Call Me by My Name

For Kim and Hannah

T
he distance was to blame. It made him hard to categorize. “Is that one of them Redbones?” Curly Trussell asked, reaching for a bat just in case.

I lowered my mitt and strained for a better look. The kid was about a hundred yards away, moving past the pool and the pool house and the snowball stand, where “She Loves You” was playing over speakers attached to the roof. Then he crossed Market Street and entered the old shell road that ran between the tennis courts and the civic center. He was heading straight for us now, arms pumping, steps keeping time to the music. The way he carried himself, you had to wonder if he thought he was welcome. A splash of sunlight fell from the trees and caught him just right, and I could hear gasps from some of the guys. We'd all seen maids in South City Park before, and a few old trusties from the jailhouse pushing mowers and pulling weeds, but except for them, black people weren't permitted. They couldn't ride bikes or drive their cars through the park, let alone play ball there. The town had a place for them.

It was May of 1965, and school had just let out for the summer. There were hundreds of us scattered over three fields waiting for tryouts to begin. Until this moment I'd been loosening up with the other Pony League kids—playing catch, swinging a bat with a doughnut on the barrel, and running sprints in the weeds.

“Look at him, Curly!” Freddie Sanders yelled. “Look close. That's a full-blown colored if I ever saw one.”

Then a bunch of them ran to the road and grabbed shell to throw.

I couldn't see how the kid posed much of a threat. He was on the lean side, with an overall construction so rickety you wondered if he even
ate
. Give him a different skin color and he could've been one of us—just another kid with dreams of glory in his head. His striped tube socks climbed up to his kneecaps and his black All-Stars had holes punched in the fabric. A short-fingered infielders glove hung from his belt and shone with a fresh coat of linseed oil, and the rest of his clothes—the gray T-shirt tucked into jean shorts, the faded feed-store cap—might've come from my own closet.

He was showing no fear that I could make out, and maybe that added to why they had such a problem with him. “Let's get him!” Curly shouted. “Let's make him pay.” And now the shell started to fly.

It couldn't have hurt much because it was mostly powdery chips and pieces, but it was enough to drop him to the ground. He curled up in a defensive posture, arms wrapped around his head, legs wheeling, as if he were riding a bike. Everybody laughed at how scared he looked, including some of the adults. These were the players' fathers who'd volunteered to coach the teams.

“Hey, boy, nobody wants you here,” one man called out.

“What is wrong with you, little brother?” said another. “You wake up this morning hankering for a beating?”

Then Curly let out a war cry and went hauling off in the kid's direction. He stood over him with the bat held high above his head, hands wrapped around the handle. He looked like somebody with an ax about to chop some wood, only today the wood was the kid's head. I figured he was probably just trying to scare him, but I also knew that it wasn't wise to take chances with a person like Curly, and so I decided to do something. I ran up to him and caught him square in the back first with a shoulder and then with a forearm. Both Curly and the bat went sailing in the weeds.

The shell kept falling and the kid kept bawling. And finally I covered his body with mine.

He was scrawny in my arms, like sticks in a sack, and his breath smelled of toothpaste, the cinnamon kind. That he was a skeleton who brushed his teeth made me feel even sorrier for him. “Don't you know the rules?” I asked him.

“What rules?”

“You're in the wrong park. They don't let Negroes in here.”

“Who doesn't?”

I couldn't answer that so I let it pass without trying to.

We waited until the shell stopped coming. I got up and brushed myself off, then I lifted him to his feet and dusted him off too. I put his cap back on. Then I pointed to where we should go and started walking with him there. We went past the pool and down a path in the woods that wound to the bayou that formed the park's western border. “You'll be fine once you make it to Railroad Avenue,” I told him.

A pedestrian bridge crossed the bayou to the other side. He got about halfway across and turned around. “I just wanted to play some ball,” he said.

“Not here you can't,” I said. And already I was trying to understand what I'd done, the risk I'd taken. I'd have to explain myself when I got back to the Pony League field. I'd have to argue that I still was as white as everybody else.

And what would I tell Pops if he found out?

The kid stopped again on the other side of the bridge, and this time he cupped his mouth with his hands. “My name is Tater Henry,” he said.

“Rodney Boulet,” I answered, saying it the old French way:
Boo-lay
.

I watched him take a dirt trail that cut between large ranch-style houses. These were houses where white people lived, which meant the trail was for whites only.

Tater was up near the street when a man appeared and stood in his yard yelling. He was yelling the usual things you heard when a black person turned up where he wasn't supposed to be and you had to put him in his place.

Tater lifted an arm and waved as if he and the man were old friends, then he kept on his way.

I was with Angie when I saw him again a few weeks later. He was raking out clumps of grass clippings in front of one of the old mansions on Court Street. I could hear a mower coming from the back lawn. The side gate in the iron fence was open and you could see a black man through it, his bald head shining with sweat as he cut rows running parallel with the fence and the street.

Angie and I were on our bikes heading toward downtown and J. W. Low to pick up something for Mama. I slowed and wheeled back around. “How you been, Tater?”

He kept working. He didn't say anything.

“Did you go out for baseball at the black park?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“How come?”

“You can't see? I got me this job instead.”

I watched him a while. He had his cap turned around on his head, and his long socks had fallen down to his ankles. He looked to be about my age, which was ten going on eleven. He might've had the skinniest calves I'd ever seen. His skin was darker than I remembered. “Is your name really Tater?”

“Tatum.”

“Ta
tum
? So Tater's your nickname?”

He nodded and picked up the pace with his rake. After a minute he turned his back to me. “I'm sorry, but I need to work.” And he glanced over at the gate.

“See you.”

“See you too, Rodney.”

I caught up with Angie at the dime store. She was in the sewing-needs section, digging around for a certain kind of ribbon that Mama wanted. “He's the only black person you've ever talked to, isn't he?” she said.

I didn't have to think long. “Yes, he is.”

“Did it make you feel tingly all over?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” she said and then laughed.

“Have you ever talked to a black person?” I asked.

“All the time.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere. I ain't scared.”

I knew it was a lie. “Pops would kill you,” I said.

“Not if he didn't find out,” she said, which was true, of course. He couldn't kill her as long as it remained a secret.

Then that winter we ran into Tater again. The lawnmower repairman also bought pecans, and Pops took Angie and me there to sell the ones we'd picked at our grandparents' farm. Tater was inside the small metal building with a sack of his own. He didn't have many. He'd wheeled them over in a toy wagon with rust-eaten holes in the bed and in the words
RADIO FLYER
on the sides.

He looked at me, and then he looked at Angie, but he seemed to know better than to look at Pops. I would've talked to him had Angie and I been alone. In a minute he was gone, the empty wagon clattering behind him.

“You pay the blacks the same amount per pound you pay the whites?” Pops asked the man who was doing the weighing.

“Same price.”

“Now that ain't right,” Pops said.

The man shrugged. “A pecan is a pecan.”

“The hell it is,” Pops told him.

Pops was like that—ornery, and always wondering why he had to be the one to come up short when everybody else was getting more. Now the man was telling him that black pecans were no different than white pecans. I could see Pops's face flame red and the veins in his neck puff up. “We'll just have to agree to disagree,” he said.

The man didn't have to ask him about what. Instead he reached into Tater's pile and came out with a single pecan, then he removed a second pecan from our bag laying on the scales. He held his hand out, one pecan next to the other in his palm. They looked identical to me.

“That one's ours,” Pops said.

The man was slow to smile. “Be reasonable,” he said.

“I'm telling you, that's the white pecan.”

The man tossed the pecan Pops had chosen into Tater's pile, and then he dropped the other one into ours. The man hadn't paid Pops our money yet, but that didn't stop Pops from lunging at him. A table stood between them, and Pops nearly knocked it over trying to get at him. Pecans spilled to the floor and puddled at our feet.

“Get out,” the man said.

“Six bucks,” Pops said, and stuck his hand out.

The man removed a wad of cash from his pocket and threw a couple of bills at Pops. “Get out,” he said again.

On the drive home we sat side by side in the cab of his truck, an old Chevy Cameo. In our haste to leave, our usual seating arrangement had been confused, and now I was stuck between him and Angie. I could feel the heat coming off his body, see the sweat like dew drops in the hair of his forearms.

“I don't like the way the wind is blowing,” he said when we were halfway home. I leaned forward and looked off at the trees even though I knew he was talking about Tater's pecans.

The next time we saw Tater was at the Delta, the movie house in town. He was waiting in line at the colored entrance. He was wearing nice clothes—church clothes, probably—and there was a lady with him. She kept her hands on his shoulders.

Then again in somebody else's yard, weeding a flower garden. Then standing at the colored window at the Shrimp Boat, waiting for a dinner order. Then out in front of the Coke plant, watching a white man on a forklift load crates on a truck.

Time went by, years went by, and I kept seeing him everywhere—this kid I'd never noticed before; the kind I wouldn't let myself notice until that day he showed up in our park. How does somebody go from being invisible to being everywhere you look? How is he suddenly there when he didn't exist before?

He wasn't a friend yet, but he was familiar and we always acknowledged each other. Most times he just touched the bill of his cap, but on occasion he'd wave. Then he started calling out my name and I started calling out his. And eventually he even felt safe enough to call out Angie's.