Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  When he pushed the bike back through the bushes, there was sweat running down from his thick bush of rust colored hair and he had a perfectly folded handkerchief he kept patting his forehead with.

  “You want me to ride you now? C’mon. Get behind me.”

  He was crazy. If I could get the bike away from him, the only thing I wanted to do was run home with it and tell my mother any lie I could think of to keep from coming outside again. The bike had attracted people I never would have spoken to or had anything to do with. If I couldn’t lose it or give it away, I had to think of some excuse not to bring it out again anytime soon.

  By the time I got home, Miss Odessa had already called Mom and told her she’d seen me behind the bushes with Ray Anthony Robinson. Told her she saw Ray Anthony ride away from the bushes on a red bicycle which by now the whole projects knew was mine. Mom asked me, “Well, what’s your story, Louis?” but she was already in a mood to beat some behind.

  “You gonna let everybody in the projects ride it but you? I didn’t spend months cleaning behind white men for that.”

  “He made me.” I was looking at her, but I was picturing Ray Anthony Robinson with his chipped tooth, his rusty hair.

  Mom started with her fists. “No, today was your fault. You can’t blame today on anybody else.” Then she grabbed the broom. She turned it upside down and used the stick part on me as my sister watched, looking troubled, but helpless.

  The following Saturday morning Mom excused me from cleaning the apartment. “Take the bike outside and see how long you can hold on to it.” I wasn’t out there five minutes before three kids started running toward me from the south end. I looked back at the window of our apartment. The curtains were pulled almost together. Mom was there, in the almost space.

  The three kids formed a V at the front of the bike. Bubba Graves was on one side, this guy called Rat on the other, and some boy I’d never seen before who smelled bad, in the front. We all just looked at each other, like we were waiting for some kind of signal. The one who smelled bad walked in closer, straddling the front tire. He grabbed the handlebars and jerked the front of the bike so hard I was thrown to the side, but I held on and kept my balance so I didn’t fall. The other two inched in closer to me.

  “Better get the hell outta here.” It was what I’d rehearsed to say to anybody about anything, the next time I got picked on.

  “Who you cursin’, faggot? You cursin’ me?” The Smell leaned in over the handlebars so that we were eye to eye. I held my breath.

  Rat said, “Yeah, he cursed you. I heard him curse you.”

  The Smell heaved the front of the bike toward Rat while Bubba Graves pushed it from the other side. Rat jumped out of the way as the bike fell over onto the snow with me halfway underneath it. I was still holding on to the handlebars. The three of them kicked the bike as I scrambled to get from under it. One, I couldn’t see who, straddled me from behind with his legs around my neck and started kicking into my ribs with his heels. My ears started to ring. I squeezed my eyes shut, but the ringing only got louder.

  “Get the hell off him! You hear me, you little bastard! Get off him now!” My mother’s voice cut through.

  Instead, he kicked me harder and faster. Each time Mom screamed, it got worse. If she doesn’t stop, I thought, he’ll kick a hole in my side. But he stopped suddenly, and someone grabbed me under my arms and pulled me up from behind. I whirled around to try to free myself. It wasn’t Bubba or Rat or The Smell who’d lifted me. It was Ray Anthony Robinson. He was in his undershirt. The first thing I saw was how much hair he had under his arm and how it was reddish colored too. Then, I saw my mother standing behind him.

  I was dizzy, spitting snow, my head dropped toward the ground again. There was a bloody silhouette in the snow in the shape of a small rabbit.

  “Why you gotta jump in for him?” The Smell shouted at Ray Anthony. “The faggot cursed me. Don’t nobody curse me. I’m gonna kick his butt good.”

  “If you gonna kick somebody’s butt, kick mine.” I looked up to see Ray Anthony step toward him slowly with his legs spread wide, his thick arms swinging free. He was taller than any of us. He looked different to me now, like he was prepared to do whatever he had to win. It wasn’t the same as when he’d been behind the bushes. I realized for the first time that he probably hadn’t even thought about hurting me that day. He’d just taken what he wanted, because he knew he could. I was ashamed to think he’d probably seen me get pushed around before. Why was he helping me now?

  “Why you wanna front for a faggot, man? Let him fight for himself.”

  My body tensed with a new fear. Would The Smell convince Ray Anthony to leave me alone with them again? Please God, don’t let Ray Anthony back down. I knew Mom would probably try to help me, but that would make it worse. They wouldn’t fight her, but I’d get beat up again later on because she’d already called them some pretty rough names.

  “Come on, you so bad.” Ray Anthony stepped in closer to the kid. “Come on and kick my butt.”

  The Smell did step in closer to Ray Anthony, but my bike was between them. The Smell jumped on the bike so hard, he dented the back fender.

  “You good-for-nothing little pig!” my mother shouted and grabbed a fallen tree branch near where she was standing. But The Smell was running backwards yelling, “You wait, faggot. You wait till your big red nigger ain’t around.”

  Bubba and Rat backed off slowly, not even in the same direction as The Smell. The fear hadn’t left me, though. I knew as far as Mom was concerned, there was still Ray Anthony to deal with. Saving me from getting my ribs kicked in didn’t erase the fact that he’d taken a turn on my bike himself, the bike she said she’d cleaned behind white men to buy me.

  “Well, looks like everybody in the projects is gonna ride that damn thing, or kill you trying.”

  She was talking to me, but glaring at Ray Anthony. He walked past her slowly, back towards his building. I stared at his arms hanging at his sides, wondering if he was cold with only an undershirt on. Maybe arms that looked like Ray Anthony’s didn’t get cold.

  Mom was asking me, “You gonna pick up that bike or just leave it there so they can come back and get it?”

  I stooped to pick it up, but I kept my eyes on Ray Anthony to see if he’d turn around before he went inside.

  DARIECK SCOTT

  [1964–]

  BORN IN FORT KNOX, KENTUCKY, TO A CAREER MILITARY FATHER, Darieck Scott lived with his family in small towns and army installations throughout Georgia, North Carolina, and Kansas. Many of the most powerfully formative and vivid experiences of his youth took place in Germany, where his family resided for six years. The seminomadic existence of an army child kindled in him an intense longing for community.

  Scott attended Stanford University, where he won several writing prizes, though he received his undergraduate degree in human biology. Subsequently he worked as an assistant to R. W. Apple at the New York Times’ Washington bureau during the year that the Iran-contra scandal came to light. After his brief stint in journalism he attended Yale Law School to pursue his dream of becoming a civil rights lawyer. However, various developments moved Scott in a different direction, including his coming out as gay, the rise of AIDS activism in nearby New York City, the academic and cultural excitement generated by the commercial as well as critical success of black women’s fiction, and the upsurge in black gay political and artistic activity, all of which inspired him to seek an MA degree in Afro-American Studies and to begin writing his first novel. He earned JD and MA degrees from Yale University, and then went on to get a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford. Scott’s writing has appeared in Callaloo and the anthologies Shade, Giant Steps, Ancestral House, Flesh and the Word 4, and Gay Travels. He is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches African American literature and creative writing, and is also a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at UCLA.

  His novel, Traitor to
the Race (1995), explores homophobia in the black community and racism among white gays. In the following excerpt, Kenneth, an unemployed African American actor, is forced to come to terms with his identity as a black gay men when his cousin is murdered by gay-bashers. He meets his friend Cyrus to discuss this death, as well as Kenneth’s increasingly insecure relationship with his white lover, Evan.

  from Traitor to the Race

  [1995]

  “Fwoinne,” Cyrus purrs, red-brown eyebrows arched over cat-eye sunglasses. I follow his gaze. “Serious fwoin,” I agree when I see him.

  “Ummnh.” Cyrus shakes his head, almost imperceptibly, just enough for me to see. “Positively strapping.” He savors the consonants in that way of his that surprises the muscles of my face by the breadth of the smile it cajoles. My laugh is already beginning. “And look at his friend.”

  His friend saunters by in a thin-strapped, deeply-plunging tank top, and the muscles of his back show, exquisitely sculpted in the sunshine. “Oh my,” I intone.

  “It almost makes me want to move back to Manhattan,” Cyrus says reverently, leaning back in his chair. He lifts a crouton from his salad to his mouth. There is such a style about him even as he does this small thing—overblown, perhaps, just a tad too consciously flamboyant (too if we take an Anglo-Saxon norm of “restraint” in all things as our guide—I remind myself of the injustice of this), but dead on. Always. “Some of these b-boys who come around here are the Bomb.”

  Now I laugh. The Bomb. Precisely. I haven’t heard that one before. “So, my sweet—” (This is what he calls me. He may flatter any number of his friends with the same endearment, but I am always made happy by it, confirmed by it, gathered by it into a grateful communion. I met Cyrus one night through a woman friend I was in a play with, and over hurried drinks at a cafe I came breathlessly to the decision that he was both charming and dangerous, delightful but intimidating, much too sure of himself for me to want to know too well. But weeks later he did a reading of his poetry at a Gay and Lesbian Performance Night and dazzled me with his warm, open assumption of community. I didn’t quite buy it, of course—brotherhood, I thought; where’s mine? But he made me desperate to believe. I have been chasing his friendship ever since.) But let me step out of the way, let him speak.

  “—there’s a new performance piece we’re putting on at the theater,” he is saying. “It’s more of a one-act play than anything else, and I thought you might want to audition.”

  Suddenly I feel the possibility of a depression flying at me. But let me step out of the way. “What’s it called? What’s it about?”

  Cyrus waves a fork—swallowed clean, of course—at my face; it is the imperial director in him. “Don’t play this, Kenneth. Don’t start retreating to that oh-it’s-a-black-thang remove you run to everytime I ask you to audition for one of my shows. No, I’m serious! It is time to wake up, little boy.” He pounces quickly, as always. Of course I admire his technique. “That’s right: lit-tle boy. Kenneth, I’ll tell you this like I’ve told you before. You need to stop pouting. You need to start making use of the contacts you have. You can’t keep pulling yourself back and stopping before you begin. You have talent. You have to use it.”

  “I’m not good at black dialect. I’m just not.”

  Cyrus rolls his eyes hugely. “Kenneth, that was one audition and one play, and one director. And she was right: traditional black folk’s English is not your strength. You sound—a little forced, a little… shaky. There are, however, a good number of plays out there with middle-class, bougie Aframericans in them that you can play, and play well.” Having been hunched, his broad, slim shoulders (they give him such carriage, those; were he a woman, he would have been a model in Paris, smooth-swinging boyish hips, pursed lips and all) fall down and he relaxes, a smirk on his lips. This is how he plays with me.

  “Phallicist’s honor, Kenneth.” He places two fingers in a V on either side of his nose, like Agnes Moorehead in Bewitched. We share a devotion to Agnes’s memory, Cyrus and I. “I really think you could play a number of parts in this piece very, very well. I even told the director you might be a good choice for the lead.”

  I meet this with silence because I am terrified. Principally terrified of disappointing Cyrus. He is waiting impassively for my reply, golden-skinned face set in quiet judgment. “Can I see a script?” I ask at last.

  “They can make a copy for you at the GMOC Journal office—the Lesbian/Gay Community Center, third floor.” But of course he knows I know this. He has seen me lurking there a number of times.

  Now a new silence looms. This is not typical of our conversations, and he must know this. I sip my tea while he watches me. It is a contest of wills now.

  Cyrus breaks first. “Uh,” he says. This degree of inarticulation is also not typical. “I, uh, heard about your cousin.”

  The roll I am lifting to my mouth I set back in the basket. “What? Who told you?”

  “Daria. She didn’t say much,” he adds quickly. “I’m really sorry, Kenneth. And I have to say, I feel it, too, a part of it, even though I didn’t know him. I remember you mentioned him once.” He sighs, shakes his head, looks across the street. “So many perils are out there for our people in this city, Kenneth. If it’s not run-of-the-mill cracker bigots, it’s homophobic cracker bigots, and if it’s not homophobic cracker bigots, it’s Jamaican homophobe bigots or Puerto Rican bigots or run-of-the-mill black folks homophobic bigots. Then if it’s not men who think beating you to death is a sport that helps them prove something precious to themselves, it’s sistas who think that because your penis is black it belongs to them in holy wedlock, or who, if they can’t get your penis, know you must be using it to steal their men. Then the police, the government… I mean, you know all this. I just want you to know that it pains me, too. It really does. And not just for you but for myself.”

  He shakes his head again, more vigorously. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quite this way, his passion expressed like this. His glasses obscure his eyes like clouds before the sun. “I’m sorry,” he says, and touches my hand. “I just keep talking. Do you—want to talk about it?” I had envisioned, practiced this conversation earlier. But I am not as smooth, as nonchalant as I had hoped to be when I say, “I think I saw him.”

  I have not said this aloud before. My throat is constricted. “He was walking around, I think, near Different Light bookstore, before it happened. I had just left there, I was walking on one of those little streets behind the bookstore, and I heard someone call my name, and I looked back. I think it was him.”

  “You didn’t speak?” There is no judgment in the question.

  “No.” There is more to say. “No. No.”

  “I hope you’re not thinking you’re to blame for his being killed because you didn’t speak to the man. Cause, child, if every relative I wasn’t speaking to at any given time dropped dead, I’d be an orphan by now.”

  I fake a small smile. I’ve thought of this, of course. Yet it gives me hope to hear it from his lips.

  He smiles back. “The universe is not that bleak, Kenneth. It’s not that cruel.”

  This time there is nothing more to say.

  But Cyrus will not permit any more silences. “So how’s Mr. Marcialis? Being a good boy, I hope?” This with a mock Caribbean lilt in his voice. I marvel at his cleverness—not the accent, but the connection he’s discerned, the link that, in a few words, he has uncovered.

  “Yes. Mostly,” I answer. My turkey sandwich tastes like paper. The sigh comes; he has already—the sorcerer—dragged it out of me. “It’s very hard, Cyrus. Very hard sometimes to…”

  The fingertips of his hand reach out to rest upon the veins that stand out on the back of my exposed arm. “To love a white boy?” And there is about him a smug but sympathetic certainty, as if his other hand were slowly stroking a sinister goatee at the end of his chin.

  “Yes, it’s hard.” I exhale. “But harder—I don’t know; is it harder? just as hard—not to. I
t’s what we’re taught, you know, to love them. Even in hate. Hate’s just another way to love someone. It’s just safer because you don’t really need to know them.”

  He stares at me. One of his brutish fingers circles my thumb in a loving vise. The sensation is of the vampire drawing the bared and willing neck tenderly to his lips, or of the Godfather, pulling an errant Family member’s frightened face to his own for the last kiss.

  “Kenneth. You are completely, absolutely wrong.” This as if he were blowing in my ear.

  And now his finger leaves mine, his breath (scented, faintly, with the cinnamon-orange iced tea he has been drinking) leaves my face, his torso recedes from the top of the small white table.

  “Your problem, my sweet, is not with white boys or even white men.” His fork is raised high for a brief second, tines to the sky. “It’s with The Folks.” The fork descends and a crouton flies. “Aframerican male Folk to be specific. So it’s hard loving white men, is it? Not really, little boy. You don’t love white men; you happen—as much as anything can just happen, I suppose—to be in love with one white man. And you might have loved one in the past, may love another in the future. Of course you’re attracted to them, but not every one every day, or even most of the time. I know you, Kenneth. Your desires—like everybody else’s, one way or another, and don’t let them fool you, baby, because it’s true—but your desires are not such that you run around with your tongue hanging out and following after every pale swimmer with a chlorine bleached-out blond crewcut and eyes that look green in bad light.

  “Don’t laugh! I’ve seen it happen, and it’s funny, but it’s not pretty. That’s not where you are. Your problem is that you’ve set yourself up so that the only men you can love are white men—and I’ll include Latinos, Asians, native Americans, and Semitic Folk in there, too, because anyone that ain’t Folks is white in your little love em or leave em, no middle ground no complications moral world.