Call Me by My Name

by John Ed Bradley

  “We’re in the pool floating on our backs in deep water and watching the stars in the sky,” she said in her Olivia Hussey voice. “We lose track of time until fireworks begin to explode. Ah, the happy moment has found us at last. It’s no longer nineteen seventy, pilgrims—thank God! It’s nineteen seventy-one. We’ve straddled the years while suspended between earth and sky. Thus from my lips to thine, we’ll never forget it, I can assure thee.”

  “We’ll forget it, milady, if we drown,” Tater said.

  They’d been plugging old English words and phrases into the conversation, with no care to whether they made sense. “Thy yonder bayou reeks,” Tater had said earlier. “Yes, but mine pizzaburger is such glad tiding.”

  Angie sucked the last of her malt. Then she removed the key for the pool yard from under her blouse—proof that she’d been plotting the swim since at least before lunch.

  “Oh, God,” I groaned. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Why can’t we just be like everybody else and steal some cooking sherry from the kitchen cabinet? And won’t it be cold out? Is the pool even heated? I don’t remember it being heated.”

  “Rodney, you might look like a full-grown man three times the size of most full-grown men, but you’re still such a child. Isn’t he a child, Tater?”

  When it came to getting her way, Angie didn’t have to work very hard. Sometimes all she had to do was smile and bat her eyelids, as she was doing now.

  “Right,” Tater said. “Rodney is still a child. But he sure is good at opening up holes for me to run through.”

  “Still thanking your offensive line, are you?” Angie said.

  “Got to, milady.”

  It often happened that winter felt like summer in our part of the state, and such was the case when the big day arrived. Pops, off from work, offered to let us take the Cameo, but Angie’s vision had us traveling to the park on bikes—“In keeping with tradition,” as she described it.

  We left at 11:00 p.m. and saw neither the paperman on his route, nor bugs swarming under the streetlights. Large populations of kids, up past their bedtime, shot rockets from glass Coke bottles, and the air smelled of cooked sulfur. The temperature was in the middle sixties. We wore swimsuits under jeans and long-sleeve shirts. Beach towels hung from our necks.

  Tater was waiting at the fence when we rode up and stashed our bikes under the bleachers. I sensed resignation in his posture, in how he held the links and stared straight ahead. Angie and I scrambled up a grassy incline to meet him, and now I understood why. There was no water in the pool; black leaves lay in drifts and clumps on the bottom. “Maybe we can stand in the deep end,” I said, “look up when the fireworks start, and pretend that we’re—how did you put it, Angie . . . ?”

  “Suspended between earth and sky,” Tater said.

  Angie glanced at her watch. “Tater, take my bike. Rodney, you big galoot, do you think your tires can support us both?”

  We took a moment to inspect them. The bike was a Schwinn Continental ten-speed with reinforced rims on the tires. “I guess it depends on where we’re going, Angie,” I said. “Where are we going?” But somehow I already knew.

  There was a private swim and tennis club in our neighborhood, built only recently in response to integration and the specter of blacks sharing the water with whites at South City Park.

  Members used the pool year-round. One of our neighbors went there each morning to exercise, including those days when there was frost on the ground. It had to be heated.

  Angie and I knew the place well enough to avoid the main entrance gate, which stood at the end of a residential street and was bedecked with wooden plaques welcoming members only and threatening police against those who entered without permission.

  With Tater fast on my tail, I rode with Angie indelicately perched on my bike’s crossbar. We pedaled up to Helen Street and past our house where lights were burning in every window to a dirt lane that led to the rear of the club. We rode past kids who gawked at us, and one aimed a penny rocket in Tater’s direction but sailed it high.

  “Go home, you!” I heard a boy shout in a rough Cajun accent. But these kids didn’t worry me much. What worried me was what their parents would do.

  As I pumped the pedals I leaned forward with Angie pressed against my chest, and caught a hint of baby shampoo and Crepe de Chine.

  “I keep having this vision,” I said. “A man strides out in the street, raises a rifle to his shoulder, and picks us off one after the other.”

  “You mean like skeet?” Tater asked.

  “Yeah, like skeet.”

  His laughter told me what he thought about my vision.

  From the path we walked our bikes to the hurricane fence surrounding the pool. Like the one in the park, the fence had strands of barbed wire on top. We threw our towels over the barbs and scaled it with ease. There now were only minutes to go before midnight. We stripped down to our suits and entered the water.

  The pool was larger than the public one. It broke into an L where competitive diving boards stood on the edge of a deep bay, and in the darkness you could see black lines for race lanes painted on the bottom. Angie swam a couple of laps and made as much noise with her strokes and kicks as she had at the other pool. Tater and I were more reticent and chose to stay in the shallow end with our heads barely above water, looking for trouble in the night. When we dared to speak it was in a whisper.

  “Have you considered an escape route?” I asked.

  “Jump the fence and run like hell,” Tater said. “Pretend we’re playing Lafayette again, and Abe Lincoln is the end zone.”

  We couldn’t see the moon or stars for the cloud cover, and when midnight struck and the fireworks started, we couldn’t see them either. We weren’t floating on our backs as Angie had planned. Instead the three of us were leaning back against the pool’s apron with our arms stretched out and our heads up, eyes on a black sky. There were no exploding blossoms of light. There were no streaks of color to convince us that our reward was worth the risk we’d taken.

  “Here’s to the best year of our lives,” Angie said, lifting an imaginary toast.

  Thirty minutes later, I was first out of the water. Our clothes were on the other side of the pool. When I glanced back at Angie and Tater, I saw them move closer together. More accurately, I saw Angie move closer to Tater and position herself in front of him. The sky was still banging with so much noise that I couldn’t hear what they were saying. They were two shadowy forms that coalesced and became one, and from my vantage point clear across the pool, she appeared to kiss him or maybe to whisper in his ear. Now the neighborhood fireworks seemed to intensify, as if the volume had been turned up, and the sky must’ve been clearing because a bolt of color suddenly found them.

  I almost felt like puking. I wanted to tell them to stop, but no words would come out. At this very moment, I knew, my parents were home celebrating at the kitchen table with glasses of wine from the A&P.

  Yes, it was a new year and the world was changing. I knew that. But I also knew that I wasn’t ready to see my sister with a black guy, even if he was my best friend.

  I’d heard the explosions, but not the car at the club’s entrance or the metal gate scraping the blacktop or the cop’s feet on the walkway as he climbed a small hill to the pool. The beam of his flashlight went to me first, then to Tater and Angie. The man didn’t speak for a minute. Then the light went out. Had he seen what I saw?

  “Get out the water,” he said. “Both of you. Rodney, come stand over here by the fence. Angela Boulet, what the hell are you doing, girl?” He waited, but there was no answer. When he spoke again his voice was louder and higher pitched. “Get out, I said.”

  By now I knew who he was. Charlie LeBlanc was a cop in town. He and Pops had grown up together and remained friends. They fished together in the summer. They passed the collection baskets at Queen of Angels
on Sunday and served the community as members of the Knights of Columbus. Only two months before, I’d spotted him in the stadium at the New Iberia game.

  He was still watching Angie. The two-piece she had on didn’t hide much, and the effort of climbing out of the pool revealed even more.

  “Hello, Mr. Charlie,” she said as she moved past him. She picked her clothes off the ground and started to get dressed. “Are you taking us to jail, Mr. Charlie? Please don’t take us to jail.”

  “Tater Henry,” Charlie LeBlanc said now, as if just recognizing him.

  “Please, Mr. Charlie.”

  He brought the light up to her face. “Angie, be quiet.”

  The three of us stood along the fence, once again in our familiar configuration with Tater in the middle, and faced out like criminals in a lineup.

  “Did we break the law, Mr. Charlie?”

  “Yes, you broke the law.”

  “We’re trespassing?”

  “That and other things—more serious things.” Charlie LeBlanc brought the light up to Tater’s face and held it there until Tater closed his eyes. “Good as your parents are,” Charlie LeBlanc said. He was still looking at Tater, even though he seemed to be talking to Angie. “Hard as they try, much as they’ve sacrificed. People said it would happen. I didn’t believe it. But look at you.”

  “What would happen, Mr. Charlie?” It was weird, but she didn’t sound scared. She didn’t look it either.

  He moved the light away from Tater. “Are those yours?” he asked. His light was shining on the bikes on the other side of the fence.

  “Angie’s and mine,” I answered.

  “What about you?” he asked Tater. “Did you ride a bike here?”

  “I borrowed Angie’s.”

  “I rode with Rodney,” Angie explained. Then she said, “It was all my idea, Mr. Charlie. I need to be clear about that.”

  “Angie, if you know what’s good for you, girl, you won’t say another word.”

  “Tell me what would happen, Mr. Charlie,” she said, sounding downright defiant now.

  “Shut up!” he yelled.

  Tater went to sit in the front seat, but Charlie LeBlanc made him get in the back. Angie and I started on our bikes for Helen Street, and the cop car followed us. We didn’t pedal fast; neither of us was in a hurry to get home. The neighborhood kids had gone inside, and the night was cooler now and you could see more than just clouds in the sky. At the house, the carport light was on and inside a light shone over the kitchen sink. You could see it through the lace in the window. There was no one looking out.

  We lay the bikes down in front of the Cameo and walked back to the street and the car idling by the curb. Charlie LeBlanc’s window was rolled down, and I could smell cigarette smoke.

  “Are you taking him home or to the jail?” Angie said.

  “I never thought I’d see the day,” Charlie LeBlanc said. “I mean, I thought I might, but I never thought it would be you, Angie.”

  “You’re confusing me again, Mr. Charlie.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said. He was still looking at Angie when he said, “There aren’t any colored girls good enough for you, Tater Henry?”

  “We were just in the water talking,” he answered.

  “Up North in the big cities they tell me you see the black buck with the white lady like that and nobody pays it any old mind. But we don’t live there, do we?”

  They’d camped a lot, Pops and Charlie LeBlanc, back when they were boys. I remembered the pictures. Mr. Charlie standing in front of a tent, Pops next to him, holding a string of fish, a fire going with a pan on top. They’d both run off and joined the army after high school. And they’d gone to Korea together, returned home at the same time, and married local girls. Like brothers, they were.

  “What’s this all about, Angie?” Mr. Charlie asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  “What is it you see in them? I guess that’s the mystery here.”

  “The mystery?” she asked.

  “I always heard that if a white girl went with a black, it’s over for her, and no white will ever touch her again as long as she lives. You ever heard that, Rodney?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You believe it, though, don’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “But you believe it, don’t you, Rodney?”

  I still kept quiet. I kept quiet, and Angie wouldn’t stop staring at me.

  They drove off, and we stood in the yard and watched them all the way up to Dunbar Street. Light from the streetlamps shone through the windshield, and I caught a glimpse of Tater as the car turned left, its headlights sweeping over the houses.

  “You’re a coward, Rodney,” Angie said in a plain voice, as if it were a fact that finally needed stating.

  I followed her inside, and she made enough noise to make certain Mama and Pops knew we were there. They came down the hall in their nightclothes and stood in the middle of the kitchen. Angie was crying, but it wasn’t because she was afraid of Pops. She was afraid for Tater, and she kept pleading with Pops to get dressed and drive us downtown to the police station. Instead Pops went to the sink and drank a glass of tap water, then rinsed out the glass and set it upside down on the drain pan to dry. He was in no hurry to do anything, and I could tell now that neither he nor Mama had been sleeping. Next he opened a cabinet door and removed a tin of coffee. He filled the electric pot with water and spooned some grounds into the basket on top.

  Mama, meanwhile, had started pulling bacon and eggs out of the refrigerator. Her skillet was already on the stove. She turned a knob and used a match to light one of the burners, then she warmed the skillet over the flame and lay lengths of the bacon across the surface in neat rows.

  And the whole time Angie stood there crying and pleading with Pops to do something. Mama slid a chair out from the table and helped her to sit.

  By now I understood who had called Charlie LeBlanc. And Angie must’ve realized it, too. She stopped crying and sat up taller. I offered her some paper napkins to wipe her face, but she pushed it away.

  “You called him,” she said to Pops.

  He had poured himself some coffee. There was a smile on his face as he brought the cup to his lips.

  “You called him!” Angie screamed. “How could you? How could you—”

  But Pops threw his cup crashing to the floor and was on top of her before she could say more. Hands on his knees, he brought his face right up to hers and seemed to pin her down in her seat with it. “I will put you out on the street before I let you get away with this, little sister.”

  “Get away from me. Rodney . . . Rodney, get him away. . . .”

  He stood up and waited to see if I had it in me. I couldn’t look at either of them.

  “I didn’t think so,” he said.

  The cup lay in pieces on the floor, and coffee was dripping from the bottom cabinets. I thought it was over. But she said quietly, “Rodney,” and started crying again.

  Mama came over and positioned herself between them. “Go to the room,” she said. She was talking to Pops. “Go,” she said, trying to keep calm. “Right now. Go to the bedroom.”

  I cleaned the floor after he left. I put the pieces from the broken cup in a brown paper bag, and I sopped up the coffee with a sponge. Then I wiped everything with a damp towel.

  The house had gone quiet, and Mama started cooking again. She scrambled the eggs in the bacon grease and reheated some leftover biscuits on the stovetop and served them dripping with oleo and cane syrup. It was almost 3:00 a.m. We usually said grace before meals, but we didn’t now.

  Angie sat without eating. Her shoulders were shaking although her sobs were silent. “Mr. Charlie wouldn’t hurt him, would he, Mama?” she said.

  “No.”

  “
He wouldn’t, would he?”

  And Mama shook her head.

  He left the house about two hours after we went to bed. My door was open, and I could hear him tell Mama he was going to the lease to hunt rabbits. The lease was some acreage in Acadia Parish where he and a couple of men from the plant had hunting rights. I heard him remove his shotgun and a box of shells from the rack in the living room. I heard him ask Mama if he should wake up Angie and try to talk sense to her. I heard Mama tell him no.

  He let the Cameo warm up a long time in the carport, and as soon as he was gone Angie came to my room. “Get up,” she said. “You’re coming with me.” She stood over my bed and nudged my shoulder with her knee. “Let’s go, Rodney. Rodney, let’s go. Don’t you need to see for yourself that Tater’s okay?”

  It was wrong how Pops had treated her, but I could still think of about a hundred guys that I’d have preferred for her to be in love with, every one of them white. I got up and dressed, and minutes later I found myself riding after her down the street.

  “Can I start over with you?” she said as we headed down Dunbar toward the bayou.

  “You don’t have to start over with me, Angie.”

  “No, Rodney. That’s what you should be asking me—can I forgive you and let you start over? Don’t you want to redeem yourself for last night?”

  I was never one for public spectacles, so I wasn’t pleased when she threw her bike down, ran up on Tater’s porch, and started pounding on the door and calling his name. Her voice was desperate again. And I knew she was imagining the worst—Tater hanging by a rope from a tree in the Thistlethwaite Reserve, or Tater bound and thrown from a bridge for animals to dispose of his body.