I Am Not Sidney Poitier

by Percival Everett

  “His arms got tired.”

  “Your daddy’s an Omega, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, Big Brother!”

  “But you don’t really want to be one.”

  “Yes, I do, Big Brother!”

  “No, you don’t!”

  “I do, Big Brother!”

  “You’d do anything to be an Omega?”

  “Anything, Big Brother!”

  “Would you let Big Brother Maurice punch you in the face as hard as he can with a fist full of quarters?”

  “Yes, Big Brother!”

  I stood there like an idiot holding up my pails of sand, watching them do that to little Eugene, watching them break him down. I hated myself for watching, for continuing to hold my load, for simply being there. When Maurice punched the small man my stomach turned, the hairs on the back of my neck rose. I watched the blood gush from Eugene’s nose and though my strength didn’t fail, my pails did lower. I concentrated my stare at Morris, one brow jacked up, leaning into it. Maurice was rubbing his knuckles, looking orgasmic after his blow, and Eugene was crumpled into a ball, blood from his nose everywhere. Morris caught me staring and opened his mouth to say something, but he turned out to be the most susceptible subject I had yet to encounter. I Fesmerized him so quickly that I was uncertain how to proceed. But his eyes glazed over in the textbook manner. Inside his head, he had fallen back on his heels and was awaiting my instructions.

  I leaned close and whispered so only he could hear. I said, “Dismiss us and meet me in our room.”

  He let us go. The befuddled Maurice said, I believe, “What?”

  I didn’t say anything to Morris that evening. I just let him wander about the room in his haze.

  I went to Everett’s class the following morning at eight, in my filthy red T-shirt and with red eyes. He didn’t bleat as he walked by my chair that morning, but walked about the room, his eyes closed as much as open, playing with a stick of chalk. He delivered his lecture like that, as if talking to himself, but not.

  “I suppose what we’re talking about in this class is art. If it’s not, then I’m lost, but of course I’m lost anyway. At least I’ve been lost before and it looks just like this. Let’s consider art as a kind of desacralization, perhaps a sort of epistemological discontinuity that is undoubtedly connected or at the very least traceable to an amalgam of very common yet highly unusual sociohistorical factors. In this, the end of our rapid expansion into mass-media pop-industrial urbanization, all of which changes daily, not only in and out of itself, but transforms the texture and the intertexture of daily life and discourse, we find the degree of expansion or unfolding modified and tested by the parallel distension and unfurling of moral and ideological attitudes, even those and perhaps especially those of religion and traditional repositories of the so-called and so-seen sacred.”

  The students looked at each other, shrugging, scared, frantically trying to carve out something to stick in their notes. I knew that he was uttering gibberish, but what wasn’t clear was whether he knew it. I don’t think he did. There was no snide, sidelong glance at me or anyone or even an imagined mirror. It was just his voice attached to his head. He droned on like that for nearly twenty more minutes, until finally I raised my hand. I was, after all, paying considerably more than anyone else for this so-called, so-seen education.

  “What does this have to do with nonsense?” I asked, grasping the levels of my question as I asked it.

  “Precisely,” he said. Then he looked at his watch. “It shouldn’t matter where you are, the cat’s in the kitchen, the dog’s in the car. There’s an elephant singing plinkidee czar, and the old man is strumming the same old guitar.” He looked out the window. “Dismissed.”

  I walked out with my classmates and listened to their awe. “He’s brilliant,” one Spelman woman said. “I wish I knew what he was talking about,” from another. “He’d be cute if he weren’t so fat,” the third and last woman of the class said. A couple of upperclassmen seemed equally impressed. I then began to doubt myself and decided to stop by Everett’s office to see if I could be made to understand.

  And so I did, around lunchtime again, and on this occasion I found him napping over an open book in his lap. I knocked on the doorjamb.

  He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Mr. Poitier.”

  “Hello, professor.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  I sat in the chair next to his desk. “I didn’t understand a word of your lecture today.”

  “What are you, stupid?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “I don’t think so either,” he said. “Listen, Mr. Poitier, I’m going to hip you to the truth. I’m a fraud, a fake, a sham, a charlatan, a deceiver, a pretender, a crook.”

  “You mean, it’s all meaningless?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Would you say that?” I asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t say that either.”

  “Then you were saying something in class.”

  “Technically. My mouth was moving and I was making sounds.” He paused and looked at my face. “You know what I see when I look at you?”

  “No.”

  “I see Sidney Poitier.”

  “But … ”

  “I know, I know, you’re Not Sidney Poitier and also not Sidney Poitier, but in a strange way you are Sidney Poitier as much as you’re anyone.” He opened and reached into the box on his desk, grabbed a cigar, pointed it at me. “You think I’m joking, pulling your leg, but I’m … ” He stopped. “Have you ever played squash with a hard ball, Mr. Poitier?”

  “I’ve never played squash at all.”

  “Shame.”

  “Can you explain to me what today’s lecture was about?” I asked.

  “Precisely. Now if you’ll get out of my office and close my door, I’ll be able to sit by my open window and enjoy my cigar without the smoke police getting wind of my activity, if you catch my drift.”

  I walked to the door.

  “Do you want to know what I think, Mr. Poitier?” When I nodded, he went on. “I think you should read Althusser and Habermas. I’ve never read them myself. Well, I’ve tried, but I didn’t get it. Something about ideology functioning to obscure the real conditions of existence or some such shit. That’s what somebody told me. Anyway, you read it and then maybe you can explain it to me.”

  “You haven’t read it?”

  “And I don’t plan to try.”

  “Then why should I?”

  “Call it an assignment. Or simply don’t do it. Then you could either tell me you haven’t read it or lie and say you have. You could even make up what it means. It won’t affect your grade either way. By the way, you have an A for the course.”

  “Already?”

  “You all have As. Grades are nonsense. I’ll give you whatever grade you want, but A is such a nice letter.”

  “What if I don’t learn anything?” I asked.

  “Well, tough titty. That’s not my problem, is it?” He waved. “See you on Thursday.”

  I returned to my dorm room to find Morris still sitting on the edge of his bed. He was confused and looked tired.

  “Morris,” I greeted him.

  He didn’t look up.

  “Are you ready for your instructions?”

  He raised his eyes to me and his head followed.

  I had thought long about what I would have him do, but everything seemed, well, obvious. I really had no desire to see him debased like Eugene Talbert. I didn’t particularly dislike Morris, and if I had, I thought, that would have been even more reason to not give in to his influence and kind. I said, “Morris, I want you to start a recycling campaign on campus. I want you and the Big Brothers to try to get the other fraternities to collect all the bottles and cans and keep doing it. You are to admit all the pledgers and apologize to them for your childish cruelty. You are not to admit me. You’re to tell me and everyone else that I am not Omega material.” I was pacin
g to the window and back, thinking and talking. “Is all of that clear to you?”

  Morris said it was.

  “Recycling, Morris. I want you to be all about recycling.”

  “Recycling.”

  “When I say ‘dismissed’ you will have no memory of this conversation, but you will carry out your instructions.”

  He nodded.

  “Dismissed.”

  He stood and walked to his desk, arranged his papers. He picked up a soda can and moved to toss it into the waste bin, but stopped. He looked at the can in his hand, then shoved it into a plastic bag. He dipped into the bin for a previously discarded juice bottle and put that into the bag as well.

  I was driving and Ted was sitting in the passenger seat of my new used Buick Skylark. It was baby blue and Ted was asking why I’d bought it.

  “I mean, it’s a pretty color, but Nu’ott, you’ve got a lot of money,” he said. “But I suppose if it runs.”

  “I like it.”

  “That’s all that matters. Don’t you just hate when you buy a new phone number book and you have to copy all those dang-blasted numbers from one to the other? I hate it even though I hire someone else to do it for me. My damn toenails need trimming, again. I am glad to see you’re not wearing that red T-shirt anymore. It was beginning to smell.”

  “It smelled before I put it on.”

  “I read in the paper about some massive recycling campaign at your college,” Ted said. He waved to someone he knew on the street, but they failed to recognize him since he was in a Buick and with me.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”

  We were on our way to a drugstore so Ted could buy condoms. “Jane prefers that I take care of these matters,” he’d said when he asked me for the ride. Now he was looking in his wallet. “Just seeing if I have any cash with me. I don’t. Do you have any? May I have a ten?”

  “Do you mean borrow?”

  “No, I mean have. I’m pretty sure I’ll forget to pay you back.”

  I gave him a ten.

  “Do you prefer latex or lambskin?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Some of them feel like you’ve slipped your puppy into a garbage bag. So many choices, too. These rubber companies try to make you feel insecure and guilty. Guilty if you don’t buy the one ‘for her pleasure.’ Our pleasure is pretty much taken for granted. I suppose the fact that we’re buying them at all establishes that as a given. Do you have any?”

  “No.”

  “Give me some more money,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to buy you some. My treat.”

  “It’s my money.”

  “Nonetheless.”

  And so Ted bought me a box of condoms that I embarrassedly shoved into my jacket pocket. He sat there reading over his box as we drove home, saying a couple of times, “Amazing things.”

  As is inevitably the case, someone from my former life showed up and recognized me. It was a guy with whom I’d gone to high school. I could remember his face and I didn’t recognize his name and this apparently offended and angered him. When he said his name, which still I can’t recall, it sounded like a name that one might remember and it was that strange notion and feeling to which I attended—that a name sounded rememberable. He became insulted. He went back to DuBois Hall and apparently told all the freshmen there what a loser I had been in high school, and suddenly college was very much even more like high school. He told them that as far as he knew I was a dropout and had been in a sex scandal with a white teacher and he wondered how I’d gotten into Morehouse. He told them it was probably because I used to live with Ted Turner and was probably his houseboy toy or something. And so I was shunned more or less. Not a new experience, but disappointing nevertheless. Eugene Talbert heard all the stories, but focused on the part about Ted. He came right out with it.

  “I heard you lived with Ted Turner.”

  I said nothing. I was sitting in the cafeteria and had not yet picked up my ham sandwich.

  “How rich is he?” He sat down across from me.

  “I’m trying to eat.”

  “Take me to his house,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s so fucking rich. I just want to see what that kind of money looks like.”

  I took a bite and stared at him.

  “I have a fascination with wealth.”

  He didn’t want to meet Ted because he was smart or dumb or because he was quirky or successful, but because he had money. The little bullied fellow shrank in front of me.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Aren’t we friends?” he asked.

  I studied his face and saw nothing but face. “No,” I said.

  “But you stood up for me.”

  “My mistake. Then I didn’t know you well enough to like you or not like you. Now I know you well enough. I’m glad you made it into the fraternity. You belong there.”

  “So, you won’t take me.”

  “No, I won’t take you.”

  “You’re not Omega material. I can see that now.”

  I nodded.

  “You’re just a white man’s toy,” he said. As he said it he reached over to pick up a plastic bottle that had been left on a table and slip it into his book bag. “You’re not black enough to be an Omega.”

  I nodded. “I’ll see you around, Eugene.” I wrapped my sandwich in a napkin and walked away wondering if I might have any virtuous feeling from my show of restraint. I can’t say that I was completely unaffected by his attack. An attack always feels like an attack, and I had to wonder if he was uttering some truth besides my not being Omega material.

  Everett talked on and on about a thing being self-identical, but failed at any turn to make a drop of sense. He laughed over his assertion that contingency was necessary for the existence of necessary truth and laughed harder as he blabbed on about truth as a “pliable vacuum of manipulated fragments of no whole entity.” The Spelman student who had said Everett might be attractive if not for his extra weight was staring devotedly at him. I watched her follow him with her eyes around the room. As always, in an attempt to understand something, I raised my hand.

  “Yes?” he said. “Mr. Poitier.”

  “I’m sorry, but are you saying that a thing cannot exist without its opposite also existing?”

  “I don’t know,” he said and looked truly puzzled. “Am I?”

  “Is there an opposite to existence?” My question felt unbelievably stupid in my mouth.

  “Precisely,” he said. “Dismissed.” Even though we were only halfway through the period.

  As we walked out, the woman whom I had been watching walked after me. “Mr. Poitier,” she said.

  “Hello, Ms. Larkin,” I said. That was all I knew of her name as Everett always called us Ms. and Mr.

  “I liked your question,” she said.

  “I’m glad you did. I don’t know what I asked him and I certainly don’t know what was ‘precisely’ about it. Tell me, do you know what he’s talking about?”

  “Not a word. Isn’t he fabulous?”

  “I guess.” I looked at Ms. Larkin’s soft features. Her red hair was pulled back tight. I noticed for the first time that she looked white, but that was true of many black people. I assumed she was black because she was attending Spelman. I felt stupid even wondering about it.

  We walked toward the student center, not talking. I was thinking about class and then I realized I was thinking about class, though I was hard pressed to know what I was thinking about the class. I did know that somehow I felt as if I had been tricked into thinking that existence was a thing instead of an attribute, and then I wondered why I was thinking like that.

  “Well,” Ms. Larkin said as we reached the doors of the center. She said “well” as if we’d actually had a conversation.

  “What is your first name?” I asked.

  “Maggie.”

  “I’m Not Sidney.”

  “I know,” she
said. “Everyone knows.” She pulled open the door. “See you Thursday morning.”

  That everyone knows was deadly. It cut through me. Yet I was not sure that she meant any harm by saying it. I had the sense, or at least wanted to think, that she was merely stating a fact, albeit a disheartening, if not disturbing fact.

  I came across Professor Everett having coffee in the commons. He invited me to sit down and so I did.

  “You’re distressed,” he said.

  “I don’t know if I’d say distressed.”

  “You don’t have to. I can see that you’re in a deep distression.”

  “Is that a word?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You know what I mean. That’s all I require of language.”

  I was about to disagree, perhaps strongly, when I caught him staring outside through the window.

  I looked to see Maurice and other frat guys dressed in black jackets, combat boots, and dark glasses stomping their way along the sidewalk. They would stomp with the left foot twice, once with the right, slide the left toe, and fall onto the right, and bark all the while like dogs. And every few steps, one would dash out of line to collect a discarded can or bottle.

  “That’s strange,” Everett said.

  “What part?” I asked.

  “All of it.”

  When I returned to my room I found it filled waist-high with plastic bags filled with bottles and cans. Morris was arguing with the brute Maurice. Since I had not given Morris the suggestion to act civilly toward me, he did not.

  “What are you looking at, maggot?” he said.

  It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t attempt an answer. I waded through the containers to my desk.

  “What are we going to do with all of this shit?” Maurice said.

  “You tell me,” Morris said.

  “You’re the one who started this. ‘Let’s recycle, let’s be green,’ you said. Well, the clubhouse is filled with bottles too and so is my room.”

  “Let me think,” I said.

  That notion struck me as funny in some way that made me feel bad about myself, and so a self-pitying laugh sneaked out before I could catch it.