Call Me by My Name

by John Ed Bradley

“Why haven’t I ever heard of him?”

  “Because he went to Clark, son, and nobody who’s white cared what went on over there. The newspaper didn’t even cover them.”

  He returned the document to the file and started playing with the rubber band again. “Crazy turd. It’s coming back to me now. Robert goes missing the week before the biggest game in the school’s history, and the principal finally calls the cops to help find him. They find him, all right. He’s holed up in a vacant house, and so high on marijuana he can’t even tell them his name.” Merry-ja-wanna, Coach said it. “What a waste of a human life. They say he was smooth.”

  “Smooth, Coach?”

  He seemed to be trying to remember something else. “That’s right,” he said. “And everybody called him that.”

  The next weekend Angie got word that she’d won a blue ribbon for an oil painting she’d entered in the Yambilee’s arts-and-crafts competition. It was a large canvas done in oils showing Mama’s dresses thrown on top of a chair. Up close it looked like a jumbled abstract, but as you stepped back you could make out the colors, patterns, and textures of the outfits, and a picture revealed itself. Angie called it All Kinds and Pops made a frame for it out of scrap boards he kept under the house. The prize was for her age group, but she’d also been named first runner-up for Best in Show.

  Angie had been reluctant to enter the competition. “It’s incendiary,” she’d said of her painting. “I hope people don’t think I’m a communist.”

  I thought I understood what she was trying to say in the picture, but Mama and Pops didn’t seem to. All Kinds to them simply meant all kinds of dresses.

  “I wish I had the energy to pick up more,” Mama said.

  “Me? I wish we could afford help,” Pops said. He winked at Angie. “See there, baby? You really got us thinking. That’s what art can do.”

  The weekend turned out to be a time of recognition and honor for me as well. My first year as a starter on the football team had begun with a long string of defeats but ended on a positive note when the league’s coaches named me first-team all-district in a unanimous vote. I received the news in a phone call from Coach Cadet.

  “You keep working hard and putting the time in, and you’ll be one of the all-time greats before it’s over,” he said.

  Tater had played in only two games, but they were enough to earn him a spot among the league’s honorable mentions. The quarterbacks who were named to the first and second teams had both received scholarships to play major-college ball. While it was true that their passing and rushing totals for the season were twice as high as Tater’s, it was also true that they’d played in eight more games.

  On Saturday, Pops let Angie and me borrow the Cameo, and we drove straight to the Yambilee grounds for a look at her painting. It was on display in the Yamatorium, a cavernous World War II–era Quonset hut with a metal bas-relief over the front door showing a sweet potato with a happy face. The festival featured various competitions along with the art show, including the Yambilee Queen beauty pageant and contests for the best-looking yams. There was also a category for most unique yam, which honored the potato that best resembled an animal or human being. One recent winner bore an uncanny likeness to Richard Nixon, and a picture of it ran in the local paper alongside a photo of the president.

  We found All Kinds hanging from a Peg-Board right as you entered the building. Two ribbons hung from its weathered cypress frame, a blue one and a red one. Next to it was the painting that had won Best in Show—a brightly colored acrylic depicting sweet potatoes spilling from a crate.

  Angie posed with All Kinds, and I snapped some pictures with the family Instamatic. Then I stood in front, and she aimed the camera at me, chest blown up big in a demonstration of pride.

  Next we gave the camera to a man we knew from church, and he photographed us standing on either side of the picture.

  “You should’ve won two blues,” I said. “Yours is way better than the one with the potatoes.”

  “Art is so subjective,” she said.

  “But it’s clear to me, Ang. Clear as day. The one of the potatoes is propaganda. Yours is profound and challenging. It’s unfair you didn’t win, and anybody with a pair of eyes can see it.”

  “The most beautiful thing in the world to one person is sometimes the least appealing to another,” she declared. Then she glanced at me and shrugged. “To be honest, I don’t like finishing second to those potatoes either. But I didn’t paint All Kinds for everybody else. I painted it for me.”

  The Yambilee also had a fair with amusement rides like bumper cars and a Ferris wheel and carnival games where you basically depleted your life savings trying to win a stuffed animal. I played a lot of Skee-Ball after Angie and I first left the Yamatorium, but it was the ring toss that obsessed me. This was the game where for a dollar you threw three small rings at sticks standing up on a platform. The goal was to get the rings to fall over the top of the sticks and to slide down to the bottom, making you a winner. But all of my rings, which really were plastic napkin holders, bounced off the finials decorating the canes and clattered to the ground. I’d already gone through twelve bucks when Angie pulled me away, and as we spun into the midway I nearly bumped into Tater.

  “Your brother’s a bigger fool than I thought,” he said to Angie.

  I was surprised to see him. Blacks usually waited until Sunday to go to the fair. Whites pretty much had it to themselves on Friday and Saturday.

  “I really wanted a cane,” I told him.

  “Then go to Low’s and buy one. They can’t cost more than a quarter.”

  “But I wanted to win one,” I said. “Anybody can buy one.”

  He was wearing a strange mix of clothes—equal parts cowboy and soul brother. His shirt was a silk number printed with a Day-Glo tropical pattern, but his pants were old straight-leg Levi’s bleached almost white. He had on his TATER HENRY belt and his feed-store cap, and his shoes were black patent-leather platforms polished to a mirror finish. It was a fashion statement that revealed what an idiot he was about fashion.

  “I went and saw your painting a minute ago,” he said to Angie. “I bet it feels good, winning those ribbons. I’m proud of you, Angie.”

  “Thank you, Tater. You’re sweet to say so.”

  He seemed to be trying to remember the rest of what he’d planned to tell her. “I like the palette. And you built up the paint surface real good. I bet you got three whole tubes of paint squeezed out on that surface. You know what they call that in Italy, don’t you?”

  “Impasto?” she asked, pretending not to be sure.

  He smiled. “Sounds like that other name for noodles, doesn’t it?”

  They wouldn’t let me try again for a cane, so we cruised the length of the midway to where a dilapidated mobile home stood back a ways in the weeds with a sign on a door that said HAUNTED HOUSE. We walked through it in our usual formation, that being an “ass-backward Oreo cookie,” and screamed bloody murder at the petrified cat and glow-in-the-dark skulls and skeletons. Then we groused about how unscary it was when we realized we’d reached the end.

  Angie wanted to ride the Ferris wheel, so we joined the line and waited until it was our turn to be seated. Because of the ride’s popularity, the woman taking tickets made sure every passenger car was filled. She sat two people in each one. “You three together?” the woman asked.

  Tater nodded.

  “Then you two boys take that car there”—she pointed to the one—“and I’ll put you next to this little lady here.” She pulled Angie toward a car already holding a passenger.

  The woman had mixed up the order to make sure Angie and Tater weren’t seated together. I might’ve complained had I been able to put into words what bothered me. Until Tater came along, I would’ve thought she was doing the right thing.

  I watched the operator hit the switch, and we jerked upw
ard, a gray burn cloud rising up from the motor and with it the smell of oil. “Something’s been bugging me all week,” I said as we climbed. “I need to talk to you about it.”

  “Just so long as it’s not about my mother,” he said.

  “You should’ve told me she was still alive, Tater.”

  “I never told you she wasn’t.”

  “You gave me that impression.”

  “I didn’t give you that at all. You went and got it yourself somehow. I never told you anything about her.”

  “Same goes for Robert Battier, too, huh?”

  He had no defense. He shook his head but didn’t say anything.

  It was dark now and from the top of the turn I could see the Eunice Highway and the headlights of cars backed up and waiting to enter the Yamatorium parking lot. I could see the fields bordered by man-made canals dredged for irrigation and overgrown now with blackberry brambles. Off in the distance, a movie was playing on the outdoor screen at the Yam Drive-In. Up in the sky, lights beat on the wings of a plane, and I wondered what passengers inside saw when they looked down at us. I had never flown in a plane before, had never left the state, had never traveled beyond the places I was instructed to go. Did they see only a scattering of color on the prairie? Or could they see enough to make out individual people, like Tater and Angie and me floating in circles?

  “We must look like little baby ants to them,” I said, “our lives no more important.”

  But Tater didn’t seem interested. Something else had occupied his mind. He barely smiled.

  “Where’d you learn so much about painting, anyway?” I asked. “Palette and paint surface and pasta primavera and all that?”

  “Book at the house.”

  “You actually read an art book? Who does that?”

  “I wanted to be able to talk to Angie about her pictures. I know how much they mean to her.”

  We had a crossbar keeping us pinned in our seats, but he was able to slip out of it and stand up. The wheel climbed to the top of its second rotation, and he put a hand on either side of his mouth and yelled as loudly as he could. It wasn’t a yell that said anything, and it probably got lost on the ground to the roar of the wheel’s motor, but Angie heard it, and she stood up and started yelling along with him.

  I’d have joined them had I been small enough to squeeze from under the crossbar.

  Mama had put our curfew at eight o’clock, but by seven we’d hit all the rides, tried all the games, eaten everything that looked good, and spent all our money. We returned to the Yamatorium for one last look at All Kinds, and this time I had Tater stand with Angie in front of the painting. She and I had posed on either side, but they stood next to each other in front of it. Their eyes weren’t on the camera, and they weren’t on the painting behind them. Instead they looked at each other.

  He accepted our offer of a lift home but insisted on riding in back. He pulled his cap down even lower on his head, then he sat leaning against the bulkhead, legs extended, ankles crossed. I steered the Cameo toward the highway, and Angie reached over and touched me on the arm.

  “Stop, Rodney. I want to get out.”

  “Why?

  “I want to sit in back with Tater.”

  I hit the brakes harder than I needed to and pulled over on the shoulder. She got out and climbed up over the tailgate, and she settled in next to him. In the rearview mirror I could see them sitting there without so much as their shoulders touching, but I saw more than that. A couple of feet separated them, just like when they’d posed for the photo. And yet blood was burning hot in my face, and I felt like stepping outside and asking them what the hell they thought they were doing.

  I rolled down my window and let the air in. I gulped at it like it was water to drink. I didn’t want to believe the view in the rearview any longer, so I turned in my seat and got the one through the glass.

  Light from the highway spread out over them. The breeze was blowing Angie’s hair in her face, a few long strands of it stuck to her lips. Out past her in the distance the carnival twinkled like a cloud of fireflies, and the Ferris wheel had just started up again. Tater tilted his head back and met my eyes with his.

  “That’s my sister,” I said, pointing.

  He didn’t seem to understand.

  “That’s Angie,” I said.

  She looked up at me too. They were both smiling—at least for a moment.

  That was the winter we went to see Romeo and Juliet.

  The movie was two years old by now, but it was finally playing at the Delta, and no girl I knew was more excited about seeing Leonard Whiting on the screen than Angie. Whiting was the English actor who starred as Romeo, and she adored every small, pretty piece of him.

  We always got movies months or years after their release, but this hadn’t diminished the intensity of Angie’s admiration for Whiting. The walls of her bedroom were still covered with photos of him torn from teen magazines. She still sketched his portrait when she found time to doodle. And on the hi-fi in the living room she still played the film’s soundtrack over and over. The music was so depressing it made her stand at the window, looking out at the rain falling on the ligustrums. When the album played a part where Whiting said his lines, tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “Isn’t he gorgeous?” she asked me about an hour before we left for the show. She was holding up the album cover. It showed Whiting with Olivia Hussey, the girl who played Juliet.

  “What kind of name is Hussy?” I asked her.

  “It’s not Hussy, you bozo. It’s Hussey.” But both pronunciations sounded the same to me, even when she used an English accent.

  Angie’s friend Julie had come down sick this morning, and Angie had recruited me to go in her place. It was the first Friday of the Christmas holidays, and we were off from school until after New Year’s. I probably would’ve declined the invitation if not for that moment with Angie and Tater at the Yambilee. It was all I thought about anymore, even though I’d decided that I’d overreacted. What they had was innocent. It was impossible that Angie would want to be with Tater. She liked guys like Leonard Whiting, and she never would’ve done that to Mama and Pops and me. Even forgetting that she was family, Angie was the prettiest girl in town. What would she want with a black dude whose father had shot his mother, then himself, and who could have a girl from his own race like Patrice Jolivette as a girlfriend?

  Nope, it didn’t add up.

  Thank God it didn’t add up.

  The picture show had a huge marquee in front that said DELTA in blinking lights. Expecting a sellout, we arrived more than an hour early and bought tickets, and already moviegoers were waiting out front in two lines. The larger line counted about thirty people, only a few of them black. They were waiting for the main doors to open on the gilded lobby dressed with scarlet carpeting and deco-era furnishings. I counted six people in the second line. Every one of them was black and standing by a door with a sign over it that said BALCONY SEATING. Until a year or two ago the sign had said COLORED ENTRANCE, and you could still make out the shadow of the old words under the new paint.

  The Delta had integrated along with the other businesses in town, but whenever I went there I still noticed few black patrons watching movies on the main floor. Miss Nettie was among those waiting today for balcony seating. A moment passed before I recognized her under the floppy black hat that sat on her head like a crow, and in heavy winter clothes that made her look bigger than I remembered. She’d spotted me, though.

  “Romeo, oh, Romeo,” she said in her best Olivia Hussey imitation, and I laughed because she got it just right—better than Angie, anyway.

  Not waiting for me to introduce them, Angie stepped over and offered Miss Nettie her hand.

  “I’m Angie, Tater’s friend,” she said, drawing the attention of the moviegoers in the larger line.

  “So you’re Rod
ney’s twin,” Miss Nettie said, identifying Angie as I would have.

  Angie nodded. “Isn’t Leonard Whiting the most beautiful thing you ever saw?” she asked.

  “You should write him a letter. Stick your picture in with it.”

  I wanted to disappear, but suddenly the doors opened and the line lurched forward. “Showtime,” I said to Angie.

  She gave no indication of having heard me. Despite my gesturing for her to come back and reclaim her place, she stayed where she was.

  I finally surrendered and joined them when only three people stood between me and the man in the velvet tuxedo taking tickets.

  “And what about you, Rodney?” Miss Nettie said. “You going to write a letter to Olivia Hussey? I got a stamp if you need one.”

  The balcony entrance opened only after the other line had moved inside. We climbed a flight of hollow stairs to seats in poor condition, their red covers threadbare, stuffing spilling from tears, so fat, rusty coils poked your backside.

  Miss Nettie sat between Angie and me. Because of my size, they let me take the aisle seat, and I stretched my legs out and relaxed as well as I could in the lumpy chair.

  “Why don’t you just sit downstairs?” I asked Miss Nettie.

  “They didn’t want me before, they’re not about to get me now. To heck with that. Uh-uh. I won’t give them the satisfaction.”

  I slept through most of the movie, which was even harder to watch than I’d expected. The actors spoke in English, but I understood little of what they said, and what I did understand didn’t make sense.

  When the end came and the two young lovers die, Angie and Miss Nettie were holding hands and sobbing. Unable to bear it, I got up and went downstairs and waited under the marquee where it was warm. Angie and Miss Nettie eventually emerged with bloodshot eyes, whimpering, their fingers still entwined.

  It was Angie’s bright idea to go swimming again.

  School was still out, and one afternoon the two of us joined Tater for lunch on the patio at the Little Chef. We were eating pizzaburgers and drinking malts, and the jukebox was playing Dusty Springfield, and as usual Angie, who wore heavy eyeliner and a leather headband that pushed her bangs down to the upper rims of her eyeballs, was holding court. It was true that she’d consumed a lot of sugar this afternoon, but the two large strawberry malts weren’t solely responsible for her excitement. New Year’s Eve was two days away, and she’d cooked up a plan for the night.