from his grandmother, Mama Alice, who herself could barely see past her cataracts, and his three older brothers and sister, who had historically paid him little attention. His grades at school suffered, but his teachers believed him when he said his discovery of girls was the cause. He spent less and less time with his friends, gave up baseball altogether, and took to walking with the aid of a tree branch. In this way his weakening vision remained undetected for three months until, one morning at breakfast, things fell apart.
Mama Alice greeted him as he sat at the table. She was by the stove, he knew, from the location of her voice. As he listened to her approach, he averted his face. She put a plate in front of him and another to his right, where she always sat. She pulled a chair beneath her. He reached for his fork, accidentally knocking it off the table. When several seconds had passed and he’d made no move, Mama Alice reminded him that forks couldn’t fly. He took a deep breath and reached down to his left, knowing that to find the utensil would be a stroke of good fortune, since he couldn’t even see the floor. After a few seconds of sweeping his fingers against the cool hardwood, he sat back up. There was fear in Mama Alice’s voice when she asked him what was wrong. There was fear in his when he confessed he couldn’t see.
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