Your Face in Mine: A Novel

by Jess Row

  It’s my turn to be silent, as he rattles on, his voice weaving in and out, packets of data colliding and falling apart.

  Was he another depressed case, like your other friend, maybe? Be honest. Makes my life easier and saves you money. Could he be dead, you think? Homeless shelter? Halfway house? Because in that case you could spend everything and get nothing. You know how hard it is to get dental records on paupers’ graves? DNA on a John Doe?

  He’s alive, I say. Definitely alive. Though that doesn’t mean you’ll find him.

  18.

  Recording #3 (34:56)

  Source: Sony cassette tape, 90 minutes, condition +

  Labeled side one “Tape 3 PRIVATE DO NOT DESTROY”

  When did I first know I was white? Not at Shabazz. No, sir. Of course I knew I was the color white. I knew I wasn’t black. I knew I wasn’t Mexican or Korean or Puerto Rican. But when did I know I was white, as a thing in itself, as something to be? At Roland Park. At Willow. At Roland Park, at Willow, where there were other white people.

  The funny thing is, it was all a little artificial at first. I had to be told. When I arrived at RP, I spoke, effectively, black English. Not consciously. Not at home. But I had a school vocabulary; I addressed the teachers as they expected to be addressed. Where Darnell at? He on the jungle gym, Miz Dixon. It’s just idiom, after all. Any child can pick it up. And at Shabazz no one thought it was funny; no one thought I was funny. Sad, maybe, a little, but not funny. But at Roland Park the teachers were in a panic. The second or third day—I’ll never forget this—they had a meeting with me, my teacher, the principal, Dad, of course, and a speech pathologist. Martin, Mrs. Richards said—that was my teacher—it’s not wrong to speak that way if you want, it’s not hurting anybody, but there’s such a thing as standard English, and that’s what we speak at this school. We don’t want you to be uncomfortable here.

  I’m not uncomfortable, I said.

  And we don’t want you to make anyone else uncomfortable. Without meaning to. Ashante, for example. You like Ashante, right? Didn’t she share her cupcake with you at lunch? You don’t want her to think you’re making fun of her. That’s when I started to cry.

  What was I supposed to think? And Dad, I looked over at Dad, and he was just kind of puzzled and amused. Don’t worry, he said. You want your little chameleon to change colors. He’ll change soon enough. They didn’t think that was funny. But you know who really took offense, after all that fuss? Malik Williams. Remember him? His son was in my class. The Sun columnist, the first black columnist they hired, though he lasted all of five minutes. He was an old-school firebrand, an Al Sharpton wannabe, with a big head of dreadlocks and a beard. Scary Rasta style, though he was local—West Side through and through. He was fired in a plagiarism scandal, accused of stealing copy from some other columnist in Atlanta. Of course he sued, and lost. Major news in Baltimore in the mid-Eighties.

  In any case, his son, Stokely, came home and told him that there was a white kid at Roland Park trying to talk like a brother, and he just hit the roof. Demanded a meeting with the principal, wanted to meet with Dad, too. He called it cross-racial experimentation. Wrote a column about it, too. What kind of perverse linguistic experiment is going on at Roland Park Elementary School? Why are they teaching white children to speak pidgin Black English? And Stokely—God, he was such a nice kid—he was really caught in the middle. He even said to me, Dad told me I should give you a beat-down. He was the tiniest kid in the class. Couldn’t have beat me in arm wrestling.

  But it worked: after that I shut up. Stopped talking in class altogether. No one said anything about it; I think they were relieved. Took me almost an entire year, most of third grade, and then, when I opened my mouth again, I was white. Dad was right. I hardly remembered being at Shabazz. To spare myself from having to explain it, I used to tell people I’d been at RP since kindergarten, and hardly anyone ever questioned me about it. I mean, I was happy, wasn’t I? You know what it’s like there: it’s a good school. A little island of happiness with a well-fortified PTA. Those jungle gyms get repainted every year, and that library has story time in three different languages. They don’t sell off the new textbooks and use the old ones at RP. I’d send my kids there in a heartbeat. Those were the happiest years of my life, you could say, once I settled in. So to speak. Third grade up until middle school. Well, it’s a latency period, isn’t it? In more ways than one. Transsexuals, you know, they say the same thing. Prepubescent children are allowed to be androgynous, to a degree. They can play at cross-dressing, they can engage in all kinds of imaginative fooling around. Or, in some cases, they can just be nothing. Ungendered. Sexless, curveless, living only in their heads. That must have been me. Once I knew I was white—once I was told, once I was reminded—I just sort of relaxed into being nothing at all. I spent no time outside in the neighborhood. None at all. If I played outside of school, it was at friends’ houses. Or on Roland Avenue. For a few years I spent every afternoon till five at the Roland Park Library, across the street from school. Dad picked me up there. And then when I was a little older I started taking the bus down to Hopkins to meet him on campus. It was a pretty genteel existence, comparatively speaking. Roland Park blots out the rest of the world pretty damn well.

  And then I went to Willow. There was no option, really, at that point. Dad wanted me to go to Northern Middle, but the guidance counselor at Roland Park had some kind of private meeting with him and convinced him that he didn’t want a dead son. What was allowable, what might slip under the radar, at Shabazz, was not to be tolerated after grammar school. Thus our apartheid system proceeds. So I was set up with the SSAT, and went on interviews, all kinds of aptitude tests, and Willow was the one that wanted me.

  I’ll never forget the first time Dad took me out there. It was in April, early April, just this time of the year. Trees bare, chilly, rainy. We came up the driveway, past the horse barn, past the pasture, the lacrosse field, the other lacrosse field, you know, rounded the top of the hill, saw the lake, the theater, and the trees all around, trees that seemed unending in every direction. I mean, talk about a brand. Talk about impact. The Willow School. As in, you are going to school in the enchanted forest. And that was before I even saw the swans. Who goes to a school with swans? People call it a country club, it’s not a country club. It’s a sacred grove. How can you not feel special? How can you not feel, like, elected to be there?

  Up to that point, believe me, I had worked hard, so hard, at being average. I followed football, baseball, and basketball. It drove Dad crazy. I listened to Z100. Whatever the big movie was, I wanted to go. After Top Gun I had the little bomber jacket and the aviator glasses. Frankly, I would have been happiest in the suburbs. I had a friend, Carl, whose dad lived out in Owings Mills; I had a sleepover there once. Typical ranch house, basketball hoop in the driveway. We played in the sprinklers and went to Chuck E. Cheese’s for dinner. I thought that was paradise.

  So you can see: Willow was a shock. Whatever it was, it wasn’t normal. Look down the hall: you’ve got the pimply eighth-graders hunched over their Magic cards, you’ve got Sheila Puchner practicing her Ophelia monologue, Dr. Kendricks arguing with Jason Kornbluth about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You’ve got kids learning to play “Epistrophy” on the xylophone and kids sneaking out into the woods to smoke clove cigarettes. God, I hated it at first. I’d worked so hard not to be a freak, and here I practically had to be one.

  19.

  Martin takes the topmost styrofoam box from a stack of three, opens it, and hands me a blue crab still in its death clench, brick-red, crusted with Old Bay. I’ve already spread the Sun across the picnic table, unpacked the cheap Chinese mallets and bamboo picks, the potato salad and tepid complimentary cans of RC Cola. What’s your strategy? he asks. Pick and accumulate? Or pick and eat?

  Pick and eat.

  Davis, he shouts over his shoulder, don’t think that just because I’m eating I’m not watching you. I’m watching.


  We’re in Druid Hill Park this time, at the picnic tables on a rise overlooking the basketball courts. Half past noon, late April now, a muggy spring Saturday. On the far side of the park drive is the reservoir, and beyond that, the fringe of the downtown skyline. I imagine I can see the shot tower, that old Civil War relic, off to one side. Davis, Martin’s little brother—Big Brothers Big Sisters of Baltimore—is running wind sprints across the court, a long, thin shadow in gray track pants and a Golden State Warriors shirt. Every so often he stops and smears an arm across his eyes. He hardly seems winded.

  He’s sixteen, Martin tells me, six-six, rear guard, great rebounder. Plays for City College High School. Doesn’t need to be coached, thank god, ’cause that’s not my thing. I’m here for the bigger issues. Life issues. Kid lives with his mom and three little ones. Older brother’s in federal prison in Richmond. Under the three-strikes system, interstate transport of narcotics, that’s twenty years. This one, though, he’s super-smart, 3.71 GPA, three AP classes. He’s going places. But he has to be watched. Mom’s supportive and all, but she’s got two jobs and a so-so boyfriend.

  And what do you do, exactly?

  Honestly? I bother him. That’s my job. He gets a call or text from me at least every other day. We have Wednesday-night dinners twice a month. I come to his practices. I’ve been to his parent-teacher meetings when Laronda can’t make it.

  That sounds more like surrogate fatherhood.

  No doubt. It bugs him, too. He’s embarrassed to be seen with me. So be it. Everyone his age should have a persistent dickhead like me tapping him on the shoulder. On his own, remember, Davis’s life expectancy is ten years. BBBS is double-teaming him, me and another guy for when I’m out of town. The program needs a big success. Harvard. Stanford. There’s matching funds at stake.

  Teeth clamped around a finger of crab, working it doggedly from the claw, I’m trying to remember the first time I saw Martin in ninth grade. It must have been at school, but I have no memories of him at school; what I remember is the first time he appeared at band practice, in the early spring. Alan and I had been fooling around in his basement for a few weeks; we didn’t have a name yet, or a single finished song, but it was permanent enough that I’d stopped lugging my kit home every time. We hadn’t decided to formally audition bassists, but somehow Martin knew about us, and simply appeared, one Sunday, in stonewashed jeans, Converse high-tops, and a plain white T-shirt tucked in at the waist. His bass—painful as it is to remember—was an Ibanez, sky-blue, with a lightning-shaped head, and he wore it, as he always would, too high, at belt level.

  Penny for your thoughts, Kelly.

  I’m just thinking about what a dork you were when we met. Or, rather, what a dork I thought you were. A music nerd. You were really into jazz fusion. Weather Report, Jaco Pastorius, all that junk.

  That was all Willoughby’s doing. Dad’s last boyfriend. He was the one who turned me on to playing the bass. Dad would never have paid for music lessons, but Willoughby was right there, after all, a house fixture. He made me practice on a fretless bass before I even got to see a normal one. I could play the Allegro from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on that thing. And after that it was all Seventies stuff. Steve Swallow, Ron Carter, Jaco, Genesis, Oregon, Pink Floyd. You could say it taught me to respect the instrument, I suppose. It gave me technique, though of course it wasn’t the technique that really mattered.

  I would have said—looking at you—that you’d never heard hip-hop in your life.

  I hadn’t heard hip-hop, he says, wiping his mouth delicately with a napkin and reaching for a third crab. Not in my conscious mind. Of course, it was there when I was at Shabazz. It was on the boom boxes. Kool Moe Dee, Roxanne Roxanne, Run-D.M.C. Probably I liked it as much as any kid. But that was rap, that was a dream, a lost era. We did breakdancing, too, when I was at Shabazz. Was anyone talking about breakdancing in 1991? It was just humiliating. Even when you guys listened to it I never paid attention. Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, NWA: I missed all that stuff. Didn’t want to touch it. You can understand why. All those layers of repression, all that impacted shame.

  And then what happened?

  He laughs and spreads his hands out on the table, putting his thumbs down on the newspaper, now patterned with concentric spills of soda, crab juice, and brine. Why does this have to be a story about hip-hop? he asks. I mean, sure, later I listened to Biggie and Puff Daddy and Tupac and everyone else. But that was never my thing, really. Not exactly. For me it was reggae.

  Reggae?

  The house of blackness has many doors. Not everyone chooses the same way in. Jazz. Blues. Plantation hollers. Talking drums. Dance. Masks. Drag. All the different forms of the diaspora. Robin taught me that much. What I liked about reggae—what I didn’t like about rap—was that you just couldn’t beat it down. Even when it was angry it was still happy. It was still music. The thing is, too, reggae tells a story. I mean roots reggae, the real stuff, not that Beenie Man crap on the radio now. Reggae is its own world. A direct relationship to Africa. A direct descendant from the kings and queens. It’s a whole cosmos. Next to that, hip-hop is pretty weak. In my view. But I didn’t come to realize this until much later. When I was alive again. When I was receptive.

  After high school. After Alan.

  Yeah, he says, you’re right. We’re jumping ahead. But you asked the question.

  You said you were alive again. Meaning what?

  He turns and looks again at Davis, who’s doing a through-the-legs dribbling routine from one side of the court to another. His nostrils flare. An extra shot of oxygen. The throb of energy a moving body, a child’s body, this child’s body, throws off.

  Meaning I was my true self, he says, meaning I was the person I am now, in embryonic form, anyway. This is hard for you to hear, isn’t it? How could it not be, right? But listen: high school was simple. I was in a band, thanks to you guys. I was some kind of punk rocker, indie rocker, by association, anyway. And the rest of the time, heck, I was studying. I’ll say one thing for Willow: all that shame, all that passive-aggressive, no-discipline, high expectations and no consequences stuff, it worked on me. I couldn’t look at Mrs. Walbert’s face when she was disappointed in me; she puffed up like a soufflé. So I learned chemistry. Whatever it was, whatever they put in front of me, I soaked it up, thank god. Don’t you remember that I won the Latin prize three years in a row?

  To be honest, I say, no. I’d forgotten.

  No, in high school, by that time, I’d found a niche. I was a busy little beaver. Up until the riots, at least, I was actually happy.

  What about the riots?

  Okay. Okay. Here we are. The final, the last, affirmation of my whiteness. He laughs, suddenly, as if he’s startled a flock of flamingos. You know what it’s like, talking to you? he says. It’s like what they say in AA about the trapdoor. You know that expression? You think you’ve hit bottom, but you’ve only hit a trapdoor.

  Maybe that’s what memory is like, I say. And think: maybe that’s what friendship is like.

  Yeah, he says, the past is a black hole and all. No worries. You’ll find a way to stitch it up. Don’t look so sad, Kelly.

  I’m thinking about ’92. No happy memories there.

  No, he says, so let’s be like the Special Forces and get in and get out, okay?

  Davis climbs up the stairs from the courts, slugging from a bottle of Gatorade the color of antifreeze.

  Have a seat, D, Martin says. Kelly and I were just talking about you. About colleges. You know, he went to Harvard.

  Davis gives me the barest possible recognition, a tight little nod, and sits on the other end of my bench, making a triangle of the three of us. He has an impassive face, rounded around the mouth, and ears that seem too small and too high, little doughy squiggles above his long temples. A slightly goofy-looking kid, used to avoiding an adult’s gaze.

  Grad school, though, I say. Pretty esoteric stuff. Chinese poetry.

  I thought you were a r
eporter.

  Kelly’s had many lives, Martin says. Like a lot of people. Like me. It’s the nature of the times. That’s why it pays to have options.

  Does he sit and declaim like this all the time, I’m wondering, or is it just for my benefit? Look, I say, I really don’t know anything about the college game these days. Other than it’s harder than ever. You taken the SATs yet?

  PSATs, he says. SATs in the fall.

  Test prep this summer, Martin says. After his defense clinic at Auburn. You get your mom to sign the form?

  She’s in Atlantic City. With Manny.

  How long?

  He shrugs. Aunt Doris is watching the kids, he says. Manny’s talking about getting a catering job up there. Keeps saying he’s going to move us all up there for school in September.

  There’s no jobs in Atlantic City, Martin says. Economy’s dying. Now that there’s slots at every racetrack in the tristate. Plus Foxwoods. Plus the hurricane. I wouldn’t worry about it.

  He’s got a friend, though.

  A friend’s not a job. Job’s not your mom taking her babies out of Baltimore.

  A fire engine races by on 29th Street, barking and screeching, sending a flock of tiny birds up into the air, where they form a cloud, a disk, and then drop all at once back onto the grass. Davis discreetly flicks through the messages on his phone.

  Where else’d you go to college? he asks me.

  Oh—Amherst. You know where that is? In Massachusetts?

  Where Emily Dickinson’s from, he says, expressionless. We just did a unit on her. That’s a real place? I mean, it’s still there?

  Yeah. Actually, it hasn’t changed that much. The buildings, I mean. It’s still a quiet little town. Great school, though. Really small classes. Why, I’m thinking, can’t I squeeze out a sentence longer than three words? Nobody falls through the cracks there, I say. You can’t be anonymous. You get all the attention you could ever want. On the flip side, you’re stuck with the same four hundred people for four years.