I Am Not Sidney Poitier

by Percival Everett

  I looked at the open door.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said.

  “It’s about Miss Hancock.”

  “Have a seat.” When I was seated, he said, “Go on. What did Miss Hancock do?”

  “She failed me.”

  “That’s her job,” he said.

  “I did A-grade work.”

  “That’s not for you to say.” He leaned forward and interlaced his fingers on his desk, staring at me. Had I not known better, I might have guessed he was trying to Fesmerize me.

  “She took me out to her house, supposedly to move bags of topsoil and manure, and then she—” I found myself unsure about how to proceed with my accusation. I could not say blow job to the principal and neither could I say to him that Beatrice Hancock had given me head or fellated me, so I landed, like a blind roofer, on rape. “She raped me,” I said, regretting it before I had uttered the final word.

  I never heard such laughter. Mr. Clapper turned beet red, his tongue rolled into a tube and pushed out of the O of his mouth as he coughed, and tears trickled down his corpulent face while he pointed at me. I think he said, that’s rich, or maybe, you wish, or that bitch, which made no sense. But it was clear, clearer than clear, that he did not believe me.

  I got up and walked from his office into the outer chamber and looked at all the wide-eyed potato faces of the staff who had evidently overheard the exchange. They didn’t laugh out loud, but they found me plenty amusing.

  As much as I didn’t want to care, I was unable to let the matter rest. The whole thing gnawed at me, much in the manner of Miss Hancock. Things were of course made worse by the story buzzing through the entire school. I was used to the pointing and laughing, the insults and beatings, but somehow, in that strange universe of high school, my universe of high school, that abuse made sense. But now what lay at the core of my ridicule was a lie. Even Eddie Eliazar turned against me; I had either lied about his beloved Beatrice Hancock or, worse, been with his beloved Beatrice Hancock. He was obliged to hate me either way. One thing surfaced through this, a kind of bodily discovery. I realized that I was not small. At just over six feet and looking much like Sidney Poitier, I was becoming a man. One of the usual bullies approached me in the cafeteria.

  “You gonna eat that cupcake?” he asked.

  I was sitting alone, in my usual place, wherever there was an empty seat alone. “Why, do you want it?”

  “Yeah, I want it.”

  I looked at the yellow-and-white-topped cupcake. I never had any intention of putting the heavily buttercream-iced sawdust in my mouth, but I said, “I think I’ll keep it.” I looked up at him, surprising myself that I had not even thought to attempt Fesmerization. And then I stood. As it turned out I was a good three or four inches taller than the bully.

  I saw retreat in his eyes, but he was pushed forward by the pressure of his friends and everyone else in the cafeteria, for that matter.

  “I think I’ll eat it.” I took a bite of the awful thing.

  “I’m gonna fuck you up,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Fuck me up.”

  Now even his friends were nervous. The bully turned to his backup singers and said, “Let’s go.” And they went.

  What should have been a moment of triumph for me, standing up for myself and even settling the matter without blows, turned oddly sour as I realized that the kids around me were now afraid of me. By so daringly stepping away from my role as victim, I was to be feared, or at least made to feel like a shit for abandoning the rules.

  I hated everything about everything. The rules that had been broken, the trust that had been broken, were all broken by that slutty history teacher, that orally fixated predator who didn’t know that normalcy was coined by a dumb president.

  At home, I ate alone and in the dark. I paced the grounds. I was walking back and forth the length of the pool on Saturday morning when Ted came out in his trunks for a swim.

  “Hey, Nu’ott,” he said, then dove into the deep end. He came up and looked at the sky. “I’ve never been struck by lightning. You?”

  Had it been anyone but Ted I would have thought he was speaking metaphorically. But he was talking about lightning. “No,” I said.

  “I bet it hurts like hell.”

  “Well, my teacher failed me,” I told him.

  “Wow.”

  “I went back to her house, I don’t know why, and she did it again and I asked her not to and she said she’d fail me if I didn’t let her and so I let her and then she failed me anyway.”

  “Wow.”

  “I went to the principal, but he laughed.” I sat on the edge of a pool chair. “You know, I really don’t care, but I care. Know what I mean?”

  “Absolutely.” He went under and came back up.

  “What should I do?”

  “I can’t tell you that, Nu’ott. You can climb the ladder of command if you want, but I can’t say that’s what you should do. You have to decide what you need out of this, what’s important to you. I wonder if you know the lightning’s coming. A fellow told me that when he got struck he felt like he had glass in his shoes. Welded his zipper shut. If I were you I might go to the school superintendent.” Then he was submerged again, swimming to the far side.

  The following Monday I skipped school and went to the office of the superintendent of the school system. The downtown building that housed that office was glass and steel and looked like it was probably outdated and obsolete before it had been completed. Everyone there seemed shocked to see an actual student on the premises and stared at me like I was an experiment of some kind. I believe I got in to see the superintendent only because they were all so confused by my presence.

  I stepped into the plush, tastelessly decorated office to discover that Dr. Gunther was a gray-haired woman with square glasses. From looking at her I felt confident that if she had ever seen a penis she certainly had not put the thing in her mouth. I had the immediate thought that I might fare better with her than I had with Mr. Clapper. She asked me to sit and if I’d like some water. I sat in the low, hard chair and said no to the water.

  “What may I do for you, young man?” She pulled a pad of paper in front of her. “First, what is your name?”

  “My name is Not Sidney Poitier.”

  “I can well imagine.” She studied my features. “You do look a little like him. Now, what is your name?”

  “Not Sidney Poitier. My name is Not Sidney Poitier.”

  She appeared suddenly nervous, perhaps afraid, casting sidelong glances at her door and phone. “And you’re here because?”

  “I’d like to report the inappropriate behavior of a teacher,” I said.

  “Sexually inappropriate?”

  “Yes. Of the oral variety.” I said this and looked away from her at one of the two big-eyed clown paintings on the wall behind her.

  She appeared to be genuinely concerned. “Just where are you in school?”

  “Decatur Normal.”

  “And your principal is—”

  “Mr. Clapper.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  “And the teacher in question?”

  “My history teacher, Beatrice Hancock.” I took pleasure in saying her name, so I said it again. “Beatrice Hancock.”

  “And what did she do?”

  I decided to not beat around the bush, but dove straight into it, to offer the shock of it. “She drove me to her tacky house, got on her knee-socked knees, and gave me what I have since learned is called a blow job.”

  “She did, did she?”

  “And, to tell the truth, she wasn’t very good at it. I don’t think it’s supposed to hurt.”

  She cleared her throat. “Well, never mind that. This happened once?” Dr. Gunther asked.

  “No, twice.”

  “I thought you said it hurt.”

  “It did, both times,” I said.

  “Why did you let it happen a second time?”

  “She fo
rced me.”

  Dr. Gunther stared at me for a few seconds. “Did you tell Mr. Clapper that Miss Hancock did this to you?”

  “I did. He laughed.”

  “You don’t mind if I call him, do you?”

  I shrugged. As she asked her secretary to get Clapper on the phone I realized what a bad idea it was for me to be there. This woman didn’t believe me and wasn’t going to believe me. I thought she might call security at any second and that I would then be just one twitch away from getting shot by a product of this very school system. She smiled, rather insincerely, at me while she waited, receiver pressed to her small gray head.

  “Mr. Clapper? Yes, this is Superintendent Mrs. Dr. Gunther Junior down here in the central office. Oh, I’m fine. And how are you? And how is your wife? And how are your children? I’m sitting here in my office with a tall young black man. Do you have a student named Poitier? Really. So, that actually is his name.” Her sounds became absurd and muted, and then she was nothing but a working mouth in front of me, like a crab eating. I wanted to dash out of there, down the glass-and-steel corridors and into the street, but I didn’t. Then the sound of her voice came back and now it was laughter, cackling, witch-cackling laughter, which at once frightened me, irritated me, and justified all of my not-so-kind preconceptions. She hung up the phone, looked at me, and laughed harder.

  As I walked out of the building and into the light spring air, I realized that I truly did not care, not even about the principle. I had no desire to see Miss Hancock punished and no notion to give her a piece of my mind. It of course helped me in not caring to remember that I was filthy rich. Grades and diplomas, perhaps sadly, simply didn’t matter to me. And as far as blond Beatrice Hancock was concerned, at least she had learned to suck a penis without drawing blood, and so I had performed a sort of public service, offering a measure of protection to the next in her line of victims. I was fairly clear in my desire to become a high school dropout. I decided right then to light out for the territory, as it were, to leave my childhood, to abandon what had become my home, my safety, and to discover myself. Most importantly I wanted to find my mother’s grave and put something fitting, perhaps beautiful, on her headstone. What? I’d yet to figure that out. The warm and humid spring air filled me with clean inspiration and a sense of independence.

  And so, this became a prophetically, apocalyptically instructive, even sibylline, moment. I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in this world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.

  CHAPTER 2

  I was my own person, so I was told, so I believed, and so I was treated by Ted, and so I therefore had no reason to sneak away from my so-called home, to leave covertly in the night without a word. Instead, I found Ted sitting on his veranda, surrounded by flowers he once told me he never liked, reading the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s sports page while having breakfast.

  “I don’t know why this is a continental breakfast,” he said, pushing a croissant with a finger.

  “I’m leaving,” I said.

  “Well, the day had to come.” He bit into a cheese Danish and looked up at the sky as he chewed.

  “I’m going to drive back to Los Angeles.”

  “That seems like a likely destination. However, you don’t have a driver’s license,” he pointed out.

  “I bought a fake one.”

  “You don’t have a car.”

  “It pays to have money,” I said.

  He nodded and put down the Danish. “I’ve often wondered how the soldiers in the Civil War could do it,” he said. “Imagine, charging across a pasture with men getting blown to smithereens to the left and right of you and you keep going. What is a smithereen?”

  “I bought a used Toyota. At least I think it’s a Toyota. At any rate, most of it is blue.”

  “It must be, then, a Toyota. Well, you’ve got all my numbers and Podgy’s number and I assume some cash. Call Podgy and he’ll get you whatever you need, wherever you are. Call me if you need help.” He went back to reading his newspaper. “I don’t know why I bought that basketball team.”

  “Good-bye, Ted.”

  “Come back soon.”

  I left Atlanta, the mansion, my so-called home, and Ted, recalling Ted’s words as I drove west on Interstate 20, then exited off the freeway and took US 278, looking for a road that was less road, possibly a more scenic route, “Once you leave Atlanta, you’re in Georgia.” And as I recalled his words, they came true. The troubling truth took the form of a flashing blue bubble atop a black-and-white county sheriff’s patrol car. I watched as the nine-foot-tall, large-headed, large-hatted, mirror-sunglassed manlike thing unfolded from his car, closed his door, and walked toward me—one hairy-knuckled suitcase of a hand resting on his insanely large and nasty-looking pistol, the knuckles of the other hand dragging along the ground. I had a thought to be terrified, and so I was.

  He said to me through the completely rolled-down window of my yellow and mostly blue Toyota Corolla, “Hey, boy.” Those were his exact words, though I cannot capture adequately his inflection. It was not a greeting as much as a threat, somehow a question, certainly an attack. His dented badge said Officer George, and I found that funny.

  “Officer,” I said as a greeting and as a question.

  He took my greeting as a smart-ass remark, which it might have been, I don’t know. But I could tell from his depthless eyes that he didn’t like it. I imagined his eyes as blue lifeless marbles even though I couldn’t see them, hidden as they were behind his mirror lenses, but I assumed they matched the rest of his features. He said again, “Hey, boy.” More threatening this time.

  “Sir?” I said.

  “Okay, boy, first thangs first. Why don’t you let me see your license and registration?” But it was not a question.

  I leaned over to reach into the glove compartment for my registration, which was as bogus as my license, and at that point I was startled by shouting, though I could not make out clearly what was being said. It sounded like, “That thar be far nuff, nigger! Sitch on back straight and git out the veehickle!” This was punctuated by the brandishing of his huge pistol. That I heard clearly.

  “I was just reaching for … ” I tried to say.

  “Y’all done heard me na, boy! Move na! Move yo black ass. Na, git out chere, raght na!”

  My first thought was this man sounds like Jesse Jackson. My second thought was not to mention my first. I got out of the car, and he turned me around roughly and used his forearm to press me against the rear window. He slid me down the length of the car and leaned me over the short trunk, patted down my sides and the insides of my legs. He jerked my left arm behind my back, slapped on a cuff, then pulled back the right. “Don’t move, nigger!” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Shut up! I don’t want to hear another word outta yo mouth, you understand me?”

  I said nothing.

  “I said, do you understand me?!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Shut up!”

  His voice faded a bit as I imagined him backing toward his patrol car. I heard him on his radio. He said, “I need backup out here on 278 near the mill. Had a little trouble with an uppity nigger.”

  Before I could whistle “Dixie” or any other tune there were three more black-and-white patrol cars and similarly brown-shirt-clad miscreants swinging their long arms around me. There was a lot of whooping and chattering and hoo-hahing and head scratching about whether my license was phony, about whether my car was stolen, it was just too clean, and about whether I was or was not that “actor feller.” A short very round one offered up the expert knowledge that “them thar movie cameras make you look older and fatter.” To this another said, “Then how many cameras on you, Cletus?” They had a big laugh. I didn’t laugh, leaning as I was still with my face against the trunk of the car.

  Officer George brought his face close to
mine. “Well, Poitier, I’m afraid you’re under arrest.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “You hear that?” he asked his cohorts. “Did you hear that?” Then he got even closer to me, his breath smelling like something dead. “Well, fer one thang, sassin’ an officer of the law, which around here is the same as resistin’ arrest. Now, there’s speedin’ and failure to stop immediately when I turned on my light. And then there’s bein’ a nigger.”

  “That’s not a crime,” I said, then realized just what I was saying. “I’m not a nigger.”

  They laughed.

  “This chere is Peckerwood County, boy,” George said. “And chere, you’s a nigger. And it’s a crime if’n I say it is.”

  I was, to say the very least, terrified. To say the very most, in my mind, I was bending over as far as I could to kiss my ass good-bye. I was taken to the town of Peckerwood, the county seat of the county of the same name. I was denied my cliché one phone call, my car and belongings were taken to who knows where, and I was being called Sidney Poitier by the deputies and the jailer. They were encouraged to do so, pleased to do so, because of my insistence that my name was Not Sidney Poitier. Dressed in actual prison stripes that made me feel a little like Buster Keaton, I was arraigned by a judge who also had the surname George and shared all physical features with Officer George, save his size. The little snaggletoothed jurist pounded his gavel and said, “A year at the work farm!”

  “Don’t I get a lawyer?” I asked.

  “Two years!”

  Evolution might have been glacial where they were concerned, but not with me. I kept my mouth shut after that. I considered attempting a bit of Fesmerization, but I was terribly afraid of the effects of ineffective staring.

  The upside was that I was getting out of the town of Peckerwood, Georgia, though my impression of it was formed without a proper tour. The downside, and I mean down, was that I was getting out on a blue-and-white county bus bound for the Peckerwood County Correctional Prison Farm. The bus was at least thirty years old, smelled of urine and, oddly, carrots, and had caging on the inside of the windows. I was shackled to a slight white man, maybe twenty years old, with grease-slicked-back dishwater-blond hair, and from the way he stared at me I knew he liked neither me nor the fact that I was black nor the fact that we were chained together. If only I could have gotten to a phone I could have called Podgy, gotten some money, and probably bought my way out of this mess. Then it would have been back to Atlanta to hire a lawyer, and I would have wound up owning Peckerwood County. It occurred to me even then: Who would want to own Peckerwood County? The reason it was what it was was because there was absolutely nothing and no one there of any value. It was a terrestrial black hole, rather white hole, a kind of giant Caucasian anus that only sucked, yet smelled like a fart. We rolled through pine trees across spiderwebbed and cracked asphalt deeper into the county’s colon. We stopped finally at the farm. Shacks and more shacks, rows of dusty nothing, with many trees that managed to provide no shade at all. We filed out of the bus, twenty black and three white souls.