Losing My Cool (3 page)

As for me, the first time Pappy called me into his study to explain my summer schedule, I was seven and my eyes betrayed me, welling with tears against my will. When he looked up from his notes and saw this, he got so offended that he stormed out of the room and I fell into my mother's lap crying. I did not want to do the work he had planned for me. I wanted to play with my friends and have sleepover parties. I wanted to capture fireflies in ventilated Smucker's jars and beat Super Mario Brothers on Clarence's Nintendo. That was the truth. However, more than anything, I wanted not to disappoint my father. With my mother's encouragement and some Kleenex, I followed Pappy into his bedroom and told him that I had just had something in my eye and that, in fact, I had not been crying. I was eager to start studying, I told him. He suspended his disbelief and led me back to his desk, where he proceeded to lay out an intensive program of regimented work in syllogistic and spatial reasoning, vocabulary-building, Miller analogies, arithmetic, and reading comprehension—his signature cocktail.

If Pappy was a tyrant, he was a gentle and conflicted one, who did not relish the role. He yearned for a time when he would cease having to be one at all. What he hoped was that if he could somehow just make reading and studying appealing enough to his boys, eventually we wouldn't need his prodding anymore and we'd simply do it on our own. To that end, he made sure not just to dangle punishment over our heads, Sword of Damocles-style, and leave it at that. He went out of his way to be fair. If we just did what he asked without too much complaint, he would do us some real solids in return, such as paying us generously for our time (“Studying is your job, and an honest day's work deserves an honest day's pay”), intervening on our behalf when our mother doled out chores (“Studying is their
only
job”), and tolerating a slew of hair, clothing, and dating choices that were in flagrant violation of his personal tastes.

Despite these enticements, Clarence would always find it difficult to take to long periods of study, and he went through fits of resistance routinely. Being the younger brother, I had the advantage of learning from his mistakes and avoiding most of his battles. I was what Pappy called a “dutiful son.” Most of the time this dutiful-ness of mine sufficed. We were rarely in open conflict with each other, and he was almost always patient and playfully encouraging with me.

“Thomas Chatterton,” he'd say, addressing me by my middle name as I sped through his study on my way to the kitchen, oblivious to my surroundings. “Do you know you wear the name of a brilliant poet, son?” he'd call from the other room.

“Yeah, of course, Babe,” I'd say, poking my head into the refrigerator, looking for something sweet.

“And do you know they call him the Marvelous Boy, his poetry was so fine?” he'd say, still talking to me from the other room.

“Uh-uh,” I'd say with my mouth full.

“Well, they do. His poetry was so fine, in fact, and he was so young when he wrote it, that the adults couldn't even believe the work was his own. They all accused him of copying someone else, someone much older.”

“They did?”

“They sure did. And do you know that he became so distraught by this, he became so discouraged, that he killed himself when he was only seventeen years old? He decided he couldn't live with the dishonor.”

“That's horrible.”

“Yes it is, son. Life is not fair. But now you're going to bring
honor
to his name, aren't you? It's very important that you do that, son.”

“But I don't know how to, Babe,” I'd say, returning to the study with a bowl of ice cream or a glass of soda in my hand.

“Well, you don't have to be a poet, son. You can be a great philosopher, for example—pull up a seat.”

“A philosopher?” I'd say, and sit down.

“Yes, in fact, you're a philosopher already, aren't you?”

“I don't think so,” I'd say, my cheeks flushing.

“Well, yes you are, son. Think about it: Do you question the things around you? Do you reflect on their meaning? Are you interested in the truth?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you're a philosopher, son,” he would tell me, and I would laugh, embarrassed because I didn't feel at all like a philosopher, whatever that was I could only imagine. I felt ignorant, which is what I confessed to him. And he would tell me that ignorance is the beginning of knowledge and talk of men named Socrates and Confucius. He revered these two men perhaps above all other men, Socrates for his edict to know thyself and Confucius for his devotion to learning and personal excellence, he said. I would sit there at Pappy's desk, exhausting whatever sugary collation I had brought with me from the kitchen, and listen to him talk.“Well, I've told you enough,” he'd eventually say. “Now, you tell me—how am I going to grow up and be smart like you?” We'd laugh and I'd try to come up with some reply. These questioning talks I had with Pappy were so frequent in my childhood that to this day the name Socrates remains mingled in my mind with the image of my balding and bearded father seated in his study. I cannot think of one without inadvertently conjuring the other.

Sometimes, though, Pappy grew impatient waiting for the love of learning to take root in me.“I don't understand,” he'd say in moments of frustration, “how you can keep walking past all these books and never stop to pick up a single one of them. My people told me
not
to read—don't you know what I would have done to have all this? Don't you ever get curious, son?” These were simple, honest questions that sometimes he put to me with a shake of the head and wry smile. Sometimes, though, he didn't smile at all. In these latter moments, the look on his face was nothing like anger and something like pain—a sort of deep, serious pain I have only seen replicated in pictures of black faces of a certain age and demographic. It was a pain that I knew I couldn't have caused but somehow must have mistakenly activated. I would stand there looking at him, frozen, like a deer suspended in halogen beams, and stammer some weak response.

That particular afternoon after my visit to the barbershop, Pappy let drop the subject of my rectangular head of hair and handed me my work for the day. There was no long talk and no sadness in his face that afternoon. “Memory exercises and then vocabulary, both synonyms and antonyms,” he said.“Write them all out on flashcards and then come see me.”

“OK, Babe,” I said, and went to my room carrying a pale green tachistoscope, a stack of SAT and GRE word lists, and a thick
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary,
glad to have dodged a confrontation. After a morning spent at the barbershop, submerged in Black Entertainment Television, speaking and thinking in my florid second tongue—Ebonics—it was time now to return to the staid and familiar language of my father.

 

 

 

T
he ball arced high off the rim, up above the top of the back-board, and over in the direction of the stage, where, on special occasions, we put on concerts for our families. Today was no special occasion, just the end of another Thursday afternoon gym class, a chance to get in a quick game of three-on-three before the final bell rang and my friends and I went home to cartoons and after-school snacks. Mr. Moustafa, the strict Egyptian phys ed instructor, stood on the far side of the auditorium, a white shirt tucked into loose black sweatpants, his back to the half of the court we occupied, guiding a group of uncoordinated girls through the motions of double Dutch. Craig and I sprinted together toward the long rebound, both putting hands on the ball at the very same time. Naturally more inclined to acts of aggression than me, at once Craig tugged hard at the ball. I bent my knees and held on firm, lurching forward and then drawing him back toward me, the ball tight between our chests. Our eyes met as we both registered that he had just failed in his attempt to wrench it loose from me.
You're a nigger, too, Thomas, aren't you?
I could hear him say as I took in his dark blue eyes and that stupid blond sugar bowl rimming his face. I stepped forward into Craig and the ball as hard as I could and let go of both of them. He stumbled backward and the edge of the stage jammed into the rear of his rib cage. He collapsed, coughing for breath. A freckled boy named Sean, the spitting image of the
MAD
magazine mascot, ran over to Craig while the other boys stood off to the side. “You OK, Craig?” Craig was red in the face, wheezing, but nodded in the affirmative.“Jesus, what'd you do that for, Thomas?” Sean said, looking up at me.

“'Cause I felt like it, bitch—what the fuck
you
gonna do about it?” I said, molding my face into my best rendition of the kind of mean mug I had been seeing a lot of on Saturdays in Plainfield. I had never said anything like that before to anyone, and I felt strange doing it. If either Craig or Sean would have just gone across the gym to Mr. Moustafa and told on me, I would have repented right then and there. As it turned out, though, and to my surprise, neither of them did any such thing. We were all about ten years old and roughly the same strength and size. But they just shrank and walked away from me, as though I were somehow much bigger than that. That was so damn
easy
, I thought to myself. When the bell rang, I gathered my things and walked off, too.

Those days, as I was learning to project a certain kind of blackness, I was also coming to understand that it is not simply a means of protection—it can be a real weapon, too.There is an undeniably seductive power that black boys who grow up around white boys and pay attention can exploit in the state of nature that is grade school and the playground. Of course, this kind of power is the power of Caliban, but as a child, I didn't know that sort of thing. All I knew was this: If they, the white boys, found me, the black boy, credibly black enough, everything was gravy.

 

 

 

 

Where I lived there was really nothing blacker you could do than shoot hoops. Luckily for me I was pretty good at it, and whenever I was free from schoolwork or studying I would play. I began taking the Wilson ball that Pappy had given me and going by myself over to the courts at Forest Road Park, down the street from our house. We had a basket set up in the driveway that Pappy had bought for us the moment Clarence and I first expressed interest in the game, but most of the time I preferred to use the park rims instead. In the driveway there was just basketball, and that was all; at the park there was basketball plus everything else that went along with it. The culture and the politics, you could say, were in the park.

One day I was there shooting one thousand short-range jump shots: five hundred from the left elbow, five hundred from the right. It was a routine I had picked up at one of the basketball camps Pappy sent Clarence and me to each summer. I was up on the elevated secondary courts shooting and keeping an eye on the main court below, where a big-time five-on-five was under way. RaShawn was playing down there, and he was like a star to me. He was neither tall nor short, but I thought he was good-looking—the way I wanted to look at his age. He had his shirt off and was wearing loose jeans and black-and-blue Air Maxes (the ones that I wanted). He was muscular and fit and had been sipping from a large bottle of Olde English 800 before the game began. Everyone knew RaShawn. He was a year or two ahead of Clarence in school, but he seemed much older than that to me. The last time I saw him, he had bought my friends and me Italian ices from the green-and-white Penguin truck. He didn't go up to the truck and buy them for us or anything like that; he peeled off bills from a knot in his pocket, as thick and layered as a Spanish onion, and said,“Go get an icey if you want one.” I thought so much of him after that, when I got home I told my mother I was going to give my children
real
black names like RaShawn or Ramiq or Jamal, not white ones like Thomas.

On this particular day he didn't seem to recognize me when I called out to him, “Yo, RaShawn!” The game was intense, though, and I thought that maybe I'd be able to catch his eye when it was over, once everyone took a break to walk to the water fountain by the tennis courts and he retreated to his malt liquor over on the bench. Some of the players in the game I recognized as members of the local high school varsity team. RaShawn was not on any team, I knew, but nevertheless it was clear that he was the best player on the blacktop. He could jump so high. He'd already caught one breakaway dunk (a slick reverse). I took another shot. When I looked back up, there was a pause in the action down below and the ball was bouncing uphill toward where I stood.

“I said get the ball, ma'fucker!” RaShawn said to a tall and well-built white boy in a blue-and-white Scotch Plains Raiders tank top who was slowly backpedaling away from him. The white boy had just about a head on RaShawn and probably thirty pounds, too. RaShawn was closing the gap between the two of them almost imperceptibly.

“It was off you. I ain't gettin' the ball,” the white boy said to RaShawn, or he said something that amounted to the same thing.

RaShawn didn't say anything, kept walking; the other boy kept backpedaling; all three courts were watching. Someone else said, “Yo, it's no big deal, I'll go get the ball.” All of a sudden there was no more space separating the two players and RaShawn was beating on the white boy savagely. I had never seen someone be hit like that in real life, and it was the sound that surprised me most—much louder than I would have expected.

The first blow came so quickly, the white boy didn't have time to get a hand up and it landed squarely on his jaw. His knees buckled and he started to sway, but RaShawn tagged him three or four more times in the face, chest, and gut before letting him fall. He hit the ground, by all signs unconscious. As he lay there, motionless, RaShawn stomped, kicked, and field-goaled him in the face, ribs, and back. The kick to the back sounded like the beat of a war drum. No one in the park muttered a word of protest or attempted to come to the boy's defense. Then the weirdest thing happened: RaShawn curtailed the ass-whipping of his own volition, went and got the ball himself, and said, “Six-five, y'all ball.” A guy on the sideline stepped in to replace the fallen white boy, and the game resumed as if it had never stopped.