How I Shed My Skin (11 page)

This, though, does not equate to erasing the ideas about skin color that were so deeply ingrained in me. I accepted equality but I still feared walking past groups of black boys, in particular, and I still dreaded confrontation with the anger of the black students, an anger I could see on their faces as they watched us in the classroom. I no longer acted on notions of my superiority but the idea that I was superior failed to disappear. (In truth, at that age, I thought I was superior to almost everybody, regardless of skin color.)

As for Steven, he tested me in a different way. I had been watching him a bit too much, I suppose, for he turned to me one afternoon, during our English class, and caught me staring. He asked, in a loud, clear voice, “Do you want to suck my dick?”

The question shocked me a bit, and the words hung over the classroom, everybody watching me. Time slowed for me, but I knew I had to respond with as little hesitation as I could manage.

I answered, “No, I don't.” Knowing that I must not show any surprise, outrage, or fear, I spoke calmly and looked him in the eye. I have no memory of blushing but I suspect I did, a bit.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I'm sure,” I said.

“Because you keep looking at me.”

“Well, I still don't want to.” I shrugged, and said nothing further.

What the other students made of the moment, I have no idea. There was no laughter that I recall, meaning, at least, that if there was it must have been minimal. I showed no embarrassment and, to my credit, I suppose, I felt none. Nor did I fear being exposed as a queer to the rest of the class. He might have an instinct that I was a sissy but he had no proof of what was inside me. I had never breathed a word of what was in my head. No one had anything on me. So I could face Steven down with only a moment of panic.

Still, I was more careful in the way that I looked at Steven after that, even when we became friends in later years.

His question let me know he had seen me clearly and that I had communicated my attraction to him, at least at some level. To the degree that it was possible for me to adjust my behavior, I expect I did. But I was resigned to my difference, and we were reaching an age when it would become more noticeable. The moment passed, though, never to be repeated.

I never connected my isolation from the other people, my queerness, with the change I underwent in the way I saw my black schoolmates. Only later would I understand the influence of the one on the other. I had never entirely accepted the social messages I received from my parents, my peers, and my surroundings, because I was different, and knew it. The white narrative of the world excluded people with desires like mine, and this prevented my believing that their ideas applied to me. I had already learned to see and think for myself in building my identity, even though I kept this part of myself silent and hidden.

Was I alone in the fact that my attitude toward skin color was changing? In this particular year I would have a hard time answering, and even for myself the path was muddied by exclusionary behaviors that I retained, including the bag lunches and the fact that in most ways I still kept faith with my whiteness. I never sat at a lunch table with the black students. I never attempted any close friendship across the color line. Even from Rhonda and Ursula I pulled back to a degree. But we kept our friendship through that transition, and I made other friends. The change I experienced was small and mostly hidden. Nevertheless, it was a real change, and it would last.

The Drowning

The Atlantic Coast Line Railroad ran through Pollocksville, crossing the Trent River on an iron railroad trestle on days when there was enough freight to justify the trip, which was most weekdays, often in the late afternoon. The rest of the time the trestle went unused, except for occasions when boys went swimming, diving into the murky water from the train tracks or from the higher platform some forty feet in the air.

The house my family bought stood beside the railroad tracks, next to the old depot and within sight of the trestle. This place would mark the last of our moves from house to house in the part of the county around Pollocksville. From our yard I grew accustomed to the occasional parade of boys headed to the trestle, and I watched swimmers in the distance, sometimes groups of white boys and sometimes black, never mixed. I had never learned to swim and thus never joined the groups.

My inability to resist watching the swimmers and divers likely added to the rumors about exactly what kind of sissy I was. Throughout these years I was aware that I was being called a sissy behind my back, though I paid it no mind. Since I was already separated from the other boys by the fact of my hemophilia, I had no reason to fear name-calling. I worried more about my weight than about any teasing I was getting. Except for my waistline my self image was fine, and I was a bit vain where my personality and mind were concerned. My sole worry was that I still carried what looked like baby fat. I had always been thin until I reached puberty, and then I bloated a bit.

Still, I watched boys swimming and diving and stared at their naked skin, their hurtling bodies. My desire must have been plain.

One day I watched a small group of black boys head to the river, dressed in old blue jeans cut off just above the knee. By this time I recognized some of their faces from school, and that was the case this day. A young man a couple of years younger than me was heading to the river—Warren, someone I knew by sight but to whom I had never spoken. The swimmers, their bodies gleaming, headed to the trestle, laughing a bit, talking to one another. Nothing out of the ordinary in this, since on a hot day the trestle and the river drew a fair amount of traffic.

Some time passed, and I noticed people going to the river, adults, and soon I learned that the boy named Warren had dived into the river but had never surfaced. I expect he had been diving from the high span over the trestle, the most daring point from which to leap. This was the picture I had in my head.

Dragging the river yielded nothing.

This information seeped into our house over the early and mid-afternoon. People passing our house gave us the story, somber voiced, relieved to have someone to tell the news, since it was hard news, and there is something pleasing to people about sharing hard news. The dead boy was a person I knew, even if slightly, and his drowning made me sad, coming so unexpectedly on a summer's day.

Late in the day, maybe in the evening around six or so, with the sun low, a large group of black people walked from the back streets of Pollocksville together. They moved quietly, with an air of sorrow. I watched from the windows, inside the house, moving from window to window to keep up with them as they headed down the railroad tracks to the river.

I never knew exactly what group this was, but I expect a minister led them to the river to pray for Warren, to say good-bye together, maybe thirty people of all ages. I had never seen this happen before, a group marching down our street. They stayed at the river for a while and then returned.

I felt no urge to follow them, though there were a couple of classmates of mine in the group. But the death struck me and my family as if we had a personal connection to it, by virtue of living so close to the trestle. Someone had drowned close to our house. The memory of the crowd and their quiet procession to the riverside stayed with me, and I wondered whether white people would have said a similar farewell had one of their own been lost to the river. Or would they have stayed in the house to watch, as I had done, letting the dead vanish without a good-bye? I had begun to see differently through the lens of skin color now. I questioned difference instead of embracing it. I had begun to think of white people as “they” rather than “we.”

Warren had dived into the river but became entangled in the weeds. I learned this after the river was dragged without success, after divers were called in to find his body. The image was eerie, his body floating in the murk, trapped by some plant that would have looked so harmless if it had not ensnared him and taken his life. His death brought an end to swimming in the river there at the trestle.

Robert

Over the years I had nourished a secret affection for Robert Andrews, the sandy-haired, husky, deep-voiced older boy who had failed fifth grade and thus become part of my class when I was still a student at Alex H. White. He was the handsomest boy in school, maybe in the whole town. I came to care for him so deeply it was like an ache in my core, a throb that belonged to my whole body; such a longing that even decades later I can feel the echo.

I tutored him in math in seventh grade, not simply for a few minutes but for the better part of two days. Mrs. Ferguson had set us to work individually while she circulated from desk to desk, correcting mistakes, explaining principles, and answering questions. She assigned me to help Robert, and so I moved a chair next to his desk and helped him work on his use of fractions. Sitting head to head with him, I explained how to add fractions, how to multiply them, and how to divide them.

While I would have counted many of my classmates as friends in those days, there were no boys with whom I was close. My hemophilia created a barrier between the world of boys, their rough play, and me, and by seventh grade I had become the sissy who had mostly girls and misfits for friends. This sounds meaner than it was; I endured hardly any teasing, and no bullying at all. But I never joined in games of softball or went on hunting trips, never joined the Boy Scouts, never went camping. So I knew little of the world that Robert knew. What he knew of me was all about my place in the classroom, the fact that I was supposed to be smart.

We worked on his math skills in earnest, doing the problems set out for us in the textbook, Mrs. Ferguson occasionally walking by to check on our progress. Sitting next to him filled my body with warmth that was pleasant and addictive, and talking with him felt easy. I liked the sound of his mellow voice. He understood the arithmetic well enough when I explained it to him, but a few minutes later he might or might not remember the rules I had taught him. Numbers on paper had little or nothing to do with the world he cared about, and he never retained much of what I tried to help him learn.

Some days later he stopped by my desk to whisper that Mrs. Ferguson had decided to give him a social promotion to eighth grade. He spoke very close to my ear, that voice reaching all through me. It was a secret, he said, so I shouldn't tell anybody. But he wanted me to know. I flushed with happiness that he had told me a secret.

This exchange made us friends of a kind, though not of a sort to hang out together or play together. This might have been different but for the fact that, as always, I could not do the things other boys did. Still, when I was in class with Robert, I could feel that we had drawn closer in some way. This sense was particularly acute during the first few days of the school year at J. W. Willie. I claimed the desk in front of his in class, and we talked a good deal.

On the first day there, with some obvious discomfort, looking at the unfamiliar faces in the class, he had said to me, “This is some mess, ain't it?”

“Everybody's in private school,” I said.

He nodded. But it was clear that was not what he meant. “Jimmy, I'm going to get myself in trouble if I ain't careful.”

He meant he would get into fights with the black boys. I could see the thought in his face. I don't remember giving him any response to that. But we talked about some of the other kids, like Anna, his cousin, who had been in class with us since first grade. He spoke as if he missed having her here, when I would never have guessed he had such a feeling. I expect he missed the old school, the old way, and that was the reason for his unease and anxiety.

Still, when he said my name I felt a change inside me, entirely unrelated to the new school or the new circumstances.

We were closer during those days than we would ever be again, save for one brief interval in junior high school. Mrs. Armstrong, our English teacher, took note of our friendship. On the second or third afternoon of school, when she released the class for our afternoon physical education period, Robert asked to go to the water fountain, and she allowed it. I asked if I could go with him, and she gave us both a smile that acknowledged the sweetness of the two of us, and of my obvious hero worship. Robert saw this, too, and offered me his arm as we headed down the walkway. We walked arm in arm into the center of the school building. This was not characteristic of how boys behaved together in Jones County. Something was clearly afoot.

There were a number of black students near the water fountain, and they grew quiet and watched us as we approached. Robert dropped my arm and stepped to the water fountain, took his drink and made room for me to do the same. The simple fact of the two of us in the midst of the black students brought about a tension that I could feel. The black boys offered some kind of challenge to Robert, without saying a word. This was so early in the year, the change so fresh, that we were very uncomfortable with each other, still strangers, black and white. But I could see at that moment the difference in the way boys challenged each other, the threat that there would be a word that sparked a fight.

The next day, Robert told me his parents had decided to send him to the Pollocksville Academy, to the same class as Anna and my other friends. My heart sank, and the tide of joy I had felt began to ebb.

I missed him terribly. Once or twice I called him after school and we talked. I was shy of calling him because my feelings about him had continued to run so deep. We talked for a long time, and it was clear he liked the fact that I liked him, whether or not he understood what it meant.

When he reached junior high school Robert returned to public school, though by then he had a girlfriend, and drove his own car. We had only one class together, PE, during which I sat on the bleachers in the gym or on the football field and watched the other boys play. Our worlds only barely intersected. We spoke sometimes after lunch, or during class changes, but still there was some friendship between us, not entirely ordinary. He joined the junior varsity football team, one of a handful of white boys. One day, before a pep rally, he asked me to wear his jacket and take it home with me. I sat in the bleachers looking at him on the football field, the coat wrapped around me, people staring.

One day in gym class I was watching him with those feelings inside me. He was bounding around a small lobby at the side of the gymnasium, the locker-room door open; he was half dressed, coming very close to me and then backing away, bounding along the bleachers and then heading back to where I was. I could hardly believe that he was acting this way. He must have felt how much I wanted him. He took my hand and pressed it against his crotch. I drew back my hand right away, and said, “You really want me to do something, don't you?” I spoke without thinking, and afterward, neither of us could look the other in the eye.

“If you're crazy enough to do it, I'm crazy enough to let you.”

There were a couple of other boys nearby. I thought he was making fun of me.

The whole cycle repeated; he pressed my hand against his crotch, and I said, “You really do want me to.”

He repeated his phrase, too.

There was something charged in this moment, and it contained some part of what I wished. He had some understanding of why I watched him, and what I wanted from him. I had only to be crazy enough to take the step, as he said. He would allow something to happen, he said. I would have given anything to have something happen between us, but, at the same time, I thought he might be making fun of me.

I was afraid. He had no way of expressing tenderness, and was a creature of immediate appetites. No one had to tell me that I should be careful; so far, I had given no one any evidence that I was homosexual, and I had no intention of doing so. This was a decision that ran too deep for words, and even a hint of opportunity left me paralyzed. I felt a dread of what might happen if I should give anyone evidence of what I was.

But I wondered about the silent system within me that created this fear, the understanding that my caring for another boy would be dangerous if I carried my longing from wish to action. How much did it share with that other quiet set of rules, the ones that had taught me I was white and must separate myself from darkness? In coming to know black people for myself, outside what I was expected to see, how much did I learn about myself?

When the revolution came, would it also free me?