by Pat Conroy
“I still think we should have Caesar put away,” my mother said. “It’s the most humane thing we could do.”
“We’re not killing Caesar,” Luke said.
“I’ll think of something else,” my father promised. “The birthday racket isn’t that good an idea. It’s about time to leave for the game. I’ve got to go hook Caesar’s cage up to the pickup.”
“I’ll ride with the kids,” my mother stated.
“Why?”
“Because I still have some dignity left. I will not go to every game dragging a tiger behind me. We’re enough of a laughingstock in this town as it is.”
“It’s just to help school spirit, Lila,” my father said. “It’s to help the boys beat North Charleston.”
“Do you remember when we played them when we were freshmen, Tom?” Luke asked.
“Remember?” I said. “They beat us seventy-two to zero.”
“At the end of the game their band started playing “The Tennessee Waltz’ and all their players were waltzing with each other when we huddled up.”
“You ready, Captain?” I asked.
“I’m ready, Captain,” he answered. “I want to be the one waltzing when this game is over.”
“And I’ll be cheering my little fanny off, boys,” Savannah said, punching Luke on the shoulder, “in the inferior role granted to women all over the world.”
The team, forty of us, fully dressed, moved through the long corridor that led from the locker room to the conference room. Our spikes dragged along the cement and we sounded like the approach of bison crossing a plain of flint. Hanging bulbs illuminated our white jerseys; huge shadows cast by the strange light danced off the wall as we walked in the superhuman unearthly disguise of our violent sport.
We entered the conference room and sat down unhurriedly in folding chairs. Outside, we could hear the crowd humming in the long dusk. The pep band played a medley of fight songs. Then we heard Caesar roar, and with Luke leading the cheers, we roared back. Then the coach began to speak.
“Tonight I’m gonna learn and the town’s gonna learn who my hitters are. All you’ve proved so far is that you know how to put on pads and get dates to the sock hop after the game, but until I see you in action, I won’t know if you’re hitters or not. Real hitters. Now a real hitter is a headhunter who puts his head in the chest of his opponent and ain’t happy if his opponent is still breathing after the play. A real hitter doesn’t know what fear is except when he sees it in the eyes of a ball carrier he’s about to split in half. A real hitter loves pain, loves the screaming and the sweating and the brawling and the hatred of life down in the trenches. He likes to be at the spot where the blood flows and the teeth get kicked out. That’s what this sport’s all about, men. It’s war, pure and simple. Now tonight, you go out there and kick butt all over that field. If something moves, hit it. If something breathes, hit it. And if something has tits, fuck it.”
There was some laughter in the room but not much. This was the fourth year in a row Coach Sams had delivered the exact same pre-game speech and even the obligatory joke was the same. He always talked about football as if he were in the hysterical final stages of rabies.
“Now do I have me some hitters?” he screamed, veins throbbing along his temple.
“Yes, sir,” we screamed back.
“Do I have some fucking hitters?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do I have me some goddamn headhunters?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Am I going to see blood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Am I going to see their guts hanging off your helmets?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Am I going to hear their bones breaking all over the field?”
“Yes, sir,” we happy hitters cried aloud.
“Let us pray,” he said.
He led the team in the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Then he turned the floor over to Luke and he left the room and waited for the team outside.
Luke rose, massive in his pads. He surveyed the room. At two hundred forty pounds, Luke was one of the largest men in Colleton County and certainly the strongest. His presence soothed; his calmness made us calm.
“You young kids on the team,” Luke began, “don’t worry too much about Coach Sams. He just likes to talk it up. It doesn’t mean all that much. And he forgot to tell you something. Forgot to tell all of us something. The reason we play this game is to have fun. That’s the long and short of it. We go out to have a good time, to block and tackle and run the best we can, and to work together as a team. I want to talk about the team in a very specific way. We should have talked about it since the season began. We need to talk about Benji.”
There was a stirring of discontent through the room and everyone looked around to find the black boy. He was sitting alone in the last chair in the room. He faced the eyes of his teammates with the same silent, resolute dignity with which he navigated the halls of the school. He looked impassively at Luke.
“Now none of us wanted Benji to come to our school. But he did. We didn’t want him to come out for our team, either. But he did. At practice we went after him with everything we had. We gang-tackled him, punched him, beat up on him, tried to hurt him—anything we could to make him quit. I did it, too. He took everything we dished out. And now, I want you to know, Benji, that you’re a member of this football team, and I’m proud that you’re on it. I think you’ve made it a hell of a lot better team than it would have been, and I’ll beat the shit out of anyone here tonight who thinks any different. Benji, come on up here and sit in the front row.”
Benji hesitated and I could hear the room breathing again. He got up and walked down the center aisle with every eye of every boy riveted upon him, his eyes never leaving Luke’s.
“Now tonight, North Charleston is going to go after Benji. They’re gonna call you nigger and every other thing, Benji, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. But I want all the rest of you to know that Benji ain’t no nigger when we go out that door. Benji’s a teammate. And there ain’t no word more beautiful to me than teammate. He ain’t no nigger now and he ain’t gonna be one for the rest of the year. He’s a Tiger from Colleton High just like the rest of us. And if they get on him, we get on them. That’s the way I see it. And Benji, I hope I didn’t embarrass you by all this, but I don’t see how it can’t be said. I had to get it out. Does anyone disagree with me?”
There was the sound of the band, the crowd, the nervous tapping of cleats on the floor, but no voices of dissent.
“Tom, do you have anything to say to the team?”
I rose, turned to my teammates, and said in a breathless, excited voice: “Let’s win.”
I carry with me always the memories of my time as an athlete and those life-changing, exultant nights when I took to the measured fields and tested my strength and swiftness and character against that of other boys. I lived for the subsidies and praise of ingathered crowds, the rousing music of bands, the pixilation of cheerleaders high-kicking to the rhythm of drums, chanting out the urgent banalities of the sport with both eroticism and religious conviction. The sight of the opposing team, black-helmeted and serious, sent a shiver of delectating pleasure down my spine. I listened to the happy cadences of their vigorous warming-up like a blind man leaning toward a window full of birds. Games, games, games, I sang, as my brother and I led our team in calisthenics. On this green field of Colleton, I would taste immortality for the first and last time in my life. I could smell the salt air coming off the river, the piquant tang of that endless acreage of familiar tides spiced with a hint of crops mellowing on sea islands. My senses deepened, ignited, and I was fully alive, like something not quite human staring into the eyes of God on the first day of Eden. I could feel the breath of God running like light through my bloodstream. I shouted, I exhorted my teammates, I danced in the lean, honed grandeur of being a boy, gifted in his chosen game, as the referee’s whistle pierced the air
and Luke and I walked to the center of the field for the toss of the coin. The referee flipped a silver dollar high in the air and Luke called “heads” and heads it was. We elected to receive.
And on this night, I raised my fist in a gesture of concordance with Benji Washington as he and I took our positions as deep backs and awaited the opening kickoff from the North Charleston High Blue Devils. I watched their kicker approach the ball, saw their team break and flow and the ball spinning high through the lights, and heard myself yell, “You take it, Benji.”
He caught it in the end zone and sprinted to the thirty-five before he was hit and hit hard by two North Charleston players. He vanished beneath a pile of blue jerseys. The North Charleston team, unhinged, frenzied, out of control, leapt to their feet, screaming at Benji. Five hundred fans from North Charleston had traveled south for the game, and a chant of “nigger, nigger, nigger” rose up from the visitors’ side of the field.
“We’re going to kill you, nigger,” their safety, number twenty-eight, shouted at Benji, who rose from the ground slowly.
They rushed up to Benji and followed him almost to the huddle in a profane, violent pack. - “Nigger. Nigger. Fucking nigger,” they screamed at him.
They were still screaming when I called the first play of the season. My teammates were shaken. Benji was in a state of shock.
As we lined up, the North Charleston line went down in tandem, screaming, “Kill the nigger.” As I bent down over the center, their safety yelled at me, “Give me the goddamn coon.”
I lifted up, pointed my finger at the safety, and shouted pleasantly, “Fuck you, cocksucker.”
The whistle blew and the head linesman signaled a fifteen-yard penalty against us for unsportsmanlike conduct. He said the words unsportsmanlike conduct with a nasal drawl that made him sound like an off-duty Klansman. I would find no Supreme Court justices among the referees of rural South Carolina.
“Hey, ref,” I said, “how about making them stop yelling at number forty-four?”
“I don’t hear them yelling at anyone,” the referee said.
“Then you must not have heard me say ‘Fuck you, cocksucker’ to that zit-faced back.”
The whistle blew a second time and the referee marked off half the distance to the goal line. So far, my brilliant quarterbacking had lost us twenty-five yards and I had yet to receive a snap from center.
“Shut up and play ball,” the referee ordered.
“Come and get it, nigger,” their safety yelled across to Benji. “I’m gonna kick your nuts in, nigger. Gonna kill us a nigger tonight. Gonna eat nigger meat.”
The North Charleston crowd maintained the cry of “nigger” and it grew louder. The Colleton fans were silent and watchful. I saw Benji’s parents sitting alone at the top of the bleachers. His mother’s face had turned away from the field. His father watched stoically and I knew where Benji’s impassive, regal bearing originated.
I called time out.
My teammates were cringing in the huddle, like those scurvy hounds who live off garbage at county landfill projects. I, ever the prescient quarterback, recognized that my team had not quite jelled. Their lethargy matched my rising fury. I wanted to eat a goal post or beat their faces in. From down field, along the track, I saw the cage where Caesar slept, kindly untutored in the malevolence of the language.
I knelt and spoke to my team: “Okay, men. It’s me, the quarterback. The fucking golden boy. Ol’ Tom Wingo is going to give a pep talk.”
“Nigger, nigger, nigger.” The cry echoed off the schoolhouse wall as the citizens of Colleton watched in eerie silence.
“Now I want you to loosen up. Benji, I know this is tough on you. It’s tough on all of us. It’s scary. But before we show them that you’re the fastest black-assed bastard in the world, we’re going to take care of a little business. Now you guys are acting dead. I want a little life. I want some noise.”
A small cheer, which would not do, rose up from the team.
“Luke,” I said, taking my huge brother by the shoulder pads and slapping the side of his helmet with an open palm. “Luke, make Caesar roar.”
“What?”
“Make Caesar roar,” I ordered again.
Luke walked away from the huddle toward the North Charleston team and looked at the cage, which was parked in darkness. He walked almost to the line of scrimmage, looked far down the field, and screamed out over the noise of the chant to the Wingo family tiger, who, bored by lights and football, slept amidst fish bones and the remnants of chicken necks until he heard the powerful strained voice of the human being he loved best, calling, “Roar, Caesar, roar.”
Caesar came to his cage’s bars, not as pet, not as joke, not as mascot, but as Bengal tiger, and he roared out a greeting of affirmation and constancy to the largest right tackle in the state.
Luke answered him with a human affectionate roar of his own.
Caesar roared again and it crossed that football field like a plane, drowning out the puny chant of “nigger,” dwarfing the voice of crowds, crossed the fifty-yard line, swept into our ears, broke through the parking lot, hit the brick wall off the gymnasium, and echoed back as if a second great cat had been born behind us. Caesar answered his own echo and I shouted at my teammates, “Now, motherfuckers, gutless shits, babies. Answer back. Answer Caesar.”
Together, my teammates roared like tigers at the tiger. Again and again, they roared, and Caesar, no rookie under the lights, who had been born to perform and preserved the instinct for the center ring, responded with that magnificent feral voice that had originated in the steaming forests of India. Caesar, whose parents had awakened Hindu tribes at night and stirred the adrenaline of elephants, delivered a message to the soul of my team. Then the Colleton crowd ignited, remembering the spirit of the game, and the tiger moved through their ranks and the field trembled with their roaring.
I raced to the sidelines and shouted at Mr. Chappel, the band director, to strike up “Dixie.” When that band broke into “Dixie,” Caesar went wild. I watched the North Charleston team stare at the full-grown Bengal tiger snarling, crazed, attacking the bars of his cage, his forelegs swinging outside the bars, claws fully extended: a study in the limits of wildness. Luke charged up to me furiously.
“Why did you do that, Tom?” he said. “You know that song upsets Caesar.”
“He’s looking for one of those fucking seals,” I said, swollen with pride. “Enjoy this, Luke. This is the greatest time-out in the history of football.”
I walked toward the North Charleston team, who watched transfixed as their fans grew silent and baffled.
“Hey, boys,” I yelled above the din, “piss me off again and I’m gonna let that tiger loose on the field.”
The whistle blew and we were penalized for delaying the game.
Then we huddled and something magic had happened. In the eyes of my teammates I saw that sacred gleam of oneness, of solidarity, of brotherhood, which is the most glorious thing in the kingdom of sport. It lives in the heart but is secreted through the eyes. I saw the coming together, the making of the team.
“Nigger, nigger. Roar, roar.” The sounds enveloped us.
I said, “The first offensive play of the season for the Colleton Tigers is this: Quarterback sneak. Only no one block for me. While those jerks are creaming my ass I want every single person on this team except Benji to go after that creep of a safety. I’m just going to run around a little in the backfield and give you time to get him.”
“Nigger, nigger. Roar, roar,” said the crowds.
When I received the snap, I did a small inelegant softshoe toward a slight opening off left guard when five hundred pounds of boyflesh and leather hit me at the same time and drove me into the ground, my face crushed into the grass and lime of our own five-yard line. The whistle blew and when I got up I could see their safety lying on his back, clutching his face and knee. Our team was assessed another fifteen-yard penalty for unnecessary roughness and the referee walke
d off half the distance of the goal line. I had skillfully engineered this retreat, which left us thirty-two yards behind our original scrimmage line. But I watched with pleasure as they carried the safety out of the game, bleeding, as Luke happily described it, from every orifice in his body.
“The nigger’s gonna pay for that,” one of their linebackers shouted.
In the huddle, I knelt and said, “Good boys. Good boys. I like it when you listen to Uncle Tom. Now, on the next play we’re gonna try to score a touchdown.”
“Here comes Benji,” Luke crowed.
“Not yet,” I said. “The master strategist ain’t using Benji yet. But he’ll be the decoy. I’m sending you right up the middle, Benji. I’m going to tell them you’re getting the ball and gonna show them the hole you’ll be coming through.”
“Jesus,” Benji said.
“That’s stupid, Tom,” Luke said.
“But I ain’t gonna give you the ball. I’m bootlegging it around left end. Get me some blockers down field. On two. Break.”
As I approached the line, before I put my hands beneath Milledge Morris’s redolent behind, I walked toward that monotonous chant of “nigger” again. I said aloud to the whole North Charleston team: “You want the nigger? I’m gonna send him through this hole right here.” I pointed to the hole between the center and left guard. “And none of you have the nuts to stop him.”
I watched their linebacker shift and the defensive backs shift a few steps toward the hole as the cadence rolled off my tongue.
“Set, fourteen, thirty-five, two.”
I came up with the ball held low, heard the helmets and pads of the linemen break out behind me, crouched low and stuck the ball into Benji’s stomach as he shot past, watched him drive toward the hole, then pulled the ball slickly out as he disappeared into the arms of the white South.
With the ball on my hip, I looked back, pretending to slow up as I saw the pile of blue jerseys pulling Benji to the earth. Then I hit the corner and shot down those sidelines right past those North Charleston fans who suddenly remembered there were white boys on the Colleton team, too. At the twenty, Luke joined me and we both ran with our eye on the defensive back with a talent for not believing liars. He moved to cut me off at the sidelines and I faked to my right as if I were reversing my field. He slowed and straightened and Luke half killed him with a cross-body block as I leapt over both of them without breaking stride and moved into the clear at our own twenty-five-yard line.