Being Clem

by Lesa Cline-Ransome

  TWENTY-SIX

  My surprise had nothing to do with history or geography, math or reading. And it definitely didn’t have nothing to do with shopping.

  Aunt Dorcas leaned down. “Your mother tells me you are interested in joining the navy like your father. Well,” she said, pointing down the end of Georgia Avenue, “we are going to get you navy ready.”

  As we walked closer, I could hear the sounds of kids screaming and laughing. And I heard the sound of water splashing.

  “This is Banneker Pool,” my aunt told me. “I signed you up for swim lessons.”

  I stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. “Swim lessons?” I asked.

  “Your mother told me that you were sidelined by your first swim lessons, so I signed you up for some here.”

  I knew there was probably a history lesson in here somewhere, and I didn’t have to wait long before she started. “The Banneker pool first opened in…”

  But I wasn’t listening to anything she said. Because I knew that if we were going to a pool, it meant water and it meant swimming.

  “But… I…”

  “I think what you mean to say is ‘Thank you, Aunt Dorcas,’” she said, staring down at me.

  “Thank you, Aunt Dorcas, but I don’t… I’m not…”

  “How do you expect to join the navy if you don’t swim?” She tried her best at a smile.

  I didn’t have an answer for that. So I tried something else. “I don’t have any swim trunks.”

  “Clemson, I’ve got them right here,” she said, patting a bag I just now noticed, “along with a towel.”

  We were at the entrance now and I could see kids big and small all lined up waiting for lessons to start.

  “Hurry up and get changed. I’ll be waiting over there.” She pointed to the seats around the pool. I could see there wasn’t no way of getting around Aunt Dorcas.

  I turned and walked into the locker room, praying for anything to make me not get sick and not be afraid. Anything to make me as strong as Daddy.

  I moved as slow as I could, changed into the swim trunks Aunt Dorcas brought me, and then put my towel around my shoulders to stop the shivering that had nothing to do with the cold. Aunt Dorcas was sitting dead center. Waiting. I made my way to the pool.

  At Banneker Pool, everyone was Negro, even the teacher and his assistants. The teacher was old, but his assistants all looked like they were about the same age as Clarisse. And instead of just me and Matthew Franklin, there was a whole line of kids waiting for the lesson to start. I was hoping Aunt Dorcas would turn and look away so I could sneak into the bathroom, but every time I looked back at the seats, she was looking right back at me.

  I made my way to the end of the line and stepped down the ladder and into the pool. I looked up at the sun and over at the buildings across the street, anyplace except at the water in front of me. The assistants spread out across the pool and when the swim teacher told us to turn to the wall, I closed my eyes tight, grabbed the ledge, held my breath, and started kicking.

  “Son?” I heard behind me. I kept kicking. “Son?” I stood up, turned around, and opened my eyes. The teacher was standing behind me with his hands on his hips. “You’ve got to let me give the instructions before you start doing your own thing. We’re gonna start with floating, not kicking. So all that splashing around you’re doing isn’t going to help you much when I need you to be on your back like everyone else.” On either side of me, kids were standing covering their mouths trying hard not to laugh out loud. “Now I want you to face the wall, take a deep breath, arms by your side, and lean back into the water.”

  I stood still.

  “Did you hear me, son?”

  “Yessir,” I told him.

  “Go on now. Come on back. Real slow,” he said again. On either side of me the other kids were on their backs, some struggling to stay up, but they were all at least trying to float.

  I couldn’t move.

  I saw a big shadow above me. Aunt Dorcas.

  “Is there a problem here, Clemson?” I didn’t say anything.

  She looked at the instructor. “Give us a minute.” To me she said, “Get on up out of that pool.”

  Aunt Dorcas didn’t care who heard when she started in on me about “acting like a fool,” and how she signed me up for “swim classes, not vaudeville hour.” I didn’t even know what vaudeville hour was, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell Aunt Dorcas that, so I just nodded my head up and down like I knew she wanted me to, until it looked like she ran out of things to say. I didn’t know where Clarisse and Annette were shopping with Aunt Bethel, but I was betting wherever they were, they could hear every word Aunt Dorcas was shouting. I didn’t know what was worse, getting in the water or listening to her scream. I picked the water.

  “Should I get back in the pool now?” I asked her.

  “Are you ready to swim and not waste my time and money?” I always wonder why grown folks ask questions they don’t want answers to, but I shut up about that too.

  I got back into the pool, but all I really wanted to do was to get back on the train to Chicago and see my momma and tell her maybe I wasn’t so sure about joining the navy, especially if swimming made me think of my daddy getting blown into a million and one little pieces floating on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

  When the teacher told me this time to lean back, I closed my eyes tight again until I felt the back of my head touch the water. My stomach bubbled and I started grinding my teeth together. He put his hands on my shoulders and tried to pull me down, but I stood up quick. I saw Aunt Dorcas walking over and he turned me toward him and said soft, “Listen, son. A lot of people are scared of being in the water. You just happen to be one of them. I’m not going to let you drown. But if you don’t at least look like you’re trying, that woman over there is going to drown you herself, so work with me a little bit, okay?”

  I nodded with my teeth chattering.

  His voice was low and deep. “Now I want you to hold on tight to my hands.” I reached out under the water and grabbed his hands. He smiled at me.

  “That’s it, son,” he said. He squeezed my hands back. “Now all I want you to do is to lean forward and put your face in the water. Like you’re back at home washing your face in the washbasin in the morning.”

  “M-my washbasin ain’t this b-big,” I stuttered.

  “Well, let’s pretend it is. Close your eyes if you want. Don’t worry, son, she can’t see you.”

  I leaned forward until my chin was touching the water.

  “Just a little bit more. This way you’ll start to get used to the water.”

  My mouth was half-open, and I swallowed some of the bleachy water and coughed. Then I leaned forward some more. Just a little bit more and my whole face was in. I stood up, dizzy.

  “There you go! You did it,” the teacher said, clapping me on my shoulder. “Let’s try that again.”

  He told me his name was Mr. Harrington, and he said he had a grandson just my age. He stayed with me that class and all the rest, helping me get used to the water. I don’t know what the other kids were doing. Probably floating and swimming laps back and forth, getting ready for the Olympics, but I was dipping my face in and out of the water like I was washing up for school. I never had a grandfather in my life, but if I did, I’d want him to be just like Mr. Harrington, protecting me from Aunt Dorcas.

  After our first lesson ended, Mr. Harrington got out of the pool and went over and had a long talk with Aunt Dorcas. I could see her nodding her head back and forth, then finally up and down, her hand on her hip the whole time. On the walk home, Aunt Dorcas didn’t say nothing more to me about the swim lesson. I’ll never know what he said to Aunt Dorcas, and I’m not sure I even care.

  When we got back to the house and everybody asked how I liked my surprise, I smiled and told them I had a swim lesson. Aunt Dorcas walked straight into the kitchen. And neither of us said nothing more to each other about it. Every day she brought
me back to the swim lessons for the whole week she paid for, and all I did was dip my face in and out of the water like a baby while the other kids learned to swim. If she was mad, she didn’t say it, but she didn’t sit and watch. I was grateful to Mr. Harrington for not making me feel like a baby. He said his job wasn’t to teach me to swim, but to make sure I was comfortable enough in the water so that one day I could swim. I thought that was a nice way of saying couldn’t no one teach me how to swim. But I was grateful to be able to put my face in the water without getting dizzy and grateful that when my face was in the water, even Mr. Harrington couldn’t see me crying.

  When we got back on the train to go back to Chicago, Aunt Dorcas and Aunt Bethel saw us off at the train platform. I could see on Aunt Dorcas’s face when she hugged me a quick goodbye that being a pretend momma, even if it was just for a couple of weeks in the summer, was a lot more than she bargained for.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It wasn’t so much that I was looking forward to starting seventh grade at Haines Junior High School, but after failing twice at swimming lessons, I couldn’t wait for summer to be over and school to start.

  Clarisse and Annette went to Haines Junior High School when they were my age, so I felt like I knew everything there was to know about it. Miss Robins was their teacher at Haines, and I knew she wasn’t their favorite but just about every teacher I had liked that the answers on my tests were right and my homework was handed in neat and on time and I liked to raise my hand in class, so I knew Miss Robins would like me too. Just like I always did, I sat up front and when Miss Robins took attendance that first day and called out “Clemson Thurber,” I was sure she’d ask, “Are you Clarisse and Annette’s brother?” like most of the teachers did back at Lincoln Elementary. But when I raised my hand and told her my name, she kept right on calling out names like she never heard the name Thurber before when Annette sat right here in this classroom not three years ago.

  Every morning, the first thing I did was put my homework on Miss Robins’s desk to collect, but I never saw Errol add his to the pile. There wasn’t much me and Errol talked about, and we sure didn’t talk about our schoolwork, homework, or our subjects. That’s the difference between boys and girls. Boys don’t need to talk something to death to know how it works. Me and Errol had “different ways,” as Momma put it. All the talking in the world wasn’t going to change that.

  In our classroom, Miss Robins loved asking questions. And I don’t think there’s anything she loved more than asking questions she thought we didn’t know the answers to. But when I raised my hand, stretched as high as I could get it, Miss Robins looked right past me. I started to wonder if she needed eyeglasses, the way she never seemed to see me but called on kids whose hands were laying on their desks. When I shouted out my answers instead of raising my hand, Miss Robins, knowing full well they were right, shouted back, “That will be enough for now, Clem.”

  It wasn’t that I liked Miss Robins and her mean self, always shouting and looking like she’d rather be anyplace else except standing in a colored classroom in Chicago. I pictured her getting into her car when school let out and driving as fast as she could out of the Black Belt and into her White Belt, or whatever white folks called their neighborhoods where Negroes didn’t dare walk their streets, and taking a long, hot, soapy bath as soon as she got home every day. But one of the things I loved about Miss Robins’s classroom was the big ole map and countries shaped like a jigsaw puzzle in all different colors.

  At home I had a small map of the United States on the wall of my bedroom. Momma bought it for me just after my daddy died and I couldn’t stop asking her where California was. But I still like this big map up in front of the classroom that pulled down, with all the countries in the world.

  After Daddy died, Momma brought home my little map and spread it out on the table and told me a map is like a picture of the world and made a big circle around the state of Illinois and a smaller one around Chicago. And then she did the same thing for California and San Francisco.

  “California is a lot bigger than Illinois,” I said, looking close at all the states in between.

  “Your daddy said he could get lost in San Francisco going around the corner,” she said, her eyes looking soft and wet. I didn’t want to start getting her worked up again, so we went back to the map. And then my momma took out a pencil and went and got Clarisse’s ruler from her room and drew a long line from Chicago to San Francisco. She showed me how to look at a map and figure out the miles between the two places using the scale. I’ve been good at numbers since before I could read so that didn’t take too long and she had me write down the numbers on a paper. “Two thousand three hundred forty-one miles,” I said.

  “That’s it,” she said, smiling.

  “Is there a map for every place in the world?” I asked her.

  “Sure is,” she told me. “But this one here is just for this country.” My momma learned how to be a secretary at the National Training School in Washington, and she didn’t have nearly all the college my Aunt Dorcas and Bethel had, but she is sure a better teacher than Miss Robins.

  So when I sat up in front of the class, it meant I could hear whatever it was Miss Robins was talking about, without the boys in the back of the class talking over her about last night’s ball game and girls, and the girls in the back talking about their hair and boys. Up front it was Ruby, Francine Myers, Reverend Maynard’s daughter Rachel, Geraldine Harris, and me. Until one day, another boy showed up, and he didn’t go nowhere near the back rows like most do but took a seat two rows over but right up front near me. With his overalls and slow-talking ways, he looked like he could barely spell Chicago, let alone find it on a map. It didn’t take long before the whole class started calling him Country Boy, but Miss Robins said he had just moved here from Alabama, and she said his name was Langston.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  After Curtis Whittaker, Country Boy was about the biggest boy at Haines Junior High School. Some days I’d watch him when I got to my seat in the morning. And some mornings I think he got there even before Miss Robins, just waiting for class to get started, in his old farmer overalls, coming apart at the edges. I never spent much time in the South besides visiting my daddy’s family that summer in South Carolina when I was barely old enough to remember, but I wondered if that poor old Country Boy could even read.

  “He’s got to be a farmer’s son, right?” I said to Errol, walking to school one morning.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Errol said, kicking at the cement.

  I wasn’t about to ask Country Boy if his daddy was a farmer, but I kept watching to see what else I could find out.

  It didn’t take me long to see that not only could Langston read, he could write too. And it looked like he wasn’t so bad with numbers either. Ruby sat behind him in class, and I think she was a little sweet on him. She just about talked him to death. But he acted like he didn’t hear a word, just kept his eyes on Miss Robins and the lessons.

  Just like me, he handed in all of his schoolwork, with big loopy letters, his paper always folded neat in half. When Miss Robins was talking, Langston looked like he was sitting in the front row at an American Giants game, leaned forward like he didn’t want to miss a word she said. Now I really did feel like a private eye, watching every move he made.

  The boys in back started in on Langston early, but it was partly his own fault. His first mistake was, he didn’t even try to talk to anyone. New kids come to our school all the time, and everybody knows, the first day you go out to recess, you gotta make your way over to the other boys, get a feel for things, see where you fit. But Langston didn’t do none of that. Him and his slow-talking ways didn’t say nothing. Just stayed to himself.

  I’m not sure who started calling him Country Boy first. But it didn’t take long before that became his name. Mostly everybody has a name in school. You sure don’t get to pick them, but once you get them, ain’t no getting rid of them.

  One day
when Clarisse and Annette came to the school to leave the apartment key with me before they went to their hair appointment after school, I just about dropped to my knees, praying to God Clarisse didn’t start talking that “Clementine” mess in front of everybody, and then I’d be stuck with that name till I graduated from high school. But the boys were so busy smiling at the two of them, Clarisse could have called me Mickey Mouse and I don’t think they would have noticed.

  In our class we had a Bulldog, an Egghead, a Four Eyes, and a Pisser, just because one day, back in third grade, Martin Barclay peed his pants before he made it to the bathroom. And now we had Country Boy.

  At first, Langston was like me, raising his hand every chance he got when Miss Robins asked a question she didn’t really want an answer to. But every time he answered, she’d say, “I’m sorry, Langston, could you repeat that, I didn’t understand you.”

  Of course, everybody just about fell out laughing. You know you’re country when the teacher can’t understand a word you’re saying. Pretty soon, Country Boy stopped raising his hand, but he still leaned forward listening to every word Miss Robins said like his life depended on it.

  Langston moved as slow as he talked, dragging his big self up and down the stairs like he was never in a hurry. But when the school bell rang at the end of the day, he was packed up and out the door so fast, I wondered if he had a Superman costume under those overalls.

  There’s not too many people I don’t talk to. And if it wasn’t for Lymon, there’s a good chance I might have tried to talk to Country Boy too. Looked to me like we had more in common than we didn’t. We were the only two boys who sat anywhere near Miss Robins. The only two handing in our homework every single morning. And definitely the only two who could answer all her questions, even when she didn’t want us to. But Lymon had it in for Langston since day one. First, I thought it was his country ways. But the more I stayed quiet and watched, the more I could see, the way Lymon treated him didn’t have nothing to do with Country Boy and just about everything to do with Lymon.