Call Me by My Name

by John Ed Bradley

  Tater had started at cornerback and on special teams, and from what I could tell he’d played well, shutting down the receivers he was assigned to cover and forcing a fumble on a kickoff that we turned into six points. But he was quiet in the locker room and slow to dress. He seemed lost in the throes of trying to sort out some small torment. I knew something was wrong, and I worried that he’d witnessed my scene with Angie and taken exception. When I finished dressing I walked over to his locker.

  “What’s wrong now?” I asked.

  “It’s about what happened after the game.”

  I couldn’t blame him for being unhappy with me, and I was about to apologize when he said, “If you’re black, you can’t even be human and make a mistake. Your daddy gets beat up for it afterward.” He sprayed some deodorant under his arms and I stepped back to escape the cloud. “I don’t like Joey Pierre, you understand? He’s got a motor mouth, and he plays dirty. But that touchdown at the end? Louie beat him because Joey lost his footing and fell down. That could happen to anybody. But the fight after the game? Come on, man. What does that tell you?”

  What does that tell you? It was becoming his mantra. And while I didn’t have an answer, he probably didn’t have one either. For some reason I flashed to that day last summer when he vowed to exact revenge on that hoodlum Smooth for knocking me off my bike. “Blacks not only have to put up with what white people do to them,” he said. “They have to put up with what black people do. It ain’t fair any way you look at it.”

  “All right, Tater. I’ll grant you that. But maybe the fight was over something else. Maybe Joey’s dad owed the guy some money.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Or maybe they had a fender bender in the parking lot before the game. Joey getting burned was just an excuse for them to settle things.”

  I could tell he wasn’t buying it. The muscles in his jaw kept bunching up in knots, and he fought with his socks like they were the cause of his irritation.

  “I’m just saying you should consider the possibility that they might’ve fought even if Louie had been black,” I said. “It could’ve been over something else, without the . . .”

  He was smiling at me. “Without the what?”

  “Without the broader racial implications,” I said.

  The broader racial implications? The words sounded strange to me too, and I wasn’t sure where they’d come from, but at least I’d succeeded in getting him to lighten up. He began to laugh. “You’re a sophomore in high school, Rodney. Who taught you how to talk like that? You sound like Dead Eye Dud.” Dead Eye Dud—Mr. Dudley to everybody else—was a biology teacher at school.

  “It just came out,” I said. “When you’re smart like me, smart things just pour out of your mouth even when you’re not trying.”

  “No wonder you’re in the top group,” he answered.

  Some seasons you want to put in a shoe box and hide in the closet, up high on a shelf where even an extension ladder can’t reach. If the closet has a burned-out bulb in the light socket, so much the better. We lost every game that year, the one to New Iberia by sixty-three points, another to Franklin by forty-two. Tater and I played enough to letter, but neither of us could beat out the guys ahead of us on the depth chart.

  After the last game Coach Cadet met privately with each of his returning players. That came to almost fifty meetings, spread out over two weeks. In his office a large panel of florescent lights was humming overhead. I sat in a plastic form chair in front of his desk.

  “You were our best offensive lineman by far, Rodney,” he said, “and I regret not sitting Tommy.” He meant Tom Smith, the senior who’d started every game ahead of me.

  “I like Tom, Coach. I voted for him for team captain. And I’m not sure I was any better than he was.”

  “Yes, you are too sure,” he said. “And so was everybody else. But the kid was a good leader and a positive influence, and I couldn’t break his heart by putting him on the bench when it was his last year here and you have two more to play.”

  “I understand, Coach.”

  “We learned some hard truths this year, didn’t we, Rodney? Losing humbles the proud, and I needed humbling. I can tell you I won’t have much of a future at this school if we continue to operate the way we have. We can’t win if I’m playing favorites and not starting my best people. And we can’t win if I’m playing them out of position.”

  I wondered if he was saying he planned to move me to a different spot on the line. But then he said, “Take Rubin Lazarus. Why didn’t I let him play middle linebacker? Lord knows he’s got all the tools for the position. And what about your boy Tater? He said he was a quarterback, but I didn’t give him a chance to prove it. That was wrong. Don’t tell him anything just yet, but come spring I’m going to let him have a try. I’ll catch hell for it, playing a black boy at quarterback, but I’m a fifty-three-year-old man. I can take it.” He leaned forward and his whistle clanked against his metal desk. “No matter what people say—and I’m talking about white people now—blacks are the exact same as we are, Rodney. That’s the main thing I learned from this god-awful year. When you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning and start asking if you’re a racist, that’s when you know you are one.”

  I was a little uncomfortable hearing him talk like that. He wasn’t my teammate or classmate or friend. He was my coach. “I never took you as having it against the blacks, Coach. And I don’t think any of the black guys on the team did either.”

  “We might lose next year, but it won’t be because I beat us. It’ll be because the team on the other side of the ball beat us.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What do you get when you pour Jell-O into a Jell-O mold, Rodney? You get Jell-O, don’t you? Then what do you get when you pour hate?”

  “Hate?”

  “That’s right. And that’s what they poured into me.”

  I thought I knew what he was talking about, and a picture of Pops popped in my head. He was sitting by the air conditioner with his paper, socks folded over and black wiry hair standing out against the white of his ankles.

  “Things will be different from here on out, son. If I expect to be a better coach I have got to be a better man. That’s all for now, Rodney. Here, shake my hand. It’s been a pleasure.”

  I always loved how sports gave you the chance to start all over again with each new season. Baseball ended and football began. Football ended and basketball took its place. Basketball dovetailed into track and track into baseball. You recovered from the loss of one by moving forward to the beginning of another.

  That winter Tater and I played basketball, then we ran track, or he ran track while I threw the shot and discus. In March baseball started, and we both went out for the team. There was one day when we had a baseball game on the same day that we had a track meet, both at our home fields behind the school. Tater and I changed out of our baseball uniforms in the dugout and ran over to the track stadium in time to win medals and score points. We played these sports trying always to win, but none meant as much to us as football. Football was everything.

  When the baseball season ended, Coach Cadet conducted two weeks of spring practice for his football team before school let out for the summer. Most of the workouts featured man-on-man drills that let the coaches evaluate talent and make roster decisions for the upcoming year. It was the time when players won jobs, and it was when they lost them. It was also the time when guys you’d never paid much attention to suddenly announced their potential, and it was when some you thought you could count on faded into the shadows.

  Our first workout hadn’t even started when Curly Trussell let everybody know he had the strongest arm on the team. He did this by kneeling on the goal line and chucking passes deep. By now he was able to cover about forty yards, a distance that many a high school quarterback would’ve been proud to claim even from an upright
position. After each pass Curly hopped to his feet, did an obnoxious dance in the end zone, then pointed to his flexed right bicep to show what a stud he was.

  A few other players tried throwing from a knee, but none got the ball far downfield. I even took a turn and managed only twenty yards, my pass wobbling off course and prompting some of the guys to flap around like ducks that had just taken bellies full of buckshot. Then Tater gave it a try. Right knee planted in the sod, he pointed to T-Boy Bertrand and said, “Go long.” T-Boy took off sprinting hard and glanced back for the ball after about thirty yards. “Longer,” Tater said, then waited until T-Boy had crossed the 40-yard-line before letting the pass go. His motion and delivery were perfect, the way he brought the ball up high at the point of his shoulder and released it from the top of his throwing arc. The ball sailed in a clean spiral that T-Boy caught over his shoulder without breaking stride. It had traveled fifty-one yards.

  We all knew Tater oozed athleticism, but I was as shocked by his arm strength as everyone else. Rather than maul him as the other guys were doing, I ran over to Curly, made a muscle with my arm, and pointed to it. Had anybody else mocked him this way I’m sure there’d have been a problem (“Yeah, like blood spilled,” Tater said later, when I told him what I’d done), but Curly knew better than to challenge me. I now stood six-foot-five and weighed two hundred and seventy pounds, and I could drive the five-man blocking sled from one side of the field to the other all by myself.

  The throw gave Coach Cadet a chance to redeem himself for how he’d treated Tater last season. It also gave him a chance to make history, at least in our small part of the world. “You know something?” he said. “You really are a quarterback.”

  Everybody went silent for a moment, and then a chorus of cheers came up. Coach waited until things quieted down to call over the equipment manger. He instructed him to swap Tater’s jersey with the number 28 for one with the number 11. “We still need you on defense,” Coach said, “but I want you to get some work at quarterback, too.”

  You could see Tater’s Adam’s apple rise and fall in his neck. “Yes, sir.”

  “So you’re a quarterback now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Say it, son. Say it to me and to your teammates. Let us hear it.”

  “I’m a quarterback.”

  “You’re a quarterback.”

  “I’m a quarterback!” Tater shouted.

  Curly might’ve had the arm, but he struggled with the playbook and out on the field he couldn’t tell zone from man coverage. At the start of two-a-days that August he reported to the locker room in the morning with his clothes reeking of cigarette smoke, and one day he showed up stinking of marijuana. Coach Cadet called a team meeting and lectured us again about the differences between team players and turds, and all the while he stared at Curly, who sat slumped forward in his chair fighting off sleep and his eyes half closed. We all knew that Curly came from a rough home. Still, that was no excuse. He was one of us now, and we expected better.

  Coach named senior Orville Jagneaux the starter, and he slotted Curly, the better talent by a mile, at number two. Tater was third team. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” I told him as we stood at the equipment cage, inspecting the depth chart.

  I was wrong to think he needed encouragement. “See that person? See him?” He pointed to his name next to the number 3. “It won’t be long before he’s here.” And now he tapped the top spot on the chart. “It’s meant to be, Rodney.”

  Later that day, during the break between the morning and afternoon practices, I went to a sporting goods store in town and ordered T-shirts for every player on the offensive line. I had the store add the word “Bigfoot” in bold letters across the front of each shirt. The season was about to start, and I thought the shirts might help bring us closer together. The order was ready in a couple of days, and I paid for it with money I’d saved from selling pecans. I handed out the shirts before our noon position meetings. One of the guys had quit that morning, so there was a shirt left over. I gave it to Tater. “You’re no Sasquatch,” I told him, “but you’re definitely one of us.”

  Tater wore it under his shoulder pads that day, and he would wear it at every practice and game for the rest of his career at the school. On those days when it got dirty or soaked with sweat, he washed it in a sink in the big bathroom where we showered. Using a small wire hand brush and a bar of Lava soap, he scrubbed it clean, then let it dry on a wire hanger at his locker.

  Despite the T-shirts, and despite our honest effort to reverse a culture of losing at the school, the new season didn’t start out well. Tater and I were juniors now, but it looked like a repeat of the year before. It’s hard to say exactly why our team was so bad, but we never seemed to enter a game expecting to win, an attitude that our opponents made sure to exploit week after week.

  Tater played cornerback and special teams, and each day at practice Coach had him quarterback the scout squad against the first-team defense. He showed potential running the option, but he was prone to mental errors that came from lack of experience. He was best when he tucked the ball and ran with it, and he could make all the throws, but everything about his game had an impromptu feel, like an actor making up dialogue when he forgot his lines. He looked confused and impatient as he set up in the pocket and let the ball fly, often to players for the wrong side.

  I once asked our offensive coordinator, Bubba Valentine, why he and Coach Cadet never let Tater play quarterback in games. We were losing every week and what harm could be done?

  “He needs to learn the offense better,” Coach Valentine said. “And we need to be careful not to throw him to the wolves too soon. Some people will want to see him fail for the obvious reason. We can’t let that happen.”

  “But he might not fail, Coach.”

  “Right. And that could also be a problem.”

  We played our games on Friday night, which made our Thursday practice the lightest of the week. After classes let out at three o’clock Coach Cadet convened a brief team meeting in the locker room, then we went out to the practice field for a walk-through. This amounted to both the offense and defense, dressed in gym clothes and helmets, stepping through assignments in preparation for the game the next day. I’d been starting since the Jamboree, and every Thursday without fail Coach Cadet called me into his office and handed over a film projector and spools of game tape for me to take home and watch overnight. The film showed our next opponent’s game from the week before, and I studied it with a particular focus on the players I’d be facing, with the aim of learning their strengths and weaknesses and finding a way to get the better of them. Tired of his blunders at practice, Tater asked me if he could attend my home film sessions, and I went to Mama for permission.

  “It’s perfectly fine with me,” she said. “Your friends are always welcome, you know that. But you should clear it with your father first, just to make sure there are no misunderstandings.”

  I caught him outside in the garden, after he’d had a rare good day of sleep. The tomato season was past, and he was chopping down the plants and folding rabbit manure into the soil.

  “Don’t you have any white teammates you could invite over?” he asked.

  “It’s Tater, Pops.”

  “I know who it is. But he’s still a black, ain’t he?”

  “You can’t possibly know how you sound.”

  He dropped more pellets onto the ground. “The neighbors won’t like it, and it’s not the example I want to be setting for you and your sister. But yeah, Rodney, he can come. He can even come in through the front door.”

  He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but all I did was stare at him.

  “Your old man,” he said at last, “he’s not so bad, now, is he?”

  We set up the projector in my bedroom and played the film on an old bedsheet I’d hung from the wall with thumbtacks. We kept the
door closed and the lights off and took turns with the clicker, watching plays over and over again. All the while we communicated with each other in the peculiar language of football:

  “Look at Willie, Tater. See how far off the ball he is. He wants you to think he’s going to drop back in protection, but he’s really got Three Gap. Now check out Mike. Mike’s going to fill the hole as soon as the center blocks down. Okay, now where is Sam? Tell me.”

  “Sam’s head-up on the tight end.”

  “And what’s the coverage?”

  “Man.”

  “And what should work here?”

  “Play action? Maybe a draw, depending on down and distance.”

  “What else?”

  “Send the split end deep and pull Willie with him, then quick-pitch to the weak side. Or fake the pitch and tuck it and run.”

  Willie, Sam, and Mike weren’t the names of players on the defense. They were the three linebacker positions. The first letters of their names represented how they lined up against our offensive formation—weak side, strong side, and middle.

  After a couple of hours Mama came to the door and shoved it open a crack. “Halftime,” she said, and the smell of supper pushed in and found us like a hammer blow. Behind her Angie was holding a tray loaded with food. One night it was shrimp étouffée; another it was overstuffed catfish and oyster po’boys and sweet potato fries. We didn’t eat at the kitchen table because Pops wouldn’t let us, but I was willing to give him that much as long as he didn’t stop Tater’s visits.

  Tater and I lunged for the food before Angie could put the tray down. Some days Angie and Mama stood at the door, watching us with equal parts awe and admiration.