The Confession of Copeland Cane

by Keenan Norris

  The interviewer was the principal hisself, Dr. Anthony Kennedy. His doctorate diploma hung in an expensive frame on the wall behind him along with several other degrees and certificates. I read the names: Harvard School of Education, UCLA School of Social Work, Stanford University. You couldn’t fake these credentials.

  The interview instructions stated that my guardian was to wait out in the lobby, where the principal’s assistant had prepared for Momma a whole flight of mini-cakes and finger sandwiches and sleek literature about the school. Me and the man faced each other alone in his office now. Hella awkward, this next piece—he ain’t even look at me. He stared down at the stack of paperwork in front of him. I waited for him to speak, but that wadn’t happening. Instead, he ticked his finger along the page corners of each sheet of paper in the stack, like he had peeped it in the bookstore and was considering whether it was worth buying. I wondered if I was supposed to talk first, if it was initiative like that that an elite prep school was lookin’ for. Part of me wanted to speak, to make statements, promises, predictions. Not just acceptance but tuition forgiveness was at stake, as well as the chance to hustle shoes to all the Douglas Deadriches of Pied-montay, California. I hadn’t came all this way to sit quiet.

  “Dr. Principal Kennedy, it’s my pleasure—”

  “Not yet. Just a second,” he said. He raised a finger in the air and held it there.

  I went silent but sat up a little in my chair, using its arms to lift me up like little kids do to get a better view—I wanted to see what it was the man was reading. When I glimpsed the form, I realized it was no paper that I recognized, definitely no transcript or personal statement or anything that was from my application materials. I was confused and stuck. It took me a moment to reseat myself properly and let go of the chair arms.

  I waited, staring at the man’s silver hair. His beautiful, expensive suit was silver, too. It was exactly the kinda thing Daddy would splurge for secondhand at the Goodwill if he had to go downtown for a permit or some shit. I imagined my old man wearing the principal’s hand-me-downs, and all of a sudden I was glad he had stayed his contrary ass at home.

  Kennedy finally spoke, his voice whispery. “I was just reviewing the projected budget. Let me start by affirming that we at Piedmontagne believe that diversity is the engine of our institution, white supremacy must be undone, and social justice must be our mission. Doubtless, you’ve applied to other area prep schools—Head-Royce, College Prep—and they are, I’m sure, enthusiastic to bring you into their fold. Those are fine schools, of course. But at Piedmontagne, we believe we offer more, beginning with our location not in Oakland proper but within the privacy of Piedmontagne.”

  He paused and looked down at his desk and his papers again. I wondered if you were right about me being Pied-montay’s dream.

  “We are prepared to offer you a full scholarship to our school. Your mother”—he gestured at the closed door behind me—“will not need to pay a dime. We also, and now I speak for my admissions staff as well as myself, are of the opinion that your presence will provide something that we lack.”

  “How can I help?” I asked, and remembered to smile.

  *

  Pied-montay Prep was hella—hella everything that the Rock was not. My first days of school, my eyes and attention stayed stuck on its structures: the big old pillars and beautifully architected buildings, the marble fountains and statues of previous principals, who had went on to govern colleges with famous names that even I knew, and of the billionaires that owned the online learning software that saved the American school system during the pandemic, according to the plaques that stood alongside the statues. Then there was the structures of the school curriculum: the classes offered included semi-basic instruction in literature and biology and calculus, shit like that. But then it was this other door you could walk thru if you had more’n just your tuition paid: the all-online Virtual Reality Education Elective Program. The study America and study abroad programs that took y’all all over the country and over to Europe and whatnot. The language immersions in Vietnamese, Cantonese, Farsi, French, and Spanish. The CEO and CFO Days. The field trips to Facebook, Salesforce, Twitter, and the companies that the men who had been made into statues had made.

  One thing that didn’t require no extra funds was the school newsletter. My contemporary American literature teacher wadn’t fittin’ to wait for me to get my eyes off the statues. Day one, during class, she told me to check my email. We was, like, doing a writing exercise or some shit, and here’s the teacher tellin’ me to get on the internet. A teacher up in Rockwood would scream on you, damn near threaten your life, for gettin’ on your phone during schoolwork. Now I didn’t even need to reach for my phone. Y’all had computer laptops at every desk. Pied-montay would be very different.

  Dear Cope (the principal tells me you prefer this to your full name),

  I’d like you to join the Piedmontagne High Times-Picayune newsletter as a columnist. Though unfortunately branded by wayward hippies turned high school teachers in the 1970s, in the intervening five and a half decades the newsletter has come to belie its moniker, becoming a serious institution in the Piedmontagne community where young writers develop and readers of all ages are provoked to thought and reflection by the insights of our emerging scholars. Writing for the school newsletter will make you a better writer, a better steward of your own thoughts, and it will make our readers a better community.

  Sincerely,

  Mrs. Greenberg

  I looked up at her. Why hadn’t she just asked me in person? The way people do when they’re being normal and shit. She reminded me of Ms. MacDonald, the pencil-skirt thinness, the yoga-type tats, Iceland white and whatnot, but she was older, so instead of coming off kinda nervous and nerdy and fun, Mrs. Greenberg just seemed focused. Her eyes locked on me and I didn’t know how I would say no.

  “Yeah, I—” I began, only to have her wave my answer away.

  “Answer me via email,” she said, rigid than a mug. “We can discuss the particulars at another point in time.”

  “Thank you for the offer,” I wrote her while she stood there, like, three feet from me in the middle of a quiet classroom. The other students typed away on the assignment like this was normal, which maybe it was in prep school world. “I accept.”

  *

  The point in time came for me to speak with Mrs. Greenberg after that Friday’s class let out and the other students streamed away. None of them knew me, let alone spoke to me, but I seen a couple heads turn and notice I was still sitting there like the last kid left on the bus. I wondered what they thought I might be staying late for. I wondered what I was staying late for.

  “Thank you for accepting the offer and for making some time for this brief orientation,” Mrs. Greenberg began. “I’m looking forward to working with you on the newsletter. Positions on the school newsletter are highly coveted by our students. The journalism class that produces the newsletter is not a class that you can simply enroll in. I teach it on an invitation-only basis. I didn’t want to cause unrest in our literature class by having you blurt out that you were accepting my invitation to be on the newsletter.”

  “Unrest?” I asked. It was a word I associated with protests, with insurrectionists and anarchists, with Trump and *8:46 and all that old back-in-the-day stuff. What did it have to do with the classroom where I sat? Pied-montay sure ain’t look like the kinda place for people to plot rebellion, nor for black folks to protest the po-lice.

  “Unrest,” Mrs. Greenberg restated, real firm and convincing about it. “Our students take very seriously every academic opportunity that is open to them. Even opportunities that may not be open to them but that they predict might become so become turf wars. I wanted to keep you out of any conflict. Just keep quiet about it and show up for the class on Monday, OK? It will take the place of your physical education course.”

  It was like she was giving me game on how to stay safe in gang territory and how not to snitch on n
obody, namely her. I did the same as I had done when I got advice like that in the Youth Control: nodded my head and kept my quiet.

  “This is a very different scholastic environment than you’re probably used to, Cope,” she went on. “When people say that a school is, quote-unquote, ‘competitive,’ that’s often interpreted as the school having very difficult curriculum, maybe that it’s highly selective in terms of its application acceptance rate. All that is true of a prep school like ours, just like it’s true of universities like Harvard and Stanford. But it also means that the students themselves are competitive with one another the way athletes are competitive. They simply want to win. There is a relentless drive to succeed, to take opportunities, and to outdo one another. It is not always as friendly an environment as it could be.”

  She stopped talkin’ and let me sit with that a second. “I suppose no one shared that bit of campus culture with you during the application process?”

  “Nah, not really.”

  “Hmmm. Maybe they figured it was simply such a common feature of this school model, sort of a natural human response to this particular environment, that there was no need to talk about it. After all, you’ll find the same thing at other similarly ranked schools. We’re no worse than anywhere else. But even so, my advice to you would be to keep your friend circle very small on this campus. Don’t get too close to people. Watch your back.”

  *

  I was used to going places and not making but one or two or no friends at all. It was that way on the island. It was that way in the pen. But I was expecting better in private school. I was experienced enough to know that Mrs. Greenberg had been at the school way longer’n any student. She would know what she was talkin’ about.

  So I kept to myself and hung with you and with Booker Taliaferro Adebayo, until that joker said to me that me and you were the first upstanding African Americans whom he had ever met. He revealed hisself a whole fool for that one. I wadn’t even sure how to respond or what to make of him after that.

  You hung out with cousin, too, ate lunch with him and talked about y’all’s goals, college things I had yet to contemplate. You had applied to all the Ivy League colleges, as well as some other dead-white-man-named schools on the other side of the continent, and Booker had already been accepted at Yale, Vanderbilt, and Oxford. It was good just sitting and listening to the jewels y’all dropped, even if I couldn’t imagine jumping from East Oakland to some college on the East Coast that might be as prestigious as ten Pied-montays put together.

  Yet and still, despite the jewels, or maybe because of them, I remember you warning me that it was more to Booker besides his impressive academic accolades. “Meticulously put together, upstanding brothers can be the absolute worst,” you said. “Maybe that’s why I like you instead.”

  Cuz you had jokes like that and cuz it was true—I didn’t know the first thing about most anything at Pied-montay. It was also true, according to you, that Booker’s fam on his father’s side had been big in government in Nigeria. And then they had had to flee to the four corners of Europe and America on account of some shadiness. “Do you know what SARS is?” I remember you asking me.

  “The virus? Like the ghetto flu but in Asia?”

  “No, the Nigerian police force.”

  “Nah, never heard of it.”

  “It’s not important that you know about it. It’s just that his family was involved in some way wit’ it back in the day,” you said. “Booker isn’t responsible for things that his relatives in Nigeria are alleged to have administered, or turned a blind eye to, or perpetrated. I just want you to know that he may have been raised with ideas about keeping certain people down.”

  After homeboy dropped that line about us being the only upstanding African Americans and I ran it back to you, all’s you did was nod like you had heard it before. You told me, “I told you, Cope.”

  “But isn’t his fam on his mother’s side African American? What about them?”

  You shrugged. “Cognitive dissonance is a thing.”

  Then why did you stay friends with him? I wanted to know. I was only just gettin’ my feet planted and soiled in Pied-montay. I didn’t understand how y’all maneuvered.

  “He’s not my friend. I keep my friend circle small at this school, very, very small. But I try to make my network as big as possible. Booker is in my network.”

  *

  Not for nothin’, I couldn’t keep cousin in my network. I left y’all to y’all’s lunches and did my own thing. You were a year older than me and were probably clockin’ college dudes anyway. I cain’t call it. I know I had enough of a crush on you not to want to embarrass myself by tellin’ you about it. I didn’t even know how to talk to you sometimes, or what to say when you mentioned certain things about Pied-montay that I wadn’t even aware of, and when I thought about your momma’s Lex and about Booker Taliaferro Adebayo’s Yale and Vanderbilt and Oxford acceptances, that feeling of distance deepened. I knew me and you were friends, that we were doing more than just networking. But, yet, and still, when I thought of you, I saw your face, your frame; I saw your wardrobe and the things that surrounded you. But I didn’t see you; I didn’t know you—didn’t know how to really know you. When I thought about who you were, it was like I was lookin’ at everything around you, everything draped all over you, and also like I was lookin’ up at you at the same time, like you were my idol or role model or somethin’. I had you on a pedestal for real, girl. Maybe I still do. Anyway, your boy don’t have much sense, clearly, but I did have enough to know that I didn’t know you as a person well enough and wadn’t close to being on your level where I could have a relationship with you. I’m tellin’ my story right now, but I wish you woulda told yours. I still hope you will once it’s safe to speak. Ain’t nothin’ simple, let alone boring, about a fine-ass black girl from both sides of the city who knows so much, seen so much, achieved so much. Like I said, you’re probably still on a pedestal in my mind.

  Instead of hawkin’ you, I lay back in the cut and applied the lessons that you taught me to my Pied-montay social life. Like networking: I decided that the journalism class would be the beginning of my network. Everybody in that piece was white. No Jacquelines, no Bookers. They didn’t know much about me, but they also didn’t say messed-up nonsense about African Americans, so we was good there. We could eat lunch together and not offend each other. We could talk about ideas and not get personal with it. We got along because, unlike black people, them white kids knew not to get too close.

  It was with that distant friendliness that I was assigned my first story.

  “After consultation with Mrs. Greenberg, I’m inviting you to write a piece for the upcoming issue,” read the managing editor’s email. He was a senior named Erick. He was tall, he was blond, he always wore Swarthmore shirts and hoodies for some reason, and he sat two seats to my right in the class. I looked at the back of his blond head. He was staring at the opposite wall. It was clear young Anderson Cooper had just wrote me this email five seconds ago from five feet away. I was schooled by then and knew what that play meant: your boy wadn’t the only kid in the room who wanted that work. I looked back at my laptop. “Mrs. Greenberg and I think what would work would be for you to write a personal interest piece on the topic of your choice as long as it is relevant to social justice. Word limit: 1,000.”

  I emailed him. You already know my answer.

  *

  Because the journalism class took me outta PE, I was short on my physical education requirement. Every student, in order to graduate, was required to pass at least one physical education class per year or, as a substitute, play a sport. If I was gonna follow your lead into journalism, I would have to play a sport.

  Back on the Rock I had never been known as an athlete. Sure, I had quicks, but nobody cared. Almost every kid on the Rock, no matter they gender, tall and short, fat and skinny, could hit the lights and be under the blankets ’fore the room got dark. Unlike me, the other kids could also pl
ay games where they threw, hit, caught, and kicked balls. Because they hadn’t been doing a bid since birth, they had had time to play games and get good at them.

  It was only when I came to prep school that people started hawkin’ me to play this, that, and the Fifth. Real talk: the minute the coaches laid eyes on me, it was like the application interview process had started all over again. One coach wanted to know: How fast was my forty time? The only “forty” I knew was the malt liquor that them old, tanked-out dudes drank while they sat in they lawn chairs outside the liquor store. How fast could I drink one of them things? It might take me a month. I learnt later that the forty-yard dash is a race that helps determine an athlete’s speed. Not being an athlete, I had been unaware of that shit. Nevertheless, the unanswerable sports questions kept on coming. Was I more of a lead guard or a wing? Was I ball dominant? Could I run the triple option, or was I a pocket passer? I know I could clean up my vocab some, but, Jacq, them coaches coulda started speaking to me in Gullah and it woulda made more sense.

  The Pied-montay PTA was in the midst of a campaign to abolish football at the school on the basis of the research done on brain trauma and the fact that they kids wadn’t a bunch of ghetto birds with no other means of gettin’ a college scholarship. I wanted no parts of football and wouldn’t mind if it disappeared like the Raiders outta Oakland. As for a brain-safe sport like basketball, it was somethin’ to do with the games I seen on the Rock, Jacq, how brothers would practically be at each other’s throats over a foul call. I couldn’t deal with all that ruckus after being incarcerated. I hid it good, but on the inside I was still nervy than a muhfucka, what the psychologists call “hypervigilant.” Anyway, my right elbow flared out like a bird’s bad wing whenever I picked up a basketball and tried to shoot it. My baseball swing suffered similar deformities.