NINE
For the next week or so, I was as meek as a country mouse. As often as I could, I headed to my special place in the woods. Inside the house, I floated through on my tiptoes, listening for footsteps, quietly checking around corners and running back to my room if I noticed someone coming my way. It was sort of like those special nights of old, only without the thunderstorms, flashlights, and the security of my grip on Daddy’s pant leg. Sometimes I had to become part of the family, or as much a part as I could be. For instance, I had to sit at the dinner table and not be talked to. Other times, when we were all getting ready in the morning, I passed my family in the hallway without being acknowledged. I had to ask my mother for my clean shirts, which she all but threw at me. I had to ask my father for milk money, which he gave to me while saying something beneath his breath like, “Useless as tits on a boar hog.”
I would just go back to the woods and study my schoolwork, read library books, listen to music, and stare at the sky. There was nowhere in my world more comfortable for me.
•••
Two truly interesting and different events took place during this time, the first of which was the transformation of my brother. It had been going on for a while, but I hadn’t noticed it because I was so busy fighting the world.
The first clue came on report-card day. I walked into the house behind Mark, who was holding his card out to Mama. She was cooking, so she stopped, wiped her hands on her apron, sat with a smile, and took his card. I could tell Mark was nervous, but I didn’t know why because Mama read the card and then gave him a big bear hug.
“That’s real good, baby,” she said. “Real good.”
Mark took his card back and walked to the bedroom. I gave Mama my card. She frowned, and that really got to me because I had brought home straight As. She slapped it shut and handed it back to me.
“Getting As,” she said as she stood to resume cooking, “don’t mean much if you got to kiss a white lady’s feet to get ’em.”
“I didn’t,” I replied. “I earned them fair and square.”
Mama turned on me. She held up her wooden spoon. “Don’t you be getting on my nerves this day, boy. I ain’t got time for none of your nonsense! Hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then get out my face.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I passed Mark on my way into our bedroom. When I heard the television come on in the den, I pulled out his report card. He’d gotten three Bs and two Cs. That was not like Mark. Even though we never talked about it, we had an informal yet intense competition as to who would fall off the straight-A pedestal first. It made me mad that Mama would hug him for that, that she would be happy he had fallen, but I guess it played into her image of how things should be. Now her friends would feel less intimidated by us, and they would feel that they had at least gotten one of the Walls boys back on the right track. Mark obviously wanted it that way because he was playing the correct political game. One that would hopefully place him back into the graces of the black community.
Even so, Mark was really feeling the squeeze. I realized this one night when I stumbled upon him in our parents’ bedroom. What I saw broke my heart.
Mark and I were both pretty nerdy at that point. So it was thought by those in our community that we had little rhythm and therefore could not dance, sing, play sports, or even walk properly. The dudes who were cool didn’t just walk; they pimped—an exaggerated method of walking. You made a quick step with your left leg, then bent the knee (a quick dip), then dragged your right foot past the left and repeated. It also required a specific swing of the arms.
Anyway, I heard shuffling in my parent’s room one night while they were out. When I peeked through the cracked door, I saw Mark in front of the full-length mirror, trying desperately to master pimping. He looked awkward and tortured, like a person trying to walk for the first time after a painful physical-therapy session. He was in that room for hours. After that, I saw him trying to pimp around other kids his age. He also started using a lot of profanity. Not that he didn’t say “shit” once in a while, but now every other word was “fuck” and “cocksucker.” It seemed like I just looked up one day and he had gone south on me and the declaration that he’d made to me on my infamous night with the session.
I, on the other hand, had no delusions of being cool. I never tried to pimp. I never could “hang,” never could “do the push and pull” or “the bump” quite right. I never found the nerve to “smoke some shit, man,” never was called “bro” by any black male my age, never was “down,” and never could say “muthafucka” with the accent in the right place.
All of these shortcomings left me isolated. At the point of Mark’s transformation, the loneliness had begun to get to me, and I began to doubt myself again. So, I found myself pouting on Mama Jennie’s porch. She had been cooking a ham, and I could smell it on her apron as she sat beside me. She held my hand.
“It’s not working,” I said.
“What ain’t working?”
“You know what we talked about? Keeping to myself and not begging for their friendship? I keep studying and doing things the way you and Bojack say I should, but I don’t get anybody’s respect. Not even Mama and Daddy’s. I just keep getting more and more ignored. They don’t accept me any more than before. I still watch the kids play football, and dodgeball, and baseball. I just sit against the wall with a book. I’m still making good grades, as good as any white kid in my class. How come nobody praises me? How come I have to be nothing special to be treated special?”
“My baby.” She turned my head so I looked right at her. “Honey, you just got to give it some more time.”
“How much?”
“It don’t matter. Time is all you got, anyway.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If you go back to begging for they friendship, it ain’t gone do you no good. You’ll still be a up’ty nigger and a Uncle Tom, and nobody will speak to you anyways. So you might as well be quiet and work at what’s good for Evan. Respect will come in time.”
That was easy for her to say. After all, it was me who was suffering. I felt I didn’t have time to wait and that Mama Jennie couldn’t really see the scope of my problem.
“I know all this may sound small to you, Mama Jennie,” I said. “But it’s big for me. Ain’t people meant to have friends? I always figured so. I just can’t take all the enemies. It wears me down. Sometimes I just hate life. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t care if I wasn’t around. You know, like dead.”
Mama Jennie took a deep breath. Her eyes looked empty, like someone who had nothing left to give.
“I ain’t gone sit here all holier than thou and tell you not to feel that way, baby. I have walked many a day with the same kinda feeling on this ole heart,” she said, patting her chest. “Maybe this is the first time you done felt it, but it ain’t gone be the last. I tell you, I survive by just telling myself they ain’t nobody on God’s green earth that’s worth Jennie Lowe killing herself over. Ain’t nobody gone make me hate myself that much, and God knows there has been some folks to try and do it, but up to this point, they all done failed. And that’s all I can say to you. There is a lot to enjoy in life despite the people that hate you. And someday there will be somebody to come along and recognize that there is something special about Evan Walls.”
She was usually right, but I had my doubts on this one. “Someday” seemed like a long time from then, and I needed some support right away. It was hard for me to go from home to school and back home again, being treated with disgust. I got teary thinking about it. I asked her something I had been thinking about for a while.
“Can I come live with you?” I asked.
“You mean leave yo’ mama and daddy altogether?” she asked, shocked by my question.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, baby. Is it that bad?”
I fought back the tears. “Yes, ma’am. I feel like it is.”
“B
aby, I don’t believe in takin’ you from your family. I’m too old anyways. I ain’t gone be around that much longer. But I will take a bigger interest in how you be getting raised if you wants me to. Would you like that?”
“I don’t know. They’ll just get mad.”
“I think I can handle your mama. Can I call her again?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Let’s try it this way for a while before you go moving out on ’em.”
Weeks later, the first breakthrough in my solitary confinement came. I was reading, sitting in my usual lunchtime space, when two shadows dimmed the light. I looked up to see two white boys from my class, gazing down at me. One of them looked to be about my height but was stocky. He had brown hair and a pleasant enough expression.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m Dee Brown.”
The second boy was probably the same height but was blond and skinny.
“And I’m Eddie Gleason.”
I already knew their names, but the fact that they felt they had to introduce themselves shows how isolated I was. They frightened me. No white people, aside from my teacher, ever spoke to me. I looked at these boys, and I kept seeing the two white men who whipped Daddy.
“I’m Evan Walls,” I finally said.
“We were just wondering,” the one called Dee asked, “why you’re always so quiet and keep to yourself except in class?”
Right away, I thought, Okay, they’re just messing around with me. How could they not know? They were the ones not talking to me. They ought to know why I stayed to myself.
“Is there a law against it?” I asked.
“I guess not,” Dee said. “We was just wondering.”
“How about that nobody talks to me, so I don’t have anyone to talk to.”
“You don’t talk to us, either,” Eddie said.
That baffled me. “You were there that first day when all you white kids were making jokes about my hair, my lips, and everything else. You didn’t stop anybody from picking on me so, I assumed you agreed with them.”
“Well, I reckon that was a justified assumption.”
“Me too,” I replied.
“I’ll admit,” Dee said, “on that first day, I was afraid to stick up for you, even though I thought you were being treated wrong. I was never raised that way. Really. My folks take a lot of grief around here for not being that way.”
“I’m not from around here anyway,” Eddie said. “I’m from Northern Virginia. They already had integrated schools before I left. I was surprised when I came down here two years ago and there weren’t any blacks.”
It stuck with me that he called us blacks and not nigra, nigger, coon, spear-chucker, or colored.
“So,” I said, trying not to show that I was beginning to like them.
“So, I guess we apologize for that,” Eddie said. He looked to Dee, who nodded.
“But why come to me?” I asked. “You don’t need me for anything but trouble.”
“You just piqued our interest,” Dee said. “What can I say?”
“You don’t have to be friends if you don’t want,” Eddie said. “I guess we can all live without each other.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I guess we could. But we can be friends.”
They smiled and Dee asked, “Whatcha reading, friend?”
I have to admit that I was still afraid of them. I had always heard not to trust a white person any further than you could throw ’em. Once at the session, Cozy Pitts said, “If a white man tell you it’s Friday and you yourself knows it’s Friday, you still ought to go look at a calendar, ’cause with them, you never know, child. You never know!”
I thought about that, but I realized I had nothing to lose. I figured that no trick they played on me could be any worse than the tricks the black kids played on me. I looked at Dee Brown and Eddie Gleason and thought, Mama Jennie was right.
Respect will come in time.
•••
I armed myself with a sentence that I would use when a black person came up and asked why I was running around with a couple of white boys.
“I went where I was wanted,” I planned to say.
Funny thing was that nobody ever asked. I guess they just took my action to be in the natural progression of a black person who they thought wanted to act white.
Dee and Eddie treated me as an equal. It was the little things that tipped me off. One day while waiting outside our school for our respective buses, I was drinking a Coca-Cola.
“Let me have a swig,” Dee said.
Without thinking about it, he grabbed the bottle and drank right after me without even wiping off the bottle, which even my own brother wouldn’t have done. It wasn’t calculated, some attempt to prove his acceptance of me. It was careless, like there was nothing to fear, so he didn’t think to wipe it off. That made a big impression on me.
And they always talked to me no matter where we were. They could be walking toward me in the middle of a group of the baddest rednecks in the school, and when we came close to each other, if they didn’t drop off to chat, they were always yelling something like, “Hey, E. Check you after school, man.”
Most whites in Canaan would never speak to blacks when other whites were around. Dee and Eddie always did. It was great to have someone to talk to about Friday’s and Sunday’s football games, someone to tell dirty jokes with and to casually punch on the shoulder to show how much you liked them. I even stopped reading all the time during my lunch break. Sometimes, we’d just hang out. Other times, we’d throw a football around or lift a few barbells in the workout room. I still never played in either of the big lunchtime games because the black kids didn’t want me in theirs any more than the other white kids. I didn’t hold it against Eddie and Dee, though, when they wanted to play with the white group. I just found my space and a good book. They always came back for me at the end of the period so we could walk to class together.
One Friday, I was sitting in my usual spot, reading about the Battle of Bunker Hill for history class. Joey Green, who was white, and I were working on a project that included maps and drawings of the famous battle for presentation to the class. I’d wanted to work with one of the black kids. I approached Rosetta, but she laughed in my face.
“Negro,” she said, “you must be crazy! I ain’t working with no snowball.”
I felt ashamed for asking. In fact, I didn’t just ask; I begged. Every once in a while my desire to be an active part of the black community overwhelmed my attempt to stand alone on my principles. These attempts always ended in the same way, with the black person laughing in my face, calling me “Snowball,” and me walking away ashamed of being stupid enough to think I’d be included.
Snowball was a new nickname given to me by the black kids. I don’t know how it came about. It just started being fired at me in the halls. Then adults started calling me “Snowball” at church. Pretty soon, the white kids started calling me by the name, probably feeling it would do as much harm if not more than the word nigger. They were right.
Anyway, I was sitting there reading about Bunker Hill when the bell rang. Dee and Eddie came running over.
“Let’s go,” Dee yelled.
I picked up my books and walked toward them.
“Hey, you know what?” Eddie said.
“What?” I replied.
“I think y’all should come over and play basketball tomorrow. It’s gonna be too cold to before long.”
“Okay,” Dee said. They looked at me.
I stopped dead in my tracks. I didn’t believe he’d actually meant to include me. No white kid had ever asked me or any other black kid that I knew about to his house. That, like so many things regarding race, was just unheard of in Canaan.
“I don’t know,” I finally answered.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Dee asked.
“Just that. I don’t know,” I repeated. I knew that Mama and Daddy would not let me go. In fact, I might get punished just for mentioning it.
“You been here all your life, Dee. You know stuff like that doesn’t happen.”
“They say there’s a first time for everything,” Eddie said.
“Yeah, well, they won’t be around when I get lynched by your neighbors, or your parents, for that matter.”
“My parents don’t care,” Eddie said.
“Sure, they don’t.”
“They don’t. I mean it!”
“I bet they do,” I said.
“I know my own parents!”
“Children are always the last to really know their parents,” I said.
“I’m telling you it’s okay,” Eddie said. “Think about it some more.”
I didn’t learn anything else that day. Instead of listening to teachers, I argued with myself over the possibilities of going to Eddie’s house. When I stepped off the school bus that afternoon, I was still arguing with myself. I don’t know why, because I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to go. I guess I was trying to figure out if it was right that I wouldn’t be allowed.
Later that night, the phone rang, and Daddy came into the den.
“Turn down that TV,” he said. “It’s for you, Evan, and listen up. I’m getting enough stink raised at me from folks ’round here about you and them white boys. Now they calling the house. You go in that kitchen in there and take this call, but this better be the last one. I don’t want no more white folks calling this house. You catch my meaning?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied, which was about all I said to Daddy in those days.
“Get on it then.”
It was a white boy all right. It was Eddie.
“What are you calling for?” I asked.
“What do you think?”
Silence.
“Are you coming tomorrow?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“Wait just a minute.”
The phone went dead for a second, and then a woman spoke to me.
“Evan?”
The Emancipation of Evan Walls Page 14