"Son, are you sure you wouldn't like something to eat?" said my mother, removing the casserole from the oven with a hot pad. I always found it hard to resist my mother's tuna casserole. She made it with two kinds of melted cheese on top.
"How can I say no?" I said, taking my customary seat, which had already been set for me, in the middle of the kitchen table. I opened my napkin and put it on my lap, and my mother took a plate from the cabinet and served me a large helping.
"Anything to drink?" she said, setting the plate down between my knife and fork.
"I wouldn't mind a glass of milk," I said, and dug into the casserole. How many times had I sat at the kitchen table, anchored under my mother's watchful gaze, feeling the warmth of her love and the deep sense of security only her presence could convey. Even now, when I had broken away and had returned home for a visit, I could still feel the force of that presence. I wondered, for a moment, if my dislike of Draper and my thoughts of returning home were the result of no longer having her constant presence in my life or the result of my discovery that Draper was not everything I expected it to be. At the same time, I knew I could not be one of those sons who never leave home, like Sylvester Reese. Occasionally, my parents and I visited his home on a Sunday afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. Reese were old friends of my parents. They raised five children, all of whom, except Sylvester, were married with children of their own and living outside the house. Mrs. Reese was a spindly, light-skinned lady with gray hair who would greet us at the door and invite us inside to sit in the living room. She would bring out a pitcher of iced tea and water glasses, and she and Mr. Reese, a retired Pullman porter with a face the color of gingerbread, would make small talk about the heat until an awkward moment :when Sylvester, a grown man wearing pajamas and slippers in the middle of the afternoon, sporadically employed and devoid of prospects would appear in the living room to pay his respects to the guests with a sheepish grin, before quickly retreating to his room like a house pet. After he had disappeared, his parents would resume talking about the weather, as though Sylvester was just visiting for a few days, when everyone knew he had never left.
"Tell me, Robby, have you thought about what you want to do while you're here?" said Mother. "A lot of your friends have been asking about you. I saw Roosevelt and a few others at church a few weeks ago and they wanted to know when you were coming back." She poured me a glass of milk from the bottle in the refrigerator and brought it over to the table and handed it to me.
"I'd like to see Russell and find out about that group he's working with," I said. "Have you heard anything more about them?"
"Haven't heard a thing," she said, raising her eyebrows and pursing her lips. "Nothing's changed around here. The white folks say they'll fight to the end to keep things just the way they are. The courts don't seem to be able to get them to change. I don't know what a group of kids can do."
I finished my casserole and my milk and washed the plate and glass and put them on the drying rack. I was dog-tired. "You haven't lost your touch with tuna casserole," I said, kissing her lightly on the cheek. She smiled and wrapped her arms around me, and I felt the way I did as a child, when I had come home with straight As on my report card and she hugged me with joy, while I yearned to go outside and play before it got too dark.
"I'm so glad to have you home," she said as she hugged me. "It isn't the same without you."
It was as if I was caught in an undertow, and I felt myself drawing away from her. "What's wrong, son?" she asked.
"What do you mean?" I said. "Mom, I'm fine." I gently extracted myself from her embrace. Part of me didn't want to be at home at all, and part of me wanted to collapse into her arms and tell her everything, that Draper was not what it seemed, that the students were cruel snobs who tormented each other for fun while the faculty looked the other way, that the headmaster was a toady for the wealthy benefactors and, other than the names of a few well-known colored athletes,just as she had said, no one at school, except Gordie, knew anything about Negroes, or seemed the least bit interested in finding out about us.
"I don't know what it is," she said. "You seem different. Is there something on your mind?"
"Nothing's wrong, Mom," I said, smiling weakly. She looked unconvinced. "Everything's fine. I'm just tired. I've got to get some sleep." I retreated into my bedroom and turned on the light, and I had the strange feeling that my room had been preserved under a glass dome. My bed was neatly made and still covered with a Brooklyn Dodgers bedspread. A framed picture of Jackie Robinson stealing home was still on my desk where I had done my homework. The knotty-pine paneling my father put up when I was in grade school was still on the walls. Like the rest of the house, the room was neat as a pin, not a speck of dust anywhere. My books were carefully arranged in the bookcase, the ten-volume Collier's Encyclopedia I used to write my papers for school, The Almanac of Negro History, the Hammond Atlas of the World I received from my parents as a present on my twelfth birthday, and the book When A Boy Grows Up, which they had given me on my thirteenth. Even some of the books my mother had read to me as a child, Toby and Make Way for Ducklings and Hopalong Cassidy Rides Again, were there. When I opened my bureau, I found all of the clothes I had left behind, most of which were too small for me now, neatly folded and arranged in the drawers. It was as if I had never left.
I went off to the bathroom and quickly washed up, and on my way back to my bedroom, I called out goodnight and received two muffled replies. The door to my parents' bedroom had been left open a crack, and I could hear them chatting softly, lying in the dark on their bed, into which I was sometimes admitted as a child, when a bad dream awakened me in the night or the sun in the early morning.
In my room, I switched off the light and climbed into bed. I thought again about telling Mom what Draper was really like, but I knew that if I did, she would tell my father to cancel his patients and she would call in sick at her school, and she and Dad would put me in the back of the Roadmaster and drive me back to Draper after New Year's Day, straight through the night if necessary, and when we arrived the next morning, she would lead the way, marching into Mr. Spencer's office unannounced, cataloguing my complaints and demanding an explanation, and Spencer would be seated behind his desk, unruffled, smiling and puffing on his pipe, as if he had expected us, and he would offer us seats across from him in grand wing chairs and patiently explain that the world of Draper is no different from the world at large. "We are in the business of developing character," he would say; "we offer our boys an opportunity to develop the inner strength to handle any situation they will encounter in life." And we would listen intently, and when the subject of "the Mazzerelli lad" came up, Spencer would decline to discuss the details "to protect the boy's privacy," but he would assure us that the situation was much more complicated than it appeared, and he would smile again, baring his crooked teeth, and offer us the use of his private bathroom, scented with the fragrance of sandalwood soap, to wash up after such a long trip, and each of us would gratefully accept, and when we were all seated once more across from him at his desk, a magnificent desk of carved walnut with brass fittings and a green leather top, my parents would look to me, at last, for my final decision on Draper. And what could I say? After everything they had done to get me this far, the matter of my leaving had already been decided. No, I couldn't tell my mother the truth, whatever that really was. And on that night, as I had on so many others, I pulled the blue covers over my shoulders like a cloak and fell asleep under the banner of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Chapter Seventeen
"So how you like it up there, anyway?" said Russell. We were sitting in the kitchen at my house before noon on the day before Christmas Eve, drinking iced tea and catching up with each other. Russell and I had been good friends since grade school, although our parents didn't know each other well. Russell's parents were not professionals. His father owned a small variety store and a laundromat next door. His mother worked in the store behind the counter making change, and someti
mes Russell did, too. Neither one of his parents had gone beyond high school, but they were hard-working people who had managed to save enough to buy a house a few blocks away from ours. Russell looked the same, lanky and brown-skinned with those hooded eyes and a wispy mustache that made it seem like he wanted to look older.
"It's okay," I said, in a noncommittal voice.
"Your mother said you're getting the grades," said Russell, rattling the ice cubes in his glass. Mom was somewhere in the house, but I could imagine her standing in the dining room with her hands behind her back, pretending to be looking out the window.
"I'm working at it, man," I said. "The schoolwork isn't the hard part. The hard part is just being there."
"You the only one of us up there, right?"said Russell.
"I'm the first and the only," I said.
"Damn!" said Russell. "That's a whole lotta pressure. You got any friends?"
"One," I said. "A fellow from New York. I have another one, but he's in a pretty bad way. He had to move into the infirmary."
"How come?" said Russell.
"The other kids made his life miserable," I said.
"What did they do?" said Russell.
"They made fun of him. Harassed him. He has bad skin, so they made fun of that. He's Italian, so they made fun of that. They threw shaving-cream bombs in his room in the middle of the night. They even set aside a special toilet and a sink in the bathroom in the dormitory and he was the only one that was supposed to use them." Russell drew back, astonished. Neither of us said anything for a moment.
"So what did the principal do? What did the teachers do?" asked Russell.
"Nothing, really," I said. "Their solution was just to move him into the infirmary."
"How do you manage?" said Russell. "Have you had to deal with any of that stuff?"
"Nah, nobody has tried to pull anything like that on me so far," I said. "But you never know. I'm trying to decide if it's worth it. To stay, I mean."
When I received my letter of acceptance from Draper and I realized that I would be the first colored student in the school's history, I was secretly thrilled. I was going to be another Jackie Robinson and break a barrier, to make history of a sort, and I couldn't wait to show up. After all, I thought, how many Negroes have a chance to be the first at anything. "The longer I'm there," I said to Russell, "the more I feel like leaving. Sometimes it's okay, and then something happens to make me want to pack my bags. Like the other night in the dining room, this upper-classman starts talking about Woodrow Wilson and what a great president he was, and finally I couldn't take it any longer. I told him, 'Wilson was a segregationist,' and you know what he said? He said, 'So what?' Just like that. It's that kind of stuff that makes it hard to take."
"So what are you going to do?" said Russell. "Stick it out?"
"I don't know," I said, shaking my head. "I just don't know."
"We sure could use you back here," said Russell, putting his glass on the table. "We're still trying to figure out how to get rid of segregation. Every time it seems like it's gonna die, something happens to keep it alive. Even though they managed to integrate the buses in Montgomery and get those kids into the white high school in Little Rock, we can't seem to get anything going around here. The NAACP can't even get a meeting with the mayor. He says they're just a fringe group that's up to no good. And the courts are slow as molasses in the wintertime. Even though the NAACP won that big case in the Supreme Court a few years ago, the one that was supposed to integrate the schools, around here the whites are still riding high. We been trying to get the high school kids together to put some pressure on the situation and speed things up. We're not like our parents. We don't have anything to lose, no jobs, no car notes, nothing that the whites can use on us. The big thing is getting everyone to agree. You go to a meeting and every kid wants to do something different." Russell paused for a moment and gave me a sober look. "But I'll tell you one thing we all agree on: nobody is scared of the white man. And they know it, too. They know we're coming. I truly believe that." Russell's eyes were shining with the same gleam I had seen in Lewis Michaux's eyes as he lectured me in front of his bookstore, and in Minister Malcolm's eyes on the sidewalk in front of Jinxie's, and even in Tyrone's eyes, crazy Tyrone, when he stood on Seventh Avenue that night, screaming at me at the top of his lungs.
"How can you tell?" I said. "Everything here looks the same to me."
"I'm telling you, man, you can see it in their faces," said Russell. "You go into a store downtown. Used to be they'd look right through you, like you wasn't even there. But now they're skittish, watching you like they waiting for you to do something."
"So what does your group want to do?" I asked.
"Still trying to decide," Russell said. "We're looking for the quickest way to bring segregation to an end. Period. Some want to picket. Some want to organize a boycott like they did down in Montgomery. One college guy even said that we should burn everything down. Nobody paid him any mind, but it's hard keeping a group like that together. When we started meeting in September, a lot of kids showed up, but we could never agree on anything and eventually people started dropping out. Now we're down to a few—oh I don't know no more than handful—that are still committed to doing something. Most kids still don't want to get involved at all. They're scared they'll get into trouble, like they would for skipping school." Russell seemed so serious. "That's why I said we could use you." He sighed and finished his iced tea.
I realized I had missed a lot. While I was up North trying to make the honor roll, all I had been doing was thinking about myself, while Russell had been spending his time on things that were really important. He was more mature than I was.
"So where do you hold your meetings?' I said.
"You know that little rundown church in Parkside near school, Mount Calvary Baptist? The pastor, Reverend Lassiter, is pretty old. You know him. He used to go to the NAACP meetings. The church only has a few members left, but when we told him why we wanted to use it, he just took the key right out of his pocket, put it in my hand, and said, 'Make sure you lock the door when you leave.' Maybe he thinks we'll join the congregation. He did come to our first meeting, but he fell asleep. He's a nice man, but he's getting old and he doesn't hear too well. When the meeting was over, he told us not to do nothin' to get him into any trouble. 'Clean up after yourselves before you leave, boys.'"
"Any other adults involved?" I said. "NAACP?" Russell shook his head.
"They think we're just fooling around. A few college kids have been coming," he said, "but it's mostly high school kids. The adults move too slow. They want to study everything and think about it and try to outsmart the white man. We think the situation is past that point. We're looking for action. If you were here, you'd be at every meeting. I know you would. We're having one right after Christmas."
"I'll be there," I said. "I wouldn't miss it for the world."
Chapter Eighteen
On Christmas Eve, I went downtown to Pritchard's Department Store to shop for gifts for my parents. I picked out a tie and a box of linen handkerchiefs for my father and a silk scarf and a small bottle of Evening in Paris toilet water for my mother. Pritchard's was crowded and, as I stood at the counter to make my purchases, in chinos and a sport coat with a white oxford cloth shirt and tie, I had to wait, as usual, until all the white customers had been served. I noticed while I was standing there that the saleswoman kept glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. She was tall and thin, a middle-aged white woman with bleached blond hair and scarlet fingernails. Her long, pale face was creased by a frown as she waited on the white customers, and when it was my turn and I paid, it was apparent that she was furious about something. She slapped the receipt and the change down on the counter, and I put them in my pocket.
"I'd like to have these gift-wrapped, please," I said.
She looked as though I had insulted her. "What is the matter with you nigras anyway?" she said.
"Ma'am, I don't know what
you're talking about," I said. "I just want to get my packages wrapped."
"Don't you sass me!" she said. "I'll call the floorwalker!" I tried to calm her.
"Look, ma'am," I said. "I don't want any trouble. I just want my presents wrapped." Her face turned purple. She balled her hands into fists, planted them on the countertop, and abruptly leaned across toward me, as though she was about to vault over the display case. The air around us was thick with the smell of her perfume. I felt nauseous.
"You people are trying to destroy everything we've got, aren't you?" she hissed. "You and the Communists! Don't you think your race has done pretty well by us? We've been like family, and now y'all want to pitch it away and destroy everything. You and the Communists!" I gathered my packages, figuring I'd be better off wrapping them myself. "But we're not gonna let y'all get away with it," she said. "Mark my words. We know how to stop you." And she marched off in a huff to wait on another customer. As I turned away from the counter, a florid, heavyset white man with a crewcut was quickly working his way toward me through the crowd of shoppers. I walked straight ahead, pretending not to notice, but near the door he caught up to me. He was dressed in a dark suit and white socks and I could see a bulge under his suit coat. He was carrying a pistol.
"Come here, boy. Lemme see what you got in those bags," he demanded. I handed him my shopping bags and he rummaged through them. "Ain't your Momma and Daddy gonna be surprised. You got a receipt for this stuff?" I found the receipt in my pocket and handed it to him. He glanced at it and handed it back. "All right," he said gruffly. "Go 'head."
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