I kept revisiting the look in Charlie LeBlanc’s eyes when he held the light on them in the pool. I wanted to see through to his brain and find what was there, but the exercise didn’t get me any closer to the truth. His eyes had probably revealed little more than my own, and I didn’t care to consider what that meant.
Angie and I sat on the porch with our legs hanging over the side. She was operating on less sleep than I was, and I had never been so tired.
“Tater,” she called again, throwing her head back to get more volume. “Please, Tater, open the door. Open the door, Tater. Open the door.”
A man stepped out from the house across the street. He was holding a kitten, mewling for food.
“He’s in there,” he said, and pointed with the hand holding the cat. “Try the back.”
And now we could feel vibrations in the floorboards, and in that moment we knew he was home and the fear washed away.
“Just let us know you’re all right,” Angie said again.
“I’m all right,” he said, answering from the middle part of the house. He was in the bedroom, judging from the distance.
“Did he do anything to you, Tater?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
He didn’t answer for a minute, then the door creaked open. “Yeah, I’m sure,” he said. He was wearing orange gym shorts from school with a tiger emblem on one leg and the Bigfoot T-shirt I’d given him.
“I’m so sorry,” Angie said. “What did I do? Just tell me you forgive me.”
“Nothing to forgive,” he said. He stepped out onto the porch, and I looked him over for evidence of a beating, but there was none. He waved at the old man across the street, and the man went back inside.
“Y’all really know that guy?” Tater asked. And we knew he was talking about Charlie LeBlanc. “He starts on me again. Then a call comes on his radio—trailer house on the Lewisburg Road is burning. So he stops on Parkview Drive and tells me to get out. He goes, ‘Next time find yourself a nice colored girl to go skinny-dipping with,’ and takes off. I walked the rest of the way home.” He looked back through the open door. “Y’all want some cornflakes?”
“I want a hug,” Angie said, and moved closer to him.
He seemed uncertain but still opened his arms, and she started crying again the way she had at home. Holding her in a loose embrace, not sure how to console her, he glanced at me from over her shoulder, and I shook my head.
When you stood next to him and allowed for familiarity again—when you came back around to the understanding that, yes, here was a friend—all the emotion that had led to wild screaming and a cup crashing on the floor began to register as a waste. And as I looked at them standing together in each other’s arms, I realized that by trying to stop them, we really had only encouraged them. It was them against us now, and they would win that one every time.
I got on my bike and started pedaling, taking the usual route and taking it slow in case Angie wanted to catch up. It wasn’t long before I heard the clattering of her bike as she closed in on me. I went to say something, and she shot right past me, going twice my speed. I stood on the pedals and started pumping harder. I tried to close the gap. She could’ve slowed down had she wanted to. After a while I let her go and stopped trying.
The school had an awards ceremony in the gymnasium at the end of the year, and seniors were called up to a portable stage and given trophies and certificates for their various accomplishments, if you could call categories such as Best Dressed and Prettiest Eyes accomplishments.
The keynote speaker was a dentist in town who’d recently been crowned champion of a statewide Toastmasters speech competition. Known by his patients as a timid man, the dentist was loud and fearless with a podium in front of him, and kids in the audience who went to him for regular care expressed shock at the intensity of his delivery. The theme of his talk was the importance of pursuing your dreams. He wanted us to dream big. If you dreamed big, he said, there was no telling what you might achieve. You might even surprise yourself and become president of the United States. You might become an astronaut and walk on the moon.
The whole student body was there—seniors in metal folding chairs on the floor and underclassmen in the bleachers. The black kids sitting around me seemed less impressed with the dentist than the white kids did. Some of them were pretending to be asleep. It bothered me that he could look out and see students making an obvious effort to ridicule him. Our school was better than that, and he had a positive message, besides, even if it did assume that the world was a fair place that dealt with everyone equally and really did reward merit no matter who you were.
Tater was sitting next to me in the bleachers. I glanced over at him, and he brought his mouth up to my ear. “First thing I plan to do when I’m president . . . ?” he whispered.
I waited for what promised to be a line loaded with racial content, such as “Free the slaves” or “Call everybody in from the cotton fields.”
Instead he said, “Find out about aliens and UFOs. I always wondered.”
“Then what?”
“Find out if James Earl Ray acted alone. That never seemed right. Same for Lee Harvey Oswald. I’d need to see the secret files on those two. And next I’d want to know the truth about Bigfoot. They have that film of him walking in the woods. Was that real or fake? I’d have the CIA work on it and give me a report.”
At the end of his speech, the dentist locked eyes with somebody in the audience. “Do you want to produce a rock album that lands on top of the charts?” he asked. Now he pointed to another kid. “Do you want to climb Mount Everest, world’s tallest peak?” He must’ve hit twenty others with similar questions. “Do you want to win an Olympic gold medal? Do you want to swim from the tip of Florida to Cuba in shark-infested waters and gain your country’s respect and admiration?”
I thought of Coach Cadet, pointing at us the same way and asking if we were turds. Most of the students the dentist was singling out would’ve been happy to get into trade school or the army. But now he had Cedric Joubert discovering a cure for cancer, when everybody knew that Cedric, who had his challenges, had no future but to pump gas at his dad’s Esso station.
The white kids gave the dentist a standing ovation, and I saw Robbie Brown, the white basketball coach who was being sued by his black assistant, rubbing his arms, as if to get rid of gooseflesh. A portion of the black kids—a very small portion, I should say—displayed their approval with tepid applause, but most of them just seemed glad it was over.
“What do you really want to do?” I said to Tater as the dentist was stepping down from the stage.
“When I’m president?”
“No, man. With your life.”
“I want to win state in football,” he said.
“That’s it? Win state, and you can die?”
“No. Winning state is first. Winning the national championship in college is second. And winning the Super Bowl as a pro is third.”
“It’s good that your ambitions are modest.”
“I don’t see why I can’t do it. I mean, you take out the end zones, and a football field is but a hundred yards long, right? It’s a hundred yards in California and New York, and it’s a hundred yards in Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi. They don’t shorten it if you’re white, and they don’t make it longer if you’re black. It’s the same for a banker’s son like Marco and for a kid like me who never knew his dad. Everybody says change has arrived, and I’m hoping that’s true, but right now when I’m out there playing, it’s the only time I feel like things are fair.”
What do you say to something like that? If you’re me, you say nothing. Or you wait a while and try to come up with a clever reply to make you stop from thinking so much. I waited. “Maybe when football’s over you can become a dentist,” I said.
But Tater didn’t laugh. He was somewh
ere else, and I was pretty sure I’d never been there before.
Like everything else at the school, race played a role in who got what at the awards ceremony. The year before, black parents had complained that the school gave almost all the awards to white students. So this year the principal and his staff, aiming to be more racially sensitive, had decided to celebrate a white and a black in each category, and in doing so segregated the student body even more.
There was a Most Likely to Succeed (White) and a Most Likely to Succeed (Black). There also were double winners for Most Beautiful and Most Handsome, but other categories, such as Best Personality and Best Dressed, counted four winners for each because awards went to Black Male, Black Female, White Male, and White Female. The day reached a high point in absurdity when Best Smile was announced. There was a three-way tie among White Females and a two-way tie among Black Males, so the school honored seven people, none of whom seemed very happy to share the award. None of the Best Smile recipients were smiling, in any case, when they were called up to the stage.
Orville Jagneaux claimed the trophy for Most Athletic (White Male). And Most Athletic (Black Male) went to Albert Johnston, a senior long-distance runner who’d been the only athlete in school to win a state title. While Albert had been outstanding, Tater easily was the school’s best black athlete. As a starting point guard on the basketball team, he’d averaged eighteen points a game; he was our top sprinter and long jumper in track; and he’d been a major contributor in baseball, hitting a team-high .513 and stealing a school-record twenty-two bases. Students booed when Albert’s name was called. Then our side of the gym—the side where the junior class was sitting—struck up a familiar chant.
“Tay!” kids shouted.
“Ter,” answered others.
Poor Albert took it hard. Shoulders slumped, head hanging so low his chin touched his chest, he looked defeated as he walked up to the podium to receive his award. I wondered how to get the student body to cut him a break, but then Tater rose to his feet, stepped up on the bench where we were sitting, and started applauding. Positioned in the middle of his classmates at center court, he put some fingers in his mouth and wolf-whistled. Everybody stopped and looked at him, and in that moment he pointed to Albert who was up on the stage. “Al . . . Bert!” he shouted. “Al . . . Bert . . . Al . . . Bert . . .”
The calls for Tater ended, and I shot to my feet next to him and yelled “Bert” after each time he yelled “Al.”
In no time the whole gym was chanting Albert’s name.
The school didn’t even attempt to have a prom. Instead the front office gave permission to the students to stage their own, as long as they were held at venues that weren’t school property. White leaders rented out the VFW Hall. Black leaders booked a church community center on the north end.
Both proms were open to juniors and seniors, and no less than three people invited Angie to go with them to the white prom. One after another she turned them down, explaining that she had other plans. This wasn’t true, but she said it with such sincerity that none of her suitors questioned her.
I’d invited Regina Perrault, but she’d politely declined and used the same excuse as Angie—she had other plans. Regina sounded genuinely aggrieved, which helped with my disappointment, but I later learned that she, in fact, was going with a former boyfriend, Shane Gautreaux. Shane had graduated the year before and now was a Marine Corps private waiting for deployment to Vietnam. Angie encouraged me to invite someone else and rattled off a list of candidates, but for me it was Regina or no one. I decided to stay home and lick my wounds instead.
It was the actual day of the prom before I realized that Angie wasn’t going because she didn’t want me to be at home alone when she was out having a good time.
“They’re just friends,” she said.
“Who are?”
“Regina and Shane. She asked him because he’s shipping out soon.”
I didn’t want to talk about it. “What are our plans?”
“I was going to ask you.” Before I could make a suggestion she said, “What if we crashed the parties?”
“Don’t you mean party?”
She didn’t answer. More than four months had passed since our encounter with Charlie LeBlanc, and she’d successfully recovered from the experience by focusing on her studies and after-school activities, often chocking her days so full that Johnny Carson was deep into his monologue before she surrendered and went to bed. We still had classes with Tater, and still sat next to him, but I didn’t notice any tension of the romantic sort between them. For all I knew it had been repressed into oblivion, and I found myself hoping for that.
One day after track practice, Tater and I were walking to the locker room when he told me he was exhausted because he’d stayed up late the night before talking to Patrice Jolivette on the phone. Thrilled to hear it, I shared the news with Mama, knowing that she’d pass it on to Pops. I just wanted things to be normal at home—normal, as we knew it.
“Is it true he’s with somebody else?” Pops asked me.
I knew he meant Tater. “I believe he is.”
“Thank God in heaven,” Pops said. “Remind me to light a candle next time we’re at church.”
I’m not sure why, but I didn’t tell Angie about Tater and Patrice. She’d been getting a lot of attention from guys at schools, and I suppose I thought none of us would benefit from a discussion about Tater’s current status. I didn’t want to distract her, I guess it was, and I hoped she would explore the possibility of another relationship. One of her admirers was Donnie Landry, a senior who’d taken her to see Gone with the Wind when it returned for its annual showing at the Delta. Donnie owned his own car, and on weekend nights he and Angie often went for drives around town, returning to Helen Street with just enough time to make curfew.
I asked her once if they ever went parking out on Nap’s Lane, and the only answer she gave me was a giggle. I’d thought Donnie might be gay, but her reaction told me I was wrong.
“What do y’all do out there?”
“What does anybody do?” she replied.
“Do y’all make out or something?”
“I’m suddenly very uncomfortable with this conversation,” she said. But it was an answer, the one I’d hoped for.
Mama said she wanted us home by midnight, which seemed generous considering our usual 10:30 p.m. Saturday curfew. We began the evening at the Little Chef, then headed out to the VFW Hall on North Liberty Street. I was driving, which prevented me from seeing much, but the prom was exactly what you’d expect from a large social given by a school like ours. Girls wore homemade formals with corsages either pinned to their gowns or held to their wrists with elastic bands, and the boys wore mostly pastel-colored suits with shirts open at the neck or finished with narrow sock ties. There seemed to be as many people outside drinking and smoking under the trees as there were inside. Through the open front door I glimpsed a rock band in matching red outfits playing on stage, and out in the night I heard the thumping of a bass guitar and caught occasional phrases from a singer struggling with “Like to Get to Know You” by Spanky and Our Gang.
On our third pass in front of the building, I spotted Regina through the door. I’d heard people say she looked like the model Jean Shrimpton but with a more voluptuous figure. Now I felt blood vessels clamp shut in my neck at the sight of her slow-dancing with the smartly uniformed Shane Gautreaux, and then a dizzy spell came on. Part of me wanted to rush the place and hit Shane the way I hit the blocking sled. But another part—the one where my sanity resided—wanted to leave the prom as fast as possible. That was the part that prevailed.
Next we drove across town to the church center where the black prom was being held. I made a couple of laps around the building and then found a place to park. The building’s walls were mostly windows, and there were no curtains to keep us from seeing inside. Mood lights were
strategically placed in the corners of the room; it was just dark enough to make out figures moving around. Most everyone was dancing, while a few drank punch and ate finger sandwiches at tables arranged along the back wall. The scene was nearly identical to the one we’d found at the VFW Hall, except here instead of a band there was a deejay spinning records. And everyone was black.
We listened to songs by the Delfonics and Freda Payne, and then one from the Jackson 5. It was “I’ll Be There,” which inspired shouts and squeals as everybody stormed the dance floor. Even Angie and I found ourselves brandishing invisible microphones and exaggerating the effort it took to get the words out: “I’ll be there, I’ll be there, just call my name, I’ll be there.”
“How are we any different than they are?” she said when the song ended. “I mean, how are we, really? Remember what Dead Eye Dud said in biology class about skin color? He said it was decoration, nothing more, nothing less.”
Something in the building had caught her attention, and I turned away from her now to see it. In the back of the room, positioned above one of the mood lights, I could make out the familiar, well-formed figure of Tater Henry dancing with the equally impressive Patrice Jolivette. Tater hadn’t told me about his plans to attend the prom, but there he was in a suit, the front of his shirt open halfway down to his navel. I hesitated to look at Angie for fear of her reaction.
“He needs to stick to playing ball,” she said.
“It’s true. The dude can’t dance a lick.”
Certain it was time to leave, I started the engine and engaged the clutch, but she reached over and killed the motor. Then she removed the key from the ignition.
“Let’s watch a while longer,” she said. “Please. It’s kind of cute.”
Not that I hadn’t had plenty of opportunities before, but this was the perfect time to ask her how she felt about him, even though if I were honest, it was a question I didn’t want answered. As long as I didn’t know with certainty, the possibility existed that her feelings for him were no different than my own.
Call Me by My Name Page 12
