I Am Not Sidney Poitier

by Percival Everett

  At the diner, I found Diana Frump shaking her ample rump under her white waitress dress to country music on the jukebox. A couple of men were watching her and laughing. She stopped when she saw me.

  “And he’s wearing a suit,” Diana said. “Looking sharp there, Mr. Poitier. Who died?”

  I’d forgotten I was wearing the suit. I must have been a sight after sleeping in the car in it. “I might think I did,” I said.

  “Come on in, Sidney,” she said. “Have a sit-down.”

  I sat at the end of the counter. “A party?” I asked.

  “Yep,” she said. “A party because work’s coming to Smuteye. I heard tell that them sisters got money to build their church. That means construction, that means construction workers, that means customers for me. A party. What can I get you?” She walked to the other side of the counter.

  “A burger,” I said.

  “Cheese?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Ain’t got none.” She laughed. “Just foolin’ with you.” She slapped a fist of meat on the griddle. “Yeah, them sisters found somebody to foot the bill. I guess praying ain’t such a bad gig.”

  “Some fool,” one of the men said. He was wearing a John Deere cap. “But I’ll take the work.”

  “You know somebody named Scrunchy?” I asked Diana.

  “Thornton Scrunchy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never heard of him,” she said, then laughed again. “Just foolin’ with you. Yeah, he lives around here. Owns some land. I hear a lot of land, over by the river. He had something or other to do with the paper mill way back when.” She studied my face for a second. “Why?”

  “Is he an architect?”

  “Elroy, is Scrunchy an architect?”

  “Thornton Scrunchy is a lot of things,” said the man in the cap. “An architect? I don’t know.”

  “He ain’t no architect,” said the other man, a fat man. “I reckon he’s a Baptist jest like the rest of us.”

  The screen door opened and slammed shut, and I turned to see a policeman of some kind standing rigid, in dark glasses and a Smokey Bear hat that wore him. He was a skinny, young man with a bad shave. He rested his right hand on his sidearm, a large-caliber revolver, and rested his eyes on me.

  “Hey, Horace,” Diana said.

  “Diana,” he said.

  I looked away from him and at my near-ready burger sizzling on the griddle. Diana watched the man behind me, seemed nervous as she flipped the patty once more. I felt the deputy approach me, hover at my shoulder.

  “What’s your name, boy?” the deputy asked.

  “This here is Sidney Poitier, Horace,” Diana said.

  “Not the Sidney Poitier,” Horace said.

  “No,” I said. “Not Sidney Poitier.” I knew it was a bad idea to say that as soon as I opened my mouth.

  “Why don’t you step out and put your hands on that counter for me,” the deputy said.

  I turned to look back at him. “What did I do?”

  “I think you know what you done,” he said.

  I supposed that was true of all of us, and in a strange way I found it a reasonable utterance.

  “Now, I ain’t gonna ask you again.” He released the leather keep on his holster. “Hands on the counter and spread them legs.”

  “What’s this boy done?” asked the man in the tractor cap.

  “I think I done caught myself a murderer.” The deputy seemed ready to giggle he was so excited.

  “You don’t say,” said the fat man.

  I leaned against the counter as instructed, and Horace kicked my feet into a wider stance. He then frisked my torso, under my jacket, and then moved down to the pockets of my trousers. He found the lump of cash in my front pocket.

  “What do we have here?” he said. He pulled the wad of bills out, looked at it, and whistled. “Boy, howdy!”

  “What is it, Horace?” asked tractor cap.

  “A ton of money.” The deputy leaned closer to me. “This here is a lot of money for a nigger to be carrying around.”

  I cleared my throat and said, quite without good judgment, “One, I’m not a nigger, and two, that’s not that much money.”

  “Oh, I got me an uppity one,” the deputy said.

  “He’s uppity, all right,” tractor cap said. “Tell by that suit.”

  “How much money he got?” from the fat man.

  “Ten crisp one-hundred-dollar bills,” the deputy said.

  Tractor cap whistled. “That must be close to a thousand.”

  “Pretty close,” I said.

  “Shut up, boy.”

  I shut up.

  The deputy reached out and took my left wrist and pulled it behind my back, slapped a cuff on it, and then said, “Put the other back here.” I did and I was cuffed. “Don’t you try running now.”

  “I won’t run,” I said.

  “Okay, let’s go.” Horace put his hand in the center of my back and shoved me through the screen door and across the gravel to his battered squad car. He opened the back and muscled me down into the seat. He let out a rebel yell and said, “Have mercy. I done caught myself a crook.”

  I tried to get comfortable against the ripped vinyl, but my hands were tied behind me and my suit coat was bunched up. I pressed my face against the cool, dirty window and looked at my Skylark as we rolled away. Just down the road from the Smuteye Farmers Savings and Loan was the Smuteye Police Station.

  Deputy Horace rooster-strutted into the crumbling station house with me in tow. “I got him, I got him,” he said in a singsong. When the big-haired dispatcher asked him who, he said, “The killer, the killer.” I wondered as I observed the woman sitting at the ancient radio set whom and to what would be dispatched in Smuteye. Horace pushed me through the first room and into the dank back where the cells were. He opened a barred door and roughly shoved me in. I stumbled, but I didn’t fall. I sat on a metal bed that was attached to the cinder-block wall and looked up to see a filthy white man sitting on the bunk opposite me.

  “Nice suit,” he said.

  “Got it in Montgomery,” I said.

  “Good place to buy a suit. What are you in here for?”

  “I don’t know. You?”

  “Stealing,” he said.

  “Stealing what?”

  He shrugged. “I steal a lot of things. It’s kinda what I do.” He studied me for a second. “You ain’t from around here.”

  “The suit give me away?”

  He laughed. “Funny nigger.” Then, “Naw, just the fact that I ain’t never seen you before.”

  The arrest in the diner and drive in the cigarette smoke–soaked squad car and the hustle back to the dingy cell all seemed unreal enough that I felt simply lost. Now, sitting in the cell across from my fellow prisoner, the reality of the situation settled on me. I began to shake. I held out my hand and looked at it.

  “Scared?” the man asked.

  I nodded.

  “At least you ain’t no fool.”

  I was in fact terrified. It was a ghostly kind of fear, a kind of distant growl or rumble in the ground. I was in jail and being accused of murder. I had a notion that I could just get up and walk out, but I knew that was just a way to get myself shot. And I didn’t want the last words I heard in life to be, “I got me one.” My stomach felt empty and icy and hot and crowded all at once. My stupid foot tapped with a mind of its own, and I stupidly watched it.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Poitier.”

  “That French or something?”

  I nodded.

  “My name is Last.”

  “Last?”

  “Yeah, last face you’ll ever see.” He laughed hard.

  There was commotion in the front of the station. I lay back and looked at the ceiling. Horace came to the door and told me to get up. “Come on, boy, the Chief’s here, and he wants to see the killer I caught.”

  “Who is it that I’m supposed to have killed?” I ask
ed.

  “Woooeee, don’t you talk pretty, boy,” the deputy said. “Just get your black ass up and out here.”

  The bald, wide Chief was sitting in his office trying to get a drawer open. “Horace, didn’t I tell you to fix this here drawer?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, did you fix it?”

  “Not yet.” Horace pushed me in the middle of my back farther into the room. “Chief, here’s the prisoner.”

  “You a killer, boy?” the Chief asked.

  “I’ve killed no one,” I said.

  “See how he talks, Chief.”

  “Shut up, Horace.”

  “Just where were you yesterday morning?” the Chief asked.

  “I was in Montgomery.”

  The Chief bit his lower lip and looked up and out the window. “Anybody see you there?”

  “A banker named Scrunchy.”

  “Horace, did you ask the prisoner any questions?”

  “No, sir. But I ain’t never seen this boy before. And he had all this money on him, just stuck down in his pocket.” The deputy pointed to the wad on the desktop in front of the Chief. “That’s close to a thousand dollars.”

  The Chief counted the money and frowned at Horace. “Pretty close.” He looked at me. “This here is a lot of money, boy.”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Whoa, he say ‘not really.’ You hear that, deputy? He say ‘not really.’ ”

  “I heard it, Chief.”

  The Chief picked up my wallet, opened it. “Not Sidney Poitier,” he said, looking at my license. “That your name?”

  I nodded.

  “Where you from, boy?”

  “Like the license says, Atlanta.”

  “Atlanta,” he repeated. “Big city. What you doin’ here, boy?”

  “Passing through. And don’t call me boy.”

  “What do they call you in Atlanta?” he asked.

  “They call me Mr. Poitier.”

  “Well, Mister Poitier, you can go on back to your room now while I call me a fella named Scrunchy in Montgomery. What bank was that?”

  “First National Bank of Alabama.”

  “You do a lot of business with banks, do you?”

  “Some.”

  “Take him on back there, Horace.” The Chief gave me one last disdainful glance. “Then I want to see you in here, you hear me?”

  “I hear you, Chief.”

  Deputy Horace took me back to the cell and I sat on the same bunk and looked across at the same face. “So, what’s your name?”

  “Why, I’m Clark Gable.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “You can call me Billy.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “So, they say you killed somebody,” Billy said. He was sitting way back on his bunk, his back against the wall. I noticed that he had one boot off.

  “That’s what they say.”

  “Well, I don’t believe it,” Billy said. “You don’t look like you could kill nobody.”

  I understood this to be intended as an insult, and the thought occurred to me that I should take it as one as a matter of decorum, but I didn’t. I looked at him looking at me. “You’re right, I couldn’t.”

  “Hmmm. So, who did you kill?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I take it you live around here. What do you do? To pay the bills, I mean?”

  “A little of this. A little of that. Now and then. Off and on.” He ran a hand through his greasy hair. “Steal.”

  Horace came back to the cell door. “Okay, boy, on your feet. Chief wants to see you again.”

  I followed the deputy back into the Chief’s office. Horace pushed me to the chair in front of the desk and gestured for me to sit. The Chief was chasing a fly around the room with a swatter. He missed again.

  “I suppose you can do better,” he said as he sat.

  “Did you call the bank?” I asked.

  The Chief called into the outer office. “Horace, get your sorry ass in here right this second.”

  Horace entered and sheepishly walked over to stand by the window. He looked at his shoes.

  “I want you to hear this, Horace,” the Chief said.

  “Yes, sir,” Horace said.

  “Well, Mister Poitier, I called the bank in Montgomery, and I talked to this Scrunchy, and it turns out he remembers you.”

  “Therefore?”

  “Therefore?” the Chief repeated, leaning back in his chair and looking at me with his head tilted. “Therefore? You hear that, Horace? Therefore.”

  “I told you he talks fancy. Don’t he talk fancy?”

  “Shut up, Horace,” the Chief said without looking at the deputy. “Therefore, Mister Poitier, you couldn’t have killed our dead man. And you know something? I don’t like you.”

  I said nothing. I glanced over at Horace. He seemed amused. His ugly face seemed ready to break into a giggle.

  The Chief looked at Horace, too. “And I sure as hell don’t like you right now, Horace.”

  Horace straightened.

  The Chief looked at me while holding the wad of bills in his hand. “You still ain’t told me where you got this money.”

  “I got it from the bank. It’s my money.”

  He looked at it in his hand, then pushed it across the desk to me along with my wallet.

  “So, I can go?” I said.

  “I don’t think just yet. I need you to take a look at our dead man and tell us if you know him.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I don’t know who he is,” the Chief barked.

  “Well, I don’t know anybody around here.”

  “That’s good, that’s good. Because the dead man ain’t from around here. If he was, I would know who he is. He’s got that in common with you. That and the fact that he’s a black boy.”

  “I don’t know him,” I said.

  “You might know him. It’s possible. You never know. Just do me this favor, Mister Poitier.”

  I didn’t want to look at a dead man, and yet in some way I knew I had to. I looked out the window behind Horace at the late afternoon light. I remembered the money hidden under that tree. I felt cold with fear.

  “Do you know another guy named Scrunchy? His name is Thornton, and he’s from around here? A strange-looking man.” I thought of the banker. “I mean, how many Scrunchys are there?”

  Horace blurted out a laugh. “Hell, boy, you can’t turn around in these parts without bumping heads with a Scrunchy.”

  His answer, not surprisingly, did not make me feel better. I was certain that there was no answer to that question that would.

  “What about Thornton Scrunchy?” the Chief asked.

  “Is he an architect?”

  “I doubt it.” The Chief stood and walked around his desk. “Come on, let’s go look at the stiff.”

  I stood on still-unsteady legs and realized for the first time that my feet were hurting from the dress shoes that no longer perfectly fit.

  The Chief led the way outside, then along the road two doors down to a one-story wooden house with a sign on the lawn that simply read, Undertaking. We walked in through the front door without knocking.

  “Donald!” the Chief called out. “Don-ald!”

  “Who is that yelling in here?” a tall, gray-headed man said as he came out of the back. “Chief?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  Donald adjusted the straps of his overalls and regarded me suspiciously. “What’s this all about?”

  “Where’s the body?” the Chief asked.

  “Which body?”

  “How many bodies do you have, Donald?”

  “Just one.”

  “Well, that one.”

  “What about it?” Donald asked.

  “I want to see him,” the Chief said.

  “Him, too?” Donald pointed to me with his nose.

  “Him, too. Now, where is he?”

  “I got him out in the garage.” Do
nald turned and started away toward the back of the house.

  “Garage?” I said.

  “It’s also my lab,” the man said without looking back.

  The Chief looked at me, seemed embarrassed. “Donald is our coroner. Sort of by default.”

  “I heard that,” Donald said.

  “I know you heard me, Donald. That’s why I said it.”

  We entered the kitchen, passed through another back room with stacked magazines, Boys’ Life and Outdoor Gazette and National Geographic, and through a door into what really was the garage. There was an old Plymouth on blocks on the far side and a stainless-steel table in the middle of the near side. Against the wall opposite the garage doors were three white chests that looked like deep freezers. Donald led us to the middle one.

  “Here he is,” Donald said, then pulled up the lid. He stood there, his arm extended, holding it open. He scratched his neck with his free hand.

  I was standing well behind the Chief, and he turned to look at me. “Well, step on up here. I’ve already seen him. Just tell me if you know him.”

  I moved forward and leaned over. The man was young, black, with short-cropped hair. His eyes were closed. His lips were slightly parted. He was circumcised. He looked just like me. He looked exactly like me, a fact that was apparently lost on Donald and the Chief. I wanted to say, “That’s me.” The thought of saying it was strange feeling and scary. My chest was tight, and my ears were ringing. I was lying in the chest, and yet I wasn’t. I said, “I don’t know him.” I was lying, I thought.

  “Okay,” the Chief said. “Close it up, Donald.”

  Donald let down the lid. “I heard somebody say that he came here to help them crazy nuns or whatever they are.”

  “What killed him?” I asked.

  Donald cleared his throat. “Somebody smashed him on the back of the head with something harder than his skull.”

  “How do you know when he was killed?” I asked.

  The Chief cocked his head and looked at me. “Because one minute he wasn’t there, and the next minute he was, along with a lot of blood that wasn’t nowhere except under him.”