Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  “What about Downer’s father?” asked Keith.

  “I’ve spoken with Mr. Downer. As I said, this is my decision. Any other questions?”

  When no one answered, Mr. Chase thanked us and then left the room. The twelve of us filed out of the study slowly.

  “It’s a good thing. I would have never stood for that,” said Keith.

  “It wouldn’t have been that big a deal. A few nights in the kitchen,” I said.

  “It would have set us all apart. Waiting on them hand and foot. How could you face them in class as their servants?”

  “It’s over, Keith. We won.”

  “We’ll never win from this side, brother. It’s like my brother told me. ‘They may let you in, but they will never let you win.’”

  That night in chapel, Keith and I sat together in the choir pews at the front of the hall. There were two sets of pews that faced each other, reserved for the Second and Third Forms. After each service, the lower classes filed out of the choir pews in pairs and walked down the center aisle, leading out the congregation. Of all the people for me to walk out with tonight, there was Ashley Downer. I grimaced and hesitated. Keith gave me a shove, and I turned around to see him smirking. Ashley’s face was afire. We walked stiffly down the aisle together. Behind me, barely audibly, I could hear Keith laughing in his exaggerated baritone, “Heh, heh, heh. Heh, heh, heh.”

  The next Saturday we were all back in the Common Room again. Ashley was stewing in a moody funk. He wouldn’t just accept Mr. Chase’s decision. He told me that his father would bring up the matter at the next trustees’ meeting, along with a general review of the scholarship program. His eyes were beady and he looked pale, almost ill, as he spoke, shivering with hostility. “If I have my way, the whole scholarship program will be dumped.”

  “Fuck you, Downer,” I said, having had enough.

  “Fuck you, Givens.”

  “No, fuck you, Frog,” T. J. jumped in.

  “Fuck you, T. J. I’m sick of you butting into my business. Leave me alone, dammit!”

  Just then Mr. Bennett came into the Common Room. “Cut out the swearing! My wife is right across the hall.” T. J. apologized, and Ashley rushed out of the room.

  One day the following week, T. J. caught up to me while I was crossing the quad going to class.

  “I know how to nail Downer,” he said.

  “How?”

  “That nasty little fuck. We should waste his ass.”

  “He’s just doing it ’cause you turned him into the school clown.” “I’m no worse to him than anybody else.”

  “How are you going to nail him?”

  “His roommate is going away this weekend.”

  “Acheson?”

  “Make sure Acheson’s going away, and let me know if he changes his plans.”

  Gary Acheson flew to Vail for the weekend, which meant that Ashley Downer would be alone in his room on Friday night. I made sure of this, and reported back to T. J. as he’d asked. “Fine,” he said. I wondered what he had planned.

  T. J.’s room was strategically located right next door to Ashley’s. Perhaps he was planting some kind of booby trap.

  Or blackmail? I would have gone along with anything to get Ashley off my back.

  On Saturday afternoon, T. J. came into my room carrying a micro-cassette recorder.

  “Listen to this.”

  “Oooh, Daddy. Oooh, Daddy, I’m sorry.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Just listen, Givens.”

  “Ooooh, Daddy. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Daddy.”

  “Are those bedsprings in the background?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is that Downer?”

  “No, it’s Mae West, genius,” T. J. said. “Of course, it’s Downer.”

  “Adams, I swear you are psychotic.”

  “I told you I’d nail that amphibian fuckface.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “If you can’t figure that out, you really are retarded.” T. J. removed the cassette from the recorder and handed it to me. “Happy anniversary, darling,” he said, and went out the room.

  A day later Ashley Downer received a note in his mailbox. The note read, “I’m sorry, Daddy. (Ribbit) I’m sorry for sending you that letter. I’m sorry you found out my little secret. I’m sorry, Daddy (Ribbit).” We didn’t hear any more of Ashley’s vaunted influence with his father the school trustee.

  Part of me felt sorry for Ashley, even though he was a snob and a bigot. I mentioned this to Keith, and he looked at me in amazement. “People like Downer are our enemy,” he exclaimed. I knew he was right, but I just couldn’t find an emotion of anger or hatred inside of me.

  I ran into Ashley one afternoon in downtown Green River. He was walking alone along the road, headed back towards school. I was headed in the opposite direction. He was staring at the ground, absorbed in his thoughts. I don’t think he even saw me. His glasses were sitting lopsided on his face. He had on a jacket and tie, and one of his shirttails was hanging out. As he walked by me, across the road, I felt oddly connected with him, as though somehow in our souls we were alike, except that I was the more fortunate.

  I think that was the reason I couldn’t passionately hate Ashley. We really were alike. We were both kind of weird, quiet, bookish kids. The only difference between us was race. It would have been hard for a black kid to be labelled a nerd in a mostly white school. But if I had been white, I was sure T. J. would have tortured me just as he had the Frog; or if I’d gone to an all-black school, I would have been the unpopular outcast— especially since I didn’t date girls. At Briarwood I was free to hide behind the indifference of my white schoolmates. No one was looking very hard at me. And so I didn’t have to look very hard at myself Ashley must have suspected T. J. or me of sending the note, but he never showed any interest in revenge. He started behaving out of sorts—bewildered and lost. He didn’t speak much to anyone. Gary Acheson told us Ashley had become depressed. Even T. J. stopped teasing him and calling him Frog.

  Later I asked T. J. how he had bugged Ashley.

  “Walkie-talkies,” he said. He pulled out his set of army surplus hand radios from under his bed. “I set one to send and planted it under Gary’s pillow. Then I just recorded from my radio.”

  “But how did you know?”

  His eyes flickered suspiciously. “Safe guess,” he said in a near whisper.

  T. J. and I became friends after he helped me nail Ashley Downer. I couldn’t very well stay rude to him after that. And I was starting to feel like a hypocrite for shunning him but playing Peeping Tom every chance I got. After all, T. J. wasn’t wrong. He was just too obvious. And not just to me. His roommate Kent Mason was spreading rumors that T. J. was queer.

  Of course, I had my doubts about Kent Mason, too. When Billy Green was sitting naked on the training table in the gymnasium, taping his ankles for hockey practice, Kent walked by the doorway and looked in. I swore his eyes almost popped out of his head.

  One night T. J. came running out of the bathroom into my room, completely naked and dripping wet. He’d been having a water fight with Gary Acheson. My roommate Barrett laughed nervously and asked T. J. what he and Acheson were doing in the bathroom.

  “Having sex!” T. J. exclaimed. Barrett just shook his head and muttered, “Jesus, Adams.” I started laughing, and T. J. smiled at me, his manic black-brown eye dots twinkling under his mop of soaked hair. “What are you laughing at, Givens?” he said. He ran his fingers through his hair and spattered drops of water in my face. Then he turned and ran back into the bathroom.

  “What a nut,” I said to Barrett, and for the only time in the year we roomed together, we smiled.

  I don’t think T. J. realized what he was doing, any more than I realized how conspicuous I was when I stared at his dick by the urinals. He was just a very horny kid, his sex exploding out of him. T. J. didn’t believe in self-control and he didn’t believe in inhibitions. Being his friend mea
nt I had to deal with his strange personal view of life and of the world.

  Privacy meant nothing to T. J. The idea of personal barriers was as useless to him as clothing. Just by talking to him, I opened myself to a barrage of intrusions across my personal space. My appearance was now within his jurisdiction: he repeatedly suggested I grow my hair like his favorite rock star, Jimi Hendrix. “I thought you were going to grow a big afro?” he kept asking me, and I winced at the thought of myself in Jimi’s frazzled, byzantine hairstyle. He could be stunningly blunt about my personal habits: “Givens, quit beating off in the shower,” he hollered at me one morning. “You’re wasting all the hot water.”

  I never saw T. J. ignore anyone, or leave anyone alone when they asked. His own nerves were radically exposed, and he couldn’t abide docility in anyone else; we all had to join him in his hyperactive universe. Being quiet, egg-headed, and black, I especially piqued his curiosity, rivalling the Frog as a target of his exploratory attentions. T. J. was Dr. Frankenstein, and I and my responses were the subject of his experiments. All he wanted was to prod and test me, to piss me off or to make me laugh; to hear my jokes (few, far between, and usually not worth the wait), my problems (multitudinous), my sexual exploits (imaginary). To T. J. I was just another soul stranded on the earth, a kindred human, and therefore an opportunity for something interesting to happen.

  We started to walk together to class almost every day. Since T. J. and I were both on honors, we could take morning study hall in our rooms instead of the library. Most mornings we were alone in the dormitory.

  “Who’s your favorite master?” he asked me one morning.

  “I guess Mr. Craig,” I said.

  “I think Mr. Press is cool.” Sanford Press was the varsity football coach, as well as our ancient history teacher and school dean. He was a big man, two hundred pounds and six feet tall, with a broad, heavy jaw and a grayish brown crew cut. It was rumored that Mr. Press had once gone through tryouts in a real pro football training camp.

  “Mr. Press?” I said doubtfully. “You would pick Press.”

  “What’s wrong with Press?”

  “The Dean of Students? What if he has to kick you out?”

  T. J. paused and thought. “Press would never kick me out.”

  “Why not?”

  “He just wouldn’t.”

  I thought of the time I’d seen Dean Press walking behind the chapel with T. J., his arm around T. J.’s shoulder. I frowned and sat up on my bed.

  “You suck up to him in ancient history class,” I said with a bitterness that surprised me.

  “I’d like to suck up to his daughter,” T. J. said. Lisa Press was a student at Trinity and spent her weekends at home with her parents. She was thin and hipless, with crystalline features and eyes that shone like blue frost in contrast to her short, black hair. More than once I had mistaken her, at a distance, for a boy.

  “Let’s head back to class,” I said.

  “Wait a minute. I have to take a piss.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  In the bathroom I sat on the sink while T. J. urinated. I looked, and his penis swelled. He turned and smiled at me casually, as if nothing were strange. “You could come home with me sometime,” he said. “We could spend a weekend at my house.” In the late spring of our Third Form year T. J. meant business, while I was still just a silly voyeur.

  APRIL SINCLAIR

  [1954–]

  HAVING GROWN UP ON CHICAGO’S SOUTH SIDE DURING THE height of the civil rights era may account for novelist April Sinclair’s activist origins, if not also the period settings that characterize her fiction. Sinclair first became involved in community issues while studying at West Illinois University. Following graduation, the author moved to California, where she served as director of a San Francisco Bay Area food bank and worked with youth programs. It was while living amid the cultural diversity of Oakland that Sinclair began giving readings of her first novel, Coffee Will Make You Black, which consisted then of only twenty pages. Her storytelling talents, combined with an outstanding gift for humor, won rave receptions from audiences who encouraged her toward completion of the book. In fact, news of these reportedly hilarious readings finally reached a literary agent, who contacted the author and sold the unfinished manuscript to a publisher.

  The best-selling Coffee Will Make You Black (1994) is a comic coming-of-age story about Jean “Stevie” Stevenson, a young African American woman discovering political and sexual self-awareness during the cultural tumult of the 1960s. The major success of Coffee Will Make You Black inspired its sequel, Ain’t Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice (1996), in which Stevie becomes sexually active in the 1970s. With lesbian themes also appearing in Sinclair’s third novel, I Left My Back Door Open (1999), the self-identified bisexual author is one of the most popular African American authors publishing queer-oriented fiction today.

  In this selection from Coffee Will Make You Black, Stevie has reached a sexual crossroads, where erotic fantasies involving Miss Horn, the white high school nurse, surpass her cooling affections for boyfriend Sean. As with much of Sinclair’s writing, racial identity complicates issues of sexual understanding, to comic ends.

  from Coffee Will Make You Black

  [1994]

  Me and Carla were walking to school. We had just decided she should tell her new boyfriend, Ivory, to buy her the Temptations’ and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ new albums for her birthday. Carla’s mother had given her a choice between a new stereo and a birthday party after Carla told her about my new box. She’d chosen the stereo. Carla finally had her room to herself. Marla and Sharla had both moved in with their boyfriends. They each had a girl and a boy now, but neither was married.

  “There’s Nurse Horn’s car, the blue one,” I said, pointing as we passed the faculty parking lot. “Carla, don’t you think Mustangs are hot?”

  “I already done told you that I want me a red Firebird. And you done showed me Nurse Horn’s stupid car before.”

  “Well, have you checked out Nurse Horn’s new pants uniform? And have you seen her new white earth shoes?”

  “Stevie, I don’t give a flying fuck about Nurse Horn or her car or her uniform! Do you hear me?”

  “Dog, Carla, why you got to curse?”

  “Cause you should be trippin’ on the prom, steada her white ass, that’s why.”

  “I am trippin’ on the prom.”

  “So, when you gon get your dress? Don’t wait till the last minute now.” “Carla, the prom is still almost two months away.”

  “I thought you said your auntie was taking you shopping?”

  “She is, we’re going Clean-Up Week to Carson’s. My Aunt Sheila’s got a charge there.”

  “Carson Pirie Scott, go ’head, girl!” Carla gave me five. “Who woulda thought you would pull a senior? Stevie, I’m jealous, girl; you should be so excited!”

  “I am excited, okay?”

  “Okay. So now, what the fuck are earth shoes?”

  “I like the way you dribble,” Sean teased me as I headed down the alley behind his house later that day. I jumped up, dripping with sweat, and made my basket. Sean grabbed the ball, slam dunking it and swinging on the rim of the hoop outside his garage door.

  “It’s getting late,” I said, glancing up at the purple sky. The wind was kicking, but it felt good after working up a sweat. I breathed in the cool night air mixed with sweet-smelling funk. Yeah, we were sweaty, but neither of us stunk, I told myself.

  Sean held me close as we snuggled, lying down in the back seat of his brother’s ’63 Buick in front of his house.

  “Stevie, I like that you can shoot some hoops.”

  “Most girls wouldn’t be into it, huh?”

  “No, but I’m glad you’re different.”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t looking for the average bear.”

  “Me either, Sean.”

  “Stevie, I feel like this English writer Miss Porter told us
about in class. I can’t remember the dude’s name, but anyway, he was at a dinner party and he heard this woman say she didn’t care for any gravy. The writer dude said, ‘Madam, I’ve been searching my whole life for someone who dislikes gravy. Let’s swear eternal friendship.’”

  “So I take it you don’t like gravy?” I asked, smiling.

  “Not really. What about you?”

  “I’m not crazy about it either. But I can sho go for some pan drippings.” “I heard that!” Sean laughed.

  “So, Stevie, how come you never went out for the girls’ basketball team?” “I don’t know, I guess I got into the Drama Club and then I got on the newspaper this year, you know.” I looked into Sean’s dark brown eyes. “It really wouldn’t bother you to have a girlfriend on the basketball team?”

  “No, not so long as she was all woman off the court.” Sean leaned over and covered my mouth with his luscious lips. I liked the taste of his tongue. I wondered what Sean would think if he knew that I daydreamed about Nurse Horn more than him—that my favorite daydream was of Nurse Horn rescuing me from drowning and giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. And sometimes I just remembered Nurse Horn hugging me against her terry-cloth bathrobe, telling me that I had potential.

  I kissed Sean back, trying my best to prove to him that I was definitely all woman. Sean’s wet tongue teased my ear, sending shivers through my body.

  “Sean,” I whispered, “I like the way you dribble too, on and off the court.”

  Sean pressed against me and ran his fingers through my natural. I could feel his thing through my jeans. I knew that I couldn’t allow myself to get too excited. Mama said that most boys won’t go any farther than you let them. “It’s up to you not to let them,” she’d warned. I didn’t stop Sean from reaching under my T-shirt and squeezing my breasts through my bra. I didn’t want him to turn off completely. My job was to keep Sean interested without going all the way.