by Paul Clemens
To prevent precisely this, my mother had stood over the stove several weeks previous, boiling the mouthpiece that I’d been issued, retracting it with a pair of metal tongs, and then having me bite down on it, repeating the process several times until the molded rubber matched perfectly the contours of my teeth and mouth. We’d achieved the ideal fit—and then I let the mouthpiece fall out anyway. The rest of the protective gear was more idiot-proof—helmet with padded chinstrap, hip pads, thigh pads, knee pads, tail pad, the increasingly pertinent cup—and cumbersome enough to calm somewhat my mother’s worries.
My father’s fears proved more difficult to shake. Between three and three-thirty each afternoon, I would strip out of my Catholic school uniform, put on my shoulder pads and helmet, and mentally prepare myself for practice. “You gotta get tough,” my father would tell me. Toughness, I came to understand, was a quality of mind as much as a physical attribute, and as I quickly ate a small dinner—nothing difficult to digest—I tried to shift gears, making myself over from a Catholic school student into a junkyard dog. There was never any letting one’s guard down with my father, but his usual disciplined approach to life was redoubled while I was a Bulldog. He suggested that I wear ankle weights around the house in the half hour between school and practice, so that my feet would feel lighter when I got to the field. After practice, when the other kids had gone home, we would run wind sprints together across the length of Heilmann Field; and he saw to it that I did not miss a practice, the great secular sin for those engaged in a team sport. Don’t want to let your teammates down.
Before one early-season practice, on a ninety-degree late-August afternoon, my mother called my father at work to inform him that I had felt sick at school and was, in fact, running a fever in excess of 102 degrees. “What should I do?” my mother wanted to know, shaking the thermometer down. From his sweltering, windowless workplace, my father said, “Send him,” and then searched for some justification. “It’ll be good for him to sweat it out.” I could have keeled over beneath a beating summer sun and fifteen pounds of pads; better this than reveal myself to be a candy-ass before a bunch of black folks.
And yet none of my teammates made every practice, and not many of them were even consistently on time. A basically reliable core, made up of the more middle-class black kids, the sons and nephews of the coaches themselves, and the team’s white wide receiver, soon established itself. Come late October, we were the ones who’d still be around. Even some of the coaches missed the occasional practice; one of them, a hefty offensive line coach whose car was always at the shop, we gave rides home to on occasion, our little Renault sinking pronouncedly to his side. Black life was on display before me in all its confusion, hopelessly complicated by factors that, for our family, would have been easily overcome. My father could replace a broken crankshaft; why couldn’t Coach? My mother had no problem picking me up from practice each day at five-thirty, while a lot of kids seemed to have parents, somewhere. They walked or rode bikes to practice, singly or in pairs, going down the middle of the street as if sidewalks didn’t exist. If they lost a cleat or misplaced the laces for their shoulder pads, they could be out of practice for a week. A broken bike chain could end a season. Life’s little details threw them for a disproportionate loop.
This was all just a few blocks away, and about as close to us, spiritually, as China. Though my mother was driving me only half a mile to practice, the mind-set there was so foreign that it was as if we’d dug a hole underneath our little corner of Detroit and had continued digging until we’d come out the other side of the earth.
To me, at ten years old, it seemed that my teammates—most of whom lived south of 7 Mile—were from another country. Our second bungalow was five blocks south of 8 Mile; by going to Heilmann Field each weekday afternoon, the black kids and I were meeting in the middle. The new house was bigger than our first, about nine hundred square feet—three bedrooms, one bath—and built on the model of the one next to it, and the one behind it, and the one across the street: row after row of indistinguishable brick bungalows, built just after the Second World War, when people were moving into Detroit, not out of it. In our backyard, growing bigger by the year, was a blackened patch of dirt along the fence line, where my father dumped used motor oil.
Our neighborhood, tucked in the city’s far northeastern corner, was by Detroit standards an outright beauty. In the heat of summer, when even the air-conditioned zip codes can seem about to boil, our area always managed to retain a guarded calm. We were bordered on the north by 8 Mile Road, on the south by 7 Mile, on the west by Gratiot Avenue, and on the east by Kelly Road, and it was easy to think of these streets as natural borders, like the Adriatic or the Alps, and of our neighborhood as a self-contained country. The area had been notable, perhaps, less for its positive qualities than for its relative lack of negative ones: no abandoned homes, no broken-down cars, no broken-out windows. Notable, too, was the way the area neatly stood Detroit’s demographic on its head. The brick bungalows on our block, and the dozen or so blocks surrounding, were occupied by cops, firemen, autoworkers, bus drivers, and low-level city bureaucrats who were, with few exceptions, white. The city planners, a century back, may have anticipated that ours would indeed be one of Detroit’s last bastions of Eurocentrism: the side street one block to our east was named Shakespeare. The neighborhood was a classic, and no one had any desire to open up the canon. That there was an all-black football team practicing just blocks away couldn’t be anything but bad news.
My mother soon learned that there was more to fear from my playing on this team than a dislocated finger. “Today, men, we got ourselves a scrimmage,” our head coach said about a week before our first regular-season game. This hadn’t been announced at the previous day’s practice, nor did it appear on the season schedule stuck up on my parents’ refrigerator with a magnet from Little Italy Pizzeria. “We’re going over to St. Ambrose. Get your game faces on. We’re going live,” the coach said, using the term that meant this would be no walk-through, but a full-tilt affair.
I was glad to be trading in another dull practice for a full-squad scrimmage, and the fact that we were playing St. Ambrose was reassuringly familiar. Down on Alter Road and Jefferson, on the Detroit–Grosse Pointe border, St. Ambrose was the school that my father’s six cousins had attended; I knew people who still went to Mass there. Though it was by this point an all-black school, just saying the name St. Ambrose, the canonized fourth-century Bishop of Milan, felt safe.
There were complications. Kids were late getting to practice, and so held up our departure, particularly if they were starters. Coaches were late. I rode over in Coach Clyde’s car, but there was a good deal of discussion among the rest of the players about who would ride with whom. Once this was sorted out and we’d all driven off from Heilmann, some of the coaches were unable to find St. Ambrose’s practice field, which was at Alter Road and East Warren, across from Ladder Co. 31, Engine Co. 52, one of the east side’s oldest firehouses, where some of my friends’ fathers were stationed.
After we’d all arrived at the field it transpired that St. Ambrose, too, had to wait on some of their players and coaches. By the time the scrimmage was over and we’d gotten back to Heilmann—I hadn’t caught a pass but threw some key blocks and ran crisp routes—it was well after six o’clock, and my mother had been sitting in the parking lot for half an hour, staring at the empty field where her son was supposed to be.
What the hell was the matter with these people? Who lived like this? She let the coaches have it, an outburst that did me no favors on the candy-ass front. “I was frantic,” my mother said, stroking my head once I was in the car, safe and sound. Clearly, there was a hole in my family’s strategy somewhere. I hadn’t bothered anyone, nor had anyone bothered me, and yet here was my mother, visibly bothered. “Frantic,” she said again and again as we pulled out of the Heilmann parking lot. “Just frantic.”
I attracted my teammates’ attention on the first day of
practice by wearing a pair of high-top Nike basketball shoes in place of the cleats that I’d yet to purchase. The Nike Corporation had only just begun its conquest of urban America, and my shoes, which many of my teammates also wore, were less a sign of status than was my counterintuitive pronunciation of the brand’s name, with a long e at the end. (A year later I would study Greek and Roman mythology with my sixth-grade English teacher, Mr. Kent. A few of my older friends had already taken his class, however, so I had some familiarity with the Greek goddess of victory.) Everyone else back then still called their shoes “Nikes,” making it sound like “Mike’s.” I noticed their pronunciations as much as they noticed mine: to a kid, the verb ask was transformed into an instrument for chopping down trees.
“Where you stay at?” one of these kids axed, looking me up and down, from high-top sneakers to feathered hair, and smiling. His question was the black Detroit version of “Where do you live?,” though hinting at a greater freedom of movement. Living somewhere implies strong roots; staying somewhere says that the stakes can be pulled up at a second’s notice. I named my street and pointed in its direction. “You go to McGregor, then, or Burbank? Never seen you around before.” “I go to St. Peter,” I said. The school was on 8 Mile, and our nickname was the Keys; I pictured our logo—a pair of crossed keys that unlocked the Kingdom of Heaven—as I said the name. “Oh,” my inquisitor said, “he go to private school.” Lots of laughter, hand-slapping, and a generalized sense of agreement, though what they were all nodding at I had no idea. “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” someone said.
Despite my black friends on 6 Mile, this was my first real encounter with that headlong rush toward conversational closure, to the inevitable exclamations of “You know that’s right!” or “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” or “I hear that!” or, more inquisitively, “Y’know what I’m sayin’?”—as if something, anything, had been said, let alone settled. We would start to diagram sentences, too, in Mr. Kent’s English class, and I’d search these types of statements for signs of actual content, trying to link the relative pronouns to their nonexistent antecedents. What’s right? What are you talking about? And what’s that? It was hopeless. No, I wanted to admit, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And neither do you.
For a full year, it seemed, we did nothing but diagram sentences. The diagrams helped us visualize what otherwise would have remained murky: the difference between compound and complex sentences, between predicate nominatives and direct objects, between direct objects and indirect objects, between the objective and subjective cases, between active and passive voice. Reading was a separate subject from English, and in that class Mr. Kent spent a great deal of time reading to us. We also read, of course, going up and down the neat rows at the pace of a paragraph per student, bumbling our way through “Young Goodman Brown,” but my favorite sessions were those when Mr. Kent would hunch forward on a stool at the front of the room, cup a book in both hands, and read “The Cask of Amontillado” or “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “The Lady of Shalott.” Sometimes he’d walk around the classroom, declaiming like a troubadour. I still recall a couplet from the Tennyson poem: “The mirror crack’d from side to side / ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried / The Lady of Shalott.” Some of the girls snickered at that, though I hadn’t a clue as to why.
In English, when our diagramming lessons were done and we could be trusted to string consecutive sentences together, Mr. Kent assigned a paper—a persuasive paper, he said, which tried to convince the reader of something. Lacking any strong convictions myself, I chose to parrot the opinion of my father on a topic for which his feelings could not have been firmer: the overwhelming benefits of a manual transmission. I had the litany cold: sticks came cheaper from the factory; they were easier and less expensive to maintain; they got better gas mileage, performed better, and allowed for greater control of the car in dangerous conditions; they kept the driver more alert; the gearbox looked cool.
I started with my topic sentence and let the argument build over several paragraphs until my thesis seemed airtight and my word minimum had been met. I still needed a closing, though, and so decided to address the opposing viewpoint—which, in my father’s telling, was that automatics were simply more “convenient.” This was all that could be said in favor of automatic transmissions: they were easier. And since people were always looking for the easy out, the whole thing could be explained away as mere laziness.
With this in mind, I closed with a killer pun. Because the papers were to be read to the class, I decided to address my audience directly, employing the second person. “When you turn sixteen,” I said in summation, “don’t be shiftless.”
It was through Mr. Kent’s classes that I came to appreciate clarity in thought and language. And so, as the years went by and I still heard nothing meaningful conveyed when black kids had heard enough to offer an “I hear that!,” it required a concerted effort to keep quiet.
But I’d inherited from my father the sort of racial common sense that comes of the ability to count; his voice in my head had instructed me to think, and I’d heeded it.
Though the team was supposed to be composed of ten- and eleven-year-olds, a few of my teammates were at least as old as thirteen. In some cases, the coaches and parents had had them lie about their age, for competitive advantage. Phony names abounded, as did nicknames: there was Professor, our bespectacled fullback; Dr. Death, our mean-ass middle linebacker; there was our reportedly fourteen-year-old cornerback, Batman, so named for obscure reasons I can no longer recall; and our split end, who was occasionally called Casper, as in the Friendly Ghost.
The coaches had no patience with this sort of talk, or with much of anything else that came out of our mouths. They walked around Heilmann Field that fall in athletic shorts whatever the weather, their hands on their hips to hitch up their waistbands or down at their crotches to cup their balls. They blew whistles and barked out orders. “Button your chinstrap!” “Stand up!” “Take a knee!” “Break down!” they’d say as we ran in place during calisthenics, a command that meant we were to drop to our chests and throw our arms out wide so that there would be nothing to break our fall, the better to accustom our bodies to absorbing blows. “Laps!” they’d say at the end of practice, and we’d begin the slow trudge around the goalposts, our overweight linemen dragging ass at the back of the pack. “Nigger, get your fat ass going,” one of our coaches, a man with quadriceps like tree trunks, would yell to our best defensive lineman, a noseguard who happened to be his nephew. If his nephew ran too slowly, the coach would pick up a football, take aim, and peg him in the back of the helmet. I never saw him miss.
There was very little patience for weakness, and absolutely none for stupidity. And our team had plenty of both: kids who cried when they were hit hard, and who couldn’t remember their responsibility on even the simplest plays. Frequently, these were the same kid. “On three, on three,” our quarterback would say before we broke huddle with a hand clap, and by the time we got to the line of scrimmage half the offense had already forgotten the count. “What the hell’s the matter with you, boy?” the coaches would yell, blowing their whistles and approaching some dimwitted, duck-footed lineman who couldn’t, for the life of him, remember a snap count, and who repeatedly got kicked in the ass while down in a three-point stance because of it. “The play was called on three. Three. Do you know how many three is? Why’d you jump on one, then? That’s illegal procedure, boy. Do you know what that means? That means you moved before the ball was snapped from center. You proceeded illegally. Now hold up three fingers for me, so I can see that you know.” There were kids who couldn’t remember, on running plays, that the even-numbered holes were to the right of center and the odd-numbered holes to the left. Other kids knew that the holes on the right side were even, but such knowledge did them little good, as they didn’t seem to know their right from their left in the first place. One of our linemen consistently wore his cleats on the wrong f
eet.
I had, by this point in the season, settled into my role on the team, not only as its wide receiver but as its white kid. I’d become something of a mascot for both coaches and players, just as I would over subsequent summers at Heilmann’s basketball courts, when I would be affectionately singled out as the bearer of “the disease”: the chronic inability, on the part of people of European descent, to leap. I could run better, being one of the faster kids on the football team. Not that this was why Coach Clyde had chosen me as a starting wideout. This was in the days before the coaching of football had been systematized, reduced to forty-yard dash times and repetitions on the bench press. Coach Clyde had had a feeling about me, a gut instinct, and he’d gone with it.
He could in part have been charmed by my novelty, which remained intact throughout the season. There was no learning curve with me, no grace period in this black studies course I was taking before I got the hang of dropping my final g’s and saying “which” when I meant “with.” I would end the season as white as I began it. The white kids in the suburbs, with their backward hats, baggy pants, and borrowed poses, struck me as too eager for acceptance. They were too dense to realize that indifference can go a long way.
This sounds tougher, plainly stated, than it proved to be in practice; I wasn’t a tough guy. The toughest kid in the Denby Bulldogs organization was a linebacker on the team a year ahead of mine, a kid who sported a severe brush cut and whose grandmother lived two doors down from us, in a house of white-painted brick. I shoveled her sidewalk one January for thirty dollars—it was a flat-rate arrangement, regardless of how many inches of snow we got—before calling off the deal. Her grandson was as singular on his team as I was on mine, though his father, a Detroit cop, had altogether less cause for any candy-ass fears on behalf of his son. Scott would be a grade ahead of me at my high school—where, with his rugged build and throwback hairstyle, he’d begin to resemble a middleweight contender from the 1950s, the tough young kid the champ’s been said to be ducking.