“We cook for hours, and then it’s gone in minutes,” Mama said.
“Minutes? Seconds, more like,” Angie said.
“You should open a restaurant, Mrs. Boulet,” Tater told her after every meal.
Then Mama had her chance to say: “Thank you, sweetheart. Make sure you take a plate home to Miss Nettie, you hear?”
It never occurred to Tater and me that we should’ve been eating lighter meals on nights before games. We cared only about filling our guts with what tasted good, and we weren’t discriminating in this pursuit.
The night before we played Morgan City, Angie brought in a ceramic vase along with supper, and sticking up from it were hand-painted cutouts of flowers. She’d made them with construction paper and decorated them with beads and baubles from old Mardi Gras throws. She’d then manipulated the flowers into forms that gave them a three-dimensional effect.
“Are these peonies?” Tater asked.
“Yes, they are peonies. One bunch is for you, Tater, and the other is for Rodney.”
“How do you know about peonies?” I asked him.
The question seemed to embarrass him. “I guess from paying attention.”
A guy who knew the names of flowers? I couldn’t fathom it.
Later that night, after I’d given Tater a ride home in the Cameo and I was winding down before bed, I picked up a flowery scent that I hadn’t noticed before. Tater had taken his bunch with him, and mine alone stood now in Angie’s little ceramic vase. I brought my face down and inhaled. Sure enough, she’d sprayed perfume on the construction paper and made it smell like something from the garden.
Peonies, I supposed.
That was Angie for you.
At night, when he was tired and in a bad mood, Pops would ask Angie and me how the experiment was going. His cynicism didn’t merit an answer, but we gave him a couple, anyway.
“Great,” Angie said.
“Very well,” I replied.
But the truth was quite a bit different. Most of the white students hadn’t let themselves get to know the black kids, and the same could be said of many of the black kids—they had few white friends.
I’d hoped that white students at the new private schools in town would be returning in droves after reconsidering their decisions to break from the public system, but this wasn’t happening. Instead whites continued to transfer out of our school. And now there were more black students than white ones; the 50–50 split had become a 60–40 split. When you walked down the halls between classes, you understood which group was the true minority.
“They’re everywhere,” I heard Freddie Sanders complain one day. “You can’t even have lunch without one of them coming over and trying to sit at your table.”
“Shut up,” I told him.
My priority was the football team, so I mourned the siphoning of talent. Add players from the other schools in town and we likely would’ve had a dominant football program. Instead we had the smallest enrollment in our district. We also were its biggest loser.
One night after practice I returned home and found Pops sitting at the kitchen table with the local paper spread out in front of him. He pointed. “Read this first, then you can eat,” he said. “Mama, get Rodney a glass of water.”
It was a story about a lawsuit filed against the school board by one of our assistant basketball coaches, Joshua Dupre, a black man. His complaint said that the basketball team counted sixteen players, all but four of them black, and yet it had a white head coach, Robbie Brown, who’d unfairly been named to the position by the board. Furthermore, Coach Dupre said he’d been a successful head coach at J. S. Clark for nearly twenty years, while his twenty-five-year-old boss had only four years of coaching experience.
The year before, I’d played for these coaches and thought they liked each other. At practice and in games, Coach Dupre had seemed dedicated to Coach Brown and content in his subordinate role. But all along, I understood now, Coach Dupre had believed he deserved to be in charge and would’ve been if not for his race.
After I finished reading the story, Pops rapped his knuckles against the table. “It took us two hundred and fifty some-odd years to get to this point and now they want it all overnight,” he said.
“But you can understand why, can’t you?” I told him. “Wouldn’t you want it overnight if you had to wait that long?”
He shook his head. “Good lord, boy, whose side are you on?”
At school our classes were now called advanced instead of top group, and they still were mostly white, even though they included more college-bound black kids. Beginning with homeroom, Tater had the same schedule as Angie and me. We always sat on the last row of desks on the right side of the room—Angie first then Tater and me behind her, in that order. Patrice Jolivette, peeking her head in the door one day, laughed and said we looked like an “ass-backward Oreo cookie.”
The legend of Tater Henry began when we played New Iberia at Donald Gardner Stadium before a crowd of a few hundred, mostly visiting fans. It was cold that Halloween Eve night, and we were 1–7 on the year, the second worst team in the district and only one win better than Lafayette Northside, which we’d needed an overtime miracle to beat.
Our team colors were the colors of the season, and Angie and Patrice and the other cheerleaders decorated the stadium with plastic jack-o’-lanterns, Spanish moss from nearby trees, fake spiderwebs made with yarn, and large cardboard cutouts showing spooked cats with spines raised. Hand-painted posters and banners rimmed the playing field: SENIOR GIRLS SAY GEAUX TIGERS, BOO TO THE YELLOW JACKETS, and my favorite, GOD BLESS THE BIGFEET.
The game had not been going well when Orville Jagneaux, setting up to pass on our 30-yard-line, went down late in the second quarter with a knee injury. Curly Trussell should’ve entered the game as Orville’s replacement, but Coach Cadet had suspended him from the team the day before when a hall monitor caught him lighting up in a men’s room. “Number 11!” I heard Coach shouting from where I stood out on the field, keeping vigil over Orville. “Get your hat on, number 11. It’s your turn, son. Let’s go.”
The crowd was oblivious to the moment, but I knew what it meant. Unless you were looking for him, it would’ve been hard to tell that our new quarterback was black. Tater barely showed a patch of skin under the white socks that met his pants at the knee and the bands and pads that covered his arms. Orville went off the field on a stretcher, as Tater entered it at a hard sprint, helmet on, chin strap buckled tight.
“As metaphors go,” Angie would tell me later that night, “this was one for the ages.”
New Iberia, loaded with future college talent, was already three touchdowns ahead. At this rate they were going to beat us 42–0, but I’d have taken that; we were playing so poorly. I kept checking the scoreboard and wishing the clock would speed up. When Tater stepped into the huddle, I wondered how he’d been spending his time. He’d been out with the defense and special teams, but he couldn’t have been paying attention to other aspects of the game. Otherwise he’d have known that the offense hadn’t been able to move the ball past midfield.
“We’re going to win this thing, okay?” he said in a calm voice, showing not a trace of doubt. “Twenty-one points ain’t jack.”
Our senior players should’ve laughed him off the field, but Tater spoke with the kind of conviction that didn’t allow for doubt.
“Wayland, Glynn, Eugene. Lemuel. Rodney. Give me the best you’ve got, and I swear to God we’ll beat these suckers.”
His first play behind center, signaled in by Coach Valentine from the sideline, was a simple rollout to the right, or strong side, where T-Boy Bertrand was lined up. T-Boy was the rare tight end who was as adept as a blocker at the point of attack as he was as a receiver running complicated routes. His assignment now was to shed the defensive end and to run a down-and-out, or sideline pattern, which meant he was ex
pected to sprint ten yards down the field before breaking hard to his right for the sideline. T-Boy was Tater’s primary receiver. His secondary receiver was Louie Boudreaux, the split end whose job was to run straight up the field and pull the coverage with him, giving T-Boy more space to get open. But of course New Iberia was all over it, as they’d been all over everything else we’d tried tonight.
Tater took the snap and moved to his right parallel to the line of scrimmage and about three yards deep. New Iberia’s defensive end chipped T-Boy with a forearm and knocked him off balance, then its Sam linebacker closed in fast, nullifying T-Boy as an option. At the same time their best cornerback was running stride for stride with Louie, removing him as a possible target as well. Nobody was open, so Tater’s only choice now was to run the ball. In the same situation Orville would’ve been lucky to get back to the line of scrimmage, and Curly would’ve thrown the ball away. But Tater put a move on the end that left him grabbing air, then he hurdled over the Mike linebacker, who’d come charging hard with his head down. Tater stumbled forward for a few yards before dropping a hand to the ground to right himself, then he found a seam that led him along a diagonal path to the end zone.
The play developed so quickly that I was still blocking when the crowd noise reached me.
Watching the game film with the team the next day, Coach Cadet used the clock on the locker room wall to time how long it took Tater to score from the instant he abandoned the pass and started to run. Even with the moves he made, he’d covered a distance of seventy yards in nine seconds.
“That’s movin’, boys,” Coach Cadet said to applause, even as Tater sat expressionless in the middle of us.
The run ended and he crossed the goal line and dropped to a knee, ball still gripped in his arm as a silent prayer issued from his lips. Miss Nettie had raised Tater a devout Baptist, and he kissed his clenched fist and pointed to the sky before hopping back to his feet and tossing the ball to the nearest official.
There was bedlam in the stadium. I spotted Angie running up the sideline, chasing after Tater along with Patrice and the other cheerleaders. Then I located Mama and Pops high in the seats. She was standing and cheering with all the other home fans—all of them but Pops, I should say. He was sitting with his chin in his hand, like someone who’d just been awakened from a nap and didn’t appreciate it.
Tater scored three more touchdowns in the second half—one with his legs, the other two with his arm—but our defense still couldn’t stop them and we lost despite his heroics. The stadium usually cleared out quickly, with only a few sympathetic parents waiting for us outside the dressing room, but tonight several dozen people were there, all of them anxious to see Tater out of uniform.
I was walking directly in front of him, and I felt their weight as they closed in. He reached a hand out and grabbed my shoulder, and the commotion grew louder as we pressed forward. We eventually made it past the ticket gate and reached the place where Mama and Pops were waiting by the bus that would take the team back to school. It’s a peculiar thing to hear people cheer for you after you’ve lost, but it had been that kind of night. I noticed a clutch of New Iberia’s fans, dressed in yellow and black. They’d stuck around for their own look at Tater with his helmet off.
Pops wasn’t impressed to see us, but Mama hugged us both even though our jerseys were soaked with sweat.
“Where’s Miss Nettie tonight?” she asked Tater.
“She had to work.”
“On Friday night?”
“She babysits when Mr. and Mrs. Miller have to go somewhere.”
“But we sat not far from the Millers in the stadium tonight.”
Tater didn’t answer. The Millers had the pleasure of watching their no-talent son Marco sit on his helmet on the sideline the entire evening, while the sole guardian of the game’s star player was assigned to caring for the rest of their snotty-nosed kids.
We’d almost reached the bus when Angie arrived. She wrapped her arms around me first and had to wait for Patrice to untangle herself from Tater before she could congratulate him. Black girls had never registered with me until I was forced to go to school with them, but now whenever I saw Patrice and she cast her big green eyes upon me, I lapsed into silence and nervous trembling. She was “black black,” as Pops would say, and yet she spoke with the heavy local patois, which would suggest she came up in a Cajun home. Cajuns were white people, and this was another revelation about attending school with Louisiana’s black kids that I never could’ve anticipated: Many of them had accents as stubbornly French as my own.
I might’ve found Patrice bewitching, but there was no way, even without Tater in the picture, that I could ever have asked her out. And there was no way she could’ve accepted, had I been able to. The integration of public schools might’ve been old news by now, but the line drawn between us was still as wide and as deep as a wartime trench, and there were consequences if you tried to cross it. I knew of no interracial couples at school, and I definitely wasn’t man enough to partner in the first one.
The coaches let the cheerleaders ride with us on the bus back to campus, and Patrice, pretending to be unable to find a place to sit, perched herself on Tater’s padded knee. Angie stood in the aisle. “Baby, you did so good,” Patrice kept saying.
“Got to give credit where credit is due,” Tater said.
“Is that you, Rodney?” Patrice asked.
“Big Rod blew me some holes open tonight,” Tater said. “Holes as wide across as this bus.”
“Way to go, Rodney,” Patrice said. We looked at each other, though not for long.
Friday was by far the best night of the week, especially when we played at home. In the locker room at school we showered and changed back into street clothes, then we piled into cars and pickups and drove as a herd to the Little Chef on West Landry Street. Angie and the other girls pumped coins into the jukebox outside on the covered patio, and we listened to the Kinks and Mungo Jerry and had Cokes and pizzaburgers, the house specialty. The white players did these things, anyway. Until New Iberia, when Tater accepted an invitation from one of the senior white players to join us, none of my black teammates had ever made an appearance at our postgame party.
Tater sat on the tailgate of Wayland Broussard’s pickup truck and ate a basket of fried chicken fingers, compliments of T-Boy Bertrand. When Tater finished the chicken, somebody else gave him a jumbo hot dog buried under a mound of shredded cheese. He ate that, and then they brought him a paper boat holding corn chips with stewed ground meat and yet more cheese on top. I’d gone to the Little Chef after every game and I’d never been given free food.
“You keep playing like you did tonight,” I told him, “and they’re going to make you fat as a walrus.”
“Then I won’t be running past anybody, will I?”
“No, you won’t.”
“Then I should stop this minute.” And he stuffed more food in his mouth.
The crowd started to thin. We hung around watching Angie dance with some of her girlfriends.
On other Fridays after games, she had sought me out and asked me to join her, and I’d always politely declined. But she didn’t come looking for me tonight.
I wondered if it was because she didn’t want to feel compelled to ask Tater to dance once I turned her down. She would’ve been sensitive to his feelings, and I was sure she wouldn’t have wanted to hurt her reputation, besides.
The party ended at midnight when the restaurant stopped serving, then the stragglers headed home. Mama usually had food waiting for Angie and me on the stove, but as a rule she didn’t come out of her room unless we knocked on the door and asked for her. She understood that it was the only time during the week that Angie and I had alone together, and she knew how important those hours were to us. After cleaning the dishes, Angie and I moved to the living room where we could talk louder and more freely without fear of waking Ma
ma. Still wearing her cheerleader uniform, Angie played records on the hi-fi with the volume turned down low, and we listened in the darkness while sprawled out on our backs on the oval-shaped rug that covered the floor. Angie was partial to R & B and singers like Al Green and Marvin Gaye, and I would have to commandeer the needle to hear any of my favorites, which tended to be bands like the Bee Gees, Rare Earth, and Three Dog Night.
We stayed up as late as our bodies let us, then fell asleep on the floor. Pops returned home at seven thirty, reeking of sweat and bean oil, his eyes red from the long night at the plant. He was carrying a bag of doughnuts and a copy of a Baton Rouge newspaper. He sat at the kitchen table and turned to the sports section. A STAR IS BORN, read a headline prominently placed above the fold. BLACK QB EXCITES IN DEFEAT.
It wasn’t every day you saw a picture of a black amateur on the section’s front page, but this one showed Tater making a move on some hapless defender on his way to the end zone.
“I can’t believe this,” Pops said, flicking a finger against the photo. “I mean the picture itself—a colored boy, and he’s not even from Baton Rouge. You never saw this when I was growing up. Everybody would’ve canceled their subscriptions.”
“Can we show it to him?” Angie asked.
“Tater?”
She nodded. “He couldn’t have done it without Rodney and his offensive line—I heard him say it.”
“I tell you right now, that boy would be nothing without Rodney.”
“It’s true. But we’re still proud of him, Pops. And Miss Nettie’s such a nice person. They deserve this. Don’t you think so?”
He poured a cup of coffee and stood drinking it at the sink. He looked at us suddenly. “That part of town is dangerous, especially for a white girl.”
“No place is dangerous if I’m with Rodney,” Angie said.
“How’re y’all planning to get there? Ride your bikes again?”
It was a while before Angie or I said anything. “In the Cameo if you’ll give us the keys,” I whispered.
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