New Boy (17 page)

"I'm the
first
and the
only,
" I said.

"Damn!" said Russell. "That's a whole lotta pressure. You got any friends?"

"One," I said. "A fellow from New York. I have another one, but he's in a pretty bad way. He had to move into the infirmary."

"How come?" said Russell.

"The other kids made his life miserable," I said.

"What did they do?" said Russell.

"They made fun of him. Harassed him. He has bad skin, so they made fun of that. He's Italian, so they made fun of that. They threw shaving-cream bombs in his room in the middle of the night. They even set aside a special toilet and a sink in the bathroom in the dormitory and he was the only one that was supposed to use them." Russell drew back, astonished. Neither of us said anything for a moment.

"So what did the principal do? What did the teachers do?" asked Russell.

"Nothing, really," I said. "Their solution was just to move him into the infirmary."

"How do
you
manage?" said Russell. "Have you had to deal with any of that stuff?"

"Nah, nobody has tried to pull anything like that on me so far," I said. "But you never know. I'm trying to decide if it's worth it. To stay, I mean."

When I received my letter of acceptance from Draper and I realized that I would be the first colored student in the school's history, I was secretly thrilled. I was going to be another Jackie Robinson and break a barrier, to make history of a sort, and I couldn't wait to show up. After all, I thought, how many Negroes have a chance to be the first at anything. "The longer I'm there," I said to Russell, "the more I feel like leaving. Sometimes it's okay, and then something happens to make me want to pack my bags. Like the other night in the dining room, this upper-classman starts talking about Woodrow Wilson and what a great president he was, and finally I couldn't take it any longer. I told him, 'Wilson was a segregationist,' and you know what he said? He said,
'So what?'
Just like that. It's that kind of stuff that makes it hard to take."

"So what are you going to do?" said Russell. "Stick it out?"

"I don't know," I said, shaking my head. "I just don't know."

"We sure could use you back here," said Russell, putting his glass on the table. "We're still trying to figure out how to get rid of segregation. Every time it seems like it's gonna die, something happens to keep it alive. Even though they managed to integrate the buses in Montgomery and get those kids into the white high school in Little Rock, we can't seem to get anything going around here. The NAACP can't even get a meeting with the
mayor. He says they're just a fringe group that's up to no good. And the courts are slow as molasses in the wintertime. Even though the NAACP won that big case in the Supreme Court a few years ago, the one that was supposed to integrate the schools, around here the whites are still riding high. We been trying to get the high school kids together to put some pressure on the situation and speed things up. We're not like our parents. We don't have anything to lose, no jobs, no car notes, nothing that the whites can use on us. The big thing is getting everyone to agree. You go to a meeting and every kid wants to do something different." Russell paused for a moment and gave me a sober look. "But I'll tell you one thing we all agree on: nobody is scared of the white man. And they know it, too. They know we're coming. I truly believe that." Russell's eyes were shining with the same gleam I had seen in Lewis Michaux's eyes as he lectured me in front of his bookstore, and in Minister Malcolm's eyes on the sidewalk in front of Jinxie's, and even in Tyrone's eyes, crazy Tyrone, when he stood on Seventh Avenue that night, screaming at me at the top of his lungs.

"How can you tell?" I said. "Everything here looks the same to me."

"I'm telling you, man, you can see it in their faces," said Russell. "You go into a store downtown. Used to be they'd look right through you, like you wasn't even there. But now they're skittish, watching you like they waiting for you to
do
something."

"So what does your group want to do?" I asked.

"Still trying to decide," Russell said. "We're looking for the quickest way to bring segregation to an end. Period. Some want to picket. Some want to organize a boycott like they did down in Montgomery. One college guy even said that we should burn everything down. Nobody paid him any mind, but it's hard keeping a group like that together. When we started meeting in September, a lot of kids showed up, but we could never agree on anything and eventually people started dropping out. Now we're down to a few—oh I don't know no more than handful—that are still committed to doing something. Most kids still don't want to get involved at all. They're scared they'll get into trouble, like they would for skipping school." Russell seemed so serious. "That's why I said we could use you." He sighed and finished his iced tea.

I realized I had missed a lot. While I was up North trying to make the honor roll, all I had been doing was thinking about myself, while Russell had been spending his time on things that were really important. He was more mature than I was.

"So where do you hold your meetings?' I said.

"You know that little rundown church in Parkside near school, Mount Calvary Baptist? The pastor, Reverend Lassiter, is pretty old. You know him. He used to go to the NAACP meetings. The church only has a few members left, but when we told him why we wanted to use it, he just took the key right out of his pocket, put it in my hand, and said, 'Make sure you lock the door when you leave.' Maybe he thinks we'll join the congregation. He did come to our first meeting, but he fell asleep. He's a nice man, but he's getting old and he doesn't hear too well. When the meeting was over, he told us not to do nothin' to get him into any trouble. 'Clean up after yourselves before you leave, boys.'"

"Any other adults involved?" I said. "NAACP?" Russell shook his head.

"They think we're just fooling around. A few college kids have been coming," he said, "but it's mostly high school kids. The adults move too slow. They want to study everything and think about it and try to outsmart the white man. We think the situation is past that point. We're looking for action. If you were here, you'd be at every meeting. I know you would. We're having one right after Christmas."

"I'll be there," I said. "I wouldn't miss it for the world."

On Christmas Eve, I went downtown to Pritchard's Department Store to shop for gifts for my parents. I picked out a tie and a box of linen handkerchiefs for my father and a silk scarf and a small bottle of Evening in Paris toilet water for my mother. Pritchard's was crowded and, as I stood at the counter to make my purchases, in chinos and a sport coat with a white oxford cloth shirt and tie, I had to wait, as usual, until all the white customers had been served. I noticed while I was standing there that the saleswoman kept glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. She was tall and thin, a middle-aged white woman with bleached blond hair and scarlet fingernails. Her long, pale face was creased by a frown as she waited on the white customers, and when it was my turn and I paid, it was apparent that she was furious about something. She slapped the receipt and the change down on the counter, and I put them in my pocket.

"I'd like to have these gift-wrapped, please," I said.

She looked as though I had insulted her. "What is the matter with you nigras anyway?" she said.

"Ma'am, I don't know what you're talking about," I said. "I just want to get my packages wrapped."

"Don't you sass me!" she said. "I'll call the floorwalker!" I tried to calm her.

"Look, ma'am," I said. "I don't want any trouble. I just want my presents wrapped." Her face turned purple. She balled her hands into fists, planted them on the countertop, and abruptly leaned across toward me, as though she was about to vault over the display case. The air around us was thick with the smell of her perfume. I felt nauseous.

"You people are trying to destroy everything we've got, aren't you?" she hissed. "You and the Communists! Don't you think your race has done pretty well by us? We've been like family, and now y'all want to pitch it away and destroy
everything.
You and the Communists!" I gathered my packages, figuring I'd be better off wrapping them myself. "But we're not gonna let y'all get away with it," she said. "Mark my words. We
know
how to
stop
you." And she marched off in a huff to wait on another customer. As I turned away from the counter, a florid, heavyset white man with a crewcut was quickly working his way toward me through the crowd of shoppers. I walked straight ahead, pretending not to notice, but near the door he caught up to me. He was dressed in a dark suit and white socks and I could see a bulge under his suit coat. He was carrying a pistol.

"Come here, boy. Lemme see what you got in those bags," he demanded. I handed him my shopping bags and he rummaged through them. "Ain't your Momma and Daddy gonna be surprised. You got a receipt for this stuff?" I found the receipt in my pocket and handed it to him. He glanced at it and handed it back. "All right," he said gruffly. "Go 'head."

I fled outside onto the busy sidewalk and started to make my way through the teeming crowd. Whites and Negroes clogged the sidewalks in the pink haze of the late afternoon, everyone avoiding each other's eyes, careful not to touch each other. I passed a Salvation Army lady in a stiff navy blue bonnet and cape ringing her bell as if she was sounding an alarm. I dropped some change into her pot and took a moment to catch my breath, now that I had escaped from the floorwalker's clutches. I was standing in front of Pritchard's big windows. A tinny version of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" was blaring from loudspeakers stuck over the windows, behind which several elaborate Christmas scenes had been arranged: Santa's Workshop, with mechanized elves assembling toys; a jolly Santa with rosy cheeks and a red suit, with a bag of toys over his shoulder, seated in a sleigh being pulled by reindeer in simulated flight on a moonlit night; and Santa sliding down a chimney, his face and beard covered with soot, his raccoon eyes and pink lips frozen in rings of mock surprise. Santa had become a minstrel. White parents were holding their children up against the glass or hoisting them on their shoulders to view the display and were laughing at the minstrel Santa. As soon as colored parents saw the minstrel Santa stuck in the chimney, however, they passed it up altogether. Aletha Watkins was there with her children dressed up in their Sunday clothes, and when she saw it, she covered their eyes and quickly led them away. It was almost closing
time and the crowds were pouring out of Pritchard's; throngs of white folks were pushing me toward the minstrel Santa and I was unable to escape. Soon I was being pressed against the plate-glass window by the crowd, while on the other side, the minstrel Santa, with his soot-covered face and bug eyes, was mechanically rising and falling in a cardboard chimney under an artificial snowfall.

"Well, I never," said an old white woman, standing next to me and shaking her head with a grin. "What will they think of next?"

"Show me, Momma. I wanna see," said a little white girl in pigtails, straining on tiptoe to see the display until her mother picked her up in her arms. At first, the child was unable to detect what all the excitement was about. "Well, what is it, Momma? What's everybody looking at?"

"Look over there at Santa Claus, Patsy," said her mother, pointing out the minstrel Santa on the other side of the window. "What do you see?"

"His face is dirty. Santa Claus has a dirty face," said the child excitedly.

"And what does he look like?" said the mother, waiting patiently for her daughter's response. With one finger in her mouth, the daughter studied the figure in the window thoughtfully.

"A nigger!" she exclaimed.

"That's right!" crowed her mother, giving her a hug.

I returned home just before dark, and Dad was standing in the living room with a Christmas tree.

"You want to give me a hand with this, son?" he said. After we had secured the base of the tree, Mom brought out boxes of Christmas-tree decorations we had been using since I was a child, and the three of us trimmed the tree with lights and bulbs. When we finished trimming, we had dinner and I went off to my room to be alone for a while. I sat down on the side of my bed. I was still upset about what had happened at Pritchard's. I hadn't said anything to my parents about the run-in with the saleslady or the scene in the store window, but the incidents served to confirm, once again, my resolve to leave the South for good. And even if I did tell them, there was nothing my parents could do. Or would do. The doorbell rang.

"Rob!" called my mother. "Come on out here and say hello to Miss Bernice Gibson!" I got up from my bed and headed for the living room. Miss Bernice was an old friend of my mother's from their college days. Her husband, Mr. Leroy Gibson, was a little brown-skinned man, shorter than his wife and very thin. A chain smoker with a chronic cough, he sold insurance policies door-to-door. Mr. Gibson had started college but had never finished, and he was often cited by my parents, in private, as an example of the fate that awaited me if I failed to graduate. Like a lot of my parents' friends, Miss Bernice and Mr. Gibson had only one child, a girl named Charlene, who was just my age. I had always suspected that Miss Bernice was plotting to arrange for me to become Charlene's future husband. When our families visited, she would always comment on how well Charlene and I played
together and how much we were alike. When I was seven, she even tried to persuade my mother to put me in a children's fashion show at her church. Charlene was going to be dressed up as the bride, and I was to be the groom.

I took my time going out to the living room.

"Well, will you looka here!" said Miss Bernice as I walked into the room. "Come here, boy, and gimme some sugar!" She was standing on the other side of the room in a floral print dress that covered her big, heavyset frame like a tent. Her fleshy, yellow arms opened wide, and reluctantly, I walked over to be enveloped in them. "Don't he look fine, Charlene?" said Miss Bernice, looking over my shoulder at her daughter while locking me in her embrace. I hadn't even noticed Charlene, standing demurely behind me in a corner. She was wearing her overcoat. Charlene was perpetually in her mother's shadow, dragged along everywhere to be displayed like a sample from a drummer's suitcase. When she was younger, everyone thought of her as spoiled. She had more dolls and more clothes than any girl I knew, and as she got older, Miss Bernice would take her to the hairdresser when other girls her age were still wearing braids, but I didn't think she was spoiled. To me she seemed unhappy, and I always felt sorry for her. "How long you here for, Rob?" said Miss Bernice.