The Moves Make the Man (5 page)

A week before school started, my momma got a letter from the superintendent of the schools. What it said was, Chestnut Street Junior High School was about to get itself integrated by one colored child, name of Jerome Foxworthy.

Chestnut is the biggest white school in Wilmington. It had nine hundred white students, grades four through eight. Now it was going to add one black sucker. Man, what a ratio.

What happened is this: The Congress passed a law said schools had to integrate. Not everybody was happy about this, black as well as white. We had good schools to ourselves and you knew where you stood all day. But since it was always made a thing of that the crackers were the ones doing the keeping out, then it was made a thing of that they had to start letting jigaboo boys and girls into their schools. Nobody ever thought to make the jigaboos let little crackers into their schools. Always it was them that did the keeping out and letting in.

Okay, so when the rules were clear, the school board had to get some black kids fast. Otherwise, I don't know what. Maybe they throw the superintendent in jail in Washington
DC or something. Ha ha. So the school board gets very clever when it comes to that fine place, Chestnut. What they did was, they expanded the Chestnut district, adding one full square block of niggertown. All kids in that new block had to come to the big Nut. Guess whose house was the only one with any kids on that block, and guess who was the only junior-high-age kid in that house? You got it: baby Jerome.

And the school board knew it too, don't go fooling yourself.

Now, I didn't like the idea much. Not so much because I was going to be Mister One Constitutional Negro among all the palefaces, but just because I was going to miss going to Parker, the big black junior high. Parker was as good as Chestnut and probably better, and I already knew three of the teachers there on account of having taken advanced classes during fifth and sixth grade which nobody at the grade school could teach me. I knew Mr. Beans, the math man, and Miss Tipper, the English lady, and Mr. Wayburn, who took care of the science at Parker. I did well in all of these classes and I liked the teachers fine. They liked me too, and they had all these special deals lined up for me when I got there, this time with a few other smartypantses so I wouldn't be by myself accelerating anymore. That would be nice. Ever since I took these smarts tests in third grade, I had about two classes a year taught to me and me alone while all the other kids got to hang together.

Worse than missing these three teachers, I would miss Coach Newcombe, who already knew me and was watching out for me to give his junior varsity basketball team a break by starting at guard. Listen, I'm not just bragging. The man saw me playing one day driving by in his car when I was in a three on three with bigger boys on the Parker tar courts,
and I was dishing off the passes and popping the ten-footer and looking dandy. He waited for me and drove me around and home, talking all the while and encouraging me to keep practicing up to the day I came to Parker and could step onto the team. He even gave me a ball, saying it was a school ball but I think he bought it himself, for me to practice with and a pump and needle too, so I would get used to the official bounce. It was the only ball I used for the past two years.

Man, I was torn up at the thought of missing my chance to make good for Coach Newk. Henri had been a flop of a forward for him, all leg and no eye or hustle, and I wanted to get the Foxworthy thing straightened out but true. Plus I had gotten used to seeing myself putting on that Parker purple jersey and trunks, and I even had my number picked out, which was going to be 10 if I could.

There were my friends too. You may have seen smarty kids who walked around all day hugging big books and squinting and never getting along with anybody else, but that's not my boy Jerome. I may not like baseball but I like my buddies, even though I don't see as much of them as most other dudes do of theirs. I did not have one best bud, you know, somebody you sleep at their house as easy as at your own, somebody you trade swigs with on each and every drink without wiping on your sleeve, which I wouldn't do anyway because the sleeve is probably dirty as sin, somebody you just plain love to look at and be around. Funny, but I never had a best bud like that. Maybe it is because I couldn't quite cut the time into my life on account of all the running to classes and slipping off to my hoops. Maybe I had time enough to devote to making good friends but not to making a best. It never bothered me, because I figured I just hadn't met the right dude. You know, some kids, they feel like they
have to have a best buddy even if there is nobody around they like that much. They just take whoever they think comes closest and that seems like the wrong way to me. I have my pals Timothy, Markham, Pinky, Joseph, Alton, Booger, Tin Can, Henry, Perry and Thomas. There are more besides. Plus I have my momma, and Henri and Maurice. I don't lack anything.

But I knew if I went to Chestnut I was suddenly going to lack Timothy, Markham, Pinky, Joseph and the rest of those boys. They would fall along with Mr. Beans and Miss Tipper and Mr. Wayburn and Coach Newk. Were there white people as good at Chestnut to take their place?

During this time when it was revealed about me going to the new school, my momma could have really blown it. She was pretty mad at the cheapo way the school board was trying to obey the integration law, and she did not hide this. She said it was a disgrace and a mockery of the spirit of the equality the law was trying to put over, and such as that. I remember it all pretty well, because when my momma talks to me she says things very clearly and I always like that she speaks like I am an adult. What brains I didn't get from Momma I grew on account of her treating me like I had them.

Anyway, she spoke like this for a couple of days and made a few phone calls. Then she sat down, still angry in a collected sort of way, and she explained to me that I must not think she was mad just because she thought I was going to be in trouble. She said her mad was a principle mad. She said it looked like I was in fact going to go to Chestnut and that was going to be just fine. I should not let her agitate me into a lack of confidence. Okay?

Okay, I said. Listen, I felt all right about it, in spite of
knowing I was going to miss everybody. I am not cocky, but I know who I am and that I will be fine anywhere. My momma said she thought so too, and most kids would have whipped up all this special caution and determination but she knew I would just be Jerome same as I always was and that was the only way to go anywhere. She said when a person acts unnatural they are doomed to be unhappy. You never trick anyone but yourself when you try, she said. I told her all my tricks went down on the basketball court. We shook hands and I ate lunch, hot turkey sandwich.

After that we didn't talk anymore about the big deal, we just went about preparing for school like every September. My momma made no more angry calls, which was okay with me either way. I got through with explaining everything to the kids I knew, and that was okay too. A few of them called me Crackerjack, which means somebody who likes white people better and moons around them, but they were mostly kidding and if they weren't, too bad for them.

We went out shopping and bought some new corduroys and shirts and a new pair of high black Chucks for dress. I like the corduroys that have flecks of all kinds of colors in them and feel like rugs when they are washed. I also like plain light blue shirts with the kind of collar you can wear a tie under, only I never wear ties, so Momma bought three of those. She also got me a new lunch box, one with Crusader Rabbit on it, the only cartoon I still liked and am not ashamed to say so. There's all kind of mystery in Crusader and I like things you have to think about. I never watch any other TV. We don't have one on account of my momma thinks they are trash mostly, but she lets me go to Beefy's on Saturdays for his Kids Breakfast, when he gives us pancakes and coffee milk and one fried egg for fifteen cents and lets us sit at the
counter and watch cartoons for an hour every week.

About three days before school I had a visitor. It was Mr. Terrence, the principal of Parker! Man, I couldn't believe he came all the way to see me. He was famous for being a tough dude, but he seemed okay to me, very sharp and businesslike which most kids think is meanness but is really just the way adults act when they want to treat you like you were more than some baby.

Mr. Terrence came just to tell me about how I would find things to be at Chestnut. He brought along all these charts and graphs and test score results citywide and so on. We talked for almost an hour and my momma made him coffee and cookies. What he showed me was that the white schools were a little faster in English and a little slower in Math and they offered more subjects. He went over every subject I had taken and showed me where I would likely fit in at the Nut. He told me about their accelerated programs, and said he had recommended that I not be put into them until my second semester there, so I could taste the regular routine first and not jump into things as both a new racial item and a new intellect item too. He used words like that, which is fine with me, I know lots of words.

Then he showed me these test scores, first on graphs and then actual people's scores. What it boiled down to is that I was the second highest kid in the whole city for those going into seventh grade, so I didn't have to hold myself low or back on any account. I told him it was nice of him to tell me but I didn't need any test to tell me that. My mother smiled and told him I was not brash but just happy, and he said bravo, especially since the only kid who scored above me was a white girl who spent at least one month a year with a mental doctor because she couldn't keep up with her
brain and got all messed up.

I asked if she went to Chestnut. He said yes, she was the star pupil. I said, maybe not for long. He laughed and handed me a cookie, which I ate of course.

Chestnut and all those white people turned out to be no big deal right away. I used to sort of have this backheaded idea that there weren't as many types of white people as there were types of black people—you know, they were all more alike than we are—but I was wrong. The Nut was like a city, and it had its rich and poor and jocks and brains and pretties and uglies and mopes and clowns, all thrown together like anyplace else. On the whole I say white kids are more nervous than black kids but otherwise they have the same sort of different kinds of people.

I guess my situation was ripe for trouble, being the only coon in the forest, like one of my uncles said. But nobody made any more trouble than usual for me. One kid named Turk, although he was blond and in Turkey they have dark hair, got me into a fight on my first day. He stood in front of me and started to let fly with some nasty names and such, but I cut him off and said Look, you want to fight, so okay let's get down to it, and I poked him on the chin and he looked startled and so I jabbed him in the eye to get him
more used to the idea and then I dove on him. He sort of squirmed and wouldn't wrestle me, I guess because he hated touching a nigger which was fine because I had an easy time without him resisting. I rolled him over, sat on his chest, smacked him in the face a couple of times and said, If you want to duke, duke, if you want to call names, call names. He shut up and nobody bothered me again for more than a few Nigger! calls. Just as well for them. I can throw the hands, baby. I don't like to, but I can. You always get in a fight now and then when you are new to a place, whether it's blacks fighting you or whites or whatever. It's not a racial thing always, that's just an excuse. Guys like Turk would probably fight in the dark when they couldn't see what kind of people you are.

My classes got along okay. I was ahead in three, Science and Math and Health, but there was a little new stuff in the new books and I could pretend I was just sticking even. In English, Chestnut had the edge, mostly from making us do all kinds of reading on our own and a book report every week, and you couldn't jive Miss Burno either, swapping books and swapping reports and doing what I did a few times in a pinch in sixth grade, which was, I made up a book altogether for the report and wrote on it, summarizing the plot that was not there and naming names that were not named. This was almost more fun than if I had read a real one. But I knew right away Miss Burno would catch me. She had eyes like mercury out of a broken thermometer, man they could move and take it all in.

I liked the reading she made us do, but I did not like the crap she picked to read out loud in class. It was this magic-kingdom kiddie jive, with a hero the same age as us, supposed to suck us in and make us feel like, Hey, that could
be little old me in that magic kingdom, whoopee-doo! instead of knowing we were just listening to an old spinster read a book in North Carolina on an afternoon in a room with the heat turned up too blame high. It's dishonest when people try that one on kids. Mostly, though, magic-kingdom stories are all the same thing, with a few new animals or spells shoved in to make it different from the ones that came before, but not too different. And did you ever notice how these writers think up a weird problem that just gets you interested, some magician against a mad king with a dragon all balanced off in this system of things that might happen at the same time, or something, but instead of working it out, just when you get interested to see how the guy is going to pull it off, well, then there is some big sudden catastrophe or invention that bails the good guy out without the writer having to think up anything clever? And Suddenly There Was a Flood, or some crap like that, and all the baddies washed away to Bad Person Island out to sea. Bye-bye, baddies, see you in the next book, baby, only you be wearing a new hat.

I had two new classes I never had before too. They taught me as much about white people as they did about the actual subjects.

First was French. The French language. Je m'appelle Jerome, man, and je suis un étudiant de français and a good one. The first day, the lady in counseling asked if I wanted Spanish, French, or German. Hey, I thought she was talking about what kind of salad dressing for lunch. Languages? I had never heard about learning languages. Nobody ever mentioned they taught them at Parker, and my brothers never took them even at high school. Niggers speaking German? Come on! I asked the lady what I was supposed to
take the language for. She said, for your foreign language requirement, of course. Right. Give me some of that French, my lady, and let me get down to requiring.

French! I was amazed. The French language. I was going to be speaking the same words those dudes and damsels chattered over there where it's night while it's day in Wilmington, Caroline du Nord. It hit me that I could go over there and talk to them one day if I was a good boy and did my lessons. It was the first time I ever really caught a look at how something from school might work outside in the world. Suddenly I thought the dude who thought to teach it in seventh grade was a genius, a lot smarter than the dude who made us learn algebra and such. What good did it do me to learn quadratic equations? Why, it got me through my math quiz, that's what. What about learning North Carolina history, which I had three grades? Well, that was so I could pass those tests asking where Cornwallis landed and such crucial things as who invented the double-sided spinning jenny on account of he was from Beaufort.

I took right to the idea of French class, and I took right to the lingo itself too. The teacher was this white woman named Madame Dupont, but she wasn't French though it was a French name. After three days, which we learned how to pronounce a few basic things and the pronouns and the rules for verbs, after that we were allowed only to speak French in that class! Anybody talked English, they got themselves ignored. Right there in a school and you could not talk English! Man, that room was something special to me, a little world by itself. When I walked in I felt completely new. I never realized before then how much my way of talking was what made me who I thought and other people thought I was. Take away your habits with the words, and
check out who is left, and you see that a lot of things can be fixed if you let them go with the lingo. Now, I didn't have a lot of bad things to be let go, but I did like the idea of being able to start from scratch and build myself a personality step by step through the words I talked, knowing every step what I was doing, which you do not know when you learn English starting at one year old and picking up all kinds of trash in yourself.

French was great. There were all kinds of rules, but in between the rules there were all sorts of little spots where you could make a choice and make your own way, places where nobody else would react like you do. I saw it. Most of the kids in the class were smarties, must have been because it was a small class, half the size of normal, and everybody clicked right into French and kept the pace speeding along. Usually in any class you get some duds. No duds in French, though. Those white kids were something else. I had been in accelerated black classes but the black kids always knew they were out ahead and acted it. These white kids learned like they didn't pay attention but picked it up like eating breakfast. They came to school every day just KNOWING they were going to get it. The word that kept coming to me was, PRECISE. They were precise from when they took off their coats, but they didn't even try, many of them sloppy in dress or the way they talked at least in English. Listen, when blacks learned they KNEW they were learning.

That was the class that gave me hints of what some of the best things about white people were. The class that showed me some of the worst things was one called Communications.

Communications was a class full of nothing but useless trash. The teacher was this flashy dude named Egglestobbs. He was about twenty-five, with wavy brown hair and big old
blue eyes flirting around under his low eyelids. The girls giggled when he looked away after glancing at them. What kind of charge he got out of them, I don't know. He was ridiculous to me. He always made big gestures when he was talking, paying as much attention to his hands as his words and sometimes even stopping in the middle of a sentence to watch his fingers flutter or his arm wave, forgetting he was talking and just digging his appendages. Other times it would be the opposite. He would look at you and fix on you and then after a second he would say something like Well, do you agree? even though he never said anything to agree with. If you said you had no idea, he would laugh and say you were not hip to body language and the girls would sigh and giggle at you and at the word body.

You see, body language was this guy's big deal. He was an official body language professor, with an official degree in it and all like that. Where they give such a thing I can't imagine, but I never want to go to such a school. It is like getting a degree in water sculpture or writing with air.

Egglestobbs said people all communicated much deeper and more sincerely without the words but by what they did besides. The way you hung your leg over the chair didn't mean anything about trying to be comfy, what it meant was I hate your guts if it was at one angle or let me kiss you on the lips if it was another angle. The shake you gave to your hand when you make a point in arguing is not just to show you're excited about being right, but it is a precise expression of hostility or envy or friendly disagreement depending on which way you shake and how much. Man, we spent two whole days shaking our pointed finger and writing down ninety different ways the shook finger said things. Did you wiggle or did you tremble? Aha, there's a difference. Is your
back straight or crooked? Better check because it says two different things. Do your toes go in or out? Is your hair combed wet or dry? How many ways can you wrinkle your beezer? Do you show your teeth when you say the letter s? All very critical stuff.

It was not so bad just hearing this junk. I mean, I could tell it was eyewash and I just goofed on how silly Egglestobbs and his girls were. The bad thing was, it caused everybody around to start getting very worried about what they were saying when they didn't know what their ear or ankle was doing, and then why they were saying it and whether anyone was getting it and so on. You'd be talking to somebody and all of a sudden he would stop and check out his hands and feet and ask Is my back straight? Well, what the heck did it matter? Everybody stopped talking natural for a while. And they stopped listening natural, too. You would be chatting away telling something and someone would be nodding at you and then say some weird response. You'd say What are you talking about and they'd tell you they were replying to your body language. Something you said with your eyelid or angle of the torso. What a pile of doody.

As I said, this was the worst case of white man's genius I saw. Make something out of nothing and turn everybody very nervous. It was only one class, though. Still, I didn't like to think about what other foolishness they might get behind.