by Roxane Gay
“Let’s just go,” I said. Being alone with Esau plus Adam was better than being alone without Esau. And it was fun to take the lead, exciting. “We can pretend we didn’t know.”
The three of us walked quickly to the lighted exit sign. I opened the heavy door to the stairwell and held it for Adam and Esau. I saw Mrs. Abraham craning her neck behind a few kids wandering between Botany and Mineralogy, looking, surely, for her son.
We hurried up a flight of stairs, laughing, which was the sound of our nervous bodies trying to expel their nervousness.
The Vertebrate Paleontology wing was cold and very dimly lit. We fell silent immediately upon entering, tiny insects beneath the impossibly tall ceilings. The air smelled like stone—no, like bone. For a minute we stood there without moving, just inside the entrance. I felt a tingle in my body like a sustained high note, like I myself was an echo chamber for our collective giddiness. This would be a double trespass, I thought to myself. Once for being a forbidden area, twice for being an ancient era. We were moving through time in two directions, forward and backward. I wanted to be in charge of this moment, of being in this ideal place alone with two boys, like some better version of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, one of my all-time favorite books. Surely it wasn’t too much to ask, to believe, that here under the spell of these skeletons and this flattering lighting they would both fall in love with me, and that although I would choose Esau, we would all remain friends and vow to undertake future adventures together. What good was a relationship, after all, with nobody around to witness it?
Adam broke off, breaking my trance, and hastened toward the crown jewel of the entire wing: the seventy-two-foot long Haplocanthosaurus delfsi. His footsteps were loud and sloppy.
Esau started to follow.
“Wait, Esau,” I said, putting a hand on his arm. “Wanna see the T. rex’s cousin?”
I actually didn’t know anything about dinosaurs, but I had seen a sign earlier: the Late Cretaceous Nanotyrannus lancensis, for which the museum had recently acquired a skull.
Esau glanced over at Adam. “Sure—I just want to check out whatever-that-is real quick.”
“Oh—yeah. Definitely. Me, too.” I followed him, suddenly feeling less in charge. Esau stood close to Adam, his striking cheekbones slightly pink.
Adam reached with his index finger toward one of the dinosaur’s tail bones. He reached and reached, but was still at least a foot off. He hoisted himself up to kneel on the platform and tried again, giggling, reaching. When he started to lose his balance, Esau caught his arm, pulling him down. The two of them in a heap on the floor, their laughter eddying through the room like ink in water. I stood above them, surprised by my anger, which felt like a betrayal to all of us, the same kind of massive bummer that happens when an adult walks into a youth situation.
“Ha ha,” I joined in weakly, wanting them to get up off the floor.
Finally, they did. I tried not to look at how Esau was looking at Adam, tried not to register it as anything but boyish camaraderie. I felt a pang of something—sadness, but also panic, and desperation, like I’d been given the chance to re-enter a good dream and had messed it up somehow. I would do anything to get back in, is how I felt. I studied Adam, trying to memorize him so that I could be more like him, look more like him.
He started to say something, but was cut off by the jarring click of an intercom, a loud voice coming from the walls: All students please report to the Discovery Room. Once again, all students please report to the Discovery Room.
“Crap,” I said.
Esau’s face clouded over, exactly the way clouds cloud over the sky. “Let’s go,” he said.
We followed him quickly, wordlessly. When we got back down to the main floor, Mrs. Abraham was waiting outside the Discovery Room.
“Where were you?” she said. She grabbed Esau in a hug and cast a disapproving look toward Adam and me. “I was really starting to worry!”
“We just,” Esau mumbled, “we wanted to see the dinosaurs real quick. Sorry, Mom.”
Maybe I could win him back with righteousness, maybe I could get his mom on my side. “Yeah, I’m really sorry too, Mrs. Abraham. It was actually my idea.”
“I see,” she said. Her face did something I couldn’t decipher. “Well, you’re here now. Go get in line with the girls, Jill. It’s time for all of us to get ready for bed. Tomorrow morning they’re going to release the monarch butterflies, bright and early.”
Reluctantly, I moved my stuff across the room. I followed the other girls into the bathroom, where we changed into our pajamas and brushed our teeth.
“Where’d you go?” Sarah asked, when we were side by side at the sink. She was wearing a soft pink pajama set with satin trim.
“Just, upstairs. To the dinosaurs.” I spit. I was wearing a giant Snoopy nightshirt.
“Esau’s mom was freaking out. It was kind of funny,” she said, dabbing her mouth on a paper towel. “And, P.S., could you be any more obvious?”
We got in our sleeping bags. Ms. Green gave us one final lecture on good conduct, standing there in the center of the room wearing some kind of a sweatsuit. I lay and looked at the ceiling, listening to the whispers and giggles around me, and felt anxious. Across the way, the boys were mostly quiet. Someone let out an enormous belch, and there were staggered titters around the room. In less time than you would imagine, there was absolute silence, the climax of this much-anticipated day folding noiselessly into itself.
I was awake and grew more and more alert. I thought about Esau, I prickled with Esau. I needed his undivided attention. What was this broken mirror inside of me, that showed me I was ugly, showed me I was wrong, but persisted in its reflection that I was better than other people? Could low self-esteem loop all the way around and become narcissism?
I heard breathing, a body intermittently shifting, rolling over. I felt like I was part of the museum, part of an exhibit, the control group of an experiment—proximity to sleep as a kind of stimulant, maybe, since my head buzzed as if from caffeine. Surrounded by bodies, bones, all the inert matter proffered by our tiny planet, I felt neon.
I don’t know what time it was when I knelt cautiously on my sleeping bag, and then stood, and then tiptoed soundlessly to where Esau was lying. It seemed as though the darkness itself was carrying me. I squatted against the bookshelf and could just barely see him, his face wholly at rest, his lips slightly parted. If I could just get him away from his mother, if I could somehow communicate through the thick silence—
“Get back to bed, missy.” Mrs. Abraham’s voice was a sharp whisper.
I fled. I tried not to cry. I didn’t cry. I slept, a hideous sleep of humiliating dreams.
The next morning, we stood shivering in the damp grass of the museum courtyard, squinting at the early sun streaming into our faces. One of the other parent chaperones had lightly slapped my arm to wake me—apparently she and Sarah and several others had tried over the course of twenty minutes, but I wouldn’t budge, and now I was holding up the rest of the class—so I’d thrown on my clothes and rolled up my sleeping bag and raced to meet the line. My mouth felt mossy and the chilly, bright air made me feel extra exposed.
Predictably, Esau stood close to Adam. I watched them openly; I didn’t care about butterflies. Esau looked as though he had slept at a spa, his pretty skin glowing, his eyes fresh. Adam was oblivious, infuriatingly unremarkable—if this were a play he’d be chorus, back row—but what did my opinions matter? I wasn’t in charge of anything. I leaned a little against Sarah, whose tallness usually got on my nerves, and watched three men from the museum set down covered cages on the long table we were standing around. I leaned on Sarah a bit more, bracing myself for a long boring lecture about butterflies and their dumb habits. But the three men merely counted to three and unlatched the doors, and all of us were made to forget for a second, as wings filled the air, what was hurting.
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
Control Ne
gro
from Guernica
By the time you read this, you may have figured it out. Perhaps your mother told you, though she was only privy to my timeworn thesis—never my aim or full intention. Still, maybe the truth of it breached your insides:
That I am your father, that you are my son.
In these typewritten pages, I mean to make manifest the truth, the whole. But please do not mistake this letter for some manner of veiled confession. I cannot afford to be sorry, not for any of it. I hope you’ll come to understand, it was all for a grander good.
You see, I needed a Control Negro, grotesque as that may sound—
You should know I was there on the day you were born, a reflection behind the nursery glass. I laid eyes on you while your mother rested, along with her husband—that man you must have accepted, at least for a time, as your father. You seemed to see me too, my blurred silhouette. Your birth (natural, vaginal) took place at the university’s teaching hospital. I noted your weight (7 lb., 7 oz.), your color (dark and florid), your temperament (outwardly placid) like mine.
I assisted with payment for your daycare as well, when you were so small, still in those plush, white Pampers. The facility sat at the edge of campus. So graduate students, like your mother, could enroll their young children while they worked or studied. And faculty, like me, could take guided tours and observe through mirrored one-way glass. I took mental notes on the room of children, a rainbow of faces, but my eyes hung on you: your mahogany skin and dark, keen eyes. Your fat, curled fingers grasping at blocks, trying to build something sturdy and true. I grew skilled at enduring the feeling you inspired, a seeping pride that filled my chest, then spilled into a painful ache.
Remember your season of Little League games, the ones at Washington Park, just down from the bus stop? I could always spot you, especially at a distance. You’d be standing at the plate, arms angled, aiming for the bright white ball, determined to hit it past every boundary we could see.
What I mean to say is that all this time I’ve watched you, or else had others watch in my stead. My TA did a practicum with your sixth-grade civics teacher. One of my graduate students tutored you in middle school at my suggestion that he “give something back.” He shared anecdotes of your progress, never suspecting that you were mine. Your sophomore year, I hired a college student, a young man of legal age but slight enough to pass for seventeen. You knew him as “David” from the neighboring county. Under my direction he befriended you, prodded you toward swimming (and away from the fraught cliché of basketball). He ferried me printouts of your correspondence, revealing your vernacular speech, the slant of your smile in cellphone pictures. Hearing this now, you might feel manipulated, violated, even. But I am almost certain that my determination to shape and groom, my attempts and failures to protect, aren’t terribly different from those of any other parent.
Everyone has an origin story and this is yours: you began as a thought fully formed and sprung from my head. No, you were more like a determined line of questions marching altogether toward a momentous thrashing. It was 1985, years before you were born, and I’d just come to work here on this campus. Mother died at the start of fall semester, her body inundated with cancer, undiagnosed until she had passed. Still numb, I traveled south to bury her, missing the initiation of my own first classes, returning as promptly as I could. I was only away for a week and a day, still a cold snap had scattered leaves onto the great lawn. My first afternoon back, I walked over to my office and was straightening the objects on my desk, my shirtsleeves rolled up, my back to the door. A man walked in and he startled when I turned to face him, so I startled too. He was—I learned a few minutes later—a senior colleague from my own department: history. He’d been away on sabbatical, and had come to my office to welcome me. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m looking for a Professor Adams. Do you know where I can find him, buddy?” I realized what was happening a moment before he did, and forced myself to laugh, to try to put him at ease, though I fear my laughter came out as a strangled sound. You see, he’d mistaken me for one of the evening janitors.
But then, the next week, I stood before all of my bright young students. For the first time in a long time, I felt, if not settled, then at least situated. Soon afterward, in a morning seminar, I remember feeling hopeful as I collected an early set of in-class writings, our topic, nineteenth-century thinkers. I discovered a hand-drawn cartoon among the shuffle, no name in the corner, passed in on purpose or by accident—it was hard to tell which. It was nothing really, just a single frame of itchy graphite titled “Irony.” Within its borders, a history professor leaned over a lectern, looking quite like me—same jacket and bow tie—except with something primitive about his face. A thought bubble hovered over the room of students: “Darwin Taught to Men by an Ape.”
It’s nothing, I told myself again, walking back to my apartment that evening, though, in truth, I felt tired. What does it matter, I remember thinking. What does it matter how much I achieve, or how clearly I speak, or how carefully I conduct myself, if the brutal misjudgments remain regardless? What if, even here, they cannot bring themselves to see me, and instead see something oblique reflected where I thought I stood? Mother always told me, “Work hard, Cornelius. Work twice as hard and you can have something.” But there I was, a grown man, wondering what it was I could have, and what would forever be withheld.
What I needed, it occurred to me then, was to watch another man’s life unfold: a black boy not unlike me, but better than me—an African American who was otherwise equivalent to those broods of average American Caucasian Males who scudded through my classrooms. ACMs, I came to call them, and I wondered how they would measure up with this flawless young man as a watermark. No, it wasn’t them exactly—I wanted to test my own beloved country: given the right conditions, could America extend her promise of Life and Liberty to me too, to someone like me? What I needed was a control, a Control Negro. And given what I teach, it wasn’t lost on me, the agitation of those two words linked together, that archaic descriptor clanking off the end like a rusted shackle.
Those words struck in me and, from them, you grew.
That was the start of my true research, a secret second job hidden inside of the rigors of my first one. Evenings and weekends I searched library stacks, scoured journals and published studies. I focused on contemporary ACMs, looking for patterns, for cause and effect. An ACM’s access to adequate childhood nutrition up against disciplinary referrals resulting in primary-school suspensions. An ACM’s expected time with his father (watching the game, I imagined, practicing catch), versus police reports of petty vandalism, of said balls careening through a neighbor’s window. I was determined to measure the relationship of support, to action, to re-action, to autonomy in these young men. At some point it occurred to me to work backwards. I gathered a more intimate sample: twenty-five case files borrowed from the university’s records, culled from a larger random pool. These ACMs came from families of high-middle income, had average or slightly above average IQs, had faces that approached symmetry as determined by their student ID photos. In my pursuit to better understand them, I called suburban high schools, interviewed teachers, coaches, parents, even, always over the phone, under less than forthright pretenses, I concede. My ACMs were all “good” promising young men, but they were flawed too if you scratched the surface. My dredging uncovered attention deficit disorder, depression, vandalism, drug and alcohol abuse. In several cases, I found evidence of more serious transgressions: assault and battery, accusations of sexual misconduct. Not one of these young men was perfect, yet each held promise, and this promise, on balance, was enough to protect them and to buoy their young lives into the future. Five years of my life spent marveling at the resiliency of theirs.
Now all I had to do was monitor a boy who enjoyed, on average, the same lifted circumstances that my ACMs had experienced. Prenatal care and regular visits to the dentist. An educated mother and father (or father figure). Well-funded schools and
a residence situated in a “good,” safe neighborhood. For his part, this young man would have to keep his grades up, have clear diction, wear his pants at an average perch on his waist. He would have to present a moderate temperament, maybe twice as moderate—just to be safe—as those bright boys he’d be buffed so hard to mirror.
What I aimed to do was to painstakingly mark the route of this black child, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.
About this time, I met your mother.
What can I say—she was, in her own way, a force of nature, and the sole woman of color in the graduate program for environmental studies that year. I spotted her one rainy afternoon in a dimly lit classroom. The door half open, she stood at the lectern rehearsing, her PowerPoint blinking furiously behind her, projecting light and shadow on her face. Slide after slide of washed-out shores and water rising. She looked up at me but did not lose her place. It would be only one more year before you were born.
Our first night together, your mother informed me she was married—she intended to remain married—which came as a relief. Those early years of struggle and I’d become a solitary sort of man. Nonetheless we continued to see one another, sporadically, into the spring. She wanted a child, I knew, and although her husband was likely the source of her childlessness, to protect his pride she alone bore the blame between them. That winter, when I found out you were growing inside her, part mine and a boy, we both agreed. I would contribute financially and keep silent about my paternity. She would keep you nearby and take my requests regarding you to heart. She knew about my ACMs, but never that I needed a boy to balance them. Right then and there, I realized who you would be.
There are many studies now about the cost of race in this great nation. Most convincing is the work from other departments: sociology, cultural anthropology. Researchers send out identical résumés or home loan applications, half of which are headed with “ethnic-sounding” names. They instruct black and white individuals to watch other black and white individuals receive a painful-looking shot. The needle digs into muscle and the researchers mark how much sweat leaks from the pores of the watchers. They measure who gets the job, the loan, who gets the lion’s share of salted, dank empathy. They mark which human-shaped targets get shot at by police, in study after study, no matter how innocuous the silhouetted objects they cradle. All these studies, I concede, are good, great work, but I wonder if there isn’t something flawed in them that makes the findings too easy to dismiss.