“Well, you certainly picked up a lot in one morning.”
“I’m afraid it’s not hard where you’re concerned. You inspire some pretty intense feelings.”
“Yeah.”
For a few seconds, the conversation died. We both stared out at the other kids hanging out. I thought she had pulled back because she felt she had come on too strong, but I was wrong. She was mulling my situation, feeling bad for me, and trying to find some way to bring me a little of the comfort I’d brought her in homeroom.
“It was a shadowy region, a no man’s land, the ground that separated the white world from the black that he stood upon,” she said, breaking the silence.
“Wow!” I replied, thinking about how she’d put everything in place with one sentence. “Did you just make that up on the spot?”
“No. It’s from Native Son. Don’t you know it? It’s a novel by a famous black author, Richard Wright.”
“No, I don’t know it,” I said, embarrassed. I wondered if the Cozy Pittses of the world knew about black people like this writer. If they did, they might understand that what I wanted was not foreign to us as a people. But all that aside, I was happy to have met Patty Cunningham for reasons other than her looks. I knew that I could learn from her.
“I know that this will make me seem stupid,” I said. “I mean, I love books. I read all the time, but I really didn’t know that there were any famous black authors. The library here doesn’t have books by black people. I’m embarrassed.”
“Oh, don’t be. There are a lot of great black writers. I’ll bring you some books.”
“Thank you.”
She smiled. “Maybe we could talk sometime about that shadowy region you live in.”
“I’d like that,” I replied, as the bell ending lunch period sounded.
“Would you show me to my next class?”
“I’d like that even better.”
THIRTEEN
“Football,” Bojack once said to me, “is a game of strategy, see. It’s a whole lot more than one man’s strength against another. It’s all about using your opponent’s weakness to your advantage. It’s about making him thank you has a certain weakness that you really ain’t got. When he builds up his game plan around your fake weakness, you surprise him. And you nail his butt.”
In the days before Aunt Mary’s ban on our friendship, lectures of this sort would come on crisp fall and winter mornings. Bojack didn’t go to church much after what happened with me and Eliza Blizzard. So while everyone else was in church, we met in the field next to my house, and Bojack taught me football. We read from a coach’s manual, and he recalled lessons from his favorite ex-football players who acted as analysts during NFL games. We practiced blocking, punting, and the proper way to hold a football when throwing. We practiced running receiver routes, catching punts, how to take a handoff, and tackling, which I enjoyed the most. I lived for Sundays during football season. On this particular Tuesday, I was very happy I had paid strict attention, because I was now standing face-to-face with Taliferro Pitts.
“All right, Walls,” Head Coach Kendel yelled. “Here’s the drill. You’re a lineman. The man behind you with the ball is the running back. The man in front of you is your defensive adversary.”
I saw pain in Taliferro Pitts’ smile.
“Now,” the coach continued, “you cannot go outside of the two blocking dummies on either side of you. But you have to clear the defensive player out of the space between them so that the back has a clear path. Understand?”
“Yes, sir!” I shouted.
The pain in Taliferro’s smile grew.
“Good,” the coach said. “’Cause the back will run straight up your asshole if you don’t get Pitts and yourself clear of the hole. When I blow the whistle, let’s get at it.”
Pain now glowed in Taliferro’s smile.
Quickly, I recalled one of Bojack’s lessons. He’d said, “There’s a trick to blocking a man bigger than you is. He can’t get down as low as you. Big men likes to make contact on they way to standing up. So what the little man gotta do in this kinda blocking situation is this here. The ball snapped, right? The big man, he steps forward and starts to standing up. The little man, he comes forward, too, but he stays really low. When they hit, the big man gone be at a loss, see? The little man got what Pat Summerall call a lower center of gravity. He just hit the big man at his waist or thigh level, and move the big man whichever way he wants to. Heavy shit, huh?”
I crouched in a three-point stance. There were no more than two feet between me and Taliferro. Dee and Tex stood behind him, cringing. They knew how much he was looking forward to this. And just to emphasize that point, Taliferro mouthed to me, “Your ass is mine.”
When the coach blew his whistle, we charged. Taliferro began to rise, and I stayed low and got in an incredible shot to his midsection. It sent him crashing to the ground, and I stood above him victoriously for just a second. “A wise man knows how far to push thangs,” Mama Jennie had told me once.
“Good hit! Way to block, Walls,” the coach yelled. “Take notes, gentlemen.”
I looked at Dee and Tex’s incredulous smiles. There was also some hollering from some of the other players; big hits always drew that kind of response. I walked away feeling proud, and the coach lined up the next three guys.
I kept my helmet on because I didn’t want to be too bold about what I’d done. After all, even though it was a great way to start out, it was only one hit. I also didn’t want to make Taliferro feel any more embarrassed. That would give him and his crew ammunition. But I guess I didn’t minimize things enough. As the coach repeated his orders to the next three players, Taliferro walked by me, fuming.
“You made a play and you thank you something special, huh? A show-off. Oh, but you ain’t seen real showing off yet. I’m gone put your Uncle Tom ass back in place with a little extra since you got my mama kicked out the session. Your daddy laid hands on her. See what we gone do to you. Yeah, this ain’t just about football, baby.”
I turned to walk away, and that pissed him off more. He forgot himself and yelled, “I’m gone fuck you up, punk! Gonna fuck you up, baaaaad!”
Everyone turned to look at us. Coach Kendel pointed at Taliferro and screamed, “It’s not Walls’ fault you don’t know how to do your job.”
That, of course, did me no favors. There was only silence, so much that, as I turned to walk away from the situation, I could hear my shoulder pads rubbing against my jersey.
Quietly, I lingered around the action until we moved on to running some plays. It was very difficult to concentrate the rest of practice. The fact that I knew my position well carried me through. In between huddles and tackles, I wondered how I’d make it through the season. It was hard enough not to get cut from a team with that much talent. It took a lot of mental toughness. I would have to do it while wasting a lot of precious energy on fending off Taliferro, T. Wall, and their boys. The thought left me tired. I just wanted to play football.
•••
I spent a lot of time, on and off the practice field, wondering why Taliferro Pitts chose to up the ante where I was concerned. I didn’t lay hands on his mother. And it would have been so easy to just let me linger in the world of cold shoulders. I saw no reason for him to actively seek to bury me, both literally and figuratively.
I concluded that he needed me as a form of stress relief and a referendum on his control. I recalled Taliferro saying his father had beaten his mother in order to feel like he controlled something. Now Arthur Pitts was dead at the hands of a white deputy who had beaten him to death with a billy club. It happened right outside the ABC store. The store manager called the police, saying that Arthur had stolen some liquor, but he was so drunk he couldn’t move very well and he was ranting and raving.
When the police got there, they confronted Arthur and they found the stolen liquor on him. When Arthur put up a fight, the deputy beat him to death right on the sidewalk in front of the store. Th
ere was no official investigation into the beating. It was deemed justified, and even a huge protest led by Eliza Blizzard couldn’t change the right minds.
As you can imagine, Taliferro’s hatred of whites had grown. Yet, like his father before him, he still felt impotent in the face of whites. He needed revenge, but he couldn’t seek it against whites, so he sought it against the next best thing—a black kid who embodied their ideals.
Starting with the football team, he set out to avenge the life and death of his hated father and his mother’s banishment by doing me in. Others, like T. Wall and company, were willing partners. Dee, Tex and I discussed it one morning on the way to school.
“Oh, for crying out loud. It’s this simple,” Dee said. “They follow him around because they’re afraid of him. He’s crazy. He’s a maniac. Everybody’s afraid he might go off and kill someone. I am. Aren’t you?”
“Well, he doesn’t have to threaten anyone in this town to take shots at me,” I replied.
“Yeah,” Tex cut in. “It’s like Hitler and the Jews.”
“Hitler! You saying that Taliferro is big enough in his mind to think about world domination?” Dee asked.
“Relax. I’m talking theory here. You got somebody everybody likes to hate anyway. All you need is one spark. One maniac. One crazy. One Hitler and on a much, much smaller scale, one Taliferro Pitts.”
“Well, I agree with Dee,” I said. “That’s stretching it quite a bit, but I get the point. You must be on the World War II chapter in history.”
Taliferro wasted no time in emphasizing that point. During the first week of classes, I passed him in a stairwell and he proceeded to trip me. I was just about to take my first step off the landing when he stuck his foot between my feet. I tumbled headfirst down the staircase, causing an avalanche of students. A girl named Tawanda Jeter broke a leg in the pileup. I was blamed for the incident. Tawanda’s parents demanded that I be suspended, but after some consideration, the principal decided that I wasn’t to blame. Others were anxious to follow Taliferro’s lead. From all quarters, the verbal abuse intensified. The nickname “Snowball” was revived, along with the other old standards. It seemed no one could stand to pass me without slinging a verbal arrow.
But these days things were different. Often I was able to parry their insults and then scoff at their intentions. I could do this because Patty Cunningham had introduced me to black writers who had endured experiences like mine. Not exactly like mine, but enough to make me feel that I wasn’t a freak of nature. That I was not alone. Enough to convince me that I was right to live my dreams, and that, despite what anybody in Canaan thought, I had not lost my blackness.
I will never forget the warm Saturday afternoon that I sat in my circle in the woods reading Black Boy by Richard Wright. On page 125, I came upon this.
I walked home slowly, asking myself what on earth was the matter with me, why it was I never seemed to do things as people expected them to be done. Every word and gesture I made seemed to provoke hostility. I had never been able to talk to others and I had to guess at their meanings and motives.
Then:
The routine of the house flowed on as usual; for me there was sleep, mush, greens, school, study, loneliness, yearning and then sleep again.
Later, I came upon this:
I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive. I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the south had been rigged to stifle.
Then:
My classmates felt that I was doing something that was vaguely wrong, but they did not know how to express it. As the outside world grew more meaningful, I became more concerned, tense; and my classmates and my teachers would say: “Why do you ask so many questions?” Or: “Keep quiet.”
I felt relief and then strength. I gained more strength from the words of people like James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston.
It wasn’t as if Mama Jennie and Bojack hadn’t helped me. I could never explain the depth of my feelings for them. But they were on the outside helping, like a doctor to a patient. What gives the patient the special, indescribable comfort that I felt was the understanding of another patient with the same disease.
It didn’t solve everything, but it made me feel better, and I had my new friend to thank.
•••
Patty Cunningham was a native Philadelphian and a child of society. She’d followed her well-known wealthy parents to all sorts of posh Philadelphia events. She’d worn modernized pinafore dresses, smiled when she was supposed to, and of course, she was her daddy’s little girl. At least in his eyes.
Patty loved the life she’d led in Philadelphia. She loved those events and the celebrities who attended. When she got older, she bought books, the plays of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. She saw all the latest films with her mother. When report cards came out and she had earned straight As, her mother always took her to New York for a weekend visit. They would spend the time running from theater to theater, catching plays from matinee to evening performances. Sundays were set aside for museums.
Patty liked rock music, but she could take it or leave it. Folk music was her favorite—Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, James Taylor. These artists taught her about feelings that her parents never talked about, and they made her question her life. The result was that Patty could never accept anything superficially.
“There’s a deep meaning to every aspect of life,” she liked to say.
I came to know all of these things about Patty in the first weeks of school, as we had been sharing our peacefulness together. Every day during lunch we met behind the cafeteria, out of sight of the playgrounds, discussing the deeper meanings of life.
“My daddy doesn’t really appreciate the deeper meanings,” she told me one day. “I drive him crazy, and he blames my mom for trying to make me grow up too fast.”
“In what way?”
“He doesn’t want me to think about anything of substance. He just wants me to be his little girl and sit around with an empty head, adoring him. The other night they got into an argument over me. I’d complained to Mom about moving here. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but it’s pretty damned boring.”
It was my turn to laugh. “You’re not hurting my feelings.”
“Anyway, he told Mom that I questioned too much. That I take everything so damned seriously and that I’m always arguing about the way things should be. Mom told him that I was a thinker and that he’d be proud of that fact if I were a boy.”
“I bet he didn’t like that.”
“He told her to spare him the feminist shit. That I’m angry about too much, and I have to analyze everything. What do I care? I’m fifteen years old. Why can’t I be a cheerleader like normal girls and enjoy something . . . superficial.”
We both laughed.
“He told her, ‘She’s growing up too fast and it’s going to come back to haunt you.’”
Patty ended up in Canaan because of her father’s obsessions. His company had purchased one of the local meatpacking plants, and instead of sending one of his vice presidents, Alex Cunningham, president and CEO, brought his family there so he could reorganize the plant’s operation. He thought if he could get Patty away from the city and its theaters, huge libraries, and artsy-fartsy films, she might not grow up so fast.
“Country girls are slower to mature,” he told Patty before they moved. “Maybe you can join the Girl Scouts or something.”
“You brought me here to deprive me of stimulation so I could be your daddy’s girl again, and to put Mom in her place.”
“Like your mother, you can be cruel.”
“Dad, look in the mirror.”
Talking about her dad made her sad, so we didn’t. But we did talk about everything else in our lives on those very special lunch breaks. I loved learning from her and getting to know her. A fe
w minutes each day with her kept me sane and moving in the right direction.
FOURTEEN
I was sitting on the dining room floor, drinking some cherry Kool-Aid. It was a warm September night, and the windows I was sitting beside were open to allow for the light breeze. The fresh air felt great to me as I sat there proudly in the blue-and-gold football jersey that I would wear to school the next day and in my first varsity game the next night. On my chest, back, and sleeves was the number 5, which was Bojack’s lucky number.
Drawn in with the breeze were the voices of the session members, complaining as usual while Mama and Daddy continued their role of the sympathizers. Chauncey Mae, Aunt Mary, Ethel and Jim Brown had their sad stories cranked up to a fever pitch, and when things were on a roll like that, the session, like a Reverend Walker sermon, usually ended up going long. I got up to leave, figuring this was the perfect chance to talk to Bojack about my conflicting feelings.
As I crossed the field beside my house, I was smiling but confused. I could handle the bad thoughts, but this calmness that made me smile out of nowhere was foreign. I thought that Bojack might be able to shed some light on my state of mind.
On the way up the dirt path to Bojack’s, I thought about Dee’s declaration of fear regarding Taliferro.
“The word has been passed around on the team,” he had told me.
“What word?” I asked, even though I knew.
“Dickhead wants to make it tough on you, Evan. He threatened us, man.”
“And I don’t mind telling you,” Tex added, “he scared the shit out of me.”
“Be careful, Evan,” Dee said.
I knew I couldn’t escape him for the entire season.
As I walked up the steps to Bojack’s house, I saw him through the kitchen window. He was sitting at the table, his chin resting on his hands. Beside him was a bottle of whiskey. In front of him was a checkerboard with both sides set up. Once in a while, he would move a checker and jump it with a checker from the other side. Then he’d stare at the situation, his head bobbing as he nodded in and out of sleep.
The Emancipation of Evan Walls Page 20
