Fire Shut Up in My Bones (24 page)

I continued to hold out hope that I could rid myself of a thing I found wretched, a thing I still believed was born, in part or in whole, of betrayal.

But, as it turned out, my fear was unfounded. My mind registered my line brothers the same way it registered my brothers in blood. In fact, the closer I grew to them, the less I worried about the male figures in my mind. The bond that grew between us had the same effect as being in love with a girl or feeling close to God—it pushed the unwanted figures down, but not completely out.

The same night Clay told me a truth no one else would, I was reminded of a racial truth, one conveyed to me with as much cowardice and cruelty as Clay had shown candor. The apartment where we were studying was in a mostly white section of nearby Ruston. When we were done, we all piled into cars to go back to Grambling. I got into a car with Brandon, Chopper’s little brother, now one of my pledge brothers and the only other freshman.

On the way, we stopped at a convenience store. I noticed a police cruiser parked out past the gas pumps, but thought nothing of it. We weren’t doing anything wrong. Everyone bought their snacks, got back into their cars, and drove away. Brandon and I were the last to leave. The cruiser pulled out as we did and started to tail us. Brandon noticed and began to drive slowly and deliberately. We said nothing. Our anxiety filled the air.

Just before we left Ruston’s city limits, the cruiser’s flashing lights came on. We pulled off the highway and into a subdivision. A white police officer got out of the cruiser and approached on the driver’s side. Brandon took his license from his wallet and motioned to me to get the insurance and registration from the glove box. When I opened the box, a plastic switchblade comb fell out. It was like the one the Fonz had on
Happy Days,
the kind you could win if your hand was steady with the claw-crane fairway game at the parish fair.

The officer drew his gun. My hands instinctively went up as the rest of my body froze. Then, realizing that it was just a comb, a smile of relief spread across my face. I told him what it was and slowly lowered one hand to push the button to make the comb pop out. I thought it was funny. The officer did not. He was now visibly irritated. He commanded me to “drop the weapon,” although I wasn’t holding it, and it wasn’t a weapon. He told Brandon to exit the car.

Brandon did as asked, but insisted on knowing why we had been stopped. The officer gave a reason: not signaling before a turn. It wasn’t true. We hadn’t made a turn before his flashing lights came on. Brandon protested, to a point. Then the officer said something I will never forget: that if he wanted to, he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head and no one would say anything about it. With that, he walked back to his car and drove away.

By suggesting that he could kill us right then and there, he wanted to impress upon us his power and our worth, or lack thereof. We were shocked, afraid, humiliated, and furious. We were the good guys, we thought—dean’s list students with academic scholarships. I was the freshman class president. This wasn’t supposed to happen to us.

As a child, I had been taught, in subtle ways, to be leery of the police. It wasn’t that they were all rotten, but you didn’t want to rustle around in that barrel and come upon a bad one. This was the first time I fully understood that message.

In the weeks before our line actually “came out,” publicly and officially, our hazing went on “underground”—we were cut off from the world. The beatings became more frequent and more severe. Some pledges flinched and cowered, broke and cried. Others stepped up and stood tall, toeing the line for those who couldn’t.

In response to the paddlings, we each developed the “pledge ass”—inch-thick, saucer-sized pads of damaged tissue and damaged nerves that formed just beneath the skin of each butt cheek, swelling so fast that they produced stretch marks. It was the way our bodies defended themselves—ensuring that we could take more blows without feeling them so intensely—or telling us that they’d had enough.

We learned to walk in line with military precision. We learned long, complicated greetings—for the Brothers as a whole and each Brother individually. And we learned to sing mournful pledge songs that recalled another time, a time of dread and drudgery, enduring and overcoming, echoing the unbreakable slaves, gandy dancers, and the black church. One of the few songs the Brothers sang to us, “I Got a Feeling,” was set to the tune of “Wade in the Water,” with the refrain “God’s a-gonna trouble the water” replaced with “Somebody’s tryin’ to sneak in my frat.” Every time they sang that line, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it referred to me.

We bought multiple sets of matching outfits because pledges always had to be dressed alike—khakis and button-downs and burgundy penny loafers and matching briefcases—everything exactly the same for all of us, even our underwear.

The Brothers gave us line names that said something about the way they saw us. Mine was Picasso because I could draw and paint. I didn’t know much about the actual Picasso, so I looked him up in the library. The name was more appropriate than any of us realized. Picasso once said, “Everything you can imagine is real.” I was living my life by this formulation, making real the self of my imagination. The only other name I remember is the one they gave Brandon: Butter, because they thought him soft. Whenever they said “Butter!” Brandon had to chime “Parkay,” like the margarine in the television commercial.

Chopper, we were told, had been particularly cruel in his hazing of previous lines, so many of the Brothers saw his little brother Brandon as a means of retribution. I didn’t know what it might mean for me, Chopper being my booster and all, but I figured it did not stand me in good stead.

During that time, the Brothers found out that I didn’t drink—never had—and they forced alcohol on me. Pledge Juice, they called it, cheap, mint-flavored liquor that went down hard. It took only a few swigs to loosen me, like my body was remembering something, an echo, or awakening to something, a birthright. The liquor left me lightheaded and Jell-O-kneed, like a loose-wallet man slinking out of a cathouse—feeling just right and all kinds of wrong. I now better understood how my father succumbed to it. It was a respite from worry, a rotgut way out, time deliriously spent, time unconcerned with the true costs to be paid later. I better understood the little lies that liquor told, lifting spirits and drowning sorrows while withholding the whole truth—that, in the end, it is the spirit in peril of drowning. Sorrows have gills.

The Brothers got a local woodworker to cut seventeen hand-sized pieces of wood in the shape of a scroll. Since I was Picasso, I led the painting of them—the fraternity’s Greek letters going down the middle and each pledge’s line number at the bottom.

After about four weeks, our debut day arrived. We gathered in a parking lot near the football practice field, all dressed alike. The Brothers tied the wooden scrolls we had painted around our necks with leather shoelaces. We were told never to take our scrolls off. We would need them, as well as our Brains, to “cross over” from pledge to full Brother, they told us. We were now official pledges.

They lined us up, put masks over our faces to extend the mystery until the very last moment, and gave us our instructions: “We better hear you muthafuckas singing on the other side of this damn campus!”

We marched, singing our pledge songs as loudly as we could, toward the girls’ dorms on the other side of campus. By the time we got to the first dorm, hundreds of girls had poured into the street, excited to see who had made the line. We could barely move, hemmed in as we were by the crush of the crowd. The Brothers removed our masks, and the girls screamed and pointed and catcalled at boys they knew. I heard one person complain, “What is the freshman class president doing on line? I didn’t know freshmen could pledge.”

We went from dorm to dorm, singing our songs and soaking up the adulation, until the Brothers led us back to the boys’ side of campus. The fun part of the evening had ended. Now it was time for the worst of it. They instructed us to meet them at a secluded, mud-holed oil field, across the interstate from a glass factory, three miles east of campus near the town of Simsboro.

We drove slowly to the field in a dreadful caravan, single file, the way cars follow a hearse with a coffin in its hollow. The other boys smoked weed and drank liquor, straight from the bottle, trying to make their bodies numb, fretting over an impending beating more extreme than we could imagine. Since I didn’t smoke or drink—other than when the Brothers forced me—I had nothing.

As we turned into the field, our hearts sank. The gravel crackled under the wheels and we fell quiet. There was a horde of restless Brothers, including Brothers from other schools, milling about in front of a row of parked cars. When they saw us, they started jumping and hooting, slapping on our cars, taunting us through the windows.

This was going to be bad.

We got out, and after a few formalities, it was on. As the oil field pump jacks bobbed up and down like giant metal birds pecking the ground, we were subjected to a brutal, unfettered, gladiator-style hazing session. We were all caught in a mind-spin of madness, doing what decades of Brothers defined as the right way to make new members.

The night air was punctuated by the swats of paddles and sticks and two-by-fours, by slaps of hands on flesh, by groans of pain and by shouts of “Come on, muthafucka!” from Brothers who lost themselves in the frenzy.

This is how legends were made. The Brothers who were most inventive, brutal, or relentless were called Massive Hazers. Some Brothers revered them; others thought their behavior unseemly.

The session may have lasted half an hour, though it felt like forever. When it was over, we got back in our cars and drove away—a few bleeding, most covered in mud, everyone exhausted. I could feel the puff of my lip, the place where it had split, and I could taste the blood leaking from it, that strange metallic taste like sucking on a penny. But I smiled with a perverse pride. We all did. They told us this was as bad as it got, and we had survived. But they lied. It would get worse.

9

After about three weeks of marching and singing and bonding and beatings, including one more trip to the oil field, it was time for Hell Week, the last week of pledging. We were told that this would be the week without rules. And, since there were no rules, many of my line brothers took to hiding from the Brothers all day.

But I couldn’t hide. I had a math class just before lunch with Joshua, our assistant dean of pledges. He made me walk with him every day from class to “the Spot,” a stretch of sidewalk in front of the cafeteria onto which the Brothers had painted the fraternity’s crest, and where the Brothers gathered at mealtimes to pose and preen like roosters atop a hen house. It’s also where we line brothers were made to stand and sing and dance and kowtow and perform any other act of public humiliation the Brothers could imagine.

That day, as Joshua and I turned the corner by the cafeteria, my heart sank. None of my line brothers were there, only three of the Massive Hazers: Malik, his roommate Calvin, and Sean, a Brother who had pledged on the same line as Kaboom. Malik, the most notorious of them, was the kind of boy who talked the way one might expect the devil to talk: saying menacing things with a smile, his eyes always a little bloodshot, as if he had been drinking even when he hadn’t, looking like he wanted to help you and hurt you at the same time.

“Come on, Blow, let’s take a ride.” Malik opened the door of his car. “The coupe seats twenty,” he always joked, room for him, his roommate, and all my line brothers. I thought for sure that once I got into that car, I would be taken for a beating, but I couldn’t refuse. I got in. So did Malik, Calvin, Sean, and Joshua. “Let’s find some of your line brothers, Blow,” Malik said with that sinister smile. “I know you know where they are.”

It became clear to me then that they didn’t really want to bother me anymore. During the pledge period I’d taken my share of punishment and hadn’t flinched or cried or broken from pain. I worked hard and learned quickly. I volunteered for extra tasks and helped my line brothers finish theirs. Some Brothers even called me Super Pledge. Now they were most interested in targeting the line brothers they thought hadn’t taken their fair share of punishment, those in danger of “skating into the bond,” or those still prone to display weakness.

I knew that some of my line brothers were probably at one of the “safe houses” we had established while pledging, but I refused to take Malik there. I told him that I didn’t know where the others were. He told me that we were going to ride around until I took him to someone. So I told him to drive me to my dorm, where, as they already knew, two of my line brothers—Marlon and Dexter—lived.

First I went to Marlon’s room. He was the boy right in front of me on the line, number 12. He was a pudgy boy, fidgety and quick to sweat.

With the Brothers standing behind me, looking over my shoulder, I gave the secret knock, one my line brothers and I had devised. If you heard this knock, you were not supposed to open the door. It meant that the pledge doing the knocking was with Brothers.

But Marlon opened the door, in his underwear. The Brothers rushed him, demanding that he get dressed. I stood there dumbfounded. Why had he opened the door? I had used the secret knock. He didn’t have to get caught. Then again, Marlon wasn’t the sharpest boy. Truth was, he seemed the kind of guy who didn’t know cat shit from candy.

Next we were off to Dexter’s room, one floor down. Dexter was shorter, number 7 in line, who looked like an old man and talked like a preacher. This time I used the secret knock more obviously. But, again to my surprise, Dexter responded, “Who is it?”

“It’s us, scrub. Open the door!” one of the Brothers yelled. “Scrub” was what they called all pledges, a derision that robbed the pledge of all worth. Dexter said nothing and did nothing. Now
I
was angry. Dexter shouldn’t have answered, but now that he had, he needed to open the door. “Dexter, they know you’re in there!” I yelled. Dexter didn’t make a sound.