And so I came to enjoy the privacy of my room. I understood that I was at Draper to work, and I had to do that on my own. There were occasional visits from classmates, usually to get an assignment or to discuss an answer to a problem, but once the information was obtained, the visit was over and the visitor would depart. We received our first grades at the end of October and I nearly made the honor roll; however, Vinnie had not done so well. Nor had there been an improvement in his social life. He had become the butt of jokes on the second floor, some of which had to do with his skin condition and others with his heritage. On the second floor, Vinnie had become a pariah.
Vinnie was my only regular visitor. He would stop in for a social call, to fill me in on a recent development in his life or to ask my advice. I was usually working when he arrived, but he would tell me a joke or do an imitation of a teacher in the classroom, and it would be enough to get me to put down my book and laugh, which I did not otherwise have a chance to do. Nevertheless, he was struggling.
"You know what they've done now?" moaned Vinnie. It was a chilly afternoon in the middle of November, and the trees had been reduced to skeletons of trunks and bare branches, although the sun was strong and bright. He was seated on the edge of my bed while I was at my desk reviewing my history assignment. "They've put up signs."
"What kind of signs?" I said, looking up from my work and wincing. I knew all about signs, WHITES ONLY, COLORED, NIGGERS
KEEP OUT. THIS ESTABLISHMENT RESERVES THE RIGHT TO SERVE WHITE PEOPLE ONLY.
"In the bathroom," he said. "They put one over a basin that says VINNIE'S SINK and another on the door to a stall that says VINNIE'S TOILET." Up until now, Vinnie had been able, with effort, to maintain his composure in the face of such indignities, but I could tell from his voice that he was starting to unravel. His face still held the lopsided smile that he often wore and his skin still bristled with acne, but his small, dark eyes were desolate, haunted. "What did I do to deserve this? Rolf told me they had a floor meeting and decided to give me my own sink and toilet and I'm not supposed to use the others. What can I do?" he said, in despair.
"Did you call your folks?" I said.
"I call my folks every night. My dad has already talked to Spencer several times," he said.
"What did Spencer say?" I asked.
"'Nothing to worry about. Boys will be boys. Everything's under control.' Meanwhile, I'm a nervous wreck. My grades are terrible. They're tossing shaving-cream bombs into my room at three A.M., so I can't sleep. Nobody on the floor will speak to me, and the rest of the school thinks I'm impossible to get along with."
"I think your father ought to come up here and meet with Spencer face-to-face," I said. "That will get his attention."
"My father already suggested that to him," said Vinnie. "He even suggested a meeting with Spencer and him and all the kids on the floor to clear the air, but Spencer didn't want to do it. He said it wasn't necessary, and he didn't want to give the impression things are out of control. He said the school has traditions to maintain and a reputation to uphold, and then he said something that burned my father up. He said, 'We all experience challenges in our lives, and character is measured by how we face up to those challenges and overcome them. Vince'—he never calls me Vinnie—'should think of this as just another challenge along the road of life.' I guess my dad got really hot when he said that. He told Spencer if things weren't straightened out soon, he was going to talk to a lawyer."
I was intrigued by Vinnie's mention of a lawyer. We never put much faith in lawyers at home. If you needed to draft a will or pass papers on a piece of property, you would hire a lawyer, but if you were colored and had a serious problem that involved the law, you were better off handling it yourself. It was cheaper, for one thing, and for another, the white lawyers couldn't be trusted, and neither could many of the colored ones. The courts were the worst of all. The judges thought it was their solemn duty to preserve segregation, and that was all that mattered. I didn't know anything about lawyers or courts in the North at the time, but if Vinnie's father was going to talk to a lawyer, I thought he must know what he's doing.
The next evening I had returned to my room after dinner when there was a knock on my door. It was Dillard standing in the doorway with a broad smile.
"Got a few minutes?" he said.
"Sure," I said. "Come on in." Although I didn't have any classes with Dillard, I had seen him around the campus often since that first day, and he had always been friendly. He walked in, closed the door behind him, and took a seat on the bed.
"How's it going?" he said.
"Not too bad," I said. "Latin is a lot of work, but I'm starting to get the hang of it. And science is pretty tough, but everything else is under control." I was seated at my desk, and as I looked at Dillard hunched over on the edge of the bed, with his forearms resting on the tops of his thighs and his hands clasped between his legs, I began to wonder about the reason for this visit. "How about you?" I said.
"Pretty good. Team's doing pretty well. Made the honor roll." Could it be, I thought, that he still wants me to come out for the football team? "Say, you're a friend of Mazzerelli's, aren't you?" he said. I said I was. "Well, what's his problem, anyway?" Dillard was still smiling, but his tone of voice was hostile.
"I don't know," I said. "Seems like a regular guy to me."
"Well, a lot of the guys can't stand him. They say he's always talking about how his father is a big-time doctor, and who his father's patients are. Pretty obnoxious."
"I don't know. I never heard anything like that." I decided, for the moment, not to mention Joe Louis.
"Well, the fellows on the second floor want him to move, but the only way to get him out is to persuade him to switch rooms with someone else in the dorm. So far, nobody is willing to do it." There was a long pause. Dillard had stopped smiling a while ago. He took a deep breath. "Are you interested?"
"Not me," I said. I sympathized with Vinnie's plight, but not enough to become any kind of martyr. The only thing left for the fellows on the second floor to do to Vinnie was to set fire to his room.
"There's a rumor going around that his old man's going to sue the school. Can you imagine? I tell you, these people are always looking for an edge. Anything to knock you off balance so they can get the upper hand. They never do anything like gentlemen. That's why you never see them in any of the better clubs or restaurants or anything. They're so pushy."
Dillard was like most of the students at Draper, certain that the world, as it appeared through his bright, self-confident gaze, was a world his parents and grandparents and ancestors had bought and paid for, and, therefore, a world that he was able to see with unerring accuracy. And anyone who sought to be a part of that world required a pedigree. That left out Vinnie, and I suspected, me too. Dillard was like the white boys in the South who still believed in the legitimacy of the Confederacy, nearly a hundred years after the end of the Civil War. Boys whose heroes were Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, who considered Richmond the Capital City, and the South a land answerable only unto itself, with its own history and inviolate traditions. I had always felt like an outsider in that world, and now I was beginning to feel like an outsider in this one.
"What do you think is going to happen?" I said.
"I can't really say. I know Mr. Spencer's been spending a lot of time on it, but he says Vinnie's father is very tough to deal with. Very excitable. They say the Italians are all like that. Carrot said they'll try to blackmail you if you're not careful. He said his father had a run-in with one of them over some real estate deal, and the guy threatened to go to the papers if his father backed out."
I had seen Carrot around the campus after our first meeting, but I had avoided any direct contact with him. I was surprised to hear Dillard bring up his name, and I was curious about their relationship.
"Is Carrot involved in this, too?" I asked.
"Well, sort of," said Dillard. "A lot of the guys on the second floor look up to h
im, so Mr. Spencer asked him to have a word with them to get them to back off of Vinnie, until something could be worked out. Carrot's a good man. He just wants to do what's best for the school."
"Did he talk to them?"
"Yeah. He talked to them a couple of days ago, and things have been pretty quiet since then."
The silence that followed gave each of us a chance to consider this last statement. Dillard had obviously offered it as proof that Vinnie's situation, with Carrot's intervention, was under control. But after seeing Carrot in action, I had my own ideas about what he had said to his friends on the second floor.
"Have you seen the signs?" I asked.
"Signs? What signs?"
"In the bathroom on the second floor. There's one over a sink that says vinnie's sink and one on the door of a toilet stall that says vinnie's toilet. Rolf told Vinnie they took a vote and decided to assign Vinnie his own sink and toilet. He's the only one who's supposed to use them."
Dillard grinned. "You're kidding. Why, that's hilarious." He slapped his knee with his hand. "These guys will try to make a joke out of anything."
"I don't think Vinnie considers it a joke."
"Sure it is," Dillard shot back, with a smile of proprietary confidence. "Vinnie's problem is that he takes everything so seriously. He needs to relax and get rid of that chip on his shoulder." As simple as that.
It was a test of Vinnie's character, and I realized that my only hope of surviving in such a world was to be able to identify what I knew to be the truth, even though others chose to ignore it, and to find my own path through the wilderness.
"I'd better get back to work," I said.
"Let me know if you change your mind," said Dillard, still smiling as he left the room.
A few days later, I was walking alone to my room after dinner when Vinnie caught up with me. The Thanksgiving holidays were a week away, and everyone, including me, was looking forward to going home.
"You'll never believe what happened," said Vinnie. His hands were stuffed into his pants pockets. His head was down, and he was wearing an unbuttoned sport jacket as he walked beside me.
"Try me," I said.
"Now they want to move me into the infirmary. Spencer called me in and said he'd been thinking it over, and he thought I'd be a lot happier if I moved into the infirmary after the Thanksgiving break."
"What did you tell him?"
"I said I had to talk to my folks about it. It might be better. Less pressure."
"Don't do it, Vinnie. Don't agree to it. It's like...," and for some reason I hesitated, perhaps because I had not used the word in months. "It's like segregation." We had reached the dorm and started up the staircase inside.
"I'll call my folks," said Vinnie, stopping at the second-floor landing. "I'll talk to you later."
A couple of hours later there was a knock on my door. It was Vinnie.
"I talked to my father, and he said I should give it a try. I don't know what to think anymore." Vinnie sat down on my bed and slowly shook his head, as though he was trying to take it all in. "I wish I'd never come to this place," he said. His head was bowed at first, but then he raised it, and I could see that his eyes were filled with tears. "I guess they got what they wanted after all," he said.
Every Sunday afternoon since I had arrived at Draper, I had called my parents to tell them how I was doing. I had mentioned Vinnie's problems, but because the problems didn't involve me, they seemed unconcerned. Now I wanted to call them and tell them everything, about the slurs and the harassment and the signs and Mr. Spencer's refusal to do anything except put Vinnie in a segregated room, and I wanted to ask them to come and take me home, but I knew I couldn't. I couldn't because I had no place to go. I had made my decision to abandon the South, to escape the web of its myths, and I was now discovering what the rest of the world was like. And my parents had paid for the ticket, not me. For me, the journey was just beginning.
"Can I help you move your things?" I said.
Vinnie nodded. With his hand, he wiped away tears that were rolling down his cheeks. "I wish I didn't have to do this. They're just going to make fun of me even more." He sighed heavily. "But maybe I can at least get some rest."
"When do you want to move?"
"Soon as possible." He sounded as though it was resolved. "Tomorrow morning."
The following morning, when I knocked on Vinnie's door, was the first time I had been to his room in weeks. He usually came up to my room to talk, to give himself a breather. On the door, someone had posted a sign that said quarantine: entering this room may endanger your health, and below it Was a crudely drawn picture of Vinnie with slicked-down hair and red dots all over his face and a large X drawn through it. I opened the door and entered. Vinnie was still packing. The odor from the shaving-cream bombs was everywhere and there were traces of shaving cream in every corner, but there was another odor that was just as strong but nauseating, repulsive. I recognized it immediately as dog feces.
"Vinnie," I said, "have you checked around your room? It smells like dog shit in here."
"I know," said Vinnie. "I smelled it last night when I came back from talking to you, but I looked everywhere and I couldn't find anything. If you see something, let me know, will you?"
Vinnie had packed his suitcases, and he was putting the rest of his belongings in cardboard boxes. "I'll start to take things down," I said, and I picked up two leather suitcases and walked down the stairs to the dorm entrance. I started to leave the suitcases at the front door, and then I thought about what had been happening to Vinnie and decided to take a short walk over to the infirmary and leave them there. When I entered the infirmary, a nurse was standing inside the door with her hands clasped, a pleasant older woman in a white uniform and a white nurse's cap who seemed to be waiting for me. The interior of the infirmary was quiet and shadowy. It had the feeling of a rest home.
"Well, Vincent," she said. "We're so happy you're going to be staying with us." She was smiling broadly.
"I'm not Vincent, ma'am," I said. "I'm Rob Garrett. I'm just helping Vinnie move."
"Well, when you see him, tell him we're waiting for him." She spoke like a character out of a storybook, a fairy godmother, and as I walked back across the campus to the dorm, I thought maybe this wouldn't be such a bad move for Vinnie after all.
When I got back to Vinnie's room, the boxes were in the hallway, packed and ready to go. I walked inside. The room was just about empty. His record player was packed up and sitting on the floor next to his laundry bag, which was almost full. Vinnie was sitting on the side of the bed, and he looked up with an expression as disconsolate as the one he had worn the night before.
"I just talked to the nurse at the infirmary," I said. "She seems pretty nice. She said to tell you they are looking forward to having you." Vinnie looked up at me. He was completely unmoved. His eyes seemed lifeless, flat.
"You know that smell we tried to find?" he said. He nodded toward the laundry bag. The top of the laundry bag had been drawn tight. I went over to it and opened it. Resting on top of a white oxford cloth shirt was a large mound of dog shit. I quickly drew the bag shut.
"Oh, God," I said. "This is awful. C'mon, Vinnie. Let's get out of here." I went over to Vinnie and pulled him up. "Take this," I said, handing him the record player. "We'll leave the laundry bag." We walked out into the hallway and picked up the remaining boxes. One or two students on the floor were standing in the doorways of their rooms, silently watching. No one offered to give us a hand. "Wait a minute," I said to Vinnie, and I put my boxes down, walked back to the door to his room, and ripped down the poster and tore it into pieces, leaving them in the doorway. I picked up the boxes again, and Vinnie and I headed for the infirmary.
Chapter Four
After breakfast on the day before Thanksgiving, I boarded a bus that was waiting on campus to take Draper students to the local railroad station. Only a week had passed since I had helped Vinnie move into the infirmary, and I was still tro
ubled by the events that had led up to it. I would have preferred to sit by myself, but the bus was filling up quickly, so I took a seat next to an upper-classman named Burns, a tall, thin, strawberry-blond fellow with pale skin and long, delicate fingers. I had heard that he liked to play the piano in the common room of his dormitory and that when he did, a crowd would sometimes gather to listen. He was staring pensively out the window and barely seemed to notice when I took the seat next to him. When there were no empty seats left, the driver shut the door and pushed the gearshift forward, and the bus slowly headed down the main driveway. It was a gray morning, and the air was moist and chilly. Filled with Draper students—"the most gifted members of your generation," Mr. Spencer had called us—the bus ferried us away from the campus as though we were a group of Boy Scouts departing on an excursion. Everyone was looking forward to the break from classes, and the bus was humming with talk of social plans, real and imagined.
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