The sun cooked us as we dragged ourselves up and down hills. Patrice helped Sis over fallen logs and over puddles, and I imagined I saw some tenderness there. Perhaps I did. Then we came to the tracks. Bobo assured us that we had made it with a couple of hours to spare, so we found some shade and rested.
“Will you help me find one of dem schools?” Sis asked me.
“Sho he will,” Patrice said.
“And I kin go to school, too?” Bobo asked.
“You sho kin,” Patrice said. He leaned his head back and looked up at the clouds. “What I wouldn’t give fer a drank.”
“I got a bottle in my suitcase,” Sis said. “Thought it might come in handy.” She opened the leather bag and pulled out a mason jar with a lid. It was filled with a clear liquid.
“Well, dang it to mercy, I knowed I loved you all along,” Patrice said. He took the jar, unscrewed the lid, and took a whiff. “Lawdy, that smells fine, finer than frog’s hair.” He took a swig and coughed. “Here, honey, have a bite.”
Sis took a long drink and wiped her mouth with her sleeve. She handed the jar to Bobo and he did the same. Bobo gave the jar back to Patrice. I was thoroughly and absolutely disgusted, yet somehow not surprised at all.
Patrice pushed the jar toward me, but I waved it off. I watched them drink themselves unconscious, and I realized that it didn’t matter where they were, they would never be going anywhere.
The train’s whistle blew. It was coming and I was the only one awake. I did not wake them. The locomotive passed, and I walked to the tracks. Just as Sis had said, the train was moving very slowly up the grade. I found an empty boxcar and easily climbed into it. Alone. I left them sleeping there where they belonged, with one another.
CHAPTER 3
I didn’t want to believe, nor could I imagine, that Ted was manipulating the crosshairs of the planchette to make the Ouija Board answer my questions in a particular way, but it was the only viable explanation. To my sad question “Will I be stuck in Atlanta forever?” the board said, “Could be.” To my panicked “Am I crazy,” it was similarly noncommittal, saying, “Perhaps.” And finally to my offhanded question, “Was I really in utero for twenty-four months?” it was irritatingly and aggravatingly more definite, giving the response “Without a doubt.”
Ted and I were sitting on the edges of lounge chairs by the pool. Jane was steadily swimming laps, her large feet and long legs propelling her slinky red-bikinied body.
“You know where the name of the Ouija Board comes from, Nu’ott?” Ted asked. “It’s from the French and German words for yes. Could just have easily been called the non-nein. Of course that’s just one theory. There are probably many. I find it simply strange that the skin they pack sausages in is edible. Edgar Cayce thought they were dangerous.”
“Sausages?”
“No, Ouija Boards. Why would Edgar Cayce care about sausages? Maybe he did. He was a weird dude. And sausages are everywhere.” Ted looked at his bare feet at the end of his chinos. “Let me ask it a question. Why can’t the Democrats come up with decent slogans?”
“I think that might be a long answer,” I said.
“My point exactly. Republicans run around chanting ‘America, love it or leave it’ and ‘Freedom isn’t free.’ ”
“The board can’t handle that,” I said.
“We ought to market a better one. Pigs are really smart, you know.”
I hadn’t said it, but I’m certain Ted knew it. I felt like a failure. I had set out on my own and had come back with my pathetic tail between my legs. Actually, I was more than a little bit lucky to have come back with a tail at all, much less one unbothered by my unseemly Peckerwood County–work-farm brethren. Failure might have been too strong a term only because I hadn’t had any real goals when I set out. That finally was my awakening, my revelation from that brief and both eye-opening and eye-closing experience, that I, sadly, had no direction in life, and my new mission became to discover some mission.
“You could go to college,” Ted said.
I shrugged. “I’m a high school dropout.”
“With scads of money, my friend, with scads of money.”
That was true, and I knew just what he meant, which in itself might have been evidence enough that I didn’t need a university. However, at last, I was large enough in stature to not be pushed around physically, and suddenly I wanted, for whatever reasons, to be near people my own age, most especially women. Even as I thought it I knew I was being naïve. People had never treated me well, and I had no reason to expect they would change just because I was bigger.
“Definitely,” Ted said. “College would be great for you. A time for searching and growth, for exposure to new and uninteresting subjects. I think that they should be called tax cells instead of brackets.”
My first letter to the so-called development office of Morehouse College offering them a bit of a portion of a scad of my wealth yielded no response. The second letter was actually mailed back to me with my name and signature circled and ha ha written in red ink beside it. I hated using Ted’s pull, but he insisted, and so he wrote to them, introduced me, and slightly more than suggested that I could be talked into being loose with my dough. I got a call from a woman named Gladys Feet, and she wanted very much to buy me lunch. I agreed to meet her at a restaurant downtown.
I arrived at the restaurant first and sat at the table to wait, with my doubts. I had had to go around the barn, as my mother would have said, just to try to offer these folks money. I watched as the hostess pointed me out and saw the reaction on Gladys Feet’s face. Gladys Feet was an average-looking woman in all respects, dressed in an average navy blue business suit with a white blouse, but she wore extremely high stiletto heels. The heels made her look like an actor in a corporate porn film. She smiled as she approached and I stood. “Mr. Poitier,” she greeted me.
“Hello, Ms. Feet,” I said with a remarkably straight face.
She sat. She was a bit flustered. “I can’t get over how much you look like Sidney Poitier. A young Sidney Poitier.”
“More every day, it seems,” I said.
“So, let me first say how pleased we are to discover your interest in Morehouse. It’s so rewarding to me personally to meet interesting people wanting to contribute to the education of talented black men.”
Her speech put me off a bit, and as she slickly spouted the words I realized that my scads of money gave me a considerable amount of power. A seemingly simple notion, but one that I had either been too stupid to acknowledge or too stubborn to accept. I cut right to the heart of the matter. “Ms. Feet, I am a high school dropout. I want to go to college, and I’m willing to buy my way in.”
“I see. Well … ”
I interrupted her. “Three hundred thousand toward anything you need, no questions, no strings. If I flunk out, the money is still yours. If I quit, the money is still yours. If I receive the stellar education you advertise, well, just remember that I have a lot more money.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Gladys Feet said.
“Say I’ll be admitted in the fall.” I was speaking with a confidence that I didn’t quite recognize and certainly didn’t feel was justified. I was somewhat saddened by the knowledge that the confidence derived from my wealth or, more precisely, the awareness of my wealth.
“I don’t have the power to … ”
“Three hundred and twenty-five thousand.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Gladys Feet left the table, and I ordered another cola. And as promised she was back quickly, a smile on her face, smoothing her skirt before she sat.
“Welcome to Morehouse,” she said.
“Just like that?”
“Done. Tell me, is your name really Not?”
“Not Sidney,” I corrected her.
“Not Sidney.”
“That’s what my mother named me.”
“It’s quite an interesting name.”
“If you say so.”
“No.” I answered quite definitely, but the fact of the matter is I was not quite definite; I did not know. I had no reason to suspect that Sidney Poitier was my father, but I also had no idea who my father was. I knew nothing about the man, whether he was a man or a basting syringe. Nothing. I’d asked my mother a couple of times during my short years with her about him, but her answers were either so vague and confusing as to be useless or no answer at all. Once after dinner, as we sat in front of the television watching an Adventures of Superman rerun, I asked, “Was my father handsome?”
She replied, “Some might say yes.”
“Was he smart?” I asked.
She stared at the television. “Why is it that after all the bullets have bounced off Superman’s chest, he then ducks when the villain throws the empty gun at him?”
I looked at the television and wondered, knowing also that my quest for some detail about my history had been again thwarted, albeit with a very good question. I never pressed terribly hard, thinking that someday the story would surface, but then she died.
I looked up to see Gladys Feet staring at my face.
“The resemblance is remarkable, uncanny,” she said. I believe she caught on that she was making me decidedly uncomfortable. She changed the subject. “So, what is it you plan to study?”
“I haven’t decided,” I said. “Psychology maybe or philosophy. I don’t know. I want an education, that’s pretty much it.” I sounded so much like a student. I liked it. “I don’t even know how I can decide what to study until I have that.”
“That’s a very clearheaded way to approach it,” she said.
“Don’t be patronizing,” I said. “I’m giving you money and that’s what matters to Morehouse. Perhaps I’ll get an education, perhaps not. That’s up to me. But don’t be patronizing.”
“I apologize.”
“You needn’t be sorry. It’s your job to be that way.”
“How old are you?” she asked in a way that suggested she was making a comment rather than looking for an answer.
“I’m eighteen years old. Nineteen, if you choose to count my extra year in the womb.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m eighteen,” I said.
She shook her head. “You seem wise beyond your years.”
She was being patronizing again, but I let it go. It was obvious she couldn’t help herself. I wondered if there was a name for her condition. She wasn’t exactly kissing my ass and she wasn’t exactly flirting with me, but with a little shove she’d have shit on her nose and I’d have a date. Perhaps she was not precisely doing anything. Perhaps each and every one of her moves and gestures was approximate. Perhaps she was smarter than I thought, smarter than me. After all, she was collecting three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars from me.
“May I ask you a question?”
I wanted to inform her that she just had, but I nodded instead.
“How much money do you have?”
“I don’t know. It changes daily. Hourly, I’m told.”
“I see.” She tugged at her collar as if a little hot.
“One other thing,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t want anyone to know about my gift to the school.”
“Okay. That’s a simple matter.”
Autumn approached with more heat than most of the summer had served up—nasty, humid, searing heat that made it impossible for one to remain dry. At least I couldn’t seem to remain anything but soaked with perspiration. It was September and I was a college student, a sweat-drenched college student, a fact that didn’t seem to matter as the first thing I learned was that I was as much of an outcast at the university as I had been in high school, only that here instead of beating and teasing me, they simply ignored me. I could have made my first day a little easier had I just once beforehand visited the campus. Then I might have at least had an inkling where one or two buildings might be, but no, I stayed away, reading and thinking. The latter activity, I was certain, would finally be my downfall. Downfall sounds a bit melodramatic or even vain, certainly romantic, as if I believed I occupied or expected to achieve some station, but the fact was I believed thinking or overthinking finally would not serve me well, if at all. Perhaps it’s not even thinking I’m talking about, but pondering or wondering or stewing or whatever the hell I’m doing right here.
I managed to register for all my classes, just as all the other freshmen so managed and, I assumed, without much less surprise than I. It was a complicated matter that might or might not have had a computer involved. My classes were what one would expect, predictable survey courses, composition, and a rudimentary introduction to calculus. I decided to try to get into an upper-division English course titled the Philosophy of Nonsense taught by some guy named Percival Everett. I needed his signature to add the course, and so I went to his office. I found his door open and before I tapped on the jamb to announce myself I saw that the room was lousy with sports equipment, basketballs, inflated and not, tennis and squash rackets, a hockey stick, a baseball bat, a baseball glove on his desk, and a pair of boxing gloves hanging on the wall between portrait drawings of James Joyce and Terry McMillan. There was a photograph of another man high on the wall above the others. I knocked.
“Come in and sit down,” Everett said, continuing to read Sporting News. “What do you need?”
“Your signature,” I told him. “I want to take your Nonsense course.”
“What year are you?” Still he didn’t look at me.
“I’m a freshman.”
“Anybody ever tell you that you look like Harry Belafonte?”
“Never.”
“I’m not surprised. Where’s your card?”
I pushed my blue card toward him, and he looked at me for the first time. “Nothing like Belafonte,” he said. He looked at my card. “Not Sidney?”
“That really is my name,” I said.
“Or else it wouldn’t be on the card,” he said. “I like it. Do you play golf? And I don’t mean miniature golf.”
“I never have.”
“Good. It’s a stupid game. A damn waste of water, keeping all that lawn alive and green. What about lunch? Do you eat lunch?”
“Occasionally.”
“Me, too. Come on, I’ll buy you some of what passes for food on this campus. What do people call you?”
“They seldom call me, but when they do, they call me Not Sidney.”
He looked at me. “That’s too bad.” Then he studied his desktop. “Tell me, do you see my glasses?”
“They’re on your head.” I pointed.
He nodded. “That’s a good place for them. Think I’ll leave them there. Come along, Mr. Poitier.”
“May I ask who that is a picture of?” I pointed.
“You may and you have,” he said. “That, Mr. Poitier, is Pinto Colvig, one of the great artists and thinkers of our time.”
“I don’t know his name.”
“You might know him by another name. He was the first Bozo the Clown. A genius. Oh, there were a lot of Bozos after him, but there will never be another Pinto Colvig. Even his son Vance was no Pinto. And that name. Pinto Colvig. What restraint it must have taken to not simply use his real name.”
Everett was shorter than me and walked with a slight limp, favoring his right leg, but he walked quickly, if not in a straight line. After the third time he grazed me with his shoulder, he said, “I’m a weaver. Can’t help it.”
“Did you hurt your leg playing sports?”
“Stepped in a gopher hole. A stupid thing to do. I wasn’t looking. Now, I always look. Of course I’m speaking metaphorically. Whatever that means.”
We found our way to the dining hall in the student center. We grabbed trays and collected food. I picked up a burger and fries while Everett filled a bowl with salad and another with cottage cheese. As we stood in line, he looked at my tray and his. “Ca
n you believe they have us pay for this shit?”
“It looks okay,” I said.
He nodded. “Maybe.”
We sat at a round table by the wall of windows and looked out at the passersby. He held a cherry tomato on the tines of his fork and then looked at me. “Are you a sheep, Mr. Poitier?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Most sheep don’t think they’re sheep. I wonder what they think they are. Pigeons, maybe.”
I ate a fry and looked out at the guys walking along.
“So, what makes you interested in my class?” he asked.
“Nonsense,” I said, flatly.
“Good.” He laughed. “Keep it that way. You do your part and I’ll do my part and all will be right in Mudville. Or Atlanta. Or maybe even Jonestown.”
“What will the class be like?” I asked.
“Who knows?” he said. “We’ll learn something, maybe. We’ll read some stuff, maybe a lot of stuff. What, I don’t know yet. You guys will do some presentations, I suppose. Bore each other and, sadly, me to sleep. Probably be some papers to write. Not long papers. I couldn’t take that. I’m not a detail person.” He finally ate the tomato from the end of his fork. “Are you living on campus?”
The question caught me off guard. For some reason it had never occurred to me that I might live at school. “I haven’t decided,” I said.
He didn’t pause. With his glass to his lips, he said, “Might want to make a decision on that one. The dorms fill up fast, I’m told. Don’t ask me why. They look like prisons.”
“Do you think it’s a good idea?”
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