Call Me by My Name

by John Ed Bradley

  His tone was almost confidential, even though we’d never had an actual conversation before. “To do what, Coach?”

  “To make this school a winner again. We need team players like you, Rodney.”

  Tater left the building moments later, but Coach let him walk right on by. Head bowed, hands nervously jiggling the coins in his pockets, Tater was waiting in line for a bus ride home when I caught up to him. “You going out for football?” I asked.

  “I’d planned on it until a minute ago. Did you see that, Rodney? He looked right through me, like I was invisible.”

  “He can’t be expected to know the black guys yet. Cut him a break, will you?” I grabbed his arm and pulled him out of line. “Come with me,” I said.

  He followed me back to the front of the school where the coaches were hitting up more prospects, all of them white.

  “This is Tater Henry, Coach Cadet,” I said.

  The way he looked at him, Coach might’ve just been introduced to a female tryout. “Your name is Tater, as in po-tater?”

  “My real name’s Tatum, Coach Cadet. But I couldn’t pronounce it very well when I was little and the mispronunciation stuck.”

  Coach seemed to find the explanation less interesting than I did. He glanced at his watch and checked the doors again to see who was coming out. “You play ball, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What position?”

  “Quarterback.”

  “You said quarterback or cornerback?”

  “Quarterback.”

  Coach Cadet smiled at the absurdity. “You don’t want to be a quarterback,” he said. “Our playbook is eighteen pages long.”

  They stood looking at each other: Tater silent; Coach Cadet smacking gum. “However I can contribute, Coach,” Tater finally said.

  “That’s what I want to hear,” Coach answered.

  About seventy guys turned out the next day. We sat in the bleachers in the gym, and Coach Cadet and his staff looked out at white players grouped together on the left and black players huddled on the right. At the center of this arrangement was a divide a few feet wide, with only Tater and me sitting next to each other about halfway up.

  For twenty minutes Coach harangued us about the differences between team players and turds. He’d played guard at Texas Christian many years ago, before helmets came equipped with face masks, and the tip of his nose was a cauliflower mass, the bridge a lumpy knot. Because his skin sunburned easily, he covered himself with cold cream to soothe the pain and protect from blistering. Today he was wearing so much of the stuff he looked like a Kabuki dancer, with a bright pink undertone peeking through. A whistle hung by an orange-and-black cord from around his neck.

  Turds had no place in football, he said now in closing, and he vowed to run any off. “Are you a turd?” he asked one guy, pointing. Then he confronted another: “What about you, Nestor? You look like a turd to me.”

  We all had to deny it. “Not me, Coach,” I said when it was my turn.

  “I ain’t no turd,” Tater nearly shouted when Coach Cadet came to him.

  “Turds have been the ruination of many a fine football team,” Coach said in summation. “I’d rather have a bunch of team players without much talent than a bunch of turds with all the talent in the world.”

  Next, Coach had his assistants form a half circle behind him, and he instructed the junior and senior players to come down from the bleachers and stand behind the coaches according to their positions. That left thirty sophomores, and now Coach had each of us stand for an eyeball test. He assessed our overall appearance and assigned us our positions without bothering to ask where we wanted to play. As expected, he sent me to stand behind the offensive line coach, and he had Tater join the defensive backs coach. Our entire future in football depended on a once-over that lasted no longer than five seconds, and after a while I noticed a pattern. White kids got the marquee jobs, such as quarterback, running back, split end, safety, and middle linebacker. The black guys got the less glamorous positions. Coach Cadet didn’t explain why particular positions were the domain of whites only, but it was understood that blacks weren’t suited for them. They ended up standing behind the assistants who coached the defensive line and secondary—positions, it occurred to me, that didn’t require you to be very smart.

  One black player, Rubin Lazarus, hesitated when Coach told him he was a defensive lineman. “But can I go out for linebacker?” he asked. “Middle linebacker?”

  Coach Cadet laughed and glanced back at his assistants, all but one of them white. “The middle linebacker is captain of the defense,” he said. “He has to make quick reads and call out schemes, and this means he has to think on his feet. Can you do that?” Before Rubin could answer, Coach said, “I didn’t think so.”

  They made Curly Trussell a quarterback. Before the meeting started, Curly had knelt at one end of the basketball court and thrown spirals with a football to the other end. His passes were pretty to watch, and he’d demonstrated his accuracy by ricocheting them off a wall and landing them in a trashcan. The guys had erupted with cheers after each one found its mark, and Curly had danced around flexing his right bicep. Even the coaches had clapped for him.

  “The opportunity will come,” I said to a dejected Tater, hoping to give him a lift. “And when it does, you’ll make the most of it.”

  “I’d rather not talk about opportunities,” he replied. That was the closest he’d ever come to complaining.

  After the meeting, we were issued helmets, pads, and practice uniforms, and then we were ushered out onto the field and put through drills until dusk fell at around eight o’clock. The coaches pushed so hard that guys were falling out from exhaustion everywhere you looked. I puked once myself, a real gully washer that strangely left me feeling better when I was finished.

  “Get it all out, Rodney?” Coach Cadet asked when it looked like I was done.

  “I think so, Coach.”

  “Good. Now get back out there and show me how bad you want it.”

  Practices were compartmentalized by position, which meant I spent most of the day with the offensive linemen, or Bigfeet, as we’d taken to calling ourselves. Casting around for a name to illustrate who we were as a unit, we’d tried the Sasquatches for a while but found the word hard to say. Eventually we’d settled on Bigfeet, the plural of Bigfoot, the hirsute giant that was half man and half ape and so shy he rarely left the woods. I saw Tater only at the end of the day when it was time for team drills, and even then we had little contact. We closed out each workout with sprints, and he was the kind of guy who had to win each one, while I was the kind who was happy just to finish them at all. Coach Cadet had us huddle around him for one last speech, and then we headed to the locker room. Or at least we were free to go there. Tater always went to the weight room instead and lifted for another half hour. If I hadn’t collapsed yet, he made sure I joined him.

  Our bodies had changed dramatically since the start of that summer—Tater’s more than mine. While I seemed to have added mostly girth, Tater had packed on muscle. He wouldn’t be fifteen until November, but the thin kid who’d been all kneecaps and elbows was now so well put together you wondered how it had happened.

  “Man, what does Miss Nettie feed you?” I asked him.

  “Not enough,” he said, taking the question seriously. “She works late and most nights doesn’t get home until I’ve already gone to bed.”

  “So what do you eat?”

  “I’ll fry me some eggs or warm a can of beans. Sometimes it’s cereal and milk. Whatever I can find in the house, I guess.”

  One night after practice I was pumping out reps on the bench press while he spotted me. It suddenly became impossible to do another one, and Tater started grunting like a hog to push me on. “It’s the fourth quarter,” he said. “Come on, Rodney. Do it for Regina.” Regina Perrault was a clas
smate, and I’d let Tater know what I thought about her. “Regina,” he said now. “Regina . . . Regina . . . Regina . . .”

  And somehow I was able to get the barbell off my chest, extend my arms, and complete a final rep.

  It was his turn next. He’d pressed a hundred and eighty-five pounds nine times, but he wanted more, and I was yelling him on: “It’s all on you, brother. You’ve got to get it done. Come on, Tater. Do it for Miss Nettie—for Miss Nettie, Tater.”

  He paused with the barbell fully extended, and his face went slack. A smile sputtered across his lips, and he gave his head a quick shake. “You get Regina and I get my auntie? Now that ain’t right.” Then he started to laugh.

  I went to grab the bar, but he quickly lowered the weight to his chest and pushed it out one last time.

  With the Jamboree scratched from the schedule, Coach Cadet filled the open date with an intrasquad scrimmage at school. We’d been banging on one another at practice for almost two weeks, and now we had a chance to bang on one another in a game setting. He and the other coaches divided the squad into two teams, the Orange and the Black, our school colors. They wanted a full-blown dress rehearsal under the lights, and they found a crew of referees to work it. The game was supposed to be a reward for the sacrifices we’d been making, and the coaches thought it would be good for morale to have our parents see us in uniform, so they had wooden bleachers installed along one side of the practice field with enough seating to accommodate a few hundred people. Coach gave us permission to invite immediate family only.

  “Keep it to a minimum,” he said. “Make sure it’s people you know who aren’t going to cause trouble.”

  All the black guys looked at one another. “Not to be racial about it,” Coach Cadet said, “but I just don’t feel like getting hauled in by the school board, you understand?”

  Tater and I were both on the Orange squad, and that Friday after classes the equipment manager issued game uniforms, which seemed little better than the ones we’d been wearing at practice. They dated back a few years, judging from the patches that covered holes and tears in the fabric and the tattered condition of the numbers and striping. We had three hours to burn before kickoff, and most of us whiled away the time in the gym watching the cheerleaders and pep squad rehearse their routines.

  “She’s something, huh?” Tater said.

  I looked at where he was looking, and that was the cheerleaders. Angie had made the squad, and so had Patrice Jolivette, a junior with curves galore. One day I’d caught Tater staring at Patrice in the lunchroom, but everybody stared at her, including white boys like me. “Yeah, man, she does that to me too,” I said.

  The school had selected an equal number of black and white cheerleaders, and Patrice had been named cocaptain of the squad, an honor she shared with Beverly Charleville, the white senior chosen to assure racial parity. Today, Patrice was wearing a maroon sweatshirt over her uniform with the face of a snarling, floppy-eared bulldog on the front. She’d been a cheerleader last year for the town’s black school, J. S. Clark High, and the shirt was a faded souvenir of her time there.

  “Just think,” I said to Tater. “If we hadn’t been forced to desegregate, you’d be a Bulldog now instead of a Tiger. Whatever happened to that old school, anyway?”

  “What do you mean what happened to it? It’s gone. They closed it. And they turned the building into a crummy junior high.” The outrage in his voice surprised me, and he wasn’t finished. “Clark was a great school,” he said. “And it had great sports teams. There were some cabinets when you walked in that were full of trophies won by all the championship teams.”

  I’d spent some time looking at the trophies in the cabinets at our own school, but I hadn’t seen any won by Clark’s athletes. “Where is all that stuff—you know, the trophies from those years before integration?”

  “Left behind,” he said. “Just left behind like none of it mattered. What’s that tell you, Rodney?”

  At home Pops had been using the word “militant” to describe angry blacks who made the news roaring for civil rights, and I might’ve tried the word out on Tater now had I not wanted to hear his answer.

  “All those seasons at Clark?” he went on. “The pictures of former players? Their medals and ribbons? It’s like it never happened. I like seeing progress, Rodney. I like this school a lot, and I’m proud to be a Tiger. But if you ask me, Clark deserved better.”

  We were out on the field an hour later. Everybody wore the same white helmets with orange-and-black stripes, but our side wore orange jerseys and white pants, while the other squad had on black jerseys and black pants. The Black looked more intimidating than we did, and one of the coaches acknowledged as much when he stood laughing at us during stretches and yelled out, “Dang if you don’t look like a pumpkin patch, the way you’re lined up in rows just now.”

  Coach Cadet had also arranged for the school band to perform, but it was proficient with only “Hold That Tiger,” an old ragtime tune that was our fight song. The band played it over and over, and we were already sick of it by the time we were done with warm-ups and waiting for the game to start.

  I’d dominated every defensive lineman on the team except for Rubin Lazarus, who was every bit as strong as I was, even though I outweighed him by thirty pounds. Rubin added to an appearance of menace with eye black that ran down his face in streaks. The eye black seemed an odd addition, considering we were playing at night, but the overall effect was undeniable: Here was a very intense and likely deranged person you didn’t want to trifle with.

  Rubin was so good that I quickly forgot there were other players sharing the field. We became the center of the universe, with a spotlight shining down on us from a hole in the heavens. As the game went on, I despised every large and small piece of him, and I despised his mother and father for siring such an animal, and the mothers and fathers who sired them. There were yet more generations to despise, especially after he knocked me to my knees and stepped on my tender vegetation en route to sacking the quarterback.

  We went at it hard, and it occurred to me, even as we were pounding on each other, that the intimacy involved in blocking a guy is a personal act that brings you closer to another human being than any other activity but one. Your skin rubs against his skin. You smell his breath and feel his weight when the play is done and he’s lying on top of you in the pile. You stare into his eyes from inches away and search for signs of surrender.

  By the end of the first quarter I’d already sweated enough to fill bathtubs, and my uniform had absorbed much of what he’d lost. And what I’d lost had gone into his. Everybody else was playing a game. I was playing for my life.

  “You got me that time, Rodney,” Rubin told me late in the fourth quarter, after I’d driven him ten yards off the line and dumped him on his back.

  “I got lucky,” I said.

  “Yeah? Heck, man, you get lucky a lot.”

  We had scored in the last minute to beat them, 27–23, on a Hail Mary pass from Curly to wideout Louie Boudreaux. Louie ran a go route up the sideline and caught the ball in the end zone when the cornerback assigned to cover him, Joey Pierre, lost his footing and fell to the ground. Louie held the ball up to show that he’d made the catch, and the referees blew their whistles to signal it was over.

  As I was removing my pads on the sideline I heard a ruckus in the stands. Several men were fighting. I automatically assumed it was between blacks and whites and the race-based brawl we’d all been dreading. But I looked more closely and saw only black men involved. Because it was the first extracurricular event bringing blacks and whites together, the school had hired a police detail to handle just such a scenario, and now cops climbed into the stands and broke up the scrum. I’d seen enough to understand what had happened. Somebody had said something to Joey Pierre’s father, who’d said something in reply. And then the brawl had started. Joey’s dad had blood running d
own his face. The other guy’s shirt had been ripped off his body. Five or six other men also were tending to injuries or torn clothes.

  “You ain’t nothing but a beast, Rodney Boulet,” I heard somebody say behind me. I spun around and there stood Rubin, his eye black so badly smudged that it covered his whole face. “I’m just glad we can go back to being on the same team again.”

  “Me too,” I told him. “Thanks for the competition, brother.”

  We started walking toward the locker room, and I spotted my parents in the parking lot between the practice field and the school. They’d left the stands before the fight started, I was glad to see. Pops was standing off to the side smoking a cigarette, and Mama had joined other parents and the cheerleaders to form a gauntlet for us to walk through on our way to the showers. We strode the gauntlet in single file, lugging our helmets and shoulder pads and exchanging hugs and high fives with anyone who wanted them. Tater was walking right in front of me, and when he approached Angie, she came up on her toes and kissed the side of his face. I gave her a look that immediately put her on the defensive. “He’s like my other twin brother,” she said, and then she went to kiss me on the cheek too.

  I pushed past her.

  “Come on, Rodney. It’s nothing.”

  I turned back once I reached the door to the locker room, and she was still standing there, her mouth fixed in a pout. Was what passed between her and Tater really that big a deal? I decided it wasn’t, and I also decided I’d have felt the same had she kissed one of my white teammates. In fact, had she kissed Curly Trussell, I probably would’ve put my helmet and shoulder pads back on and gone after him. To further calibrate my feelings, I reminded myself that I’d just spent three hours in ferocious physical contact with Rubin Lazarus, the two of us swapping bodily fluids as my big warm bulk pressed up against his. I was wrong and I knew it, so I puckered my lips and blew her a kiss with the flat of my hand held up to my face. Just like Angie, she leaped up as if to catch it, then she brought the kiss down to her chest and held it with both hands against the place over her heart.