Call Me by My Name

by John Ed Bradley

  He and I both wanted to stay in the state and play for LSU, but we knew it was best to keep our options open. While we didn’t have a pact to sign with the same program, I couldn’t imagine the two of us splitting up and going to different places. He made me better, and I liked to think I did the same for him. “Where would I be without my offensive line?” might’ve been his favorite line. But everybody knew he was really saying, “Where would I be without Rodney Boulet?”

  One night that week, Beau Jeune came back to town, stopping first at Tater’s for a meeting with him and Miss Nettie, then driving over to Helen Street for a fried catfish dinner with my family and me. Coach Jeune had left practice early to make the hour-long drive, and he arrived wearing a baby-blue sport coat thrown over a mesh shirt trimmed in LSU’s purple and gold, and you could see the indentation around the top of his head left by a baseball cap. He seemed to understand how important it was to win over Mama, and he honed in on her as soon as he walked in the house, complimenting her on things I’d never noticed before, such as the handmade doilies on the arms of the sofa and the color of our telephone, which was avocado. We ate at the kitchen table, then moved over to the living room, which Mama and Angie had cleaned up and organized earlier that afternoon. Mama served chicory coffee from a silver tray, then she and Angie retired to their rooms and left the coach alone with Pops and me.

  It was quite a thing to hear someone I respected so much tell me that I ranked as the top prospect on his list, a pitch I was sure he’d tried out on other blue-chip talent, but one I still very much appreciated.

  “What about Tater?” I asked, interrupting Coach Jeune’s spiel about my golden future as a Tiger. “Where does he rank?”

  “That one’s special, ain’t he?” Coach Jeune said. “That kind of raw talent you don’t see every day. The sky’s the limit for that young man.”

  Pops sank deeper in his seat. “You don’t really see a boy like him playing quarterback in Baton Rouge, do you?” he asked.

  “You mean a black?”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t completely rule it out, Mr. Boulet. Not yet I don’t.”

  “Sign him and see what happens,” Pops said.

  All of a sudden Coach Jeune seemed to remember that he’d really come to see me. He turned in his chair. “Can this stay in the room with us, Rodney?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I like Tater, I like him a lot. But I keep asking myself if he might not be out of position. He has the arm strength and the intelligence and all the other intangibles to play quarterback, but he’s absolutely at his best when he’s carrying the ball.” He put his cup on the coffee table and leaned forward in his chair. “Can’t you just see him taking the pitch out of the I-formation and turning the corner, Rodney?”

  “I’m just a night watchman at a plant,” Pops interrupted, “but I can tell you the world ain’t ready for one at LSU.”

  “The world,” Coach Jeune said, as if he’d just now heard of the place. “Isn’t that where if you don’t win ten games a year, the Board of Supervisors convenes an emergency session and hires somebody else?”

  Mama wrapped some catfish in aluminum foil for him to take in case he got hungry on the road. He left a media guide for the 1971 season on the coffee table and gave Mama and Angie hugs on his way outside. Pops only had about ten minutes to get ready for work, so that finally gave Coach Jeune and me some time alone.

  We walked to his Cadillac parked along the curb and stood in the lamplight. “We’d love an early commitment from you, Rodney,” he said. “I know it would influence a lot of quality young men who haven’t made their minds up yet, and my recruiting coordinator tells me it would be a knockout punch to Alabama. Every year they sneak in this state and steal some of our best boys, and your commitment would go a long way to putting an end to that.”

  “I’d commit to you tonight, Coach, if you gave me your commitment to play Tater at quarterback.”

  I was looking right at him when I spoke, and even in the strange light I could see how surprised he was by the offer. I could also see how tempted he was to accept it. But in the end he only gave me the same uneasy smile he’d given Pops earlier.

  “I’ll take that under consideration,” he said, “but I suppose I should first tell you straight up about my reservations. Your dad’s position is shared by a lot of people, Rodney—I’d even say by most of them. The proposition of a black boy quarterbacking my football team stops being about the game and becomes about something else.”

  “I don’t know why race has to matter, Coach. Isn’t the field the same one hundred yards for the black players as well as the white ones?” I should’ve given Tater credit for the line. But instead I said, “Have you told him you weren’t sure where to play him?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “The northern schools all say he’s a quarterback. Most of the ones down here avoid answering the question when he brings it up. Ole Miss told him he projected as a cornerback, and he asked them not to come around anymore.”

  The Sedan de Ville, white with purple and gold trim, was as long as our house. He got in and pulled the door closed. The electric window came down.

  He’d set Mama’s catfish on the seat next to him, with the foil peeled open. “Let me talk to some people, Rodney. Everybody might not want it. But everybody’s not Beau Jeune, now, are they?”

  On Thursday Tater and I kept with tradition and met again to watch film in my bedroom. Mama made redfish sauce piquant, and we ate in the room with the reel rolling for the second half. When we were finished, Angie came in to take our trays away, and as she was leaving, Tater said, “My auntie knows Clifton Chenier. You heard of Clifton Chenier before, huh, Angie?”

  She nodded.

  “He’s playing at Richard’s in Lawtell this Saturday. He told her we should come.” A second or two passed and he said, “You and Rodney and me.”

  “We can’t go to bars,” I said.

  “It’s a dance club more than a bar. They’ll also be serving barbecue, my auntie says. We can eat and hang out and listen to the music. They won’t bother with us as long as we don’t order a real drink—you know, a beer or whatnot.”

  Angie never could hide much. “We’ll have to get permission,” she said, then let out a squeal as she pulled the door closed behind her.

  Richard’s, pronounced Ree-shard’s, wasn’t a place I’d ever thought about visiting. You saw it on trips to Eunice, standing back past a ditch in the shade of some loblolly pines, its tin roof covered with rust, aluminum windows facing out. Some of the faster kids at school went to the all-white Southern Club, also on that road, but Richard’s attracted mostly black people from nearby towns like Frilot Cove, Swords, and Mallett. Many of these people had French ancestry and French surnames, and the musicians among them had taken Cajun music, jazzed it up with a saxophone and a rub board, and turned it into Zydeco, a French word that meant “snap bean.” Chenier’s admirers called him the “King of Zydeco,” although that wasn’t saying much. Zydeco was just being discovered outside the region, and locally its popularity had made little headway into the white community. No one I knew listened to it.

  We knew better than to ask Pops for the green light, so we waited until he’d left for work that night and ambushed Mama as she was getting ready for bed. Seated at her vanity, rubbing cream on her face, she looked at us in the mirror as we entered the room and stood next to each other in a show of solidarity. I let Angie do the talking.

  “I’ll need to discuss this with your father,” Mama said in a harder tone than usual.

  “He’ll just say no,” Angie said.

  “And in this case he’d probably be right to.” She turned in her chair and faced Angie, her mask of cream shining against the frosty white bulbs. “Is this a good idea?”

  “I swear nothing will happen,” Angie said. “We’ll come home early.
Rodney will protect me, won’t you, Rodney?”

  “Anybody gets too close,” I said, “and I’ll give them one of these.” And now I punched the air with a forearm.

  In the morning Mama waited until Pops had gone to the bathroom for his shower before giving us an answer. We were in the Cameo, letting the engine warm. She came outside still dressed in her robe and tapped on my window. I lowered it.

  “Don’t make me regret this, but I’m giving you permission to go. You can’t drink, and you have to be home by midnight. And you must never tell your father. Comprends?”

  “Comprends,” Angie and I said in unison.

  “One more thing,” Mama said. She held up a finger. “Don’t forget who you are. Will you promise me?”

  “Promise,” Angie and I answered at once.

  But on the drive to school that morning, as Angie rattled on about how much fun we were going to have, Mama’s warning messed with my head a little. Over the years coaches had told me to remember who I was when they wanted to stress the importance of staying humble and showing class after big wins, but her command sounded different and had an undertone that left me confused.

  Don’t forget who you are. . . .

  Did she mean we shouldn’t forget that we were white? It didn’t sound like her. Besides, I’d already decided that the one thing we weren’t likely to forget in a roadhouse filled with black people was the color of our skin.

  It was too cold for Tater to ride in back, so he and Miss Nettie squeezed in the cab with us. As we drove out west of town, we listened to Cajun music on the radio, the songs punctuated by wails and moans that had the four of us wailing and moaning along with them. We arrived at the club at around seven thirty, early enough to beat the crowd and to claim a table by the stage. On the side of the red-painted building, a couple of men were standing by a huge barbecue pit with no less than three smokestacks on the lid. They were drinking bottled beer and listening to LSU–Kentucky on the radio. We followed Miss Nettie to the door, where admission was three dollars a head. Just inside, Patrice Jolivette stood waiting, and she and Angie fell into each other’s arms.

  “You’re home,” Angie said. “Oh, I’ve missed you so much. How did you know we would be here tonight?”

  Tater held up his right hand, as if taking an oath. “Guilty as charged,” he said. “I thought I should invite another girl. Ain’t no way you can keep up with me by yourself, Angie Boulet.” Then he did a little dance that spun him around in a circle.

  “Somebody’s been practicing,” Angie told him.

  Miss Nettie ordered a whiskey sour for herself and Cokes for the rest of us. We also had pulled pork sandwiches still hot from the pit and dripping barbecue sauce. People kept filing in, some of them familiar faces from town. One lady was a server in the lunchroom at school. It was the first time I’d ever seen her without a hairnet, and Angie had to tell me who she was. I also spotted the man who made deliveries in our neighborhood for Clover Farm Dairy. During the day he was dressed all in white, carrying milk bottles in wire crates, but tonight his black suit, black western boots, and turquoise rings gave a different image.

  “He looks like the dude from Shaft gone country,” Tater said, and that about covered it.

  I suppose the thing that surprised me most about the place was the diversity of the crowd. You had old men in cowboy outfits and young ones in nylon shirts and bell-bottom pants. Some of the women looked like they’d just put their hoes down and left the farm, while others had fancy ways about them and fancy hairdos and clothes. At around nine o’clock, Clifton Chenier and his band came through a back door and mounted the stage. Chenier played blues accordion, and the one he harnessed to his shoulders looked like a fireplace bellows grafted onto a piano keyboard. He wore a white dress shirt with a bolo tie, white pants, and black church shoes, and his hair, which glistened with oil in the hot lights, was swept back in a Little Richard pompadour. Several men walked up to the stage to greet him. “What’s happenin’, soul,” Chenier said to each of them.

  I’ve pretty well established here that I’m a large person, a Sasquatch, a tractor-trailer rig, a monster, and a load. I’ve been called all these names. But no one ever accused me of being a dancer. Chenier had barely hit the first note of “Bon Ton Roulet” when I lured Miss Nettie out on the floor and got things started. She might’ve put me to shame had shame been a possibility for me. Tater, Angie, and Patrice soon joined us, and for the next half hour we swapped partners from one song to the next as both couples and trios, allowing for any number of combinations except the one that had me dancing with Tater.

  When Chenier arrived at “Louisiana Blues,” it was my turn with Patrice, and what luck I had that it was a slow one. I held her close because that was my job, and Tater held Angie close because that was his. Even Miss Nettie was feeling it, tied up with the milkman who went ahead and nibbled on her ear while he was at it.

  “Come hug me, Nettie,” Chenier called out between songs. She ran up to the stage and did as she was told, and then he broke into “Zydeco Sont Pas Salles”, which if my eighth-grade French was correct, translated to “Snap beans aren’t salty.”

  “Cut a rug with me, Rodney,” Miss Nettie said, then she and I were going at it again, dominating the floor and pulverizing anybody who got in the way.

  I never had a better workout. When Angie and Patrice finally conked out, and Miss Nettie’s sore feet put her in a chair, Tater and I recruited other women in the club and gave them spins on the dance floor. Sweat poured down our faces and soaked our shirts, and all the while Chenier’s accordion kept driving us.

  A clock over the bar said eleven thirty, and that meant it was time to go. Angie and Patrice returned for one last dance, dragging an exhausted Miss Nettie by the hand. The song, “Jolie Blonde”, was about a pretty blonde, and suddenly all eyes were on Angie.

  “Where would I be without my offensive line?” Tater yelled as we stumbled out the door when it was over.

  He jumped on my back and wrapped his arms around my neck, and I took off running with him under the pines.

  Against Eunice the next week, he got sick.

  We were playing on the road, and although it now was October, we still had to deal with more heat and humidity than seemed fair, even for people accustomed to suffering because of the weather. I struggled to catch my breath between plays, and I saw misery on the faces of my teammates and the guys across the line.

  Tater was the best-conditioned athlete on our team, but he was seriously winded in the first half, and in the huddle his voice was so thin it was hard to make him out. It sounded like he’d had the wind knocked out of him and couldn’t get it back, and when he made calls at the line he had to drop his voice to a lower register to project the words and numbers. I saw him grimacing in pain, and on the sideline he adjusted the straps on his shoulder pads to give them a looser fit. As usual he outperformed everybody else on the field and seemed able to score at will, but his obvious discomfort had me worried.

  “You coming down with the flu?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  “You have us twenty-one points ahead. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if you sat out the rest of the game.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  He sat, thinking about it. “People paid good money to see me play. Wouldn’t want to disappoint them.”

  Late in the third quarter, he broke free on a quarterback draw and was racing down the sideline when he suddenly collapsed. He landed on his back and fumbled the ball, and Eunice recovered. I thought he’d slipped. But he tried to stand and quickly went down again, staggering, then falling sideways like a boxer who’d taken one on the side of the head. By the time I got to him he was vomiting. His helmet was still on, and the stuff was shooting out through the bars of his face mask.

  “Stomach virus,” Coach Cadet said.


  Rubin ran out from the sideline to help, and he and I threw Tater’s arms over our shoulders and carried him to the bench. Two other players on the team had come down with the same thing, and we brought Tater to where they were pulling guard duty by the water buckets.

  “I ain’t staying here,” he said.

  “Yes, you are,” I told him. I carried his helmet to a faucet on the side of the bleachers and washed it off. When I looked up I could see faces in the crowd, looking down at me as if for an explanation. Pops got up from his seat and took two steps at a time coming down.

  “That didn’t look right,” he said.

  “There’s a virus going around.”

  “It looked like he passed out cold on his feet.”

  “He probably did. Alfred and Timmy are sick with it too.”

  “Yeah, but still—”

  “It’s always something, huh, Pops?”

  It was a cheap shot, and I wished I could take it back as soon as I said it, but he was already climbing back up to his seat.

  Our team doctor hadn’t made the trip, but the one for Eunice came over to look at Tater. I saw him shine a penlight in his eyes. He did a few other things and asked some questions: “Did you take a shot to the head?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you woozy?”

  “I was earlier, but I’m not now.”

  “Are you cramping?”

  “I had me some, nothing too bad. They went away. I promise I feel good, Doc. Can I go back in the game?”

  The ice in our coolers had already melted, so the doctor dipped a towel in our drinking water, wrung it out, and draped it over Tater’s head. “You’re done for the night, son. Not another play, you understand?”