The Alumni Grill, Volume 2

by Tom Franklin

  A few weeks later, and still a few weeks before he was up in workshop, Blake asked if I would take another look. This slacker had become my most assiduous student. Upon rereading, I immediately liked the way he had reworked his frame (although its politics still irked me). He’d also fleshed out parts in the first half that before had been sketchy. The second section remained largely the same, however. For instance, he kept unchanged a vague and awkward description of his mother that I’d indicated to him should probably be explored. (He called her “weak-willed” and focused attention on her breasts “flopping in the air” as her boyfriend struck her.) Some new information had been added. There was a friend, “Bug,” with whom he hung out when he couldn’t go home. He also wrote of distinguishing himself at football, but remaining largely friendless—the rare white in a community and school which, although he never specifically articulated it, was predominately black and Latino. There was perhaps a page and a half where before there had been only a half. Little of what was there, though, was self-reflective, nor did it seem purposefully constructed, like the frame and the first section had been. It felt haphazard, disgorging.

  Blake and I sat down the next day and talked again. In many ways, I felt like I was repeating myself from our previous conversation. The second part of your story is not happening on the page, I told him. You know what happened, your day-to-day life at the time, but your audience doesn’t. It sounds like it was a difficult time, I said, and you might feel uncomfortable facing it, but, if this rhetorical construction is going to work, then you have to realize that your audience is bigger than just you. By writing this for this class, the members of the class become privy to the world you’re divulging to them (us). And we don’t know your story. We also don’t want to have to guess at details. Just write the second half, I advised him. Give your audience the key to reading your life.

  This time, Blake was a little more visibly perturbed by my persisting criticism. Not angry. Nor discouraged. But the stuff under the surface of his face was visibly agitated, churning. I asked him about the missing stuff—about his absent brother; about his relationship with his mother, the line that read so awkwardly to me. He gave cursory answers, his face pensive.

  Although I had been looking for an opening, I did not find the opportunity to mention the charged racial and class issues that were implicit, but as yet undeveloped in his piece: his mother’s abusive boyfriend, who was described as a “devil all covered in soot”; the “projects” where Blake was beaten up; how he did and did not fit into this world. For instance, I could see that Bug was black, although he was never explicitly identified as such. From what little there actually was of him on the page, Bug—by his manner; by his relationship to the world—reminded me of boys I’d grown up with. It was because of this racial subtext that Blake’s memoir was truly original and carried tremendous power—more than he imagined. I began to envision that this could be worked into a publishable piece.

  But it was as though Blake didn’t “see” Bug as black. No one in the text was explicitly racially ascribed, from the troubled youth of the frame to the mother’s soot-colored boyfriend. While, had it been deliberate, this might have been an interesting statement against the artificial construction of race in America, in Blake’s case, it felt rather like an omission, like a willful blindness.

  I told Blake I would look at another draft if he wanted. Inwardly, I was thinking that maybe the feedback from the larger workshop was what he now needed in order to better “get it”—to spark those memories within him and also to better understand their significance in relation to the story he was trying to tell. From what I had read up to that point, they sounded like hard ones, maybe ones he was uncomfortable sharing with the class. After all, he was the All-American boy. James Baldwin echoed in the back of my mind, as he always does, exhorting us to look into that truthful mirror. Such “looking,” I believed, is what I had seen agitating Blake’s face.

  Blake didn’t take me up on my offer to reread his essay a third time. On the day it was due, he handed in his draft. I made copies and distributed them. As I’d already read earlier versions, I put off rereading until the night before workshop, when I took Blake’s memoir and a green pencil to bed with me.

  The frame had changed again, and radically so. Blake now began by describing the recent football awards banquet, where he was named Player of the Year. This was a smart narrative choice; it showed an awareness of how he is perceived, allowing the reader to see him as the All-American boy, while also setting up the coming contrast to his stark life growing up with his mother. He followed this by transitioning smoothly into the original opening—the discussion/argument with his girlfriend. (He’d toned down the neo-Reagan vitriol.) The Europe section remained largely unchanged, and that was fine; that part had been working.

  In the second part, I noticed that, early on, he had done more with his friendship with Bug. Blake did a nice job describing scenes of him and Bug hanging out as his own family life was disintegrating. Bug came to replace his absent brother, who had gone to live with the grandparents in the Midwest. There was a nice, touching scene in which Blake showed the two, Bug and himself, walking along the beach and, later, when the nightly rains rolled in, but before it was safe to venture home, crawling onto a bed of flattened cardboard boxes in a Dumpster behind an oceanside motel. “The smell wasn’t the greatest, but it was a place for us to take shelter from the harsh storm that chased us off the beach and chilled us to the bone.” Blake was obviously luxuriating in the recounting of that moment and aware of its impact on the reader.

  He went on to describe staying at Bug’s place in the projects, being the only white face there. (Yes!) He described incidents from his school life, too, where he still encountered a lot of trouble and got into some fights—most of which he lost, usually by capitulation, to save himself from serious harm. This seemed a particularly vulnerable moment for the football team’s most valuable player.

  Then Blake described how Bug, who was two years his junior, joined a gang. For protection, Bug explained to him. At first, Blake disapproved, but then, a few weeks later, Bug told Blake that he should join, too. “I saw how much it meant to Bug and what it did for him, so I thought it was good enough for me. I made the choice to join the gang.” (Wow, I was thinking: a white kid—one of these privileged and sheltered white kids—in a black gang. I was imagining the other students reading this.)

  His initiation involved “jacking” a car. The older boys in the gang, who were fifteen and sixteen, gave Blake a bat, with instructions to smash the window when the car rolled up, throw the driver out, and speed off. A black sports car pulled up, and Blake did as he’d been told—but the crashing of the glass and the frightened man behind the wheel caused Blake to panic, so he forced the man inward instead of pulling him out, and got into the driver’s seat. Bug and two other boys ran up and jumped in, too. They screamed off down the road.

  An older boy named G-Dog told Blake to drive to “their territory.” They parked near an abandoned railroad car. There, the older boys dragged the man at gunpoint into the boxcar and debated what to do next.

  “Just cap his ass,” Mustard, the other older one, advised, but G-Dog, who was the leader, didn’t want to. They went back and forth, until finally G-Dog agreed. He held the gun out to Blake. “It’s your initiation.”

  Blake took the gun and approached the man, who was now on his knees, crying in this empty boxcar. And Blake was petrified, fighting to keep his whole arm from trembling.

  The man pleaded for his life and offered many empty promises. I shook with terror as a bead of sweat fell from my forehead and landed on my extended arm….

  He sighted down the barrel of the gun for a long time, afraid of what he might do, afraid of the power he felt at the weight in his hand, and afraid of the voices he heard behind him, encouraging him, telling him how tough he was and how great he would be for doing this.

  Bug knew that I didn’t want to and that I couldn’t. H
e spoke up and insisted that he wanted to do it. He made it seem like he was challenging me and that he should get to because he was a member before me and never got to shoot anyone. Well, his argument worked. I handed him the gun and turned my head. All I can remember was a loud bang….

  I could not believe what I’d just read. That night, I phoned my wife, who taught at a college two states away. She too was speechless.

  Early the next morning, I called on a friend, a professor of English Education who was also committed to “writing as discovery.” I was concerned about Blake’s revelation and how his peers would respond to it, but my friend helped me see other, bigger concerns. “There’s no statute of limitations on capital offenses,” he told me, “and I don’t think teachers and students’ conversations are privileged like with a lawyer and client.” There was a pause. “I mean, this kid killed someone. What will you do?”

  What would I do?

  I did not know. Instinctively, I knew what I would not do: Turn him in to the police. I had brought him to this point, I had solicited this self-exploration from him—had required it—as a way to read and write life stories. In so doing, I had coaxed—coerced?—this confession.

  But what about the victim? What about the unnamed man crying on his knees in the boxcar? “I never got the chance to thank Bug,” Blake wrote, “for what he did for me on my initiation night.” What was Blake’s, our, my responsibility to the man who was killed?

  And Bug. Blake was able to escape by fleeing to the Midwest and joining his grandparents, his mother soon following, but Bug died a gangbanger’s death before the end of the summer. Not even twelve years old. The others, G-Dog and Mustard and the rest—like Bug—live and die, and live and die, and live and die. I felt that we, my class, the rest of us, are to be held accountable to them, too.

  If justice is retribution, was that man’s death vindicated by Bug’s, G-Dog’s, Mustard’s horrible lives and their premature ends? And does Blake’s access to a suburban escape represent rehabilitation? He had remade himself into the All-American boy. I did not know how to hold Blake individually accountable for the good fortune of having been born white and middle-class.

  James Baldwin, in his novel Another Country, wrote:

  …[P]erhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness.

  After reading this as a young man, the passage stuck with me. It resonated throughout my training in the Elbow school of writing pedagogy. Suddenly, it was my only point of reference, the rosary I could rub before blindly stepping forward.

  For I had started this process in Blake. I had opened this door. So, despite my fears—that uniformed police would appear during class and lead a handcuffed Blake away; that the class would find some way to figuratively stone Blake, to cleanse themselves of the filth of a world whose reality they willfully ignored by banishing the one who had tricked them and “passed” from that world into their own; that, in asking my students to be fully alive and accountable for that life, I had somehow failed them, had somehow failed him, Blake—I could not stop the process now as it spun out of my control, as if Blake’s story, this “secret,” would then somehow cease to exist.

  I called Blake to my office before class. We had to talk about where we now were, I told him—about these risks. But mostly I wanted to talk to him about accountability. While he may not have pulled the trigger, he was accountable. For that, after all, is the point of such writing exercises: to come to terms with one’s life. Confession alone is not enough. The word is not priest, and absolution can only be had in the vast darkness of one’s self, by confronting and accepting responsibility for that darkness. I told Blake these things. He sat in the chair opposite my desk, looking at me blankly.

  I told the class the same things, prefacing workshop with Baldwin’s quote about our secrets. And workshop went well—uncomfortably so. Blake was not led off in cuffs. There was no recriminatory stoning. In fact, the other students’ responses were careful, soothing, as if to let Blake know that their feedback was meant to offer unction, not to signify excommunication. One young woman, as workshop wound to a close but before class was officially over, asked Blake if it was true. He smiled and deftly avoided giving a direct answer.

  Though conflicted, I also felt relieved. I couldn’t help thinking we’d fooled them. They’d thought Blake was “white,” just as they’d allowed themselves to not see me as “black.” All term long, after their initial surprise at the sight of me the first day, they merely understood me to be “different”—from the professors they typically had, as well as from what they thought African-Americans to be. But the truth of the matter was that, in fact, they did not see me at all. Nor Blake. When they looked in the mirror, did they see themselves?

  Here are these MTV children, decrying our passé obsession with race and all the while listening to black music and dressing and speaking and talking “black.” Blake had lived the “blackness” these droopy-drawered, rap-listening kids fantasized—both in terror of and hungry for—and it had pushed him to become “whiter than white,” the All-American boy. Blake, despite his trouble articulating it, was coming to realize something that gainsaid all the neo-libertarian verbiage his generation wants to believe. Race exists in America. Our notions of race are complicated by class and a political rhetoric that obfuscates rather than clarifies, but still, today more than ever, race exists. We, as a society, have created it and are bound to it. Aspirations to colorblindness are merely misguided fantasizing by the privileged who understand viscerally, if not deliberately, that in a world that does not “see” race but in which power still resides with those who historically have held it, they maintain their privilege.

  As a result, this generation that refuses to openly acknowledge differences and the discrimination based upon them is no closer to equality than were its grandparents who “called a spade a spade.” Despite the gains of the past few decades, today’s society is as entangled in dangerously schizophrenic self-delusion as were its forebears. In mindlessly mimicking the appearance and behavior of some imagined persona—a persona whose identity they have created based upon his supposed race—these MTV children have “showed their asses,” so to speak.

  Theirs is the same rebellion as every generation of disaffected mainstream youth, from the Slummers of the Jazz Age to the Beats to this even sadder version today. In each case, white youth aspire to assert their own unique identity by becoming the black Other that their parents reject. The “wigger” inclinations of this group, dressing and speaking and behaving in ways they perceive to be black, make them merely caricatures of the “blacks” that mainstream America created and strives to perpetuate. The “white nigger” that these kids emulate is nothing more than the “nigger” whom white America created in its collective mind as a way to define its own whiteness.

  It is not new. And it is in no way rebellious. This behavior has little to do with blacks or blackness—what we Americans of African descent do or don’t do; how we speak; what we wear. It’s about whites and whiteness—whom they imagine themselves to be and, after they’ve tired of it, whom they can then allow themselves to become.

  My class refused to recognize this. It became all too clear to me when, later in the semester, after one of my two black students offered a similar memoir—with no murder, but describing the obstacles he’d overcome growing up in the inner city and his flirtation with gangs—the workshop was torpid. I saw one woman scribble in the margins of her copy, “I’m so tired of these Boys in the Hood stories. It’s not original.” His story hadn’t even confirmed their fears. He’d merely bored them by reciting something they had so much believed beforehand that they could not imagine his experience might have been anything else.


  But, of all people in my class, Blake got it. In concluding his final draft, he returned to his frame, to the argument with his girlfriend. In it, he acknowledged that “maybe she was right” about her at-risk youths—that they were good kids, but that sometimes circumstances can conspire to make a doppelganger of any one of us. Blake had not begun his essay believing this nor even anticipating that he would. Still, this victory seemed hollow, misdirected.

  My wife wants us to eventually find jobs nearer an urban area. She too is black, and feels a responsibility to work in the community, with young black folks. More likely than not, it will mean making a horizontal move professionally, or one in the wrong direction. It will probably mean a cut in pay and a heavier course load. More likely than not, the range and breadth of courses we can offer will be severely limited. Where before I was indifferent, now her wish is mine too. Is there any other choice? After all, who would be fool enough to want to integrate into a burning MTV house party?

  THOSE STEEL ARMS

  by Matt Brock

  I saw what was about to happen that day at the rail yard, but I didn’t warn him, I couldn’t: My mouth was full of pimento cheese and whole wheat. Plus, he was wearing headphones, probably couldn’t have heard me anyhow, and it happened so damn fast. One second he was kicking up gravel dust as he jived toward the tracks, head up, eyes closed like some blues singer lost in his happy sadness. The next—wham!—he was hanging between a pair of empty coal gondolas, spiked through his gut by the steel that joined them.

  It was springtime, I remember, the kind of day when birds grip electrical wires and the air smells like clothes straight from the dryer. The kind of day my wife, Cindy, might have had the windows open at home, a breeze stirring her hair as she strolled barefoot through the kitchen, our baby suckling from a firm breast she had pulled over the neck of her nightgown. Except the windows of the house we rented were painted shut and my wife was cleaning rooms at the Hyatt and she was without kids or the ability to have them, which is to say there was some cancer in her ovaries and she had had them removed.