by Chris Lynch
You wanted to believe him, you wanted to care, and you could, if you didn’t worry too much about the message and just listened to the way he would swing through certain words, like “forward,” which came out like far-ward, and “the minister of finance,” which rolled out as dee meeneestah of fee-naanse. It sounded very slick to me, and I noticed somehow his hands did a sort of mime version of the same thing as he sang the words accompanied by a fluttering of those hands—birdlike toward the ceiling, then a quick loud clap, then a challenging long finger in somebody’s face, then all our faces as he spanned the room asking, “You think so? I think so. You think so?” to one obscure literary idea or another.
I had never heard anybody like Dr. Ellis before. Right, I was sitting next to his son, but just the same, I felt as if I had never heard it before, in any form. Why? I looked over to Napoleon. “He’s great,” I whispered.
Napoleon nodded. He smiled, and I could tell he was proud. But then the smile slipped away. If it was me I would have held it a little longer.
I went back to listening to sounds instead of ideas, and found myself so lulled by him that I was caught flat when he asked for questions. There was a bit of a silence, followed by the whispering, as people tried coming up with questions that had some thin connection to what the doctor had been talking about for the last half hour. I looked up at the small box of a window at the front door of the class to see framed in it the soft and kind but not-too-pleased face of Sister Jacqueline. It was considered terrible form not to ask our guest speakers a slew of informed questions, and if we didn’t, the scene after he left would not be pretty.
Miraculous Manny rescued us for a start.
“The way you speak, it’s almost a singsong, more like a little kid than an adult.”
Dr. Ellis was pleased. “I am not an adult, I am a writer.”
“Hah,” Manny said. Manny was developing a new hero. Unfortunately he was not developing any follow-up questions.
“Ask him what forms he writes in,” came the quiet, island-inflected voice on my right. Again, it made me think of the differences in their speech, father and son. Napoleon was so much more... controlled.
“I write realism,” Dr. Ellis said, “until realism wearies me. Then I write fables, allegories, plays, songs, verse, essays, and letters to my friends. But in the end, I write about the same two things. The same two things, I think, that everyone writes about. I write about my dreams, and about my doubts. Dreams and doubts, they will keep a person’s mind occupied for a great long while.”
There was silence then. Sister was smiling, pleased, in her window, like a big canary in a small cage.
“And mulligatawny,” he added.
More silence.
“Mulligatawny. It has a lovely sound, does it not? I have always loved the sound of mulligatawny, the very loveliness of the syllables, the play in there. And it is a very fine soup. As words, it is beautiful, mulligatawny, as food it is beautiful, mulligatawny, so it fills me twice. I write about mulligatawny whenever I can because that is what it is all about. I keep a can on my desk even, for inspiration.”
After a brief pause, Dr. Ellis thanked us and we broke into applause. “Really, Napoleon,” I could say louder now with the cover of hands clapping, “he’s great.”
Napoleon Charlie Ellis was smiling again, but still looking not too sure about it. “Yes, well, you would be less enthusiastic if you had to eat mulligatawny four times per week. I am missing my mother’s cooking.” He waited. But he wasn’t finished. “I am missing my mother.”
I was in no doubt about what was the right thing to do then.
I looked away.
We were allowed to buzz for a few minutes after we had a speaker, so Sister could chat with them, ask all the questions we hadn’t, and basically butter them up enough to come back for another free visit next year. While this was going on, we suddenly got the call. Sister was motioning for Napoleon to come up, and when he did, to my surprise, he tugged a chunk of my shirt sleeve to haul me along.
“Hello, sir,” I said. “Nice talk.”
“Thank you, Mr. Moncreif,” Dr. Ellis said, shaking my hand.
I stood there like a dummy.
“Napoleon has talked quite a bit about you. Says you are a fine baseball player.”
Wa-hoo. Familiar territory. “Well, yes sir, I do love baseball. I play all the time. I want to get Napoleon playing too, as much as I can. Do you like baseball?”
He smiled at me, checked his watch. Sister Jacqueline rolled her eyes and bugged them at me at the same time, which is quite a sight. She was giving me the old ix-nay on the oring-bay aseball-bay face. Like I really bore all our speakers into never returning.
“Yes, as a matter of fact I have followed it somewhat. But I plan to watch a lot more of it this season since I am working so close to Fenway Park and all. Do you know I can see the Citgo sign from my office window?”
I gasped. I actually did. “Napoleon never told me that. You never told me that.”
Napoleon sighed. “I was saving it.” He sounded a little sarcastic.
“Anyway,” Dr. Ellis said, though it sounded more like ahh-na-wey. “I must be going. But I thought it was time I met you. And we will continue our discussion at the dinner. I am looking forward to it.”
I was completely lost. But I had never heard of a student at St. C’s contradicting an adult on school property, in front of a nun, and living to tell the tale. Not even a normal adult, never mind a big-time international speaker with a “Doctor” at the front of his name.
“I’m looking forward to it too.”
I looked at Napoleon out of the corner of my eye. He looked away with his entire face.
We were walking home together.
“You don’t have to go,” he said quietly. He sounded embarrassed.
“Why wouldn’t I want to go?” I had never been to a restaurant in my life. Not a proper one anyway, that took reservations and credit cards and stuff. Never really wanted to go to one either.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe the whole thing is... foolish.”
“Nah,” I said. “No it isn’t. We’ll go. It’ll be fine. Where are we going to go?”
“Someplace called Anthony’s Pier Four.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Pier. That means water. That means fish. Is this going to be a fish place? Am I going to have to eat fish?”
“What is wrong with fish? Fish is wonderful food.”
“Fish is what people eat when they can’t find any real food. It’s like disaster food.”
As he often, mysteriously does, Napoleon seemed to take this personally. “I am sure they will have some meat for you.”
“Cool,” I said.
We walked in silence for a bit.
“So, you picked me,” I said, in a sort of wonder.
“My father wanted to get acquainted with my circle. You are my circle.”
My first impulse was, I wanted to make a joke about that. I had to. I looked at Napoleon.
“Thanks,” I said.
The whole day he had seemed off. Unsure of himself. Not as rigid or as hard as I had come to expect. I figured his father had done that by showing up. If my father had shown up, my day would have been thrown off too.
“Can I ask you a question, Napoleon?” I said. When he didn’t say anything, I asked it anyway. “How come your accent’s not as strong as your dad’s?”
Napoleon looked me face-on, right into my eyes, and he looked hard and grim, and suddenly old. His voice came out very flat.
“Worlds within worlds,” he said.
I didn’t even try. “Huh?”
“Because we function in our own worlds, even though we live in essentially the same place. My father is in the business of being West Indian, and people everywhere love him for it. While his son, on the other hand, spends his days in a place where it would be better not to make a point of it.”
“What? What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
What came next was the first harsh thing Napoleon Charlie Ellis or Richard Riley Moncreif ever said to each other.
“How stupid are you, Richard, may I ask?”
My first response was—I could feel it even if I couldn’t see it—to go all red in the face. My second was to walk faster and try to leave Napoleon behind.
“No, no, listen to me,” he said, staying with me.
“No. I don’t want to listen to you. I don’t want to listen to that, all right. You know, Napoleon, everything doesn’t have to do with that, does it? You’re always talking about the same thing, no matter what anybody else is talking about.”
“What?” he said, and he laughed when he said it. But he didn’t think it was a bit funny. “Listen to you. Always talking about that? You can’t even speak it. You can’t even say what that is.”
“Yes I can.”
“No, you cannot.”
I breathed a couple of loud, exasperated, steamy whistly breaths through my nose. Then I said it. “Blackness,” I said.
I knew why he was laughing now. I tried to hold my hard-guy face but it was a chore. I had heard myself, after all. I said the word in such a ridiculous stage whisper, like a three-year-old with a secret. It was the best argument I could have made for Napoleon’s side of things.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” I said, giving up to a small laugh myself.
Anyhow, I had managed to make him laugh. No small task. I didn’t want to mess with that just yet.
We were nearing the bus stop in the square, the stop where all the Ward 17s waited to get bused out of here.
“Right,” said Napoleon. “Here is a good example. You read the papers—”
“Sports pages only,” I quickly pointed out.
“Yes, well if you were not hiding in the sports pages you would know that this city is a place where a lot of people would do anything to keep from going to school with black people.”
“Maybe, but—”
“Richard, you have to know that that means a great many of the people who wind up in a school like yours—”
“Ours—”
“Yours. You have to know that they are there because of hate. Because somebody hates—”
“I don’t have to know that. I don’t have to—”
“Yo,” came the call from the bus stop.
“What?” I answered Butchie. Naturally enough I figured he meant me. But no. Not this time.
“Yo,” he said again.
Napoleon ignored him, held his head even higher than usual, and strode on.
“Yo, Mowgli,” Butchie called, “you deaf, or ignorant?”
I winced.
Napoleon Charlie Ellis did a rapid veer maneuver across the street toward the stop. I followed quickly after him. “Come on,” I said, “you don’t have to pay any attention to this.”
“You don’t have to pay attention to it,” Napoleon said. “I do.”
Once more, as seemed to be happening more frequently, Napoleon was suddenly up close with Butchie. “I am neither hard of hearing nor ignorant,” he said evenly. “That is not my name, and you know it is not my name.”
“I just thought,” Butchie said, smiling, “that that’s what your papa said he called you.”
This was really, really close. I had never seen somebody get as mad as Napoleon was now, without somebody swinging at somebody.
“My father,” Napoleon answered, “never said any such thing.”
Butchie half-turned to face his group, which included Jum McDonaugh, Redheaded Beverly, and a dozen or so other kids who were only half-listening before but were inching closer now.
“I am sorry,” Butch said. “I thought that was you he was talking about, Mowgli Tommy Ellis. And you love soup. Mowglitommy soup.”
He got a few laughs with that, but less because people thought it was funny and more because they figured they were supposed to laugh. With Butch that was the quickest and most sensible way to get through something sticky. It was wise.
Napoleon Charlie Ellis was not wise.
“Is that supposed to be an imitation of me? Or of my father?”
“What?” Butchie said, in the broadest, stupidest, most simpleton voice he could muster. “Mowglitommy soup? You mean, Mowglitommy?”
“Shut up, Butch,” I said. “You sound like a jerk.”
He just grinned at me, like a jerk.
“Do you take this bus, Mowgli?” Jum McDonaugh threw in. “I never seen you on this bus. You wouldn’t be going our way, would you?”
“I do not have to take any—”
“Right, your bus would be going the other way, huh? Takes me an hour and a half to get home. Must take a real long time to get you bused home, huh? It’s, ah, south, isn’t it? Long way south. Let us know if you need any help getting home. We could help you out, bust you home good and quick. Any ol’ day.”
“Let’s go, Napoleon,” I said, gently tugging on the front of his jacket. He squirmed out of my grip.
“If you don’t like it,” Napoleon said, “maybe you should not take the bus a’tall.”
Both Jum and Butchie laughed hard at the sound. “A’tall. Naht a’tall,” Jum said.
“That is right,” Napoleon went on, composed but still angry just the same. You had to know him to really be able to tell when he was angry. And I was just getting to know him. “Maybe you should go to school where you belong, and leave us alone.”
I had never seen a face go as red as Butchie’s face went then.
“Where we belong?” He was bearing down on Napoleon now, with a stare so intense, his eyes were crossing, bulging, and going pink with bloodshot all at once. “What,” Butchie said, “do you know,” Butchie said, “about where,” he said, “I be-long?”
If this was a film with no sound, and if you had never seen a fight build up before, you would still know, this was a fight building up.
“Shut up,” Redheaded Beverly said, yanking Butch’s arm.
He stopped moving toward Napoleon and turned on Beverly with enough force that it was almost as if he was moving on her now. He shook out of her grip violently.
So it was my turn to put a grip on him, and my turn to have his hot breath up my nose. “What’s this, like one of them mass hysterical things? You all goin’ nuts at the same time?” He was looking at me mean, but I was all right. I could do this with Butchie, at least this far. But as I said, I wasn’t really willing to test it much further. I stood.
“You’re just embarrassing everybody, Butch,” Beverly said. And true enough, all the others, including Jum, had sort of backed away from him. They were like most people, happy to make noise, in a crowd, but not much more than that.
Butch was different. Butch wanted more than that.
The others all made a serious show of watching for the bus instead, as it now came into view.
“Stop giving the Ward a bad name,” said Beverly.
The bus was pulling up to the curb when Butch gave me the smallest little shove in my chest, enough to push me back about three inches. But as he did it he was looking at Napoleon. And talking to Beverly.
“Okay Bev, I’ll stop embarrassing you. Let’s get on our scummy bus back to our scummy neighborhood where we can be ignorant and nobody’ll notice, huh?”
The bus doors opened, the 17s filed on. Except for Beverly. As Butchie stepped up, she stepped back, and away. “I’ll catch the next one,” she said just before the driver snapped the door shut.
Butchie really was a silent film this time, as he stood staring wide-eyed and openmouthed at us through the bus window at bold Beverly the traitor.
“What a goon,” Beverly said, then paused. “Shall we walk, boys?”
We walked, Redheaded Beverly in between Napoleon and me.
“I think you just need to ignore it,” I said when we’d gone a silent half-block up Centre Street.
“I think you need to not ignore it,” Napoleon said quietly.
“No, I just think... It’s not really a
bout you personally, right? I mean they really don’t like that long ride to school... you wouldn’t... I wouldn’t. Really, you can’t blame them, entirely.”
“Why can’t you?”
“If you knew them, that’s all. I know they sound like jerks, but... especially Jum, he’s not like that... they just don’t speak their minds real well.”
“Butch does,” Beverly said. “He speaks his mind very well. It’s just that there’s not much in there.”
With the added weight of Beverly’s brain it would be fairly ridiculous to argue that. “Okay. Butch. Butch can be, y’know... but if you take away Butch—”
“The problem remains,” Napoleon said. This time he didn’t sound like he was fighting. He sounded like he was despairing.
Napoleon simply shook his head, saying no more through the rest of the walk to the next bus stop where Beverly would be getting aboard for real. She looked at me. I shrugged and looked back. The bits of snow still lying around from last night’s blanketing were turning to crunch by the minute as the temperature dropped.
“It is so cold here,” Napoleon finally said.
“It will warm up eventually,” I said. “You learn not to feel the cold so much. Just like you learn not to be so stubborn, and not to listen to stuff. You’ll learn.”
“I will not,” he said firmly.
“I don’t want to talk about them anymore,” Beverly said. “The real reason I didn’t take the early bus even though I’m freezing my toes off, is I wanted to tell you that I think your father is incredible, Napoleon. He’s a real artist. And a performer.”
Napoleon looked at his feet.
“And really handsome,” she added.
Napoleon looked up. So did I.
“You must be very proud,” Beverly said.