Call Me by My Name

by John Ed Bradley

  I shook my head.

  “Who works harder, Rodney? Who tries harder?”

  “Nobody.”

  She got up and put on Romeo and Juliet. I wished she’d chosen something else; I was beginning to hate that album. But now wasn’t the time for me to question her choices.

  “I’m embarrassed, Angie,” I said. “Why am I this way? Where did it come from?”

  She cleared some room for me on the couch, and we sat next to each other. “Do you really want an answer?” she asked.

  I shook my head, and she wrapped her arms around my head and pulled me against her chest, then she started rocking in a gentle motion, like a mother would do, and after a while I could hear her reciting lines from the soundtrack.

  In the morning I wouldn’t remember falling asleep, but we woke up together on the floor, with the stereo needle, having run out of grooves, bouncing against the paper label at the middle of the record. I had my left arm around Angie’s waist, and a couple of Mama’s bridesmaid dresses covered our legs.

  “I’ll change,” I told her. “I’ll do better.”

  But she didn’t hear me, she was still asleep.

  I kissed her face, then went down the hall to soak in the tub.

  In the team meeting that afternoon Coach Cadet reviewed the game film from the Jamboree with little commentary. But when he reached the plays where Tater threw the ball against my helmet, he used the clicker to repeat the action over and over. A low rumble of laughter accompanied each screening. Coach Cadet also seemed amused. He touched the back of his head every time the ball spanked my helmet.

  “Either one of you want to explain what’s happening here?” he asked.

  Tater and I were sitting on different sides of the room. When neither of us spoke up, Coach rewound the tape for another look.

  “What am I seeing?” he asked. “Are the throws misfires, or is Rodney out of position?” We watched it again. “It’s one or the other,” he said.

  Neither of us answered, and we had the pleasure of yet another review.

  “Tater? Rodney? Somebody needs to own it or we spend the rest of our lives here trying to figure it out.”

  Tater was taking aim at my head a fifteenth time when I heard the projector malfunction and a block of white light filled the screen. The film had torn in half, a common occurrence when Coach got too familiar with it.

  Somebody turned on the overhead light and for a moment I kept my head down, not wanting my teammates to see my face burning red. But then as Coach Cadet patched the tape, I felt myself rising to my feet, and I heard myself calling the room to attention. “I need to say something,” I announced.

  The locker room went silent. I looked around from man to man before finally coming to Tater.

  “What happened last night was my fault, and I got what I deserved. Tater, you should’ve thrown a brick at me instead of a football.” I waited until the laughter stopped. “I’m sorry, Tater. I hope you’ll forgive me”—he was already nodding—“and I hope the rest of you will forgive me too.”

  Coach had fixed the tape. He started playing it again, and I was glad to see that he had moved past the passes hitting my head.

  “So in other words you were out of position,” he said.

  “Yes, Coach. I was out of position.”

  On Sunday after mass we picked up Tater and Miss Nettie in the Comet and drove with them to Soileau’s Dinner Club. Angie had talked Tater into letting us join them on their weekly visit with his mother, and now we were retrieving the lunches Miss Nettie had ordered to bring with us—fried shrimp salads, pecan pie, and sweet tea.

  Despite our insistence on paying, Miss Nettie said she would walk home if we didn’t let her treat. While she and Tater were inside, Angie bought a copy of the local paper from a newsstand by the front door. The paper wasn’t published on Saturdays so the story about the Jamboree had not appeared until this morning, two days after the fact. I’d seen it earlier at home, but apparently Angie hadn’t.

  There was a photo of Tater and me on the front page, with a caption that read: Henry, Boulet lead Tigers in Jamboree blowout; LSU’s Beau Jeune says they’re going places. Tater and I were shown sitting next to each other on the bench. I recognized the moment—it had come after the series when he’d thrown the ball at me. The photo gave the impression that Tater was lecturing me about the game, when in fact he had been lecturing me about my attitude. The actual subject of his remarks, who looked especially fetching today in a simple white dress that Mama had made, held my face in her hands and kissed the corner of my mouth.

  “I’m proud of you,” she said. “My word, you’re going places. Wherever might that be?”

  Tater and Miss Nettie returned to the car, carrying a stack of white cardboard boxes. Miss Nettie sat in front with me, Tater in back with Angie. Angie leaned over the seat, holding the paper for Miss Nettie to read.

  “Boy, you need a haircut,” Miss Nettie said to Tater as she studied the photo. “I knew Rodney was special, but what’s this Beau Jeune saying about you?” She mumbled the words “going places” under her breath, then turned to Tater with a smile. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

  Chateau De Chene must’ve been built about six or seven years before, at the same time the government was constructing housing projects around town. It was a long, low-slung building of red brick and white-board trim, with a jumble of television antennae on the roof. It stood at the end of an alley of ancient oak trees with massive limbs hanging low to the ground.

  “Whenever you see trees like this,” Miss Nettie said as we drove down the alley now covered with a cement drive, “you know the place was a plantation once, where there was a big house for the white people and little cabins for the slaves.”

  Race again. It didn’t matter that shrimp salad and pecan pie were on the menu, there was no escaping the subject. I parked and walked around the car and opened Miss Nettie’s door.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that,” she said, offering her hand. “But we’re all family here, aren’t we, Rodney?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That we are.”

  She led us into the building and down a hall to a room with a label that said ALMA HENRY on the door.

  “Hey, Mama,” Tater said. His mother was sitting in a wheelchair; he stooped down to kiss her. “You look pretty today, Mama.”

  “You lie,” she said.

  “No, I swear, Mama. You do.”

  I wished I’d prepared myself for the reality of her condition. She had only half a face, with one small hole and a mound of tortured flesh where her nose should’ve been. Even though she was wearing sunglasses, the light was bright enough in the room to let you see past one lens to the sewn-shut socket that once held her right eye. I wondered if the bumps on her skin were birdshot. Her left ear had not been damaged, but what remained of the right one was a mass of red, fleshy tissue.

  Miss Nettie leaned over and hugged her now, then she came up tall. “Angie, Rodney, this is Alma, Tater’s mom.”

  “So nice to meet you, Mrs. Henry,” Angie said.

  “I was never married,” she said. She waited a moment. “Why don’t you just call me Alma?”

  I stepped up and offered my hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Alma.”

  “Pleasure’s all mine, Big Rod.”

  She wasn’t as old as our mother. She might’ve been thirty-three or thirty-four, but it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that she was actually years younger.

  “It’s a nice day,” Tater said. “Why don’t we go outside and eat at one of the picnic tables under the trees. Sound good?”

  She nodded. “I don’t mind the bugs if you don’t mind the bugs.”

  Miss Nettie helped her put on the same hat that she’d worn to the game last year, its lace veil covering her head and puddling on her shoulders. Pushing her chair at a slow pace, T
ater led us down a corridor and out of the building to a metal table that was bolted to a concrete slab in the ground. I was carrying the food, and the smell of fried shrimp was so good I thought I might have to stop and sample it. We’d forgotten the tea in the car. Angie went now to get it.

  “Such a pretty girl,” Alma said.

  She was looking at me, but Tater said, “Thank you,” before I could reply.

  We talked about the Jamboree and the recruiters who’d come to see us play. We talked about our classes at school and our teachers and friends. Alma knew we called ourselves the Oreos, and she seemed familiar with the name of every friend we mentioned. In order to eat she had to pull up her veil, and it didn’t take long to get used to looking at her, to take her as she was. From the undamaged part of her face you could see that she’d probably once been a beauty herself. A breeze came up and helped with the heat. I ate and let them talk, and even though the salad had its merits I wished I’d ordered something more substantial, like a T-bone steak and a stuffed baked potato.

  “I had an interesting thing happen this morning,” Alma said. “There was a phone call for me at the nurses’ station. They come in and say it’s important, so they roll me down the hall to get it. Anyway, it’s a sportswriter at the paper, and he tells me Coach Jeune has a message for me. I said, ‘He can’t call me his own self?’”

  “What did he say, Mama?”

  “Just that he liked what he saw. And that he would come out and visit me as soon as he could, when he can get away from Baton Rouge and his own boys.” She laughed now. “I told that man to tell Beau Jeune he was welcome anytime.”

  “I’m going to be the first black quarterback to ever play for LSU,” Tater said.

  “I know you will, baby.”

  “And when I’m in the pros and making some serious money, I’m going to buy you your own house, and we’ll have our own nurses and wheelchair ramps and a cook who comes in the evening to make us supper.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “It’ll have two stories,” he said.

  “Two? How do you expect me to get up them stairs, boy?”

  “The elevator.”

  “That’s right. All right.”

  “And in the kitchen we’ll have counters low enough so you can get your own water at the sink.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And a white picket fence, and what else?” he said.

  “A flower garden.”

  He sipped his tea. It was clear they’d indulged this fantasy many times before, and even though they seemed to be enjoying themselves, the exchange made me sad. There was no way any of it was going to happen unless a pill came out that let him change the color of his skin.

  “Don’t forget my cat,” Alma said.

  “What kind you want, Mama? A Siamese?”

  “An apple-headed Siamese.”

  “I’ll buy you two. How’s that sound?”

  “I like that.”

  “You want a dog?”

  “I’m not a dog person. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Not even a golden retriever?”

  “Well, all right, then.”

  I noticed as we ate that Alma had difficulty handling her fork and bringing it up to her mouth, and it occurred to me that she likely also suffered from nerve and muscle damage. But she worked through it and used the arm, anyway, sometimes employing her left hand to support it. I also noticed that neither Tater nor Miss Nettie helped her. They seemed to know better than to try.

  “Tater came first, his sister, Rosalie, second,” Alma announced suddenly as she was working on her pie. “I looked up and could see in the nurse’s eyes that something wasn’t right. She probably would’ve grown up to be like you, Angie—a cheerleader at the high school, rooting for her brother and Big Rod here.”

  “She would be my friend,” Angie said.

  “I know she would, baby,” Alma Henry said. She sat looking at Angie. “Do you know I don’t own—and have never owned—a picture of their daddy?”

  “He was no good,” Miss Nettie said.

  “That’s true,” Alma said, although something about her expression told me she didn’t believe it.

  “When he was little,” Miss Nettie said, “Tater would cry and ask me what his daddy looked like, and I’d tell him to go look in the mirror, to get right up to the glass and look close, to stare, he would see him there.”

  “Was his dad an athlete?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Alma said. “To be honest with you, he was more a tomcat than anything.” She lowered her plastic fork and laughed with her good hand covering her mouth. “Rodney, would you like the rest of my pie?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  But she slid it over, and I looked to see how much was left. You hated to waste anything as good as that.

  “I met him walking home from school,” she said. “I was fifteen—that’s all, just a baby. He pulls up in his car and asks if I need a ride. How many times have I interrogated myself why I didn’t tell him no? But that would mean there would be no you, wouldn’t it, Tater?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Robert Battier was his name, same as the name he gave that first boy. He was ten years older than me. He worked as a deliveryman. I didn’t even know he had a wife and child until I was ninth months pregnant. Not eight months, mind you. Nine months. And big out to here.” She showed us with her hands. “It was one of them things where if he couldn’t have me, nobody else could. He came to my mama’s house—she was still alive then—and he had all these grocery bags lined up on the backseat, waiting to be delivered. He had some ground meat in there for Lois Duplechain. I can still see her name written out on a slip on a bag—Lois Duplechain. He had other perishable items. Your milk, ice cream, oleo. You think I’m crazy for remembering that, don’t you?”

  “No, ma’am,” Angie said.

  “Sounds so stupid now. Me worrying about the cold things in his car, when I had a baby in the house. I screamed at him to leave. I told him I was going to call the police. He opened the back door and threw the bags out in the yard. I think he knew he would be losing more than just me, when he did that. He would also lose his job. I have a lot to be mad about, but I’m just glad he didn’t go after my baby. Some men do that, you know?”

  “Yes, they do,” Miss Nettie said. “It’s on the news every day of the week.”

  “You get the newspaper, Angie?” Alma asked.

  “My father does.”

  “You like it when Tater’s in there?”

  Angie nodded. She looked down at her plate. “It’s wonderful.”

  When we returned to the building, a crowd was waiting for us in the hallway. Most were elderly, but there were some young people too. Like Alma, the young ones had injuries that required medical attention and kept them institutionalized. I couldn’t figure out why they’d gathered in the hall, staring and smiling at us, but then I noticed the newspapers. They were also holding ink pens.

  “Could you sign this for me?” an old man said, holding out the section of the paper with the picture of Tater and me.

  I was a Bigfoot. I’d never signed an autograph before. But I enjoyed these first ones. Tater and I must’ve signed fifty that morning, and all the while Angie stood behind Alma Henry, holding the handles of her wheelchair.

  We went on a run like the school had never seen before. To start the regular season, we beat Crowley in the rain at home. Then came easy road wins over Franklin and Morgan City. Next up was Lafayette Northside, where it was 57–0 at half, and 71–12 at the end. Tater ran three quarterback sneaks for touchdowns the next week against A team from Baton Rouge. Before the last of them, Coach Cadet called time-out and had me join him and Tater on the sideline.

  “See their miserable excuse fo
r a coach over there?” he said. “He’s the biggest turd that ever walked a sideline, maybe even the planet. And I would like nothing more than to drop a load of shame on him tonight. Rodney, I want you to hold your man and draw the flag.”

  “You want me to hold him, Coach?”

  “Yes, Rodney, hold him. Hold him like this.” And he grabbed my jersey and yanked me toward him. “We’re on our own 26. We get a penalty and that puts the ball on the 1. Tater, after the ref steps it off I want you to run the quarterback sneak. And make it pretty, will you?”

  Tater made it pretty, all right. It was so pretty the coach for the other team threw his cap at the ground even before Tater crossed the goal line. Next he shot the bird at Coach Cadet from across the field and drew a flag for unsportsmanlike conduct. Then in arguing with the officials he was ejected from the game. All this made it perhaps the prettiest play Coach Cadet had ever seen.

  Tater’s run was also the longest for a quarterback in school history, and because a run from scrimmage can’t be longer than ninety-nine yards, it tied state and national marks and put him in the record books for all time. It also put him back in the news—“from Haynesville up high to Boothville-Venice down low,” as Coach Valentine put it, naming places at different ends of the state. When local TV stations showed highlights and scoreboards that Friday night, Tater’s run was the top story on every program.

  We had an open date the next weekend, and over the days leading up to it, he and I welcomed recruiters into our homes. Most of the big schools that wanted him, like Michigan, Illinois, and Rutgers, were from up North, while the major colleges that were pursuing me hardest were in the South and Southwest—Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, and Alabama. Our phones at home rang day and night. Sometimes when we left the locker room after practice, the recruiters were lined up outside, waiting for a minute of our time. That was what they all asked for—just a minute. But when we gave it to them, they tried to convince us to give them the next four years of our lives. Not that Tater and I ever complained. There was no way Miss Nettie could pay for his college education, and Mama and Pops had both Angie and me to worry about. Coach Cadet stored our mail from recruiters in matching metal washtubs in his office, one with Tater’s name marked on the side, the other with mine. The letters counted in the hundreds, and they all seemed to say the same thing: We can’t win without you.