Call Me by My Name

by John Ed Bradley

  “Imagine that,” she answered.

  As Tater’s swimming skills improved, Angie came up with exercises to push him harder. One morning she removed the leather string from the pool key and tossed the key into deep water, and then she ordered Tater to dive for it. Because it was darker on the bottom than on the surface, he had to feel around for the key and test both his capacity for holding his breath and his ability to remain under. Angie used my watch to time each dive, and she challenged him to better his mark every time he went in.

  “God, you’re slow,” I’d say to him when he popped up for air. “Is that the best you can do?”

  When he’d heard enough, he said, “Can you do better?”

  I’d been swimming since I was five years old, but I still couldn’t match his best time. Not pleased with losing to a novice, I challenged him to dive with me for the key at the same time.

  “You mean both of us going for it at once?” he asked.

  “Yes. And just to be clear, there are no rules prohibiting interference once we’re in the water.”

  “Interference?”

  I was making it up as I went along. “Uh-huh. In other words, if I want to push or pull you away from the key, I can do it. And you can do the same to me.”

  “What if I punch you in the mouth?”

  “Sure. That too. It’s anything goes down there.”

  We stood a few feet apart from each other at the deep end. Angie climbed to the top of the lifeguard station and lobbed the key in the water, then she called out, “Ready . . . set . . . go,” and Tater and I dove in together.

  He beat me nine out of ten times, but I roughed him up enough under water to keep the competition close. “What about you?” he said to Angie, after he must’ve grown bored with winning so easily. “Think you can take me?”

  Now it was my turn to throw the key from the lifeguard station, and I did so with what I thought was theatrical flair. Rather than simply drop the key in the water, I posed like a ballerina dancing en pointe, then I segued into a baseball pitcher’s motion as he comes with heat from the top of the mound. The key met the surface with a pa-lunk, and I waited until it had time to reach the bottom before letting them start.

  Tater made it interesting, but Angie still dominated. The whole time I watched from high above, their bodies driving through the water side by side: his a dark spear probing the cloudy blue; hers a lighter one.

  The winner resurfaced holding the key above her head. The loser pretended to be devastated.

  I hated for those days to end, but the new school year was about to start, and it was time to give up the pool and summer.

  At home Pops sat by the air conditioner with his paper and complained in a loud voice about “the blacks taking over.” What riled him was desegregation, a story that inspired bold headlines and had white parents scared for their children’s future. While the rest of the country’s public schools had integrated years before, ours were just now getting around to it, and only because the federal courts were forcing us. The situation was more than a lot of white families could accept. Over the summer two private schools had opened for those who refused to let their kids share classrooms with blacks. Rebel flags had started appearing in the back windows of cars and pickup trucks, along with bumper stickers showing the flag and the words “Keep It Flying.” Even Pops had put a sticker on the Cameo. But Mama and Angie had removed it one afternoon while he slept, peeling it off in ragged pieces with butter knives from the kitchen.

  Despite his feelings about integration, there never was any discussion about where Angie and I were going to school. We’d turned fifteen on August 12, and we were set to be sophomores at the public high school—old enough to fend for ourselves. Pops might’ve railed against integration, but the truth was he and Mama didn’t make enough money to send us anywhere else.

  “Is it true we’re all going to be going to the same school now?” Tater asked one morning in the pool.

  “Yes,” Angie replied. “And we’ll also be classmates. I just hope we have homeroom together. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

  Tater seemed to find such a scenario hard to believe. “I can remember, when I was little, we would have to step off the sidewalk if a white man was coming toward us. That man could be an unemployed drunk who spent most nights in the jailhouse. If he was white, you had to give him room.”

  Our daily adventure in the pool suddenly didn’t seem as daring as it had been when we started. Angie must’ve been thinking the same thing. “If the schools are integrating,” she said, “it’s only a matter of time before the parks do too. And once South City Park opens to black people, so will the pool.”

  “Incredible,” Tater said.

  Angie looked up at a sky moving from night to day. “I can almost see a time when we eat in the same restaurants and attend the same churches,” she said.

  Tater’s last lesson was on a Friday. I heard a soft rain ticking against the house when my alarm went off, making it almost impossible to get up and drag my sleep-deprived body to the kitchen. Angie was already at the table. The rind of a tangerine lay in pieces on an open napkin in front of her. Next to it stood an empty glass with cranberry juice darkening the bottom. No cold biscuits for me today. But I did find a stale honey bun in a paper bag on top of the refrigerator. It must’ve been two weeks old. I bit into it and felt my molars sting in protest.

  Tater was quieter than usual when we reached the pool, and I wondered if he, like me, was contemplating the end of our dark, dreamy hours together. He wore a raincoat draped over his shoulders, the bill of his cap poking out from under the hood. He followed us into the yard and we stripped at the foot of the lifeguard station, and then he dove into the deep end, the first of us in. We watched him swim under water all the way to the other end, from twelve to three feet, and he didn’t come up for air once. He touched the wall, then swam back again. I marveled at his athleticism.

  Angie had always worn a one-piece suit, but today she was in a bikini, a flowery number that left little to the imagination. She’d bought it only the week before, and when she’d tried it on at home and walked into the living room Pops had told her it was pretty, but sorry, he couldn’t let her leave the house with it on.

  “Go cover yourself,” I told her now.

  “I am covered.”

  “That ain’t covered.”

  She looked down at the suit. “But it’s cute.”

  We didn’t say much else that morning. Tater and Angie swam laps and dove for the key, but I mostly floated on my back in the shallow end. Tater by now was probably my best friend, but I wasn’t sure about all the other blacks I was going to have to go to school with. It bothered me that Angie and I were part of the generation that was being pushed together with blacks. Why do it now? Why not wait another few years, until Angie and I had graduated and were in college?

  I was still floating on my back when I heard the jogger making his approach. He was earlier than usual, but he came up on his regular route, and I lifted my head off the surface and watched him as he ran the length of the fence. He wasn’t running as fast today, and I felt my heart begin to punch against my ribs when he stopped and faced us. He stared out first at me, then at Angie and Tater. We’d made it this far. What were the odds that somebody would catch us on our last day?

  He pulled the hood back, and I saw a familiar face. It was Junior Doucet, our baseball coach that summer. I climbed out of the pool and walked over to where he was standing. “So you knew we were here all along?” I asked.

  He needed a moment to figure out the best way to answer. “I ran into your mother at the A&P a few weeks ago. She knew I jogged in the park each morning, and she asked me to keep an eye out, since she couldn’t.”

  Angie and Tater got out of the pool and came walking over. “It’s Coach Doucet,” I told them, and then Tater repeated his name.

  I felt prett
y foolish at this moment. We’d thought we were being so daring, when we’d had a chaperone all along. “So you timed your run to let us know when we needed to head home?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

  He was facing Tater. “I’m sorry I didn’t do a better job fighting for you earlier in the summer,” he said. “I hope this makes things right between us.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Coach,” Tater said.

  Coach Doucet shook his head, as if to say he knew better. “One day I suspect we’ll remember this time and understand just how silly it was.”

  And with that he pulled the hood back over his head and took off running down the trail through the trees.

  That Sunday under the pecan tree, Pops cleaned a clutter of sacalait on an old cypress worktable. A lone stray calico watched from the shade of the ligustrums nearby. He was using an electric knife to fillet the fish—the same knife he used to carve the turkey at holiday meals. Inside, Mama and Angie made homemade ice cream with fresh cream and chunks of Ruston peaches we’d picked up after church at a roadside stand. I was sitting in the living room, pretending to work on a crossword puzzle. In actual fact I was trying to avoid being noticed because I was feeling especially lazy today and didn’t want them to ask me to turn the handle on the ice-cream bucket. I was using the power of my mind to make myself invisible. So far I’d been successful.

  “By the way,” Angie said, her breath thin for all the effort she was putting out, “Julie’s maid told her last night that they would prefer not to be called colored or Negro anymore. She says they want to be called black now.”

  “Is that true?” Mama asked. She was chopping a block of ice in the sink with a wood-handled pick. “Who makes these decisions for them? Do they all want to be called black? You’re talking about millions of people. Was there a vote?”

  “Julie heard her say it. So remember that at school tomorrow, will you, Rodney?”

  My shield of invisibility had been penetrated.

  “Rodney? Will you remember that?”

  “I’ll remember,” I said. “Whenever I see one, I’ll walk up and say ‘Hi, I understand you’re not a colored or a Negro anymore, but a black.’ I’m sure they’ll appreciate my sensitivity.”

  “Rodney, come on, son,” Mama said. “Your turn to crank.”

  I was giving it my all—and shaking the whole house—when Pops came in with water dripping from his arms. He’d rinsed the fish scales off outside with the hose but had forgotten to have a towel handy. He held his arms up like a surgeon who’d just finished scrubbing before surgery and was ready now for his nurse to help him get his gloves on.

  “You’re going to mess up my floor,” Mama said.

  “It’s water.”

  “I know it’s water, Dr. Kildare, but you’ve got fish mixed with it, and you’ll leave little dots where you drip.”

  I wondered if there’d be fights in the halls. I wondered if anybody was going to bring knives or guns or brass knuckles. There’d been rumors. One of our neighbors was keeping his daughter home just to be safe, as were a lot of other white parents. I didn’t believe any of the stories, but Pops did. He had me doing curls with a pair of dumbbells to make sure my biceps broadcast a certain message.

  Pops had caught the fish that morning, and we had them along with hush puppies, cucumber and tomato slices, and iced tea. We also had the ice cream for dessert and ate it from cereal bowls while watching TV. The news from Vietnam came to us in grainy black and white. My uncle Bay-Bay was there, fighting with the Marines. Pops liked to pretend his baby brother was still working on a crawfish farm in Evangeline Parish, rather than rooting Viet Cong out of tunnels.

  He got up and changed the channel. “Ed Sullivan’s still an hour away,” Mama said.

  “In that case how about something we can digest by?” he said.

  There was a hi-fi console standing along the wall, as big as a coffin. He put a Ferrante & Teicher record on the turntable with the volume turned low, and we ate our ice cream to the whisper of golden pianos.

  “Pops, guess what?” Angie said. She didn’t wait for him. “Julie’s maid said they want to be called black from now on.”

  I’d hoped we were done with it. She’d caught Pops as he was about to put another spoonful in his mouth. “They do? Who does?”

  “Colored people,” she said. “Negroes.”

  “They want to be called blacks now?”

  “That’s what Julie said.”

  “Then we’ll have to make sure to call them something else,” he said.

  I kept looking at her. She didn’t acknowledge me.

  “When I was a child,” Mama said, “I had an uncle who used to say with utmost sincerity that he had no problem with the opposite race. Isn’t that the most amazing thing? The opposite race . . . I mean, yes, he confused the expression, but don’t you think he was really revealing his true feelings about colored—” She stopped herself. “I’m sorry, I mean black people. In any case, it stuck in my head and here I am mentioning it all these years later.”

  “Like there were only two races,” Angie said, “the white one and the black one.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Most I know around here aren’t even black to start with, like Simmons at the plant,” Pops said. “They’ve got something else mixed in—what you call cream in the coffee. In New Orleans they call that café au lait. When I was a kid we called that high yellow, but I understand it’s not polite to say that now.” He ate some more and added as an afterthought: “You hardly see any black blacks anymore, the way you would have in the olden days, when they first got off the boats.”

  “The boats?” Mama asked. “You make them sound so primitive. But they weren’t the only ones who got here in boats. How do you think we got here? In jumbo airplanes? In air-conditioned buses?”

  Angie: “You ever look closely at Tater Henry? He’s a lot like Mr. Simmons—a palette of many colors, all blended together. You even have yellow ochre and umber in the mix. Best of all, there’s vermilion, which I think makes all the difference. True black doesn’t reflect light, anyway, and that young man is positively radiant, so what does that make him?”

  “Yellow okra,” I told her. “What the heck is yellow okra?”

  Pops got up and turned off the music. “Mark my words,” he said. “This experiment won’t work—this black-and-white thing? I could blame the federal judge that’s forced it on us, but I still say it’s Abra-damn Lincoln who got this ball rolling.”

  We knew when to stand up to him and when to let his declarations pass. If he looked overly tired, we let him get away with almost anything, and this day his eyelids were drooping and he slurred his words.

  Angie and I finished our ice cream and brought our bowls to the sink. “It’s like he forgets what year it is,” I whispered to her as Pops kept on.

  “Not only the year, but the century,” she said.

  The high school had moved to its new location only about five years before we got there. It was a large, rectangular-shaped pile of brown bricks that most people in town hated. It looked like an airplane terminal, some complained. Pops said it better resembled a mausoleum.

  When the big day finally arrived, the sight of black students on campus didn’t shock me much, nor was I traumatized by having to share the halls with them. A lone police cruiser remained parked all day near the front entrance, its red emergency light rotating on the roof, as if to warn against mischief. On my way to fifth-hour English class, I looked out the main doors and spotted a cop slumped behind the wheel. He was using his window as a pillow and sleeping the afternoon away.

  “Shucks,” Curly Trussell said. “There wasn’t a single stabbing all day. What fun is that?”

  Integration, I quickly learned, was an elusive concept and easy to avoid despite government mandates. We might’ve attended a school with as many blacks as wh
ites, but Angie and I had classes with few black students, and all of our teachers were white. Administrators had divided the student body into groups, ostensibly according to past academic performance, and Angie and I landed in the top group. Like me, Tater had been a solid B student the year before, but he was assigned to the second group, which better reflected the school’s racial makeup. The third group, also known as the last group, was all black except for a couple of hardcore delinquents who probably belonged in a reformatory.

  In rural towns like ours, people tended to judge the quality of any given year on how well the crops grew and the prices farmers got for them. But we measured our value on how many games the football team won. In a move that blacks opposed as much as whites, the local school board waited until classes started to let Coach Hollis Cadet assemble his team and commence practice. By forgoing two-a-days at the end of August, the board had only delayed the inevitable and guaranteed that we’d be unprepared and probably lousy once the season started. The board also canceled the Jamboree, the exhibition game that always opened the season. The decision incited such an uproar that a petition circulated calling for the heads of the board members, not a few of whom walked out one morning to find the trees on their front lawns draped with toilet paper. The local paper said the board was concerned about crowd control. How blacks and whites interacted after being thrust together at a large public event was an unknown that it didn’t want to face.

  “The board got something right for a change,” Pops said at dinner one night. “I say better safe than sorry.” He shoveled more corn in his mouth. “Nothing some people like more than an excuse to riot.”

  Everybody knew my size made me a good prospect for football. The year before I’d started at left tackle on the freshman team, earning the award for Most Outstanding Offensive Lineman at season’s end. I’d been planning to go out for the varsity as soon as practice started, if ever it started.

  At the close of our first day of classes, Coach Cadet and his assistants stood outside the main entrance handing out bulletins inviting boys to try out. As I left the building he grabbed me by a shirtsleeve and led me off to the side. “Can I count on you, Rodney?” he asked.