I Am Not Sidney Poitier

by Percival Everett

  “What do they grow here?” I asked no one in particular, but for some stupid reason said it out loud.

  “This here is a dirt farm, boy,” a mirrored-lens-covered set of eyes shouted at me. “Our dirt crop ain’t what it used to be and it never was!” That’s what I finally figured out he said. It sounded like, “Dis chere a dir farm, boi. Aw dir crop ain’t wha eah yoost to be, but den tit neber wa.” This would be how all the guards sounded all the time, and so I had no idea what they were telling me to do or not do.

  They gave me a moth-eaten army-surplus blanket and a bar of soap and a tin cup and a quilt-thin mattress to put on the metal slab that was my bunk. The toilet was a hole in the middle of the aisle in the center of the shack. In other words, we were sleeping in a big outhouse. All of the men in my shack were black, as lost looking as I was, but finally not so much different from the rest of the inhabitants of Peckerwood County. The older men pushed me and insulted me, called me nigger, and forced me to the bunk nearest the toilet hole.

  That first night I was awakened by a big white potato face looming over me. I of course had no idea what he was saying, at the top of his lungs, but it was clear that he wanted me to come with him. He took me out into the yard and handed me a shovel, opened his mouth, and let out, “Way dunt ye digs me a hole ri chere, boi?” But it wasn’t a question.

  Since there was a shovel in my hands and ground beneath my feet, I assumed he wanted me to dig my own grave, so I started. The ground was rock hard, and the shovel didn’t make a dent.

  “Put yer bac inter it!” he said.

  I did, leaning onto the implement and scratching out a little stubborn earth at a time. I worked away; the tobacco-chewing Nazi stood over me while I became soaked with sweat and grief.

  “Keep awn deegin’.”

  It was so dark and still so hot. I was about two feet down into a sizeable ditch when another peckerwood joined us. He looked at me and said, “Why’n ye takin tha dir outta my hole, boi?”

  “Because I was told to,” I said.

  “Ja hear tha?” the second said to the first.

  “Sho nuff.”

  “You’n a uppty nig, aintcha?” the first said. “We’s awl gyine put y’all in da cain.”

  “Ya, in da cain,” the second said, laughing a kind of panting-dog laugh. “We see haw he see thangs in the mornin’.”

  I had no idea what they said, but I knew it couldn’t be good. They dragged me some yards away and stuck me all folded up into a four-by-four-foot corrugated-tin cube in the middle of the camp. I felt hot and sick in the dark and thought that I was about ready to die. I recalled all the prison movies I had seen, not many, and wondered if some good-hearted trustee or brave fellow prisoner would appear with a much-needed drink of water or a biscuit or a leathery scrap of dried meat. None did. However I was sure that the cliché shower scene was certainly on the program. I had the thought that things could not get any worse, and then I heard the thunder. It rained much of the night. With the heat and the humidity, the rain and the confinement, I felt hot and cold and parched and soaked.

  The next morning I was dragged out of the can, not the box as I might have called it (it being a box), and was nearly blinded by the intense sun. I was distracted from the stinging light by the stinging blows to my midsection and the side of my head. I stumbled into the mess line and received a platter of gruel and a tin cup of warm pond water. We were then lined up chained to a partner, in my case the same fellow as the day before, and marched toward a bus, the top of which was laden with shovels and hoes and slings.

  The bus was an oven. I felt my stomach turn as soon as I boarded. It stank of the sweat of men, the piss of men, and the shit of men. And though we prisoners were soaked and sickened, somehow neither the smell nor the heat seemed to affect the guards whose jackets remained on and buttoned, the brims of their Stetsons remained pulled low, and the ammo belts were worn snuggly around their corpulent middles. I sat near the back of the bus, my face pressed against the diamond-patterned cage, my right wrist shackled to the white man’s left. The foul-smelling behemoth belched and roared to life, and we bounced out to the highway. The sad guts of Peckerwood County rolled by in a blur, and the sight of it did not lift my spirits. A red pickup with a couple of teenagers riding in the bed pulled even with the bus and then started horn blowing and shouting. I could not make out what they were saying, their being from Peckerwood County, but the quality and substance of their noise were clear. I heard “nigga” a lot and “darkie” and “slave.” Then, as the pickup sped up to avoid oncoming traffic, it began to fishtail. Then the bus began to fishtail, and I could see that this was not a good thing. I gripped my fingers tight around the plastic molded seat, pulling against my shackle mate’s attempt to pull his hands to his face, which by the time I looked was wide open in a Munchian scream. My grip failed as the bus began to capsize. We tumbled across to the far side, then across the ceiling as the bus somersaulted down the embankment. The air was filled with screams and choking sounds and dust and crying and dust and swearing and dust. It came to rest upside down.

  I don’t believe I was knocked completely unconscious, but it did take me some time to gather myself and evaluate my predicament. My first assessment led me to the ridiculously obvious conclusion that I was deep in what my mother would have called dung pudding. I was lying facedown on my faceup shackle partner. He was out cold, an immediate plus that soon became a minus as I detected the odor of gasoline. Fearing the bus would explode into flames at any second, I yelled at his dead face.

  “Hey!” I looked around. Then, “Peckerwood!” I closed my eyes and listened to the moaning and weeping all around me. I did not believe myself to be injured, though I considered the possibility that shock and adrenaline might be covering any pain. The gas fumes found my nostrils again. “Peckerwood!” I shouted. I crawled over his body and dragged him across the ceiling to the emergency door at the rear of the bus. At some point it had been welded shut, but the accident had torn the doors off. My shackle mate began to come around as I pulled both of us through mud and away from the wreckage. I sat up and leaned against a thin tree and watched. The guards were dead or unconscious. Many of the prisoners were not moving either. Others were locked into place by their incapacitated cuff buddies. My partner sat up and looked at the mess with me. He looked at me.

  “I thought the bus was going to blow up, so I dragged you over here,” I said. “I was wrong.”

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Let’s get outta here. You stupid or somethin’? We gotta run.”

  Of course he was right. The Peckerwood justice system had proven to be anything but, and if I remained I faced perhaps another year tacked onto my sentence for surviving the crash.

  “Come on, boy!” the cracker shouted, getting up to pull me into moving with him. “Run!”

  And so we ran. Without looking back. Without looking at each other. We roughly yanked each other this way and that, not thinking about destination or even direction, moving only to put distance between the wreckage, the guards, the cops, and ourselves.

  We ran through a hollow and got scratched thoroughly by a stand of some kind of thorny bush. Finally we stopped running, panting like dogs. Peckerwood tugged the chain and I pulled back and suddenly we were wrestling with it. He tried to yank me past him, but he lost his balance and I fell on top of him. He must have injured his back in the bus crash because he screamed out in pain that I had not inflicted. I stood up and over him, my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.

  “My back be fucked up,” he said.

  I fell to sitting on my butt.

  “What your name, boy?” Peckerwood asked.

  “Poitier.”

  “What? That sound like some kinda girl’s name.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Patrice,” he said. He spat on the ground between his feet.

  I said nothing.

  He started to get up,
pulling me by the chain. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “South,” he said.

  “Atlanta,” I said.

  “I gots people southa here.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “I sayd we’se going south, boy,” Patrice said. He struggled to his feet and gave me his best cockeyed dangerous look, but when he pulled on the chain he grimaced in pain.

  “Atlanta,” I said again, observing how my yank at the chain caused him such discomfort. “I’ve got people and money in Atlanta.”

  “You ain’t got shit, nigger.”

  I tugged the chain again, this time with a bit more authority. “Well, I don’t have an injured back, you stupid moron.” I pulled once more and watched him wince. “Atlanta.” As I said it I realized I didn’t know how I planned to get us there. I knew only that we needed to head east.

  Due east we ran, or as close to east as I could guess, as hard and as fast as we could go, which wasn’t very because of Patrice’s injured back and our inability to move with any coordination whatsoever. We fell over each other like a couple of Keystone Kops, pulled ourselves up over each other, scrambled up steep hills and tumbled down muddy yet rocky embankments. We listened the while for the barking and howling of dogs, but heard nothing. I wouldn’t have thought to be concerned about dogs at all, but Patrice said, “Them dawgs is fast and if’n dey catch yo ass, yo ass is last week’s poke chops.”

  We paused for another necessary breather, this time sitting side by side on a fallen log. I looked at him and realized just how ugly he was. His face was somehow much too big for his head; his crude features sprawled everywhere to no good effect. “Why do you think they chained us together?” I asked for no reason other than to make conversation.

  “I guess that thar warden guy has got hisself one of dem senses of humor,” Patrice said.

  “No doubt.”

  Patrice looked at me and then at the sky. “Atlanta,” he said. “That don’t sound so bad. Dem’s some purty gals in Atlanta.”

  “What did you do?” I asked. “Why did they put you in prison?”

  “I stole me a fuckin’ car. Twere the finest midnight blue Buick deuce and a quarter with cream yeller insides you ever laid yo sad darkie eyes on, boy. And then I drove the thang into my girlfriend’s living room, the lyin’ cheatin’ bitch. What about you?”

  “Apparently it’s illegal to be black in Peckerwood County.”

  “If it ain’t, it oughta be.” He focused his eyes on the sky again. “Atlanta. If’n I had me some money I could be Charlie Potatoes in Atlanta.” He winced at a pain in his back.

  A dog barked in the distance. We got up and ran. We climbed a short hill and found on the other side what could only be called a raging river. The water was churning, violent, wearing steadily away at boulders of all sizes. It was about fifty yards across, but it looked like a mile. The river’s noise was deafening. The din served to cover any sounds dogs might make, but also made them seem closer and more real. I could not hear what Patrice was yelling at me, but I understood that we had to cross. I took the first step into the, if not icy then cold as hell, water. The water pushed first at my ankles. I was surprised by the strength of the current even in the shallow water. Then it pushed at my knees, my thighs, until I was chest-deep, and it was all I could do to move my feet at all. I tried to drag my feet through each step, feeling the water wanting to lift me. I clung to slippery, slimy rocks. I picked up a foot to step over a stone and felt the force of the river seeking to push, pull, twist, and suck me into its flow. I glanced back at Patrice. He was tracing my path, gripping the chain that connected us in the fist of his cuffed hand. Suddenly I was weightless, completely without purchase, and I was gone, sucked under and popped back up like a cork. I felt a momentary snag as Patrice tried to hold onto a boulder, but then he was with me, bobbing and thrashing and crashing into each other and every rock we could find. I was pulled completely under, and I could see my mother’s face. I was in our old kitchen and she was baking cookies, talking about investments and the changing face of media. “News will be the new entertainment,” she said. “Trust me, Not Sidney. It won’t be enough to report it, news will have to be made. It’s going to be a bad thing, but it’s going to be.” She slid the first batch into the oven and closed the door. “That’s where we’ve gone. Everything in this country is entertainment. That’s what you need for stupid people. That’s what children want. Drink your milk.” Then my head was out again, and I was sucking in much-needed air. Though Patrice was tethered to me, he seemed very far away. I saw that we were passing a calmer section of water and I tried to kick toward it, but I had no control. Patrice was able to swing around into the friendlier water where he grabbed an overhanging branch. He screamed as he pulled me to him. We pulled ourselves into the safety of some driftwood and panted like dogs.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “For what, nigger?”

  “For pulling me out.”

  “She-it, I ain’t pulled you out.” He hacked and spat. “I kept yo ass from pullin’ me in.”

  We dragged ourselves onto the bank, up and away from the river. It started raining, pouring. I was surprised at how bad the rain felt even though I was already soaking wet.

  “Well, at least them dawgs gonna lose our scent trail for a while,” Patrice said, coughing up and spitting out more river.

  I caught a whiff of him and wondered if that was true about the dogs losing our scent. I looked back and imagined the redneck trackers and the bloodhounds coming to the river’s edge. It wouldn’t take much more than a below-average intellect to conclude that we had crossed over, so to speak. We climbed and then came down a hill into an open scar of land. A rusting and idle backhoe was standing near a pit. The rain fell harder, and thunder rattled in the distance. The place seemed to be a construction site, but nothing was being built, and so I thought it was a fitting metaphor for Peckerwood County. The ground was sloppy with mud, and we sank to our ankles with each step. Then we heard the sound of a car or truck, and we jumped into the pit. We splashed and fought with the mud and standing water in the bottom until we were plastered against the red clay wall. The engine noise faded, and we looked around to find that the hole was about ten feet square and as high.

  For minutes we tried to climb the clay walls, but not only could we find no purchase on the slimy face, we defeated our efforts by our retarded, out-of-sync motions. It was a miracle, if you’re receptive to such language, that one of us didn’t end up strangled by the chain.

  “This isn’t working,” I said.

  Patrice looked at me with his eyes. I thought I could see panic seeping into his face.

  “You stand on my shoulders,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “So you can reach the top and then pull me out.”

  “Why you gonna be on da bottom?”

  “Your back is hurt,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Naw, I ain’t fallin’ fer it. I don’t trust you. You want me to do all the work pullin’ your lazy nigger ass up.”

  “Okay, I’ll stand on your shoulders, and then I’ll pull you out. Does that sound better?”

  “Right. You think I’m stupid? You’ll get up there and next thing I know you’re runnin’ to Atlanta and I’m still in di hole.”

  I looked at him, then held my cuffed wrist in front of his face. “Patrice, we’re chained together. I can’t leave you.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  I tried to climb up on his shoulders, but his back just wouldn’t allow it. I leaned over and helped him step onto my shoulders, then I stood as tall as I could with my right arm raised as high as I could reach. Patrice reached up with his right hand, the chain pulling at his left. Mud fell down into my face. He grunted, a sound not so different from his talking, and swore, and finally said, “I got me sumpin’.” The sumpin’ turned out to be a root, and he managed to get his body out and clear. He grunted even louder, even screamed once as
he pulled me up.

  “We’d better get out of this road,” I said.

  The rain let up, and the heat of Peckerwood County found its full form. Now, without the rain, I was as wet with perspiration. We staggered a mile or so away from the muddy pit and collapsed on our backs in high grass.

  Patrice looked over at me and said, without provocation, “You know, I don’t like you. Nigger.”

  “I can well imagine.”

  “I don’t even like yer name. Potay.”

  “That’s fine by me.”

  “You makin’ fun of me, boy?” he asked.

  “Nature beat me to that,” I said.

  He hopped to his feet, and of course I did as well. We stood there staring at each other. I wish I could say I felt nothing, but I found a bit of hatred in myself for this redneck fool. I could see that he was not only ready to throw a punch, but that punch was forthcoming. I had seen the behavior so often in my life as a constant bully victim. I decided it was a good time to attempt to Fesmerize him. Up went one brow, and I leaned into my gaze.