We Cast a Shadow

by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

  I won’t take you through all the myriad incidents that we—that’s him as a boy, me as a boy, and us in our patrilineal relationship—experienced in the course of events. It would be impossible to do so. But I could randomly flip through my journal, a Big Chief Bigboote tablet where I kept a written record of all the indignities my son and I experienced.

  Memories could be questioned, distorted, forgotten. But a transcript could not. The physical act of remembering is a bulwark against insanity. Against the possibility that the insidious big white machine exists only in my head and in the heads of similarly delusional persons. That the big white machine’s carcinogenic pheromones and countless rows of razor-sharp teeth are the result of indigestion, a bad Plum, an inferior mind. In any event, my written journal was far more secure for posting these thoughts than some digital cloud where Uncle Sam, Anonymous, or God could get their talons on them.

  I’m seated now under an Adansonia looking at a page that I opened to by chance. Here are notes from a long-past outing: It’s the summer before Elevation Night. An ideal Saturday afternoon. A well-maintained, semipublic pool. Only a five-minute stroll from our house. To get in, I showed the desk clerk my neighborhood association card. Then he asked for my federal ID, which he held up to the light. We wetted ourselves in the exterior shower. Matching swim trunks purchased by Penny. Blue field with Captain America shields in an orderly pattern. Deck chairs mostly occupied. Pool active, but not crowded. Nigel and me not the only ones like us. A black family already splashing around in the shallow end. Joyous and common like any family at any pool on any hot day anywhere. But even I wonder where they came from. Lifeguard hunches on his perch. Stares at them. They ain’t done nothing. The lifeguard ain’t done nothing. But I staple my eyes to the scene. And that’s something. The act of observing rewrites reality.

  Nigel swims back from the deep end. A strong swimmer. Water streams over his small back like encouragement.

  He climbs out. “I think somebody spilled soda in the pool.” He sticks out his tongue, flicks water from his face. “What?” he says.

  I grab his shoulder and spin him around. That dark medallion of skin on his tummy is bigger. Nigel’s other blemishes cover his body. The greatest concentration of marks: belly and back. A dark asterism. Some flaws approach the size and complexity of the stigma on his face. Some discolorations have undergone transmutations similar to the facial mark. Some even seem to have moved over time from one hemisphere of his body to another. My fear is that these islands will merge to form a continent. The lesser smudges, they’re just ordinary freckles. But what image would emerge if I traced those dots? His mother’s face? Our home? A playground viewed from a hilltop? But there I go again being melodramatic with a capital dramatic.

  “Maybe I should go home with them.” Nigel nodded toward the black family. “I bet they’re really nice people.” My boy’s mark humor, his scar-chasm.

  “No,” I say. “You’re all mine.”

  * * *

  —

  After my speech at the Musée, and after I dropped off Jo Jo, I drove home, mentally mulling over Nigel’s blemishes as I pulled in to our driveway. I brought the Bug so close to Penny’s minivan’s rear bumper that my vehicle seemed to be puckering for a kiss. Inside our house, Penny was swabbing her decks and battening down her hatches, so she could shove off for her shift at the hospital. I’m being too coy. Have I mentioned the giddiness I inevitably felt watching my wife prepare for her day? She stood, leaning slightly over the bathroom sink, on tiptoes. My girl. I’ll spare the reader my X-rated thoughts. But I’ll confess that they involved a lightning-quick reimaging of the Rapunzel myth, which, of course, is nothing more than a prudish allegory about sexual desire and climbing with one’s lover to orgasmic heights.

  Actually, whenever I think back to that time and Penny’s prework prep, I’m drawn to an entirely different fantasy. One where animated nightingales float down through the skylight to land on her shoulder. A white rabbit scurries up from a hole in the hardwood to say, “You’re late. Hurry up. Get your sun shades. Because it’s bright and you’re late!”

  “Ground Control to husband.” Penny pinched my cheek.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You were off planet again.” Penny crossed into the closet and grabbed a jacket. “Nigel does the same thing. How was the museum thingy?”

  “Weird,” I said, “but that’s to be expected with anything Supercargo is into.”

  “Well, I’m glad you went, even if it was work-related,” Penny said tersely. That tone had been entering her voice more and more since I told her about my assignment as the Face of Seasons.

  “You should spend more time with your cousin anyway. He adores you.”

  “I guess. How’s the kid?”

  “In his room. There’s something different about him lately. He didn’t want to help in the kitchen just now.”

  “It’s a hard age.” I leaned in for a kiss.

  “Just talk to him.” Penny bopped my nose. “There’s Tater Tot casserole in the oven.”

  Nigel’s room was situated in such a way that the sunlight poured in during the morning. But by late afternoon, as our snow globe city spun away from the sun, his chamber grew dark. It was his habit to spend entire weekend afternoons on his bed reading classics or doodling in his sketch pad or playing with his device if he was very bored. The world shadowed around him. He never bothered with the lights.

  Nigel’s position was usually such that, standing in the long hallway, I could silently watch him without being noticed. An invasion of privacy? Yes. A little creepy? Prolly. But doesn’t every parent do this in some fashion or other? Don’t we all feel that some substantial portion of our essence has made its way into the child? In this sense, the voyeuristic parent is really watching herself and hoping for some revelation. Or at least a tip.

  I had seen all the seasons of our child’s life: the winter he stacked a set of alphabet blocks to spell safe even though he was surely too young to know what that word meant; the spring he ran a remote-control school bus into a crowd of action figures and, seeing the horror of his actions, gathered the figures in his arms and laid them under bedsheets to recuperate; the fall he pulled one of my hats over his eyes and shadowboxed an invisible gang.

  Now Nigel lay on his bed, a sketch pad open before him. In small, cramped strokes, he created something I couldn’t make out.

  Nigel glanced at me. “Dad,” he said in a way that was both cheerful and wary. He swept the pad closed.

  “What you got there?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Just drawings.”

  “Can I see?”

  Nigel pulled the pad away from me. “That’s okay.”

  The truth is I knew precisely what was inside. It was the latest iteration of a comic Nigel had ginned up years before during a particularly difficult time in our household. Our caped hero was a stand-in for my boy, of course. A kind of Nig-El. The baddie was a weasel-faced villain he called the Fascist Fedora, who went around forcing the citizens of Sun City to wear super fancy hats: top hats and bonnets, derbies and Gainsboroughs, etc. This didn’t bother me. The family organizational chart listed me as “father, breadwinner, protector, role model.” The part about me as a best bud was somewhere in the addendum.

  “I brought you something. Take off your shirt.” I said. Nigel sat on his haunches in bed but didn’t take off his shirt. I showed him the tube I’d gotten from the Musée.

  “Super extra strength,” I said. It was bad enough that skin toning cream was relatively hard to find within the City excluding the Tiko, which I avoided for reasons already described. Even within the Tiko, so much of what I found was watered down. Lower percentages of active ingredient. The jar of Madame C.J.’s that Penny chucked off the steps of Nigel’s school was an example of the lower-quality product. But not J.B.’s Whitener. It was the skin-toning equivalent
of acetone.

  “I don’t want to,” Nigel said.

  “Don’t be that way,” I said. “We’ll go out for ice cream after. Won’t that be great? Maybe head over to the bowling alley.”

  “I just don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “It stinks, and it stings.” I knew that Nigel was right on both counts. I had, many moons earlier, smeared some J.B.’s on the right side of my torso over the ribs. It smelled faintly of sulfur and burned worse than an analgesic. The next morning there was a faint patch of reddened skin that seemed somewhat lighter if viewed under the powerful light of the vanity from a certain angle. I never used the cream again because I recognized how silly I was to try it. I would have had to dive into a pool of the ointment to fix my skin. I was too dark all over. A full body stain.

  But even with my personal experience, I knew Nigel wanted the cream. How did I know? Because he held the hem of his shirt between his thumb and index. I knew my son.

  Of course, we had discussed this before. We didn’t have to during those times when he relented without comment. But during other times, I had to remind him of where I was coming from. Of whose side I was on in the war we were fighting.

  “Why do we do this?” I asked.

  “So that I can get better,” he mumbled, sounding for all the world like his five-year-old self, that being the first time we did this.

  “And what happens when you’re better?”

  “We won’t have to do it anymore.”

  “There are dark things and light ones, and you’re the very best thing in the world.” I threw my arm over his shoulder. “You know I love you, right? One day this will all be in the rearview.”

  Nigel nodded. The edges of his eyes were wet. Such a sensitive boy. But my eyes were wet, too. Empathetic me. Nigel removed his shirt and his shorts. My son in intermezzo. The interplay of his light skin and dark spots brought to mind the stracciatella in the freezer. I stretched a latex glove onto my hand and let go with a snap.

  Now, I’m perfectly aware of the judgmental thoughts running through your head as you read these words. I suspect your pupils have dilated, your lips are agape, your heart filled with venom toward me. But let me make an attempt to clarify my position as this is neither the time nor the place for the mincing of words or slightest prevarication of any kind.

  I am a unicorn. I can read and write. I have all my teeth. I’ve read Plato, Woolf, Nikki Giovanni, and Friend. I’ve never been to jail. I’ve voted in every election since I was eighteen. I finished high school. I finished college. I finished law school. I pay taxes. I don’t have diabetes, high blood pressure, or the itis. If you randomly abduct a hundred black men from the streets of the City and deposit us into a gas chamber, I will be the only one who fits this profile. I will be the only one who survives. Is it because I’m better than the other ninety-nine? No. It’s because I’m lucky, and I know it. Somehow the grinding effects of a world built to hurt me have not yet eliminated my every opportunity for a happy life, as is the case for so many of my brethren. The world is a centrifuge that patiently waits to separate my Nigel from his basic human dignity. I don’t have to tell you that this is an unjust planet.

  A dark-skinned child can expect a life of diminished light. This is truth anywhere in the world and throughout most of history. But let’s stick to the Home of the Free. Place young Jamal on an all-white basketball team, and guess who will get ejected from the game more often for normal rambunctious behavior? Give a hiring manager a stack of applications. Let him choose between an equally qualified Jamal, Jane, or Jonathan. See Jamal waiting at the unemployment office. Again. (Admittedly, none of these examples are particularly shocking, and I fear that I risk insulting your intelligence, dear reader, but ride with me awhile longer.)

  See Jamal evicted from his apartment. See Jamal arrested for vagrancy. See Jamal mysteriously die in a transport van on the way to the City jail. A brief interlude of cursing the heavens. Resurrect Jamal with lightning. Smoke. Sparks. The smell of burning cocoa butter. Put a toy gun in Jamal’s hand in an open-carry state. Wait for Jane or Jonathan to call the police due to a “suspicious-looking black guy.” See the cavalry show up and scalp Jamal. No questions asked. Jane is heartbroken for the tragic misapprehension of the situation, she says over a pumpkin spice latte, as Jonathan bites the tip off a double chocolate biscotti.

  I have a natural aversion to numbers and statistics, as they can be manipulated by any reactionary with an agenda. But that doesn’t change the objective fact that prospects for African Americans have devolved even since my grandparents’ time. Black women make thirty cents for every dollar a white man does, and 90 percent of black moms are single mothers. Unemployment among black males is the norm, not the exception, and nine out of ten brothers have done time. And virtually none of us black guys and dolls can vote since felons and the children of felons need a voucher from an upstanding citizen to earn a voting pass. (Jo Jo was mine.)

  None of that even takes into account the fact that every black person is a de facto enemy of the state. They used to call bringing every able-bodied black male to jail for questioning racial profiling. Now it’s called excellent police work. Did I mention that blacks in most major cities live in fenced-in ghettos just like the Tiko? There may be beauty in my blackness and dignity in the struggle of my people, but I won’t allow my son to live a life of diminished possibility. I see a constellation of opportunity that those of my ilk rarely travel to. I see my Nigel at the center of those stars.

  This reraises the question I’ve occasionally concerned myself with during Nigel’s life: What if I can ensure that my boy is not perceived as a black man? What if he is simply a man?

  “Ah.” Nigel winced. Did I enjoy using the noxious stuff on my son? Of course not. What parent likes to see their baby cry at the barber or squirm beneath the dentist’s drill? But weaker creams weren’t effective.

  As for Penny, she loved our son as much as a person could. She gave more hugs. She provided more words of encouragement. She was the practical one, the reason Nigel got all his shots on schedule and never missed a day of school. But what did my amazing, considerate wife know of the unseen slights our son experienced, the monstrous episodes so internally disturbing that our doomed boy would never tell anyone—not Penny, not even me—about? Still, I didn’t have to hear words to understand. Wasn’t I also among the marked?

  He stood in front of his bed in skivvies while the cream dried into his skin. I couldn’t have him rolling around and spreading it on his bedsheets. Even the milder version stained.

  “Last spot,” I said. “Close ’em tight.” He shut his eyes. This was the most important part of the care. But also the trickiest. The tarnished skin around his eye was naturally quite tender. And then there were the delicate membranes nearby. I had to use finesse. I squeezed a teardrop’s worth onto my purple-gloved pinky and gingerly applied the unction. I was nearly done when Nigel flinched.

  “Keep still,” I said.

  “Ah!” he said. “It burns.”

  “Hold on.”

  “Dammit. Stop!” He grabbed my hand, roughly.

  “Ow,” I said.

  For a moment, Nigel glared at me with one eye clamped shut. He let go. He went for the open door. All along his back, blotches of white cream gleamed like gems.

  I had talked with the parents of older kids about the transition to teenagedom. Nigel was on the cusp of that ever-expanding dark interior world. Even in moments of small rebellion, there had always been an agreement that he was not the final arbiter of his own life. But I could tell that my job of preparing him for the best of all possible worlds had just gotten harder.

  In the second bathroom, Nigel ran the sink. In the kitchen, I tied off a garbage bag containing the soiled latex gloves. I opened the door and ran the overhead fan. I couldn’t leave any evidence in the house for Penny to find.
As I walked outside to the garbage can, the white sack dangling from my fingers, I heard something like Nigel’s laughter from back inside my home.

  17

  Those were the times when I thought about Sir locked away in his rusty prison cage. Sir, whom I had only spoken to once since his arrest, when Mama had, after some considerable prodding, convinced me to see him in his new native captivity, a visit the three of us would come to regret.

  But it wasn’t that encounter that came to mind now. What I recalled was a family reunion we attended when I was a precocious preteen, just before Sir’s arrest. Ours was a large family, although the great body of us lived in the state next door or the state next to that one. I’m excluding the overhanging branch, our distant light-skinned cousins; those yellowish leaves had grown in California valleys for generations. They never showed up for anything.

  The reunion was an especially auspicious gathering as it marked my grandfather’s ninety-ninth birthday, which would turn out to be his last, as he would die suddenly a few days later. I didn’t know him very well, in part because he sired Sir late in life, shortly before abandoning my sainted, deceased grandmother and moving to the country. He and Sir didn’t get along.

  He was a scary guy to young me. In retrospect, I had no good reason to fear the man, who worked multiple jobs until his eighties. But also, in retrospect, I realized that my fear had something to do with my father’s attitude toward him (“He’s just another wog”) and with the clothes he wore when not working: stiff-billed snapback caps, baggy white T-shirts, baggy blue or black jeans that slouched low on his waist and occasionally below his butt. In other words, he dressed like an old-timey thug. In still other words, I was scared because I was supposed to feel scared, in the same way that one is jokingly terrified of a faux-blood-covered man in a haunted house. As I grew older, I recognized the ridiculousness of my position and, that day, consciously tried to correct my attitude and treat him as if we’d gone crabbing every summer of my young life.